Finding Beauty in the Beast

It is interesting what we find when we pull away the layers of what we believe ourselves to be.
We see life in a new light when what we think is ugly becomes beautiful.

From an outside standpoint, tears are not pretty, pain is not graceful, and there is very little of what we call beauty in the raw state of being created when everything we think ourselves to be is stripped away.

Yet...There is beauty in the beast. Because stripping away the superficial takes away all that is impure, everything that is not truly real, and leaves us as we really are.

Underneath our fears, underneath everything we think we are are, behind what we want people to see, on the far side of darkness, beyond our inner scars and outer turmoil, there is beautiful and terrifying truth.

There is beauty in humiliation.
There is purification in pain.
There is freedom in bondage and control.
There is release in blood sweat, tears, and fear.

Daily life is very much about constructs--what we want people to see, who we think we are, the superficial aspects of reality wherein we place so much import.
But underneath it all, we are very basic and primal creatures.
Life is about birth, death, survival, love, joy, pain, blood, and tears.
So many of these things which to which we ascribe ugliness, are truly beautiful underneath the surface--because they transcend the superficial face that we place on our reality.

There is love in the sadist, and pleasure in the masochist.
There is freedom in slavery, and strength in submission.
There is danger in the beast, and safety at Master's feet.
There is blindness in the light, and purity in the darkness.

So much of what we spend time on and think about is superficial.
We get swept away by our need for survival, the demands of our cultures, our preconceived notions of beauty and propriety, the defining concepts of society, and the scars we carry from old wounds.
It becomes easy to forget that underneath it all, we are perfect beings struggling with being human.
Some of us want what we need, others need what we want.
And within all those struggles of being human, we forget the art of simply being.

There is ugliness in beauty, and there is beauty within every beast.
There is infinite release in being broken, and tender cruelty in the act of breaking.
There is cleanliness in BDSM, and denial in the pursuit of purity.
There is safety in vulnerability and danger behind walls.

I think that what is so attractive about the Master, is the seemingly conflicting fact that inside the white knight there lies a villain, within the rescuer lies one's abductor, and the purveyor of one's fears carries the ultimate security.

Perhaps what is attractive about the slave is placing the queen on her knees, the surrender when her will becomes one's own, the freedom of caging the untouchable, the beautiful truth that appears when she is stripped down to nothing more and nothing less than what she is--the owning of something truly wild and previously untouched by the world.

Sometimes, when we stop looking and close our eyes--we find that there is beauty in the beast.