Candyland Sweet Briar Corner on a Frosty Morning

I did two different versions of the same piece.  This one has an effect added to it that i really like, that makes it brighter.  However, i loved the richness of the darker colors in the first version i posted of this:


I have to say, I've come to love this version better.  Of course, now i won't be able to submit it to very many groups, coz i posed the other one all over the place, but such is life.  Here is the writing that goes with this piece, which explains the symbology:

Sweetbriar Corner, such a pretty place, despite - or even maybe enhanced by? - the thorns.  And such it is with sweets, isn’t it?  Sweet things, sweetmeats, even sweet people, have their prickles, don’t they.  Sweets can get you into terrible trouble sometimes, they can alter your body shape causing you to huff and puff up stairs, they can put a terrible strain on your heart.  They can give you jowls, and turkey neck, and wobbly arms.  But, oh, they are SO delicious, and it’s so easy to find yourself craving them...almost constantly - hm, yes, prickle and stick.  Even sweet people have their thorns, my darlings, for sweet people are sweet because they are emotional, they are empathetic, they can feel how others feel - but all that can be troublesome - for both you and the sweet one.  Sweet people can be sensitive, temperamental, melodramatic - emo.  They can be fun because they excitable, and terribly loving, demonstrative in their affections.  But they can be tempestuous and hot blooded.  They can be tender and sentimental, they can pour their affections on you, shining their loving, colorful heart upon you, and you will bathe in their warm light.  But if you cross them, that light will go off, they will turn their heart from you, and you might find yourself craving their sweetness.  Then you might find yourself having to ween yourself off them - too much drama.  

But, what is life without it’s drama?   Will you really stop visiting Sweetbriar Corner because of the thorns?  Do you really want to live without the sweet and the pretty because they are prickle and barbed?  But isn’t that American, midwestern mores, our national psychotic ethic - that our lives should be colorless, free from barbs and sweets, for barbs and sweets are wicked, and only the wicked enjoy life.  Sex is solely for procreation - the fact that’s it’s pleasurable in ways that have nothing to do with procreation can be scientifically justified as a way of making us want to continue our race (something the puritanical could only think up because only they think of sex as unenjoyable in and of itself).  As if certain bodies having a prostrate gland inside their booty that produces sexual pleasure will get them to have sex because the pleasure they feel from their genitalia just isn’t enuff.  As if stimulating the g-spot in certain bodies will further procreation, because stimulating their clitoris isn’t enuff.  As if our nipples being erotically sensitive will overcome some amorphous reticence on our parts to engage in procreation activities because genital and clitoral stimulation isn’t enuff to sustain our interest.  The irony is that the very people who claim that sex is solely for procreation are the least likely to engage in sexual play that involves stimulating anything other than the necessary erogenous zones.  

I often wonder…at one point does the necessary biology end, and the imposed or learned psychology begin?  Sweetmeats, and bloodmeats, may make us gain weight - but in olden times, when humanity was young, putting fat on your body in summer allowed you to live thru the winter.  Yet, while that necessity ended long ago, we still crave the sweet and fatty.  We create food, we create recipes, we grow different strains of vegetable and fruit, to make food taste wonderful in ways that can make us unhealthy, can put a strain on our hearts.  As if food needed to taste good in order to get us to eat it.  Why would we evolve such highly differentiated taste buds to get us to eat? we don’t need to eat any where near us much as most of us in the First World do. Our hunger, our cravings, they are not just for survival either.  We eat for pleasure, as well as to live.  

But our poor, dull, drab, grey science, looking thru the lens of Euro-Am puritanism, our inculcated religio-cultural bias will insist on boiling everything we do down to survival, evolution, sustaining our race.  And that is why our science ultimately fails us, it’s why, no matter what miracles of wonder we can conjure, we are still living in a world of massive inequality, prejudice, violence, rape, war, and abject poverty.  We live in a world where the colors and the sweetmeats are ignored for the grey cold hard facts, and so, we miss levels of complexity that divinity or nature or whatever you believe, has leavened into our reality.  Things that cannot be explained by a simple drive to survive.

Even when, all around us, we can see so much evidence that humanity is doing more than surviving, more than even thriving, it is over flowing, so much so that people are starving while others live in unfathomable luxury, the scientific minded insist that all is based on an instinct for survival.  Last night i cried, thinking about how some people live with - well, not just more than they need, but with so much wealth as to make their lives free from any struggle at all for generations to come - while so many other people are working so hard to simply survive, and more are living in an abject poverty so brutal most of us can’t think about it.  And so many people are so willfully blind, they can’t see that one of those states of being exists because the other does too - the luxury of extreme wealth relies on poverty, it relies on a struggling working class fighting over scraps, a working class that will help shore up a system that’s crushing it, so long as people can feel they are better and more well off than those below them.  

Dorothy lived in a drab American puritanism, and she went to a Candyland of wonder, and without taking a minute to really appreciate where she was, she spent a two hour movie trying to get back to her drab greyness.  She never stopped to smell a multi-colored rose.  In that grey drabness is safety…but there’s also prejudice for anything and anyone different, there is an ignorance to the shades of life that bring pleasure, there is an immaturity so deep it’s pathetic.  Our culture is sexually immature, we can barely talk about sex, we have trouble accepting anybody who does not conform to the notion that we exist simply to procreate so another generation can exist to procreate.  No matter how miserable we may be, nor how miserable we make others, we are inculcated with this idea that we must strive on, so that we can survive and strive on, so that we can procreate and the next generation can survive and strive on - no matter how much poverty we endure, no matter how much harder our lives our, compared to those who live atop us ladling off the biggest slice of wealth for themselves.  

I know that with each generation we create a better life, a life with less disease and more medical care, with more comfort and less suffering from the elements, more technology to advance our noble humaness and create more toys for us to play with.  But is that all just more candy?  We obviously do not need those things to survive as a race; why, we were straining natural resources and covering the earth well before the advent of time-saving electronic interweb devices that allow us to work nearly every second of the day.  Hunter-gatherers spent less time working than many modern humans - who spend their days at a workplace doing things, then drive home with their cellphones in their ears doing things for work, keeping their android phone next to them always, at home their laptops are at the ready, even taking computing devices to bed with them.  Even people who aren’t strictly working for money on those devices, are in some way working, at their hobbies, at their own attempts to better the world thru blogs and memes.  

We are striving to make the world better - but for what?  So we can live drab lives of procreation, maintaining our race and status quo, blind to the ruling classes and plutocracy who are living in unimaginable luxury off of our labor? So we can pretend that the pleasures we feel are solely to get us to maintain the spread of humanity for the sake of spreading humanity? 

Or are we striving the make the world better so we can partake of it’s endless dimensions, it’s pleasures and it’s thorns, it’s dramas and it’s serenity?  The color and candy of our lives is what makes our lives worth striving and suffering thru.  The pleasures of our bodies are what make life worth suffering thru.  Maybe if people allowed themselves to grow to sexual maturity they’d eat less fatty foods, or they wouldn’t feel they’d have to starve themselves to be attractive.  Maybe if people understood that pleasure is supposed to come with this body and be a part of this existence, there’d be more acceptance for people who are different, people who don’t fit the mode of endless procreation for the sake of procreation.  People who enjoy sex that doesn’t involve procreation, whether it’s with someone of the same sex, or even with someone of the same sex.

It seems to never have occurred to the scientifically minded, that humans who love those of the same sex have evolved - or were created - so that we don’t overpopulate the world, put a terrible strain on it’s resources, and nearly pollute ourselves to death?  Maybe, if we accepted difference, if we accepted that people have sex for pleasure, not just to procreate, our world wouldn’t have so much abject poverty, so much starvation, so much overpopulation in areas with so few natural resources.  

Maybe, and i know this is a huge lump for many of you to swallow, if we accepted that sex isn’t just for procreation, people could see that monogamy is a social construct, not a natural inclination.  The evidence is everywhere, there have been, and currently are, many thriving societies that have no concept of monogamy...modern mid-eastern societies built on polygamous marriage...happy modern Euro-Am polyamorous marriages.  Not to mention we haven't managed to eliminate adultery from our society in thousands of years.  Yet, we cling to this fantasy that for every single one of us only monogamous marriage can make us happy, no matter how many people it hasn't served.  It's obvious monogamy is only right for some people.   I’ve heard all the justifications, but in reality, monogamous marriage doesn’t foster massive procreation.  If people had sex whenever they felt like it, with whomever they felt like it, there’d obviously be more pregnancies - and if human societies accepted all children as the responsibility of all adults, then we could procreate to our heart’s content. Perhaps that’s why human societies of the past, that were on the edge of survival, had no monogamy, and fostered the idea that everyone in the village was responsible for raising the children.

The modern, nuclear family, is a cold, drab, lonely, barren place, my darlings.  Human families, even in the religiously constructed monogamies of the Euro-Am past, have always encompassed adults and children not blood related.  It is not blood that makes a family - it is love.  It doesn’t matter who biologically gave birth to a child, if you love a child, foster her, nurture her, than you are her parent - and no family needs to have only two parents, in fact, in reality, few families do.  Even in religiously constructed monogamies, children will be parented by other, or more, people than their biological parents.  Accidents happen, parents die.  In some families, while younger, stronger adults are working outside the home, elderly adults and older teens, or adults who don’t need to work outside the home, are at home nurturing the children. Or parents and other adults group together resources and trade off caring for children - whether it’s neighbors trading babysitting, or young parents creating play circles…and eventually most modern children end up in some kind of school system.  Adults who aren’t blood related share parenting duties, it’s a fact of life.  And some of us, who didn’t get the love and nurturing we needed from our biological parents, found it in other adults.  

Love, it’s the sweetest candy of all.  Why do we put a cap on this nurturing, why do we have this fantasy that only parents can nurture a child, when all around us, both in the past and present, there is evidence that this isn’t so.  Love is what makes a family - and we all need love, emotionally, we all need love.  I’ve heard the justifications about love as part of the drive to procreate, but humans don’t need love to procreate and sustain humanity, not really.  We need love to fill the darkness inside us, and when we don’t get love to fill the darkness, we will take anything.  The love we see in a television family on tv, the abuse and blows of guardians who merely take care of us but don’t love us.  We were given, or evolved, an emotional, psychological landscape, and so we crave love.  We all need the sweetmeat candy of love; but it comes with it’s thorns, it comes with drama.  That is it’s nature.

And that is Candyland’s Sweetbriar corner.