I’ve been thinking, a lot, about the consequences of engagement.  (And this piece is definitely in dialogue with Christine Claire Reed over at christineclairereed.com and with Briana Saussy over at brianasaussy.com.  They are both brilliant.)

Which is to say, what happens when you really truly get both feet into a thing and do it like there’s no going back.  It’s commitment with a vector–a direction of movement.

What happens is that you crack open.  The energy of motion starts to tear away the protective tiles on your spaceship and you become exposed to the world and to the possibility that what you have known is not what is.

And you keep going and keep cracking open, and you discover that under all those tiles your skin and flesh and bones are exquisitely, intensely sensitive.  Anything can happen in there.  You can feel it all, feel it as sharply as the day you were born, feel lit like sunrise on the morning after, feel it like opportunity, like becoming, like the sharp slice of truth.

And you keep going.

Learning to orgasm is the art of learning not to stop even when the sensation is so big you might come apart at the seams.  It’s finding the ways to shift into pleasure and shift again and shift again, even as sensitive skin and nerves report in at blinding speeds and you can no longer think your way through anything.  Learning to go deep is the same way.

You don’t get to see the end of the tunnel.  You don’t get to watch the scenery.  You get to be present with feeling in a way that almost hurts it’s so rich.

And then you get to the core where it’s meltingly hot and you, in fact, melt and are reformed, cooled into a different kind of being than you ever have been before, impurities burned away.

This is what the old ones used crucibles for.

There’s a deep kind of meditation required to transform pain into something else, but it can be done; much of pain is a story we tell about a sensation we are having.  The rest of it is the sensation itself, about which we can usually tell a different story if we will.

It’s a commitment, then, a commitment to transformation, a commitment to re-encounter intensity, a commitment to allow intensity at all.

It’s a commitment to welcome something bigger and deeper than the everyday.

You will come apart.

And you will be reformed.

Have faith.