Wise words

Sorry for being late on the HNT- I'll post it later today.

Meanwhile, Guy Baldwin's words are, as usual, incredibly powerful in most contexts than simply BDSM:

"Let me remind you that the words integrity and integrate are related.
In psychology, we speak of an “integrated personality,” and by that we mean that all the parts of one’s self fit together and mesh smoothly with all the other parts.
We mean that no part of the self is exiled.
We mean that all parts of the self welcome all the other parts.
We mean that none of the parts of the self is at war with any other part... As I said last week in Los Angeles, 'The brave may not live forever, but the ashamed do not live at all.'”

(This is from his Keynote at the Houston NLA )

Live. Live as who you are. 

Laugh. Loud and long and without fear. 

Love. Not only others and the world around you, but yourself... all of it. 

A Lunatic Fear

She was the color of sand on the floor of the desert. Her eyes caught moonlight and held it. Somewhere far away, he tried to tell her there was no time and it wasn't safe. He thought he spoke, but he couldn't be sure. The skin of her legs was against his and there was no barrier left between them. She had fire in her skin and the moon in her eyes. She was close enough for him to breathe into her lungs, and the moon washed through her to him, and he could no longer instruct his hands not to pull her down to his mouth.
Here, he said to her, to himself. Here...
He told himself clearly and firmly that he must not. Not yet. Not here, not this way, with the moon in them both. But it felt so good and he would rather drown in her eyes, be burned by her skin than fade into... despair, a shadow of a shadow of fear. Her eyes could swallow him right here. Her eyes and her hand, and he would be content.
Then his mouth was against hers and hers warm as light on his and she was pressing herself into him, her desire an animal with wings that carried them both over the edge of the abyss they'd skirted for so long. He drank from her, drank from the source of energy that belonged specifically to her and nobody else in all the universe.
-A Lunatic Fear
B.A. Chepaitis

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Most delicious thing I've heard yet today: "I like to keep the assertion of power rooted in flesh as much as possible." -PlanetEm

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"I'll remember it forever. She preached good."

"What did she say?"

"She said faith was letting God be what God wanted to be. Orishas. White Buffalo Calf Woman. Jesus. Mary. The earth. She said if you didn't do that, you didn't have faith. You had fear. That dogma and fanaticism was the absence of faith."

-The Fear of God, pg 95. B.A. Chepaitis.

More Anita Blake quotes

"If he'd been a girlfriend I would have asked by now, but guy friends re different. Sometimes you have to sneak up on them... all men are leery of their emotions, spook them and they'll shut down. If you're careful, quiet, not too eager, sometimes you'll learn more. Of course, sometimes you have to club men over the head with some question to get any sense out of them, but they prefer to speak from a quiet place." -6

“Sex is one of the most personal things we do as people. To have someone who says she loves you limit how you express yourself in the bedroom is like a small death. It kills the soul." -11

"It was one of the highs of BDSM, that possibility of disaster and pain. Not the pain you wanted, but that this time your partner could go too far. We had our safe words, and I trusted... (him)... implicitly, or I never would have let him tie me up, but still... part of the game was that you looked into your lover’s eyes and let him see, that you aw the darkness in them. That you saw the potential for... evil, but you trusted that he wouldn’t do it. You trusted him enough to be helpless. It was a lot of trust to have... this odd trust." -22

"I mean...(her)... Idea of love and your idea of love weren't the same. You want to be consumed, not smothered. A fire needs air to burn bright. She took your air away, and the fire died." -43

"...I've always spoken my mind, I’ve always been independent. That is not a trait that draws men to pretty, petite, delicate-looking women. They want to protect and coddle, and do stupid shit like that." -56

"I held him while he wept... he cried in huge racking spasms, but he wasn't loud. His body felt like it was being torn apart with grief but he didn't shout with it. He cried like someone who'd been taught not to attract too much attention to his grief. Too much noise and they'll come and find you, to find out why the tears." -91-92

"If this is your version of careful, then be reckless; it's got to work better." -129

(Blood Noir, Laurell K Hamilton)

Love?

"It may a crush, or hero worship [or friendship, or respect mixed with lust, or...], but remember... that it's the strongest emotion he's ever had for a woman. It may not be love, but if you've never felt anything stronger, how do you tell the difference?" -The Harlequin (Laurell K Hamilton, p 250)


Too true, about too many of the men I've known.

Another Laurell Hamilton quote

But this one isn't from the books, this one is from her blog. And this one hits home as
deeply as anything I've seen in one of her books:

"I am thinking of absent friends, and those people you lose in your life, some through death, and some through them just walking away. There is a reason I’m back in therapy, because the thought that went through my head is one I’ve had before. Why? Why wasn’t I enough? Good enough, pretty enough, whatever enough. But it’s a child’s thought, to believe if you were good enough, or better behaved, or better at something, that they would have stayed, or loved you better, or hell, even loved you at all. It doesn’t work like that. It really isn’t your loss, but theirs."

This ties in painfully well with the episode of "True Blood" that Jack and I watched last night, involving a confrontation between the adult daughter of an alcoholic mother, and the mother in question. Tara, the daughter, points out that she gave up her entire life to care for her mother, and received only abuse in return. Now, when Tara needs help, she again receives only abuse.

It was... painful to watch, and tears welled up in my eyes.
I don't know why my mother hated me. I don't know why she deliberately made choices to hurt me. I don't know why she chose to justify those choices by claiming they were "for my own good," despite knowing better.
I don't know why my mother made the decisions she did.
I'll never know now, because she's been dead for almost two years.

I keep wanting to make excuses for her, convince myself somehow that her behavior was "okay", was somehow noble (if misguided). I want to make it my fault, not hers. My father's fault, not hers. Her parents' fault, not hers. But there is no excusing the maliciousness of the things she said, the things she did. There is no way to make her flaws my fault.
As LKH said, that is a child's thought.

And I am not a child anymore.