Two days from now, Master and I will be flying to Phoenix for the annual Southwest Leather Master/slave conference. I’ve never been to such an event, as you might expect, and I’m a bit nervous – although Master told me today it’s the most spiritual of all such events around the country, and more than any of the others I should be met with a warm, welcoming feeling while I’m there.
Yeah, I should be excited, and I am in ways. But I hate flying. I dislike hotels. I don’t like change. And I’m nervous about the “Dance of Souls” on Sunday, in which I’ll be pierced with a bunch of hooks, from which weights as heavy as lemons will be hung while I dance for what might be hours.
Next week at this time I might be looking back on it as the best weekend of my life, so I’m remaining optimistic. I just hope I don’t react to the chaos by getting frustrated and depressed. Fortunately, Master said there’s a very quiet place set up at the con just for the purpose of allowing people to escape from all the confusion, and I have a distinct feeling I’ll be visiting there a few times. *smiles gently*
Before I go any further, I want to stick in an unexpected little thing that I discovered yesterday morning – the fact that mixing oatmeal, salsa and peanut butter makes a FANTASTIC breakfast that’s delicious and filling in just the right ways. I didn’t get it out of a book or anything, by the way. I had made oatmeal, and I added the other ingredients at Horse spirit’s prompting (yes, that sounds weird, but he and I were talking at the time, and he very vividly made some suggestions regarding what I should eat, with me feeling like it wasn’t going to work, but he telling me all the while I’d love it -- and I did! *whinnies happily*). Alton Brown, the host of Good Eats on the Food Network, says you should “take charge” of your food, and he encourages wild experimentation as the way a chef can go beyond a recipe and find truly new taste sensations. So go out and experiment in the kitchen, everybody! *bounces happily*
Okay, back to less fun stuff. Like last week.
Y’know that post I wrote where I was so depressed, lamenting how awful things had been while Master and M’Lady were gone? Well, that was early on a Monday morning, and later that day things continued to be crappy right up to Master’s arrival.
I admit it – I’ve got a bit of unpleasant hair growth on my face. Not a lot, but just a touch in the wrong places near my lips. Master gave me some extra money to go get it removed by laser treatment in time for the conference, and I scheduled it for last Monday. I wanted it done and out of the way. When I got there, they told me to scrub all the pre-treatment numbing cream off my face, and apparently I scrubbed too hard, because the specialist called in her manager and told me she wouldn’t risk the treatment on me because my skin was all red. I was shocked, and tried to explain that my skin was fine before I scrubbed it, but then they started saying there was obviously something wrong with my skin, and I couldn’t get the treatment done until I went to a dermatologist and got a written note saying it was safe. That was so ridiculous and absurd, and they wouldn’t believe me when I said my skin was fine, and I lost it and started bawling loudly and uncontrollably. A week earlier I probably would have written it off and gone somewhere else, but after days of awfulness, I just couldn’t take it anymore and I left there crying my eyes out.
I called Master to confirm that their flight was on time, and he could tell I was upset, and I told him what had happened. In response, he very tenderly told me to take the day off and do whatever I needed to do to comfort myself before they arrived. It warmed my heart, but I replied that I wanted to be busy as a way of not dwelling on the situation, and he gave me permission to make one of their favorite dinners – blue cheese pork and noodles – as their welcome-home meal. (It’s TRULY yummy, and I’ve put the recipe at the bottom of today’s post).
FYI, the manager of the laser-treatment spa called me later that day and let me explain things, and the appointment was rescheduled for the following Thursday. Unfortunately, that appointment also turned out to be a fiasco in ways, with a newly graduated technician doing the work, and when I told her how the owner of the salon had done my face before, she told me she “didn’t give a shit” about what the owner of the place said, and then proceeded to rush me through very sloppily using a process that had never been done on me. It’s been almost a week, and the few hairs that were supposed to have been burned away are still there, to my annoyance. Master told me to call today to complain, and I did, and the manager said she’d get me back in and do me personally after I get back from Phoenix. *sighs*
Anyway, enough of that dumb subject.
Master and M’Lady’s flight returned right on time, and I surprised them by meeting them early at the luggage terminal, and I felt so wonderful to see them again. Not much of note happened the rest of the night except for the simple act of everybody getting home and tiredly trying to get back to normal.
Tuesday I was already feeling so incredibly better. It was so wonderful to have Master back, and to be able to turn to him when things got confusing, and to just have his presence near me, giving me the peace and sense of rightness that comes in being fully owned. I missed everything about Master. The sound of his voice, the feel of his arms around me, even the knowledge that he would punish me for disobedience or making mistakes. I am his property. I am his pet. And like many a canine, Master is the world to me in ways that non-slaves likely might never be able to understand.
Speaking of non-slaves, that night I had a very enjoyable coffee with a woman I’d met at the Sanctuary BDSM Club in Denver. She originally told me she was a submissive, but later (during a discussion at a group for submissives) she said she might actually be more of a slave. We stayed up extremely late, and the more we talked, the more we liked each other, and we parted by saying we really hope to get together on a regular basis – and Master likes her, so he approves of us being good friends. As she and I talked about our lives, we both concluded that she’s not a slave, but she does have very slave-like tendencies. She could never imagine giving up total control, and she would never desire to devote herself full-time to a Master who is married (and her primary Master is) – yet she said she also couldn’t imagine disobeying her Master when he gives her a direct order. She actually has two dominants, with the second one spending more time with her than her main dom. It’s a complicated situation, but it works for her, and I love talking with her about it and other things. And to top it off, at the end of the night she gave me a FANTASTIC coat and scarf set because she lost a lot of weight and I fit what she used to weigh. It’s not that I’m way overweight myself, mind you -- she’s quite a bit shorter than I am, so really overweight for her is normal for me. (Okay, close to normal – I am on a diet, y’know. *grins*)
Wednesday Master and I went to a class on paddles and crops at the Sanctuary. It was okay. To be honest, I was both bored and nervous at the same time – S & M (sadism and masochism), particularly when it directly involves inflicting and receiving pain, doesn’t really interest me that much except in how it directly affects the relationship between Master and me. I find it weird that people get a kick out of hitting each other with sticks of wood or pieces of leather – but then, I also find it weird that people enjoy watching football or collecting stamps. Actually, I can understand stamp collecting a bit because it can be beautiful and relaxing. And I guess S & M can be that way to some people. But not to me, so the presentation was dull – except for the fact that I was concerned that Master, who enjoys S & M, might have been planning on using me as a test target to play with at the class. He didn’t want to, however, to my relief. Master and I are still working on figuring out a balance regarding that part of our lives. Master will occasionally paddle me for fun or for minor offenses, just to get a reaction out of me, but he never does anything lengthy or serious because he knows I’m not into that.
Regarding BDSM, I am into the first letter, I should note – “B” being for “bondage.” Master isn’t, however. So just as he chooses to not get his jollies from beating me for long sessions in his dungeon (even though he enjoys such things), I don’t get to have the jollies I want from being stuck in a cage, tied up, gagged and blindfolded for long sessions in his dungeon. He’s got a fantastic dungeon, and it’s not being used. Well, not yet. He’s hoping to have some parties here during the coming months. We’re both crossing our fingers, because even if I don’t play much during the coming parties, at least I think I’ll enjoy the company.
That is, if the parties aren’t high protocol. Which I’ve officially gotten sick of for awhile.
Friday night was Inner Sanctum, the monthly high protocol event at the Sanctuary. It was okay. Not great, but okay. I truly enjoy serving Master, but I was really spacing out at times as I kneeled for what seemed like forever at Master’s feet. The topic was on “objectification”, and the Master leading it seemed like such a novice. I’ve had about 15 years studying the subject, if not longer, particularly in online fiction and erotic sites, and I so much wanted to correct his misstatements and add my own knowledge, but I couldn’t because, as a slave, I had to remain quiet and keep my opinions to myself while he talked. At one point the Master leading the discussion said that animal play was objectification, and I wanted to correct him so much! (My Master and I talked afterward, and he agreed with me on that point, that animal play is something else altogether. More on that later.)
I started getting sore during the kneeling, and I started zoning out at one point, to the point of almost “crossing over” mentally into a trance state. Horse spirit was already with me that night, and my connection with him got exponentially stronger very quickly – and it stuck for hours. That night, I truly felt like Horse was talking with me, so much that at times he was making me giggle. I really felt him with me. I truly heard him and, without a doubt, could tell what were his words and what were my own thoughts.
One thing that was interesting that happened then – there’s was a slave there that’s generally considered really attractive, but I saw her with only a few clothes on, and I noticed how much cellulite she had, and I looked at myself, and I realized how muscular I am, and I felt so extremely proud of my workhorse physique. I saw my own benefits not as a human, but as a beast of burden. Actually, while at the meeting, I felt like everybody looked weird. Like human bodies looked strange and unappealing. Like nobody there was attractive, male or female, except for one person – my Master. And, truth be told, my Master is HOT. Think “Sean Connery” in the Hunt for Red October hot, except taller and a bit more broad. Maybe I was feeling the way that an animal feels for her Owner, in that people in general are bizarre except for the person who owns you. But it felt good to see my Master and feel that way. Very, very good and wonderful.
Horse also made me feel really alienated from the idea of high protocol, and was saying things to me, “Wow. They’re really getting into this. It’s like we’re in a church or something,” and I couldn’t help but feel just how absurd it all was that night.
The very next night was a formal dinner at a Master’s house, with everybody engaged yet again in very high protocol, with the Masters in one room and the slaves busy serving a full, complex meal. The slaves who belonged to the Owner of the house did all the cooking, with the rest of the slaves splitting the serving duties. I jumped at the chance to make cappuccinos, which I love to do and wanted to make sure was done right. Truth be told, the night was rather dull and, especially after the previous night, very tiring. I was so sore from having to uncomfortably kneel another night for long periods at Master’s feet, unable to stand and stretch my legs when needed, while he and the other Masters chit chatted. I’m officially sick of high protocol for awhile. I’m ready to just serve Master normally.
On the way back from that party, Master and I talked about furry fandom and animal play, and he said he considered them kinky, and it took me awhile to help him realize that they weren’t by nature. As the ponygirl said, furriness is about enjoying anthropmorphics (i.e., art and media that involves animals walking and talking like humans) , and erotic play doesn’t have to be involved.
What ponygirl, you’re wondering? Well, earlier in the week I joined a couple of ponyplay-related groups on Fetlife, and I found out there’s a group of people who want to do ponyplay in the Denver area. The main thing we’re needing now is to find a good place to play, and to figure out when and where to meet. The group is headed by a 20-something-year-old transwoman (a woman born with a man’s sexual organs). As somebody on a therian board once said, if you have species dysphoria (like I have), then gender dysphoria really isn’t a big deal! *grins*
The ponygirl I just mentioned and I met for coffee at a nearby Wiccan-oriented coffee shop, and we had quite a pleasant conversation talking about life and such. She’s not a therian, by the way, in that she doesn’t consider herself a horse spiritually (in contrast, I’m a wolf spiritually, making me a lupine therian).
Among other things, she talked about the local furry community, and I left feeling quite interested in getting involved. Granted, I might wide up rather disappointed. It could be just a bunch of people who like to dress up as animals and freak out the mundanes, the fuzzy equivalent of Goths. But I don’t think so. I think once I get to know people in the local furry community – which I’ve heard is a rather large group of people – I’ll find more than a few who are in it because of a spiritual connection with their animal. If anything, just finding people who enjoy anthromorphic art and comics, and who enjoy similarly themed roleplaying games, might be rather fun.
With that in mind, I looked up information about the Rocky Mountain Fur Con , a local furry convention that the ponygirl said was great. I considered attending last year, but I that was the weekend I was collared by Mistress, and needless to say my life was rather chaotic at the time. It seems like it would be wonderful to attend, but it’s all the way in August. By that time, however, I hope to get to know others in the local community and, if we click, I’ve already volunteered to present some events related to animal-associated spirituality. If people are interested in it, that is. We’ll see.
Whatever the case, the ponyplay group looks like it might have some great opportunities, too. I’ve been looking online to see if I can find us a cheap pony cart that we can use to pull each other around. If so, we could take turns training each other. The ponygirl and I realized that, as opposed to Master/slave or Dom/sub relationships, ponies just want to be ponies, and we can take turns being human sometimes and a pony other times. *nickers happily*
I already know I love being in pony gear. Remember how I mentioned I spent the Friday before last (while Master was gone) at the home of another slave? Well, while there, I modeled my pony gear, and came out in front of everybody wearing nothing but my bridle, halter and harness strap. And the thing is, it felt great. I was close to being nude, but I felt like I could have gone out in public like that with no problem. I really hope I get to be involved in pony play soon, somehow. The way things are working out, though, I think something will happen!
*crosses her hooves and bites her lips*
Horse. It keeps coming back to Horse.
I was so tired after last Wednesday’s class on crops and paddles that I crashed pretty much as soon as we got home, with a stuffed horse fetish with me all night. It’s actually a Webkinz horse that my daughter gave me (she offered it to me after I gave her a much larger stuffed horse as a surprise one day), but it definitely acts as a conduit to Horse spiritually. And, yes, anything can be a spiritual conduit, as long as it’s connected to somebody’s mind that way. I know of a very traditional Lakota holy man who had in his medicine bag a rubber mouse, which he very seriously used in his ritualistic work. Whatever the case, that night I dreamed a lot of things that had to do with horse’s presence, but unfortunately the next day I could only vaguely remember them without solid details. I knew he was with me, though, without a doubt.
My connection to Horse spirit is getting stronger and stronger, so much that it was hard to concentrate on being a slave sometimes during the last week. Maybe being away from Master did it, or gave Horse leeway for awhile. Last night, however, Master did something that totally snapped me back into place mentally, making me feel as if everything was right in my life again as far as the path I’m following.
I had heard so many wonderful things about the movie “Up,” and I was dying to see it – and I thought I finally would last night. But it turns out that Disney didn’t put ANY closed captioning into the rental copy, and with me being very hard of hearing, I was heartbroken and went up to my room crying in frustration because I wouldn’t be able to understand the subtleties of what was being said.
A few minutes later I came downstairs to find Master on the phone to Netflix (which sent him the movie) complaining about the lack of subtitles. He was very concerned and angry about the situation, and he stayed on the phone a long time making sure they knew how upset he was and how it was keeping him from watching a great movie with “his family.” Family. That’s how he sees me. I felt so incredibly proud to be Master’s slave at that moment. As I heard him fighting for me, working to protect me and take care of me, I knew more than anything I wanted to serve him with everything that I am. It was a wonderful, beautiful, incredibly joyous feeling that flows through me even now.
Yesterday Master “fine tuned” me some more – corrected me for a list of minor infractions he wants to make sure I fixed and learned from. Accidentally leaving some water on the counter in the bathroom after cleaning a silk sheet. Neglecting to empty the trash in his room the night before. Things like that. At first I was rather annoyed at myself for missing them. But that abated, to be replaced with a feeling of determination, because I knew all of that was part of Master making me better and better every day.
The feeling I had last night, one of bliss in being Master’s property, is what I plan to use to carry me through all the stress of this weekend, because in the coming days, I will be serving in every way as Master’s girl, in a place surrounded by other Master/slave couples, all coming together in friendship and togetherness.
Surely nothing could go wrong with that, right? *chuckles*
La kajira!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Blue Cheese and Pork Tenderloin Casserole
Yields: 6 Servings
INGREDIENTS
6 ounces Egg Noodles
6 slices Pork Tenderloin 1 inch thick
3/4 teaspoon Salt
3/4 teaspoon Pepper
3 tablespoons Butter
3 tablespoons All purpose flour
2 1/2 cups Milk
3/4 cup Blue cheese crumbled
1 4 oz can Chopped green chilies
INSTRUCTIONS
Preheat oven to 350 F. Grease a shallow 2 quart casserole.
Cook noodles according to package directions. Drain. Transfer casserole.
Season tenderloin with salt and pepper. Heat 1 tablespoon butter in a skillet and brown meat on both sides over moderately high heat. Place on top of noodles.
Add remaining 2 tablespoons butter to the pan. Add flour and stir until lightly browned, about 5 minutes.
Add the milk and bring to a boil, whisking constantly. Add the cheese and stir until smooth. Add the chiles. Pour the sauce over the meat and noodles.
Bake uncovered for about 30 minutes, until bubbly.
Showing posts with label ponyplay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ponyplay. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Day 164 -- On Being Connected to Horse Spirit, Following the Path of a Druidess, Becoming a Tree Spirit, and Things Sorta Getting Back to Normal
Some weeks are so bad that it takes you awhile to get over them. The week Master and M’Lady were gone was like that.
They returned, as expected, the day after my last post. During the week since, I’ve been trying mentally to get back to normal, but without complete success.
It’s hard to explain, but things still feel weird.
The fact that I’ve been working with Horse spirit so strongly – or, should I say, the fact that he’s been working with me, as he’s been very determinedly making his way into my head – may have something to do with my mindset as well. That, along with the fact I’ve been looking into ponyplay much more during the last couple of weeks, and I’ve been communicating with other people interested in the same thing in the Denver area. Naturally, those two things go together.
Horse. He’s been trying to make himself my primary spirit guide since late summer of 2008, since I first started considering full-time slavery as a real lifestyle choice.
It began slowly, in SecondLife of all places (the online virtual world). Well, that provided the springboard. I needed to teleport somewhere quickly to avoid another person, and I randomly chose a pony ranch to visit. I was intrigued at what I saw there, and I soon became involved a bit in the online virtual pony community. There are entire ranches set up for it, with online pony girls (and boys) pretending to do dressage and racing and …
Yeah, that’s all just pretend. I know. But it created a connection in my mind between being a pony and being a slave (which was the path I was pursuing, at Raven spirit’s prompting).
Pony play appeals to me because it would allow me to bridge the gap (in a way) between my human and non-human animal natures. However, with the ability to actually have a fully animal body in SecondLife, the limitations of ponyplay soon became too much, and I went the next step – to becoming a horse in SecondLife.
That’s about when Horse spirit started contacting me.
For several months, I lived off-and-on as a horse in Secondlife, the property of a very loving married couple in a sim dedicated to the Tombstone, Arizona, of the Wild West days. They gave me a stall in their barn and everything. I attended stock shows and pulled a cart around the city. And I never talked. Ever. I was a horse, with the only means of communication being to occasionally snort or stomp my foot in annoyance or whinny happily or something.
It was about that time that I had my first direct encounter with Horse, without a doubt. I was coming out of a job interview and, as I approached my car, I was hit with an extremely strong mental “shift” into the mindset of a horse, along with an extremely strong feeling of being a horse in a human body. Everything about my human body felt wrong, and I sensed I could feel my equine limbs as if they were truly a part of me. The experience passed within a few minutes, but it left me a bit shaken – in a way I found pleasantly breathtaking.
By early fall of that year, I was wanting to be a horse in real life so much it hurt. I briefly worked near a horse farm and I would visit there during lunches, and I fell deeply in love (or was it lust?) with a wonderfully playful (and randy!) young stallion there. If I could have woken up one day as a mare in that pasture, destined to be bred with him and mother his foals, I would have in a heartbeat.
Regarding Secondlife, by the way, unfortunately, most people in the Tombstone sim didn’t really know how to handle roleplaying with a horse, so I was largely ignored, and slowly moved away from that role – but the seed was there in my mind, and it remained ready to sprout.
That time arrived in January after I encountered a woman who ran a sim based on Celtic Spain, circa 1241. We talked, and she said she needed a druidess in her tribe, and I took on the position, little knowing where it would lead me.
During the next two weeks, I would have a series of spiritual experiences prompted by the roleplaying in the sim that actually went far beyond what everybody else was doing there, so much that I was kicked out of the sim for being too “intense” and for not limiting myself to their style of roleplaying. They just wanted me to roleplay, but something very real happened to me, and they didn't want a part of it.
During that time, I felt the calling to become a druidess for real. I felt the first strings of a connection to Rhiannon, the Welsh Celtic horse goddess. And I encountered a spirit in the guise of a white horse – which I didn’t find out until quite a bit later happened to be the way that Rhiannon presented herself at times.
To quote something I told somebody at that time … “There is a white stallion who owns me. He told me his name. It means ‘moonlight.’ I hunt when I need to, but I often can live without it. I am a wolf at heart, and I'm used to being one. Living in a human body is strange for me. But Rhiannon has come to me, and she's starting to encourage me to see life through a horse's eyes ... and to consider living on a horse's diet. I do have memories of being a wolf in my lives before this one, though. I'm not sure why I'm human in this life. But I'm sure there's a reason for it.”
I sought the reality of my experiences soon afterward, and I began researching druidism. And I began taking walks around the area near my apartment. One day, in a grove of trees, a natural area set aside at a local park, I was hit by a very powerful presence that I knew without a doubt – because I recognized her – to be Rhiannon. She came as a woman and left as a white horse, and she told me she would only come to me in natural places, like the grove of trees. It was wonderful and beautiful. I have to admit something, which is I haven’t contacted her much since then. Why, I don’t know. Maybe I just feel I don’t need to, because she’s there for me and will call to me when I need to be with her. Whatever the answer, though it’s a question I feel I need to pursue soon.
I was able to find some very reliable sources on Druidic rituals, and one of them gave instructions on how to begin the path of a Druidess by connecting my spirit to a grove of trees. I didn’t realize just how powerful the ritual was until it was too late – not that I wish I hadn’t done it. By the end of it, after a long ceremony and meditation in which I communicated directly with each of the spirits in a group of cottonwood trees near my apartment, I allowed their souls to connect to mine and mine to theirs, and to bind my energies to their own and … I became a part of the grove. A sister to them. Part of their family. Truly, a tree. And that’s what I hadn’t expected, that my soul would literally be changed. That I would afterward be, in a very real way, a tree spirit. But if I had thought about it, that’s the only way I could become part of the grove.
Afterward, I did research to validate my experiences, and I found out that what happened to me was actually typical of somebody who crossed the barrier to becoming a druid. The legend of Merlin going into a tree upon his death is based on that, in that upon his leaving his human life, he became a tree in the next – or that’s my understanding of it. So closely linked are druids and trees spiritually that the word root for dryad, which means “female spirit,” is the same as for “druid,” with “dryas” meaning “female druid.”
So I’m a wolf. But I’m also a tree. A dryas. And while that’s impossible to explain, it makes perfect sense to me because, simply, I know it in my soul to be right in ways that words can’t define.
The grove wants me back someday, to live there as a tree. Before, the idea of being a tree would seem horrible. Now it fills me with peace and a sense of rightness. And I long to be there someday, at least for one of my future lives.
And I long to be a horse, as well.
But, with luck, I’ll be able to be a ponygirl at times soon. But I’m getting to that.
Well, I’ll get to that in my next post. This one’s already getting too long, and so it’s time to cut it off here and get it logged into place.
So, for now, just know that things are better now than they were in my last post, without a doubt. But I’m still a bit off-center mentally. Hopefully soon things will be fully back to normal.
*crosses her hooves for luck*
And, as always, la kajira!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
p.s. Here is one a quick summary of the most famous of the stories regarding Rhiannon, as I told it to a friend in SecondLife:
Rhiannon is a goddess who came to Earth and married a human male instead of the god she was arranged to wed. There is much to tell of her, but I'll mention a few things
The god she was arranged to wed was furious, as you may expect. But Rhiannon married the human, and after several years they had a beautiful infant son.
Well, being a mother can lead to tragedy, as Rhianon and her husband found out. The son was cared for by six handmaidens. One night they all fell asleep at the same time by accident. And when they awoke, the child was gone.
They were all afraid they would be blamed for the child's loss, so they took a small animal that had been killed, and they smeared its blood on Rhiannon's sleeping body, and placed the animal's bones by Rhiannon's side.
Rhiannon swore her innocence, but she was put to trial. Because she was the queen, she was spared death, but she was punished to serve as a horse for seven years. She had to wear a horse's collar and bridle and to stand at the gates of the city and give rides to the castle to anybody who asked. She did this for four years without complaint, and the people grew to love her and respect her dearly. One day, a man and a woman and a child approached the city, and Rhiannon offered to give them a ride. In response, the child held to Rhiannon a scrap of cloth, which Rhiannon had woven herself. She realized it was her son, and she hugged him dearly. What had happened is that Rhiannon's jealous former fiancee had kidnapped the child and left him to die in a field. The man, a farmer, had come to the field that night to help a horse give labor, and had seen the child lying nearby. The man and his wife adopted the child and raised him as their own.
After they had heard of Rhiannon's punishment, they realized who the child was, and came to the city to reunite him with his family. Rhiannon brought the child back to the palace, and all the people of the kingdom were remorseful for having judged Rhiannon so harshly. She was a loving and kind queen, and she forgave them all, and the kingdom was blessed by her rule and prospered for many years in happiness.
Rhiannon is now considered to be a Goddess strongly connected with horses, and those who connect with her often are guided to truly understand what the life of a horse is like, in mind and heart and spirit. She is also a Goddess who teaches love and compassion, and teaches forgiveness, and teaches following your heart no matter where it leads, and teaches perseverance during life's toughest trials.
And all of those things .... compassion, following your heart, and perseverance ... are all traits of a horse for the person who rides it ... if the horse and the rider share a bond of love.
They returned, as expected, the day after my last post. During the week since, I’ve been trying mentally to get back to normal, but without complete success.
It’s hard to explain, but things still feel weird.
The fact that I’ve been working with Horse spirit so strongly – or, should I say, the fact that he’s been working with me, as he’s been very determinedly making his way into my head – may have something to do with my mindset as well. That, along with the fact I’ve been looking into ponyplay much more during the last couple of weeks, and I’ve been communicating with other people interested in the same thing in the Denver area. Naturally, those two things go together.
Horse. He’s been trying to make himself my primary spirit guide since late summer of 2008, since I first started considering full-time slavery as a real lifestyle choice.
It began slowly, in SecondLife of all places (the online virtual world). Well, that provided the springboard. I needed to teleport somewhere quickly to avoid another person, and I randomly chose a pony ranch to visit. I was intrigued at what I saw there, and I soon became involved a bit in the online virtual pony community. There are entire ranches set up for it, with online pony girls (and boys) pretending to do dressage and racing and …
Yeah, that’s all just pretend. I know. But it created a connection in my mind between being a pony and being a slave (which was the path I was pursuing, at Raven spirit’s prompting).
Pony play appeals to me because it would allow me to bridge the gap (in a way) between my human and non-human animal natures. However, with the ability to actually have a fully animal body in SecondLife, the limitations of ponyplay soon became too much, and I went the next step – to becoming a horse in SecondLife.
That’s about when Horse spirit started contacting me.
For several months, I lived off-and-on as a horse in Secondlife, the property of a very loving married couple in a sim dedicated to the Tombstone, Arizona, of the Wild West days. They gave me a stall in their barn and everything. I attended stock shows and pulled a cart around the city. And I never talked. Ever. I was a horse, with the only means of communication being to occasionally snort or stomp my foot in annoyance or whinny happily or something.
It was about that time that I had my first direct encounter with Horse, without a doubt. I was coming out of a job interview and, as I approached my car, I was hit with an extremely strong mental “shift” into the mindset of a horse, along with an extremely strong feeling of being a horse in a human body. Everything about my human body felt wrong, and I sensed I could feel my equine limbs as if they were truly a part of me. The experience passed within a few minutes, but it left me a bit shaken – in a way I found pleasantly breathtaking.
By early fall of that year, I was wanting to be a horse in real life so much it hurt. I briefly worked near a horse farm and I would visit there during lunches, and I fell deeply in love (or was it lust?) with a wonderfully playful (and randy!) young stallion there. If I could have woken up one day as a mare in that pasture, destined to be bred with him and mother his foals, I would have in a heartbeat.
Regarding Secondlife, by the way, unfortunately, most people in the Tombstone sim didn’t really know how to handle roleplaying with a horse, so I was largely ignored, and slowly moved away from that role – but the seed was there in my mind, and it remained ready to sprout.
That time arrived in January after I encountered a woman who ran a sim based on Celtic Spain, circa 1241. We talked, and she said she needed a druidess in her tribe, and I took on the position, little knowing where it would lead me.
During the next two weeks, I would have a series of spiritual experiences prompted by the roleplaying in the sim that actually went far beyond what everybody else was doing there, so much that I was kicked out of the sim for being too “intense” and for not limiting myself to their style of roleplaying. They just wanted me to roleplay, but something very real happened to me, and they didn't want a part of it.
During that time, I felt the calling to become a druidess for real. I felt the first strings of a connection to Rhiannon, the Welsh Celtic horse goddess. And I encountered a spirit in the guise of a white horse – which I didn’t find out until quite a bit later happened to be the way that Rhiannon presented herself at times.
To quote something I told somebody at that time … “There is a white stallion who owns me. He told me his name. It means ‘moonlight.’ I hunt when I need to, but I often can live without it. I am a wolf at heart, and I'm used to being one. Living in a human body is strange for me. But Rhiannon has come to me, and she's starting to encourage me to see life through a horse's eyes ... and to consider living on a horse's diet. I do have memories of being a wolf in my lives before this one, though. I'm not sure why I'm human in this life. But I'm sure there's a reason for it.”
I sought the reality of my experiences soon afterward, and I began researching druidism. And I began taking walks around the area near my apartment. One day, in a grove of trees, a natural area set aside at a local park, I was hit by a very powerful presence that I knew without a doubt – because I recognized her – to be Rhiannon. She came as a woman and left as a white horse, and she told me she would only come to me in natural places, like the grove of trees. It was wonderful and beautiful. I have to admit something, which is I haven’t contacted her much since then. Why, I don’t know. Maybe I just feel I don’t need to, because she’s there for me and will call to me when I need to be with her. Whatever the answer, though it’s a question I feel I need to pursue soon.
I was able to find some very reliable sources on Druidic rituals, and one of them gave instructions on how to begin the path of a Druidess by connecting my spirit to a grove of trees. I didn’t realize just how powerful the ritual was until it was too late – not that I wish I hadn’t done it. By the end of it, after a long ceremony and meditation in which I communicated directly with each of the spirits in a group of cottonwood trees near my apartment, I allowed their souls to connect to mine and mine to theirs, and to bind my energies to their own and … I became a part of the grove. A sister to them. Part of their family. Truly, a tree. And that’s what I hadn’t expected, that my soul would literally be changed. That I would afterward be, in a very real way, a tree spirit. But if I had thought about it, that’s the only way I could become part of the grove.
Afterward, I did research to validate my experiences, and I found out that what happened to me was actually typical of somebody who crossed the barrier to becoming a druid. The legend of Merlin going into a tree upon his death is based on that, in that upon his leaving his human life, he became a tree in the next – or that’s my understanding of it. So closely linked are druids and trees spiritually that the word root for dryad, which means “female spirit,” is the same as for “druid,” with “dryas” meaning “female druid.”
So I’m a wolf. But I’m also a tree. A dryas. And while that’s impossible to explain, it makes perfect sense to me because, simply, I know it in my soul to be right in ways that words can’t define.
The grove wants me back someday, to live there as a tree. Before, the idea of being a tree would seem horrible. Now it fills me with peace and a sense of rightness. And I long to be there someday, at least for one of my future lives.
And I long to be a horse, as well.
But, with luck, I’ll be able to be a ponygirl at times soon. But I’m getting to that.
Well, I’ll get to that in my next post. This one’s already getting too long, and so it’s time to cut it off here and get it logged into place.
So, for now, just know that things are better now than they were in my last post, without a doubt. But I’m still a bit off-center mentally. Hopefully soon things will be fully back to normal.
*crosses her hooves for luck*
And, as always, la kajira!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
p.s. Here is one a quick summary of the most famous of the stories regarding Rhiannon, as I told it to a friend in SecondLife:
Rhiannon is a goddess who came to Earth and married a human male instead of the god she was arranged to wed. There is much to tell of her, but I'll mention a few things
The god she was arranged to wed was furious, as you may expect. But Rhiannon married the human, and after several years they had a beautiful infant son.
Well, being a mother can lead to tragedy, as Rhianon and her husband found out. The son was cared for by six handmaidens. One night they all fell asleep at the same time by accident. And when they awoke, the child was gone.
They were all afraid they would be blamed for the child's loss, so they took a small animal that had been killed, and they smeared its blood on Rhiannon's sleeping body, and placed the animal's bones by Rhiannon's side.
Rhiannon swore her innocence, but she was put to trial. Because she was the queen, she was spared death, but she was punished to serve as a horse for seven years. She had to wear a horse's collar and bridle and to stand at the gates of the city and give rides to the castle to anybody who asked. She did this for four years without complaint, and the people grew to love her and respect her dearly. One day, a man and a woman and a child approached the city, and Rhiannon offered to give them a ride. In response, the child held to Rhiannon a scrap of cloth, which Rhiannon had woven herself. She realized it was her son, and she hugged him dearly. What had happened is that Rhiannon's jealous former fiancee had kidnapped the child and left him to die in a field. The man, a farmer, had come to the field that night to help a horse give labor, and had seen the child lying nearby. The man and his wife adopted the child and raised him as their own.
After they had heard of Rhiannon's punishment, they realized who the child was, and came to the city to reunite him with his family. Rhiannon brought the child back to the palace, and all the people of the kingdom were remorseful for having judged Rhiannon so harshly. She was a loving and kind queen, and she forgave them all, and the kingdom was blessed by her rule and prospered for many years in happiness.
Rhiannon is now considered to be a Goddess strongly connected with horses, and those who connect with her often are guided to truly understand what the life of a horse is like, in mind and heart and spirit. She is also a Goddess who teaches love and compassion, and teaches forgiveness, and teaches following your heart no matter where it leads, and teaches perseverance during life's toughest trials.
And all of those things .... compassion, following your heart, and perseverance ... are all traits of a horse for the person who rides it ... if the horse and the rider share a bond of love.
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