Vulnerability and protection

"I’ve been checking out your blog from time to time.  Sometimes I’m staggered by the amount of personal disclosure you put out there.  I can’t help thinking that by making yourself so objectively discoverable, even in your uncertainties, you may isolate yourself from the intimacy with others that means so much to you.  The writer’s curse, I guess."

I am naked all the time.  Sometimes, if I am walking through a national park with a small group of beautiful people burning with the passion of life, I can get naked right there amongst the trees and tourists, dipping my body and myself into the water and stepping under the heavy piercing intensely charged waterfalls, screaming with the  exquisite vividity of being alive.  I can feel pride at the presence of my body in all its glory.  I can increase my sensitivity to the subtleties of the world and the forest and the possibilities of the moment, shared with myself, with my environment and with my radiant friends.  I can embrace the moment and cover my body in yellow ochre and spend the rest of the day as an angelic three-man Golden Mud Tribe.  Together we can not expose ourselves to the surprised passing walkers but the normality of their own humanity and the vehemence of their own shame.  When I feel encouraged and supported and loved by my companions I am powerful and open and able to expose myself to the world without danger or shame.  And thus the world is transforming around me.  The human race and the world as a whole opens up just a little more simply because my brothers and I have opened up together for all to see.  We have become so delighted with each other and with the natural world that people threaten to call the police, they smile at us, they turn away, they engage with us in an attempt to extract the conscious justification we must have made before getting naked and golden in public.  There is no reason.


In the real world my sensitivity tells me exactly where to draw the line and I am rarely wrong.  The internet, however, is vast and sprawling and inconceivably complex; it has little physical reality, little tangible vibrational frequency, no life force.  How am I supposed to know how far it is safe to open myself in this digital-intellectual dimension when here I am inherently alone, there are no friends present with me on my website despite the links connecting me to the interface of hundreds of people?  I have no fear of government monitoring of my details because I am not planning any terrorist attacks and they are powerless anyway.  But if all my thoughts and fears and loves and uncertainties are available for subscription to anyone on the planet, what is left for the delicate quiet moments when two individuals trust and love one another and intend to share their affection and sensitivity in an intimate moment?


I fell in love again the other day and I stared into this man's eyes and offered him everything.  He looked back and it seems to me we were relatively equal in our ability to be present in the devotion of the moment.  I guess there is only so deep either of us were willing to look and certainly as a result of this moment I felt no expectation of an extension of this intimacy.  It seems there is only so far any one entity allows you to move towards them and perhaps the degree is always mutual and it's only our conscious mind that undermines are certainty when we have decided we are in love with someone because we see their beauty.  Perhaps when we meet an entity, especially a human being forced to balance themselves between the art of life and the game of civilisation, who is willing and able to be beautiful we should merely accept and honour them in their vulnerability.  What more is there to demand?


I certainly make a lot of friends in being so objectively discoverable.  Everywhere I go there are people who want to talk to me, people who want to look me in the eyes, who want to be my friend or show me some kindness.  I am 26.6 years old, I am a man, I am vigorous and healthy and there is a part of me that wants to make love to the most magnificent humans I meet, by which I mean physical intimacy.  Are the presence of my masturbatory thoughts on the internet an impediment to the fulfillment of my desire?  Am I exposing the genitals of my soul to the faceless masses and therefore desensitising my physical genitals from the glory of exposure in a delightful moment to a single precious individual?  Communication is my job and intimacy is my inspiration and I don't know whether frustration is supposed to be a part of the manifestation of my intention in this life.


I am a human being and I am not ashamed.  I love you and I am not ashamed.  I am in love with you and I am ashamed because I'm not sure you want me to express my love in the ways my heart and my body desires.  I am ashamed that I want to touch you.  Perhaps there is some trauma-related reason why I am sitting alone in front of a computer, farting and drinking water, typing out my love, instead of holding my body against yours, advancing within each other from the cold and damp of the cave.  Perhaps the truth of the loving observation quoted above is not in the effect of my writing but in the intention.  It seems I would rather write about longing and frustration rather than fulfillment and acceptance.


I could also add to this story the simultaneous text message from another valuable person who wants to be gentle with me, who I do not desire sexually.  I tell myself it is better to give than to receive or if I give I will also receive so I should not deny the entities that desire me with their heart and body.  I should fulfill the possibilities of every friendship and say no only to the callous and jealous.  I should continue this dialogue wherever it takes me and delicately adjust the balance between vulnerability and protection for the rest of my life as I navigate through the loves and desires of this world.

How safe is this world?

Late at night we all desire the warmth and comfort of dreams or love.  This seems to be a daily need.  We want nothing but to go somewhere we know we are safe, a place where we can become vulnerable enough to sleep or vulnerable enough to open ourselves up to another person.

And yet we spend so much of our time on the streets, where we do not feel safe.  What is the fear of spending a night on the streets?  That we can never allow ourselves to feel safe enough to be vulnerable enough to sleep.  We can sit down, we can rest, but we are not in dream, we are not in love.  We are guarded, we are clothed.  This is not satisfying because every day we must become naked, every day we must shed our protective barriers and reveal ourselves to a safe and contained section of the world; our bed or our partner.

We then ask ourselves why the streets are not safe.  Or rather, why do we perceive the streets as unsafe?  The streets are where the strangers come together and we have been taught to fear the stranger.  The streets are the inevitable realm of chaos in between our trips to the workplace, the school, the institutions of control and comfortable reassuring understanding.

We understand the social context of our institutions and we all play by the rules.  On the streets there are no rules.  We so fear the chaos of the streets that our politicians must create laws and hire gangs of intimidatory thugs to patrol the streets and enforce those laws which barely scratch the surface of restraining the chaos of the streets.

Life cannot be contained and even though we have created what we like to call civilisation and we participate primarily in consumption and production rather than the circle of life we are still living creatures and inevitably intertwined into life itself, despite our efforts to appear as robots or to behave as ants, busily selflessly serving our queen.

We are not like we talk about.  We are dynamic multi-dimensional creatures of infinite complexity and despite all these thoughts of fear that cloud our over-developed under-utilised brain we are living in a state of love and the streets are not actually dangerous after all and we all know that personally we prefer faith and trust and comfort to the ability to take advantage of some stranger by removing a few dollars from their sleeping pocket.

We don't want to walk through streets of fear and threat.  We think we must because we believe the news and the news tells us to be afraid of each other and this makes us confused rather than truly afraid because deep down we know that fear is boring and unnecessary and inappropriate.

Not so deep down, just below the surface thoughts of the incessant manic conscious mind, we realise that we have the ability to choose a place where we can sleep in vulnerability and dream of our most loved and know for sure throughout this restful night that even the possibility that our bag will be stolen is remote and even so the risk of losing the bag is insignificant in comparison to the value of knowing that we are safe in this world.  That we are in it together and that even when we have an unpleasant confrontational moment with another person we both carefully select and induce this experience from one another and perhaps we should appreciate each other afterwards.

However, culture is an organic living system and we decide every moment how it is going to manifest.  The limits of entropy as an explanation are limited in a world where millions of people are aware that their reality is their choice every minute of every day of their lives and that all their brothers and sisters are in on it too.

"You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends."
- Robert Anton Wilson

My new friends everywhere

I don't care what people think of me; usually.  I don't need their love; until I find myself alone.  I don't want to be dependent on other people who may or may not resent my vulnerability.  Some people open up to me and I allow them to expose the beauty of their soul for as long as they desire, all I can promise is that I will witness and protect their perfection.  And then it is time for me to go; practicality takes over and I must leave my favourite beautiful person to go somewhere I am alone and have no purpose.  I do not understand sometimes why I make the decisions I do in life, leaving behind those souls who are most open and most beautiful to me.  I seem to have a profound effect on those willing few who I then go and dessert at their time of most sensitive exposure.  I call it necessity but suspect the problem is in my ability to commit to these people who are conveniently all over the world and therefore I leave behind for long periods one lot to be with the other.  The contradiction of my life is that I spend my life searching, to be close to others while in the process taking myself away from those I am closest to.  I have visions of a future in which I own a holy hilltop home where there is land for all my angels from all over the world to come and stay with me as long as they want.  This land will home us all and sustain us with its fruit and vegetables and seafood.  We will live together as we see fit, free from the cultural baggage of our heritage.  Until then I can only work and dream of returning to those I feel are currently most in love with me and holding them in whatever form presents itself.  Sometimes I want to hold my friend in bed all night long, sometimes I want to look my friend in the eye and see their everything, sometimes I want to use our shared language to penetrate the insanity of each others' psyche and hopefully diffuse the seriousness of a world that doesn't really exist and is certainly not as real as the beautiful intensity of this moment we are sharing silently.