It’s been a long time since I wrote Love Letter, and I return to it now, a thousand footsteps away… Brought back through a chance encounter; that like all encounters with meaning, leaves me changed.

 

 

When I remember first moments in rope, I remember a time of desolation where I was lost, broken and alone, trapped in my own frozen hell.

 

I remember my Rope Mistress who first bound me.

Who introduced me to the ecstacy and transcendence of rope.

Who cradled me and stitched those fragments of bloody flesh, mind and bone with scarlet threads, slowly taking shape.

Who kept binding me till the wounds healed enough to take flight.

Who bade me to run riot, to be wild and free and to live and love again in all the ways I thought lost, and all the ways I never had before.

Who put me on this road I now walk, to pass on the gifts that she gave me – and the gifts she helped me see that I had all along.

 

The gift of the first time bound, suspended, lifted off the ground and drowned in those waves, to be reborn – brought gently back to the world, rewriting the violent gasping of that first resuscitation.

The gift of reaching deep inside, binding broken parts, lifted from the ground; freed from the tyranny of gravity.

The gift of creating that moment – in whatever form that takes – time and time again with play partners, lovers, audiences or clients – that sacred moment, the gift passed on and on and on.

 

 

Each time I tie, I honour my Sensei/s, my rope partner, myself, but in every moment of rope I honour her, the one who helped open up my heart again. If not for myself, then for Her must I live truly in this new chance, new life.

 

 

Since then… There has been love, there has been heartbreak, there have been beautiful experiences, exquisitely bittersweet, ephemeral joy, the crushing leaden weight of despair. I feel it all, most times I feel so much that it threatens to overwhelm me. But…

 

 

As much as sometimes the intensity of the feelings makes a heart scream to shut, to close off, to harden like a rock, to protect itself from the pain and the sorrow – to do so would also calcify those shimmering moments, those ecstatic gifts that also are found in that maelstrom.

 

 

I am not content in the temperate, the mild. I thrive in the storm, the change, the violent downpour, the wind. The unearthly stillness. The thrill of new love, the flames of a long burning fire, banking and rising over time. The joy of discovery. The danger of walking along the edge. Alchemy and transformation.

 

This is how I tie. This is how I sing. This is how I write. This is how I love, how I live, how I need to be.

 

 

Opening myself so that you can open to me. Finding the place that you need to be and leading you on the journey that takes us there. Opening up so that every movement, every beat, every breath is magnified in consciousness. Opening up to create and hold that space in which we become more than the sum of our parts. Throwing myself into it with everything that I have, as if each moment would be the last. As if we were the only ones in the world.

 

My life thrives on fluidity, on shifting boundaries, being able to dance with those blurring lines. The Flow. The patterns are never fixed, even within the same shapes – the rhythm, the energy within the act is something that can never be conveyed by mere sight or words. The nuances of the desire for “intimate”, “sensual”, “torturous”, “beautiful”, “sexual” rope, coupled with the circumstances and picture of the self that are drawn out by the inferred and the implied, not just the stated. The stated obvious is ideal for boundaries and consent – no grey areas there. But the depth of a session for me comes from breaking through the surface and finding what lies between the lines – to grasp the currents of the energies that we play with, the ineffable, the transcendent. Flowing with the changes from moment to moment.

 

Like martial arts, you learn a pattern so that it becomes reflex, so that you can react instinctively to incoming blows or openings.

 

Like music, you learn a pattern so that you can forget that you knew it – yet the possibilities that it teaches you are what allows you to weave improvisations and pull out seemingly spontaneous compositions.

 

Some patterns must be rewritten. Patterns can be learnt, inflicted, absorbed which become prisons, pathways to frozen hells. You can only break a pattern with a new one – and I find that within new connections, finding new patterns in others and holding them against my own. The sum is greater than the whole and we are not just the patterns, the patterns are not the objective.

 

It is our passion which breathes life into the patterns.

 

 

Stillness. The moment of the gathering storm, the aftermath of the downpour, the moment of suspension, when we draw out the time into infinity. Where reflection is found, breath so slow it’s not so much held as cradled. When the fluidity settles into the container that has been built, just for

 

This moment.

 

Alchemy. Transformation. Of myself, of you, of others. A catalyst, an agent – mischief and mayhem, music and sex, life and death. Tasting the pain, the sorrow, the agonies and loneliness and transmuting them into golden threads. Creating beauty, shapes and configurations that change us. Where the storm can rage over us, and leave us in that stillness after. To play joyfully and teasingly, like the childhoods that were long past or never had. To hold and create that space where all else fades away, and there is only the death, the rebirth, the breath that gives new life. To fold you into a new configuration, then strip the ropes from you like clothing, like skin.

 

 

There have been so many new patterns, connections, first times and experiences and life is all the richer for it. Fractals – the myriad combinations and interplay of energy and their exponential divergences of time, circumstance, multiplying possibilities.

 

Change can bring fear. A situation which seems familiar and linked to an old pattern of pain, can bring fear. But change is how we rewrite those patterns. Maturity is not about a slow settling into entropy and dust. Maturity is about knowing when the time is right to move. About having the courage to embrace the change. Because the only thing past the fear, is the cessation of that fear either in its realisation or negation. The fear is paralysis. The fear is stagnation. Movement is how we create distance from those events. Or bring us closer to each other and home. Trust, belief that we can be strong enough to change, to move, in this present to write futures away from past endings.

 

Each time I tie

Each time I touch

Each time I delve as deep as I can

Into the unfamiliar, into the unknown, into another shape, another soul.

Into you, again, and again, and again, another moment, another shape, a familiar soul.

A glowing web of hearts, bodies and minds over time and space. Understanding, companionship and connections in all their forms.

 

We could close our hearts. We could live in fear. We could stop moving. We could accept what we’ve been programmed into believing. We could die that slow, lingering death of a thousand cuts and denials. Or, we could not.

 

 

To those who feel so very much, to those who walk a different path, to those who struggle, to those who fall, to those who rise, to those I’ve found, to those I lost, to those I’ve found again, this is for you. This love letter. To those brave enough.