Stories of a Black Sheep

I feel like an ancient deity with many arms, capable of simultaneously holding so many seemingly contradictory truths. The way death brings people together. I will be the last arrival of all my siblings and cousins to make it to the desert to gather around my grandfather's death. It takes this to get us all in one place. I don't feel my own deep sorrow over his passing; I'm thankful he went peacefully and I have compassion for those who were close and will miss him most.

For myself, I am the black sheep that strayed far, far from the flock and it was the judgmental law that he laid down that led my father to keep me a secret for years, preferring to let the family wonder where I could've disappeared to rather than risk being seen as the failed father of a beautiful, brilliant genderqueer tattooed tranny. Me, who sees animals and entities in the swirling cream clouds in my coffee. Me, who is probably the most closely and purposefully acquainted with death of anyone in my family. Me, who still, at thirty years old, anxiously labored over what kind of wardrobe felt respectfully "gender appropriate" and also still myself enough to wear for this occasion.

There is irony in the fact that now I struggle to find clothes that do not feminize my form. They have managed to accept my transition and shift their language to "he". I think they were so grateful just to have me around again and hear what I've been up to in life. But to wrap their heads around this formerly gregarious little girl who was always playing dress up becoming a boy who is not at all like the sports-watching, car-obsessed, cookie-cutter suburb family man, perhaps that is too much to ask. I don't really care how they see me, to be honest. They don't need to fully understand my life.

The mystics and the healers have always been poorly understood by their contemporaries. We are profoundly blessed in this modern age of travel and communication to have found our own connected covens and rabble-rousing crews.

So I go into this remembering my kinship to earth and sky and all that surrounds and supports me. I call on my acquaintance with death's gatekeepers to guide me and I call on the deepest well of compassion I know to allow me to hold space for the grief of my family, that I may be a channel for their healthy release, so they might become freer and deeper and more aware and grateful for this. So be it.

Samhain Reflections & Back in the Big City

November 3rd, 2010

Back in the city and I feel like my heart is breaking out of my chest...remembering crouching down low under brush and moving quietly like foxes over the landscape with companions also feeling the wet moss, twigs and sapling firs brush them in exquisite detail. Heart to heart conversations with those who see into my hurt like I'm wearing it proud on my sleeve. Understanding presence and ground beneath my feet and listening wholly and giving freely to my community. Lurking around the edges of the fire, keeping watch over the east gate, turning my face outward to the ancestors, spirits, sky and trees beyond our tight circle, then spiraling back in to tend the fire we all gather and conjour around.

And now I feel like I'm bouncing off all this cement -- it's too hard, it doesn't hold me, I don't fit in here in any sense of the word and my heart was not welcomed in this which masquerades as my homecoming. I am still not the first nor the tender concern of the one I share breath and my most vulnerable aspects with. And all the other lovers I've kept are falling away and usually I'd find myself grasping desperately, sending out lines of communication madly just to receive something back from someone somewhere to help survive me for today. Today I just can't. Today I let go instead and open myself to finding where I need to be. Because this whole scene is not working, my spirit suffers gravely and I deserve more. I am capable of shining this beautiful and needed light from within me in ways that touch others and change them and this place and this love dull me. Keep me always on the run, always dodging shadows and protecting myself savagely. I do not like what I've been becoming here.

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November 16, 2010

I'm whittled back to a stump now. The outer tough bark of me shredded off over time of trying to love well enough to save someone from their shadow. If someone doesn't want to help themself, the best thing, the only thing we can do is to put up our hands and walk away. Thank you to my guides for that.

The chill is creeping in to late California fall. The moon's peering down on me in this painted alleyway of corrugated tin and potted plants and barbed wire. She reminds me of the movement ever present and of the pull we have on each other and on all things. I choose to sever the energetic ties that no longer serve, the ways in which I've bound myself that keep me sabotaging myself and mistrusting my wisdom. I can be this whole, beautiful, contrary creature, crafting a nest for my heart and choosing with intention where I extend my heartstrings.

Scavengers...

I have become more interested recently in this idea of “useful debris”. Perhaps some of this is moving to reside in a much bigger and more densely populated urban area. There is trash everywhere here, especially in the poorer neighborhoods and industrial warehouse zones where I spend a lot of time. This existence is always a challenging dichotomy for me, the gritty urban reality which often foments such brilliant creativity and vibrant community on one hand, the rural wilder forest reality where the natural cycles and lives of creatures prevail on the other. I felt for years that when I finally pushed myself out of the nest of my hometown, which occupies a particular balance between green space, human community and artistic outlets with the urban, that I would move toward the more wild spaces. In the open places the wind and the birdsong are louder than the traffic and I am greeted each morning with a clearer mind for my practice rather than the sometimes inspiring, sometimes hopelessly muddled noise of the city dwellers.

The scavengers have been most present with me, the ones with whom I cross paths, who peer at me from under brush, watch me from power lines’ perch, scamper away just as I am approaching and seek me out in dreamspace. The bald-headed vultures who consume and make use of that which is too rotten and rank for the taste of most. The raccoons who have adapted so stealthily to city life by pawing through the veritable mountain of sustenance and shiny treasures we throw out routinely. The crows who flock often together and speak constantly of their critique while daring to swoop down for French fries or pastry crumbs dropped in the middle of busy streets. The skunks who leave their bold olfactory marks behind after their forays into our refuse. What are these messengers telling me?

Here I am, in the midst of the slow, lurching death of industrial decay, mustering some understanding of my own present place in this bigger picture. Learning the lessons of the scavenger, making a life out of the cast-offs, reinventing ancient skills with the manufactured means at my disposal, adapting to this strange life without giving up the essence of my creature self. I had this well-practiced in a place in my home, where at least superficially voice was given to the need for open spaces where trees and critters have a chance to flourish. This place is different, it calls for the ingenuity in me if my feral self is to survive where the urban hustle attitudes prevailing, with the neverending noise of traffic and trains and fights on the street, and the very real energetic density of this many souls all moving to and fro endlessly.

The muse that speaks to me in this place is of a mumbling, hermitty collector. A small hooded creature most often spotted pawing through others' bins of garbage or the sparkly bits that tend to gather near railroad tracks, who can disappear on a dime by side-stepping realities at first unwanted notice. I can’t help but wonder what this creature is going to do with all those gems and pieces of broken toys and lengths of wire and flattened springs and twisted sticks they find. Perhaps they only show up to spark my imagination.

My precious tender heart must find a safe and well-protected place to call home if we are to survive this particular adventure intact. Time, perhaps, to continue the spellwork I begun on stage at home…I recognized the tearing and restriction of having my heartstrings strung up in so complicated a manner between so many in that place. I lovingly gathered them back and began to weave a soft resting place for that most sacred beating drum in my chest. I held it close to me in sweet reverence and understood this to be the place from which I could most truly give with my whole self. So now I have taken this heart to a new home where its very survival seems to be threatened. What now to take care of this intuitive listening organ?

When writing feels more urgent than eating

I've been thinking a lot about presence. I've been noticing how I'm changing as I get older, that how I'm interested in connecting has shifted. I am much more interested in quality and depth of relationships. It all comes back to that ability to be present and participate in one's life, not just getting a list of things done, but actually living in the moment as it's happening from time to time. This is the intention.

I've been missing this lately. Part of moving away from my support network. I've been missing it in my sex. The deep ache in my body that reaches out for another warm, moving, living in their flesh and their heart and this world. But this gulf in me of missing is about seeking that presence of multiple levels.

If we are to come together to push hard into each other, to feel the expanse of skin on skin creating friction that builds, to find crevices and bones to wrap our hands around and cling to, sing to, speak to...then you need to be here. This experience of passion and tension cannot be one way. I can create that for myself; this desire is for the sharing, the magnetic, incomprehensible force that blurs the lines between yours and mine, meeting in the in-between by choice. To see what we can craft with all these bountiful resources of imagination, primed, ready, waiting to pounce.

On $$, pain and resources

Today I'm figuring how I can juggle money around between various debtors to pay for fixing my truck, so that it will keep running, which enables me eek out a bit more of a living doing massage when I can find the clients...Moving has helped me to appreciate the vast wealth of resources I had available to me in my hometown. I understand resources as connections and networks that facilitate me trading my skills to meet my basic needs, rather than as the money itself. Connections open up opportunities, and I had many of them back home. The capability to earn a living. It's harder here. I do have some folks trying to pull strings for me to help scramble some extra work, but the 20 hours a week packing boxes in a warehouse certainly isn't going to cut it. I know myself well enough by now to see that if I do that repetitive stress job much more than 20 hours a week, I will damage my wrists and hands, which are valuable to me for so much more vital work than packaging someone else's product, not to mention kill my spirit. I'm not cut out for the 40 hour a week grind doing the same thing all the time, especially when it's not particularly engaging more of my brain and passions. Honestly, I don't think most of us are cut out for it; some of us can just cram down the reactions deep into our bodies and psyches to keep plugging along more easily than others.

This is such an old, tired story. I don't think I am anywhere near as decimated by economical disenfranchisement as so many others, even in this city, but I feel the strain of this capitalist beast, nonetheless. It manifests in my body, my shoulder locking up tight toward my head after working a twelve hour stretch yesterday. Couldn't sleep. Puts a gloomy cloud over my head to be in pain all the time.

I am so thankful this has eased some from being the daily phenomenon it was when I was still injecting testosterone into my body. More slight muscle structure equals less tension and daily pain for me, this is good. This decision about what I'm putting into my body has also opened up the floodgates for my emotional life to move again. Tears come easily, when they were blocked up behind a thick and impenetrable dam for years. I cannot hide from the tender quiet words of my heart. Thankfully, building my heart a sturdy home inside this chest is much more a challenge of internal resources.

Heartbreak is sometimes the best medicine

I started this blog business a few months ago. After years of staunch ambivalence about all things technology, I was genuinely surprised to find myself investigating and stumbling through the steps of setting up a blog. "If I put myself and my work and ideas all out there for the world to have access to, they might read them." Exactly. As a self-defined writer my whole life, I have mostly kept my words to myself. Fear of failure is debilitating for artists. I began to branch out a few years ago at the motivation offered by a rad filthy queer open mic in my hometown of Portland, OR hosted at In Other Words bookstore. Having an audience helps put a fire under my ass to keep writing and sharing, as it turns out. As of yet, I've only posted bits that have been groomed and thought-out for days before rendering them to the web. I'm researching other people's use of this cyber-connectivity and I am beginning to understand the value of letting it flow...

It's taking heartbreak to get me here. How much of my queer life have I spent pouring my focus and energy into other people, more specifically my intimate relationships? I am truly the child of baby-boomers, and not the types that ever strayed onto the hippy path in the 60's or 70's, the put-away-toward-retirement-through-a-soul-sucking-job and trust-the-big-"They"-experts-to-take-care-of-us types. Maybe it was the socialization of growing up in a household with a mom that bent her will and spirit to caretake the male authority figure (dad) or coming out into dyke community at such a young age laden as it is with hyper-processing tendencies and uhaul syndrome. At any rate, here I am almost 30, sure I was ready to shed the patterns of basing my sense of self on the well-being of another, stuck right back in the depths of such a situation. And I'm far from home, to boot. I transplanted myself to the metropolis of the Bay Area last spring to follow my creative dreams and ostensibly to be closer to said lover, so my extensively developed support network of folks I've been weaving community with over the last more than a decade are not here to call upon when I just need to get out of the house, remember other pieces of myself as alive and vital.

I'm a fire sign, I thrive on passion and the vibrancy of connection, be it intellectual, performative with an audience, a walk in the woods where I can quiet my brain enough to listen to the forest or intimate exchanges with lovers and friends. I pride myself on my hard learned abilities to communicate, yet I feel like I am speaking a different language from the one I am working to sort through this relationship with. I feel that I am becoming invisible sometimes from lack of being seen. It's strange to share space so much with someone so shut down to me.

How do we keep our sense of self alive when we don't have opportunity to see positive images of ourselves reflected back to us by those around us? I have been committed to creating this kind of community in my hometown for years, it is at the root of all my creative work and networking and travels. I know that I come from a place of privilege to have experienced this at any time; this point in history we occupy is tumultuous and challenging, and as queers it's probably the best we could ask for of anytime in the last few centuries on most continents. Those that went before us made this time of above ground community-making possible. So how did those folks survive their spirits without others to share with?

I think they found solace in their work, their art, the few precious ones enough like them in their difference that they banded together. We don't need each other like we used to. So far my experience of the Bay Area queer community, although sparse, has been that everyone has their world crafted and they don't necessarily have room for or need for more amazing, creative queers.

Branching out, this will take time. I recede into myself, believing this solitude amongst the masses to be the holder of lessons for me presently. Otherwise, why on earth would I be here, right now?

Gritty City Notes, June 16, 2010

We, who are here on this precipice, this particular turning round the bend, are at the end of the lifespan of a culture, it heaving heavy sighs of its demise. This time that we call the beginning of a new millennium, the ancients called nearing the cataclysmic shift to something new and entirely different.

We are the pirates living on buses in warehouses in zombie towns. Here cracks flow like rivers down alleys and crack wheezes into lungs, eyelids permanently pitched open and that nervous twitch blows the cover of not-sleeping under boxes by the dumpster.

We are singing songs that we co-create in the darkest depths of manic-solo nighttime churnings. Piano-pounding fingers contemplate where rent will come from again this month.

We put ink in our skins to remind us of the muses we stumble onto, the stories that keep us honest, the images we burn onto the insides of our eyelids daily.

It's All Relative, July 31, 2010

What of the size of an airplane versus the giant glowing ball of fire in the sky known as our sun? The comparison seems preposterous. Yet since I have lived here, it's happened on multiple occasions that I hear the hollow seashell roar of jet engines and for a moment, all the intensity of heat and light energy pouring down directly from that burning star ceases. One relatively tiny object has huge impact, if only for a millisecond, when it finds its way to the right place relative to other objects or beings in the universe... Such profound observations yielded from living in the desolate weed-tangled sidewalks and cement forest near the airport of a major modern industrial port city.

All this comes in on a morning when I discover an opportunity that's been keeping my logistical and planful hopes alive here has been indefinitely cast out into the future. What I see in this world is beautiful, is tortuous, is synchronous, is curious and tricky and beguiling. How am I to go about the work of translating the flood of images that enter me with a sunset? The creatures that are formed out of moving shapes made by piles of stones in the fading light. The complete transmuting and changing nature of all that surrounds us. The incredible distance that my shadow grows in height in the time it takes me to stroll up a hill with the setting sun broiling into an ocean of endless sea and clouds at my back. The glitter-studded hillsides that are banks of windows reflecting that golden moment, clinging to the hillsides that will surely shrug them off at the next cataclysmic buckling of earth that is inevitable for this area.

How are we so culturally blinded? How am I so busily concerned with the menial details of my life, that all this speculation over the accumulation of meaningless scraps of green paper vastly overwhelms motivation to see through attempting to capture the truth of mutability and impermanence of all things?

City Life Flow Notes, July 13

These days, sometimes "Good morning" means 2 o'clock in the afternoon breakfast. Staying awake til the wee hours, staying in bed late. I have this deep association of productivity as money-making which I'm still trying to break...I expend so much energy with or without pay. Paying attention to where the flow goes. Are these the pathways I choose for myself when I step back, perch high on a branch to gain perspective?

I've climbed trees as long as I can remember, scrambled up their branches, hugging trunks with my clinging limbs, them scratching me up and me not caring because this elevated view is worth it, is perfect. The trees are harder to find here, in this particular stretch of land I inhabit. More present are the screech of the Bart on its raised rails on one side and the lurching rumble of the railroad on the other. Human voices calling to each other or peels of laughter falling in through skylights and high windows.

Remembering the roots that spread beneath this concrete jungle.

Epic Dreamtime, June 22

Woke from an epic long dream about hiding out in the forest with a crew of folks. We were living in caves underground and trying to protect the forest from a company that was coming in to destroy it for the "natural resources". The trees but also the caves were somehow valuable to them. There was much sneaking around in the woods and tensely hiding out while they came in to look for us.

Finally it was obvious that our stand was meaningless to them and they began to move in with their equipment. We decided to come out of hiding to negotiate. I tried to convince the head dude on the project not to destroy one particular cave I'd been tending because it was sacred to us. He told me he'd think about it but that it lie in the perfect spot to build his house.

We left and came back a bit later and already bulldozers had cut roads through the forest and were starting to take trees down. I was wrecked, seething with anger, so devastated. There were some kids playing, children of the workers; they were dancing around and singing silly songs. They were so excited about the plans the adults had shared with them that the forest was to become an amusement park and residential neighborhood. I sat down and had a heart-to-heart conversation with one of the kids about what was actually happening, about what the trees and the caves and all the web of life in the forest meant, how long it had taken for this place to reach its present balance and what destruction was being wrought at the hands of their parents and this company. This kid became very upset and decided they really wanted the forest to be preserved. They went to go tell their parents how they felt.

Then I returned to one of the sacred caves. Our folks were gathered around telling stories, legends of the area about the land and the critters that had lived there since the beginning of time. We talked about the multi-species forest spirit who was ancient and resided in those particular woods. Someone said that particular cave was protected by a rattlesnake. Just then she woke and slithered out. Immediately she struck and ate the cat of one of the workers who was there with us..........

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This is far from the first dream I've had of environmental catastrophe of various kinds and magnitude. Since I began to more consciously open myself to the voices of the beings in this world (human and mostly the non-human), the message has become deafening. I still get caught up in my own self-involved stories plenty of the time. I am understanding how, just like television and other mainstream media and all forms of rampant consumerism (which I choose not to participate in as much as possible) serve as distractions, so can my own self involvement when it prevents me from keeping these truths in sight. How can I positively transform myself into being more fully myself and sharing my gifts with the world? How may I further this quest to gain skills in living in a way that is not harmful but considerate and honoring of all life? This does not mean not taking, it does mean attending to HOW I take and where I give back. How do I share the knowledge that I hold of the consequences of our collective actions in ways that can be heard and digested? I hear in this dream the metaphor or literal message of "speaking to the children" (or the childlike parts of us) and allowing the gatekeepers and messengers (like the rattlesnake) do their work.

On A Train Platform, June 18

I didn't bring any music to travel by, but it runs through me anyway. This makes more space for all that comes in now. What do you notice when you're sitting on a train platform for an hour? I watch the birds swooping in chase above the tracks and under an overpass. Watch someone walking away down the tracks in a tattered coat. Look around to see if I can identify any of the plants nearby. Feel the breeze cool on my skin, then chill as the sun ducks in and out of cloud cover. See the air vibrate over the gravel beneath the tracks as the heat rises off it.

I am contemplating what form creation may take through me. How to loosen up the flow? I know it to be present; it transforms and sustains me each moment that I breathe and move through this world. I have witnessed myself consciously directing the flow of this energy to help shape reality and connect with other beings. How to manifest in the physical realms? Allow space for experimentation. Get it out and play with it. It has to feel like play simultaneously with being work. If I am doing what I am truly called to do, the universe will align itself around me to take care of me.

Sometimes we are given more than we can handle. To bear the psychic burden of being open enough to hear the labored groans of this wounded world is a heavy load to carry. So we listen and we also cleanse ourselves and sit silently and sometimes joyfully and sometimes broken open at our altars, and we ask what we need out of this bargain... A home, circles of community, a warm, dry place to sleep, food to sustain me, water I can drink, scavenged and reclaimed resources out of which to craft and create, the means to move about and connect more deeply, the senses and ingenuity to continue to inhabit this place in a good way.