Sadly, Constance, “Animal Cruelty” is merely human beings being what they are…directed at animals.
It is what we have become…because when Animal Cruelty is directed at me, it is gender cruelty, and when it is directed at someone of a different race it is racial cruelty…
…who are we kidding? We are sick, and we need a cure.
This song was playing when They did a significant and life preserving miracle in my life…in 2008, when I had gone on a trip with plans to never come back…and I mean never come back to this world.
I love Them so, They are so good and nothing but good. (DDH…still need to tell you this!!)
What is worse?
Failure to comprehend
or inability to do so
or simple stupid unwillingness?
Well, those are bad,
but I think maybe
that mindful dedicated
application of religion
is the worst of Worse!
Disguised in pretty robes
and preening in petite frocks
but there beneath the costume
naked greed bathing in legalism
and staring into the mirror
of pragmatic production
of self righteousness.
Opposite of Beauty, that!
Legalism.
Opposite of Beauty, this!
Greed.
Opposite of Life, there!
Pragmatism.
And those determiners
strangle souls
and injure the living
with their so called answers
and blind eye to suffering
and hard heart to longing.
What is worse?
Not knowing any better
and not knowing any worse.
(when would that be? After?
When does that happen?)
I choose silences. I choose to let myself be haunted by words rather than speak those rivers that would erode fabricated realities.Tonight the wind smells like memories… oh nothing I can put my finger on, mind you…just memories blowing on winds fragrant with nostalgia and neglect.
I am mindful in these memories of the language of lilies and I wonder if I have missed some great and vital means and end in their present beauty, some antidote for anxiety, some prescription for preoccupation, some long term cure contained in short-lived beauty born?I am mindful of Mary there in Bethany pouring out perfume fragrant and pervading with extravagance
permeating every pore present
and singing the liturgies of lilies
on the winds!
Sweetly, singly soaring over that rukus of disgust and anger that puffed up, distracted religious men
righteously piled on in their Canticle to Cacophony!They hated her…but they hated Him more for His blindness to her there, clinging in tears and wild hair
sinner whore profligate waster defiler and defiled!
They hated His stinky feet smelling of humility and adoration, perfumed in gratitude and broken beauty
and I think they would hate me, too
sitting silent and choosing
the haunting wind over the haughty story.I imagine the language of lilies
that day divinely appointed
and here this night now,
I look, listen midst ashes all around me
to catch a glimpse of life
in risk and recognition,
of rising up, above
the toiling, turning,
spinning and weaving…
life lived
simple and poured out
in haunting perfumed
adoration and beauty…
life as a lily,
and how it grows fleeting
and haunted by memories in the wind
and eternity in my heart.
“Nothing in the world can bother you as much as your own mind, I tell you. In fact, others seem to be bothering you, but it is not others, it is your own mind.”
—
Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
Sorry, male cis-gendered person…gotta call BS on this one.
The person spouting filth at me in front of kindergarten children? That was not just “in my mind”.
Constance…when you take your outrage for injustice out of your mind, your sense of compassion out of your mind and let it be incarnate in your actions in this world…THEN we will see some transformation!
I wanna see the person who will tell her now that they are enforcing the binary on her that they have sought to enforce on me…and tell her she is not really a woman.
Here is a crude and sad fact: in a large group of minds genitalia and gender are identical.
“It’s not ‘natural’ to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way.
People living in groups, families, communes say little—have few verbal means.
Eloquence—thinking in words—is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality.”
—
Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh, Journals & Notebooks
Constance, this may be so? But I will tell you what is not “natural” to me…it is not natural to not speak. It is not natural to open the heart and tell of its deepest places, and then shut it again and starve someone. It is not natural to draw someone into a place of intimacy and then stone them. It is not natural to tell someone how towering their significance is in one’s life, and then allow an event of life to tower so greatly that they never talk to the other person of “significance” ever again.
It is not natural to take the secrets of someone’s openness and then harbor them if they are your own and then not respond in kind and thus hold that person in your debt.
It is not natural to make a person feel like they are a burden for breathing, a weight for wanting, a dead body for desiring.
There are people I miss so badly, that I guess it is not natural to be separated from the ones you love.
I wish this wasn’t so. I wish that I wasn’t some chore to check off a list. I wish I wasn’t some shade to whisper of around campfires. I wish I wasn’t judged dead because an understanding of who and what I am was in error and must die and be reborn in a truer way.
I wish I was treasured more than memory.
I wish someone wanted to talk to me everyday instead of toss some Alpo in the dish and disappear until my ribs show thru.
I wish…I wish.
I wish I could forget the words a man told me of undying friendship and what I meant to him and how he is changed forever because of me…because his actions tell the truth that his words lied.
I wish I could forget the words a woman said to me that are undermined by her actions like the ocean undermines a glacier until it falls into the sea and is melted and gone…
I wish I wasn’t me…but who then would I be? Who should I be?
Well…I will be the person I wish these others were, and strive to not be the person who is like them.
I will try to be there, always. I will try to speak, and then do and do with all I have.
I will try to make a life that is full and not hollow, present and not absent, flexible and changing as time births new understandings of history.
I will try to forgive and remember, but remember in redemption and grace.
But we shouldn’t be pressuring people to come out. Instead, we should be challenging the expectation that others are entitled to our identities.
No one should be demanding that people take on the risks of coming out. No one except you can make that decision. Your identity is yours, and no one else owns it.
You don’t owe anyone anything – especially not people who are ignoring your personal autonomy and safety by demanding that you come out.
Constance…I face a lot of challenges in life that are in addition to the ones faced by all people simply as a condition of being in this world. If you have read here for awhile, you are acquainted with the gamut of these, and if you are new, well have a gander at the other posts ;-)…giggle.
My point is that it is the additional ones that kill. They are like the difference between running a marathon, and running one chased by dogs, and running one when you aren’t fast enough to keep from getting nipped numerous times on the run. And it is the nips that bleed, get infected, and drain…of vitality, of energy, and eventually of hope.
Right now the hardest of these challenges for me is that of making myself known to other people that are of utmost importance to me. They are mourning what they perceive as the loss of the person they knew, rather than perceiving it as the loss of the explanatory narrative that stitched together our common history.
For a whole host of reasons, some of them spiritual, some of them developmental, and most of them cultural/paradigm related, the onus and burden falls squarely on me in this process…to be the bigger person…to walk the second mile, or the third or the fourth, or however many miles must be walked…to turn the other cheek again and again and again…
My own identity is in need of justification, of proving, of validating, and the ways I respond either contribute to or detract from my right to be.
Judgement is passed on the narrative that I have, as it compares to the narrative that was.
Again…I get it. Fairness is not the operative determinant. But I want it to be understood: this is a costly gift, and gift I do think it is. It is not something that I owe…to anyone except myself whom I owe the debt of authenticity inner and outward. I think that my perspective on things is equally valid, is equally valuable and to be treasured. The “things I have lost” or the sense that “what I thought I had never existed” is just as real, as vibrant and legitimate for me as it is for anyone else who feels like they are being robbed.
Let me state it baldly: anything they are “robbed of” wasn’t real in the first place.
How about this: instead of the point of view that “a father I thought I had is now dead and replaced by you”, how about this: “I have a father who just happens to be a woman, and the idea I held that my father was also a male was an incorrect one. I am fortunate to be able to have this inaccurate understanding corrected while there is still time and life remaining to know this person that I valued and treasured as a father!”
Because this is my story…my history. I fathered four people…as a woman who inhabits a body that is biologically male. And as far as I am aware, my children always felt that I was a good dad to them, valuable in the love, acceptance and counsel that I offered them. And I am still here! The same person with the same ideas and same truths (and some newly understood ones too).
Perhaps instead of me saying over and over again I am sorry I am sorry…I am sorry for being…I am sorry for wanting to be, needing to be…maybe it could be thought about that a different sorry could be said…I am sorry that I held onto my own belief and insistence that a father has to be spiritually and biologically male and only that…I am sorry that I invalidated the lives and efforts of the millions of women who “fathered” young boys into men because there was no one else there.
I am posting this link, because it gets to a lot of the reasons why there is so much gravity behind the other narrative, the one that requires me to justify my right to exist, my right to pursue congruency, my right to be free from suicidal ideation, my right to feel okay about the truth that I did the best I could and while not a perfect parent did a pretty adequate job even compared to a cis-male…and as a transgender woman serving in the role of father and not knowing, well maybe I did an admirable job.
and maybe I suck. but I suck based on what I did and didn’t do, not based on whether I identfy as male or female…others who are insisting with actions that the actual measure of my being is in that identification are the ones who must grapple with the suckitude they frolic in!
Read the article…acquaint yourself with the myths…and then divest yourself of them for some clearer, more objective standards that we will all, together, be held accountable to…how we love one another, how we forgive one another, whether we divorce and separate ourselves or remain connected…those are things that will endure long after gender identification falls away as not needed.
This instrument, bound in time and dust and ashes
attacked by pressure and moments passing
wracked by neglect and careless stroking
of keys made of flesh and bone
has lost its continuity, lost its simple melody
cannot follow harmony
but mashes sound chromatic
and dissonant, dramatic
just echoes all the static
that rattles all around it,
neath the layers of grime
the passage of time
and each gender crime
Ye possess a beauty innate
far surpassing my deepest efforts
and most twisted machinations,
for I have being in living flesh sensate,
I dwell in alchemical dirt miracle
While you, though made of stone
find shape and form that fits you fair
and curve that matches moons and stars
and softness that my soul sings of in air,
and sadness choked and stifled by me, dirt and stone.
you are carved, a statue, stuck and still
and yet are one, while I am severed in this chill,
never knowing unified connection
with myself and peace within the nill.
alas and not a lass, that’s me
and you? mere shackles hold you
that one day you can break or be delivered from
by some grave Odysseus or Hercules,
someone with the boldness to forgive you
Gender orientation…once again. In another brain, in another place, in another genetic pool, unrelated to me, unrelated to “demonic possession”, unrelated to “unsubmission and rebellion”, unrelated to “mental illness”…
…related to the gender spectrum and continuum of creation as human, male at one pole and female at the other…related to hormone washes over body and brain and the differences in how they align…related to a world that sometimes spawns cleft palates, holes in hearts, heart murmurs, diabetes, etc. etc. …related to a world where the miracles of modern medicine exist to alleviate suffering and give life fulfilled and joyful…
…pushing against your taboos…pressing against your prejudices…pounding down your judgments…piercing the veils of your ignorance…presenting to you new understandings…
I am starting to think that trans women and trans femmes — all of us linked by the cardinal sin of being named boys at birth, yet breaking the rules of boyhood and manhood — are trapped inside a traumatized story. From an early age, we are inundated with the story of our deaths, we relive it over and over many times before we actually die.
This same story is taken up, commoditized, and mass produced by communities outside of ourselves — media outlets looking for sensational stories, academics looking to produce research, and as Morgan Collado points out, even “LGBT” human rights organizations eager to use the statistics of transphobic violence to garner funds used to pursue the interests of cis, white gays and lesbians.
Even well-meaning liberal cis people, eager to earn “ally” points, consume and exploit the narrative of the doomed trans woman in their way.
Constance, you know my thoughts about this topic. This article states them far more eloquently than I do. There is a part of the article speaking about how people who “knew us then” feel as if we have died already…
…in light of the murder of trans-women being an almost ritualized offering of human lives to the bloodthirsty god of patriarchy, it feels so eerie, as if my own loved ones consign me to those fires with forked fingers and muttered incantations invoking protection against the evil (trans) eye…
My deepest sorrow is that my life seems a curse. If I exist as I was, then I am doomed and serving life in a prison invisible and undeclared and I am forever derided because I am depressed or despairing or I am resented because I hated myself…
…and if I exist as I am, then I am resented because I am the cause of death of a man who never was and never could be, except in the thoughts and minds of everyone around me. And all they offer me is the promise that they will give me their illusions and fears to prop me up and costume me and call it liberty, or they will call me Patrick Henry and give me death.
It is my choice they say.
Yes…it is…my choice. And I choose Tikkun.
I choose to live, and let go of all other things I cannot control. And if I die before you wake, then I pray the Lord your soul will take…to the fountains of truth and revelation…and then I pray that He will take you across that river you so proudly declared you would never cross…I pray that He will ferry you across Himself, and show you the blood-soaked ground that constitutes the banks of the river called Rejection.
The men became enraged once they discovered that Nettles was transgender, according to prosecutors and a fight broke out.
Dixon punched Nettles in the face, making her to fall to the ground and strike her head on the sidewalk, causing a serious brain injury, said Assistant District Attorney Nicholas Viorst.
Viorst alleges that Dixon brutally beat Nettles and “struck her repeatedly as she lay on the ground” while “driving the side of her head into the pavement.”
The indictment charges that Dixon used the sidewalk as a “dangerous instrument” to cause Nettles’ death.
I have never ever found that God will make life easier.
Whatever it is I face, it never gets easier.
But I have also found that there is always an offer of greater strength…but not strength like humans see strength, it is Their strength that is offered…and that strength is made perfect in the crucible of our weakness.
In effect, you have to glory in weakness in order to become strong.
There is another name for the strength They give: Grace.
Never made easier, but greater strength They will give, in grace upon grace.
We start this life with such bright expectation,
each sunrise morn of discovery and
each eventide of hope, our lifetime passes
and time flows like tides constantly in waves
that wash in over us, the same and ceaseless
yet we, in ever-new anticipation
that this new day is diff’rent, something yet
to be discovered in the shell-pink dawn,
we lift our hearts up cheery with bright song.But there are ashes from the desperate fires that we assemble in the long sloe nights so cold upon those yawning yearning shores, when stars hide behind black clouds of unknowing and oceans hide in mists of dank despair,
and we are forced to burn all our Hosannas, those palms fronds of our hopes so optimistic waved innocent and arrogant and prideful because we hadn’t seen the moon’s dark side.We built frail fires from those brittle branches and clutched at weak warmth, bathed in dim wan light and marked ourselves with those imposéd ashes and mourned those days we sang triumphantly unknowing of the coming loss of all our innocence in suffering…
and sorrowing…
and death and…
Ashes…ashes…
we all fall down…
and we are mindful of our common crown,
our destiny of dust wreathed round our foreheads,
that destiny of dust around our hearts,
that destiny of dust from which we came
and thus departed
that destiny of dust and our return…
to dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
from dust departed, dust returned,
dust returned…And it is only at this place, in ashes after our hopes and dreams have burned to ash and we have lost our hope and optimism that we can finally see that stony path
and squinting, see the bloody foot-print outlines left by the One who goes before our hearts, the One who walks the Via Dolorosa the One who, living, there lays down His Life,
the One who shows the way of self-denial the way of sacrifice, relinquishment entirely unnatural, the opposite of every longing of our liquid hearts that wants to feast upon self-preservation and turn from bitter cups of self-denial…And we must choose the place that we will walk: the ceaseless shores of our naked ambition and never finding ending place, or home? Or…walk the path of ashes with this Shepherd and lose our lives completely to His care and thus spring from the ashes like a phoenix leaps from the golden flames to live anew!
See, ashes are the opposite of owning
the mirror image of self-preservation,
the sign-post of the way of life He offers,
the insignia of the lifestyle that He models,
the mark He makes forever on His own
writ large in His own blood mixed with the ashes
of hopes consumed and dreams become dry dust!
This is the downward journey to the highest place victorious,
the deeps of Sabbath Rest and Victory Won.Regardless of the gods you say you follow, we all share in a common destiny: “From dust you’ve come, to dust you shall return”.
Like Him, we too shall die, Life’s pressing question becomes…how shall we live? How shall our lives this day respond to death’s reality,
and answer to Life’s strident invitation
to leave all of our privilege and status,
and turn from lives marked for success and promise,
and turn from some potential undefined,
and turn from false things that we think are true,
and let go of wealth, power and consumption,
and deny that false god: accomplishment
and dare to love our enemies with candor
and dare embrace the heady risk of peace without one stray thought of self-preservation, take courage to live for the sake of others
and for the sake of Him who shows this way,
the way thru death, the way of blood and ashes,
will we walk in valiant hope in dust and ashes?
We can sing our songs
of life in dust and ashes
and thus return to God
our dust redeemed.
This woman is never going to be seen by the eyes of this paradigm. It ain’t gonna happen. Too many layers of judgment, too much weight of assumption, and not enough understanding of the nature of gender orientation and where it resides in a human being.I am never going to be “pretty” in the sense of how human eyes grown in the world in which I live perceive beauty. My only possibilities for beauty lie within my soul…in my heart…in my spirit…in that inner life that my spirituality and theology teach me is the truest reality anyway and the only one that extends eternally.
Mama, please give me a hunger for true things that outweighs the longings that plague me, that cry out from each and every chromosome that finds itself at odds with the spiritual DNA that flows from (what, my brain? My soul? My heart?) me…
I close with this quote I ran across, and make it my goal…kindness, good humored, smart, and strong of heart.
“We get so worried about being pretty. Let’s be pretty kind. Pretty funny. Pretty smart. Pretty strong.”
…thank God for the director at the center where I volunteer! She knows what the right thing to do and say is!
So…there was this “specimen” who came to the center today. I know him, and he “knew” me…and did not even come close to recognizing who I was. I was dressed in a very nice American Eagle plaid shirt, soft pink, flannel, and a tie-die spink broomstick skirt, with a black t-shirt top and pink jewelry.
I looked nice.
But as I walked by, I felt his eyes, I felt his derision. I was in his vicinity less than 5 seconds, and yet for some reason he was compelled to refer to me to my director as “a dude in a dress”…
…as in “what’s with the dude in the dress”…
My director simply said “She wanted to wear a dress today”. When he sought to contradict that and reiterate his insult, she stopped him, and repeated herself…and then a third time!
I was soo blessed by that, what she did. She did not try to go into any explanation, she did not differentiate me in any way whatsoever. She simply cut him off, and told him that I wanted to wear that pretty dress today.
I don’t know which was stronger…the resignation and sadness over another insult by another privileged boy, or the gladness and genuine admiration for this strong and steady soul who sees something worthy in me and lays it out straight to anyone who comes around.
I think I will go with the latter…
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa Grace
“Sometimes the meaning for things comes later. There’s a million poems that I’ve read that I have no idea what they mean but it does something to me to read them, they excite me like nothing else can excite me. Sometimes a lyric collects meaning—like a magnet collects iron filings—over time.
“The actual meaning is not that important—it’s the emotional resonance of something. When I sit down and write a song, I’m not trying to write something that people can learn from. Songs don’t impart wisdom or information, but we get a sense of awe when we’re in the presence of a good song that you don’t find anywhere else.”
Constance, I think I have posted about this previously, but I think this layout here is succinct, accessible, and easy to digest. Ya know, I have been thinking about the backflips that some people do, the contortions they knot themselves in so that they can preserve a way of thinking about a topic and not have to deal with changing a point of view…
…sadly, they place that point of view over a person far too often, and end up contributing to a tragedy.
It really is the ultimate in idolatry…a human life slain on the altar of the idol of their point of view.
Thank God there are parents like these, who understand the appropriate reaction to the phenomenon of cognitive dissonance.
Ryland’s story is real for people all over the globe. Please listen to your children. Be understanding and accepting. If only Leelah Alcorn could have known such understanding parents. Stop trans discrimination.
Ohhh CONSTANCE! I get so thrilled as we are able to “scientifically” demystify gender and thus debunk the superstitious taboos and unfounded prejudices against gender variant human beings!
When I first began my own research a few years back, the existence of intersex individuals immediately exposed the crux of the matter to me: if someone was created with both sets of plumbing, how did we sanction what gender they were? Even more basic, if they had both sets of plumbing and yet still strongly identified as one gender or the other, did that not prove that the determination of gender superseded a person’s plumbing? Did it not implicitly cede that the core of gender identity was wrapped up in the warp and weft of what it is that makes someone who they are…that persistent and consistent expression we call personality or soul, that self that exists regardless of what happens in or to the body until life itself ceases in the person as an organism?
Yes! Of course it did!
And now…the evidence is simply mounting to add visible evidence to what our hearts have always known…that we are more than our bodies!
It is such a shame that there are people who have made such misguided and ignorant judgements of a person’s moral standing or spiritual standing, on something as irrelevant as a body…
It’s an even deeper shame that those same people are missing out on the rich interaction they could be participating in here on the planet…
And it is riches irony when they will run into me inside those pearly gates, and find all their arguments and judgements rendered moot and null and void…and see me as I am and always was…a child of God who loves Them, confesses Them and seeks to live as a small imperfect picture of Their heart.
Reader…if you are one of these people, why not just give up now? I will still be friends, if you will play nice and keep cruel words in the only place they belong: the pits of hell.
How about you? Will you dip into the wells of living water instead of the swamps of putrid judgments?
This is must reading. It gets to a very dangerous assumption: that only monsters or freaks commit rape.
Sadly, rape is committed by loving fathers, normal husbands, common brothers…in short, by ordinary non-monster men who think it is their right to take what they want sexually from these other-gendered objects created merely for a man’s use and pleasure.
This message underlies major sections of some theological beliefs and it is based on a complete misunderstanding of the true nature and essence of who woman is…
…this attitude is inculcated at every turn in our culture today, and sadly women internalize much of this within themselves and end up being vulnerable in ways they would not otherwise wish to be.
I like how the author lays out the issue…head over and check it out, yeah?
Constance…ears are deaf to our pleas…another one has gone over the precipice of despair.
This area is the same one where some of my own dementors hail from, those truly baffling souls so full of hate that they are compelled to speak spite and make sure that they attempt to infuse my heart with that poison…oh yeah, cus they love me so much.
I am deeply saddened but not one bit surprised that this poor dear despaired in such a caustic and hateful atmosphere as this.
Ima keep on posting these things…you cannot pretend it doesn’t happen. You cannot pretend that reading here is the same as supporting a transgender person. If you read here but do nothing, you are like the rich person who walks the streets in -20 degrees below zero and tells the ones who freeze in their nakedness “be warm, be warm.”
Listen: it is not going to stop until you get you up out of your ease and privilege and stand with me! With us! In your community…and yeah, you will lose face and reputation and may be called a name or two…quel horreur!
Do Justice. Love Mercy. Walk Humbly.
Charissa Grace
Each one, everyone…know that I have been given this person into my marrow and core.
She lives inside me forever. She is woven into my essence. I cannot imagine life absent her, anymore than I can imagine a life without a living heart within.
I am never alone…my heart of hearts is mine, and I am hers…transcendent and elevated, and practical and day to day.
Thank you my dearest darling, my love and heart of hearts.
My Heart of Hearts
by Charissa White
The dawn, peach fuzz on this dripping peachy day,
smelled like juice dribbling down my chin,
and musky yellow perfume.
Your earrings flashed in the sunbeam sneaking thru the blinds
Your eyes flashed, lamplights of love sneaking thru my blind
and gleaming like that cat Cheshire.
I intended to rip my heart from my chest
but it came free eager in my hand
which was covered by yours (I had not noticed that happen)
Fell from me like that peach
with groaning, heavy relief and ache
into your waiting basket (I was the only one there)
You carried me to bed, and there we sectioned our fruit
and fed each other with fingers, slick and sticky
and smelling of the peachy summer day
And we drowsed, and woke to find our hearts grown again,
except mine was now you, and yours was now me
Oh my Heart of Hearts, My Heart of Hearts.
Speaking for us,
making a way
for those of us
shattered by abuse
and raped by men…
defending the powerless,
which is (unfortunately)
most all of us (even men)
in this paradigm
of patriarchy and privilegeIt is far, far deeper and more complex than anyone lets on or is allowed to show…
I could be wrong…
I could be vapid as vapor…
(or wapid as waper, you wascally wabbit!)
but my heart tattoos say otherwise
Messy houses filled with secret staircases
leading neither up nor down and built of starved excuses
stellar and extending to the past and to the future
as a hedge to make secure our souls against their cold inflation.Idols stand resplendent in their regal good deed rags atop secure safe mantels stolid, still in false security within these homes of disarray and all the forlorn deeds of our own self-besotted hands.
No corner is untouched or deemed untouchable,
no conclusion inescapable, for we did soon discover, no–we were shown–these messes low and broken,
jangly jagged in the pieces of our ruined hostile hovels.This is that tableau displayed of our lost searéd conscience, disembodied, floating room to room and deeply mourning what’s been lost, and worse, abandoned in the losing of idealism’s living throbbing shine.
And our hearts, once lifted up and strong
are finally unadorned and brought down low,
so broken, so contrite and finally open to this Living Invitation
to be drawn at last into a bigger Story…to be remade and molded, gripped and filled, to be enfolded in the new creation by a Mercy Stark and so unyielding, by a Love Severe and so unwieldy in our messy rooms and serial sin-stained walls and monstrous ways of utter horror.
It takes a broken body and it takes a different stain,
one indelible and permanent, scarlet red and bloody glowing
in the darkness of our tragedy’s pretentious phony triumph…
see the Hand that rips our masks away to make us whole again!Eat and drink, remember! Then forget the past and rest within those ruins at last cleansed and emptied of their wreck, delivered of the dreck and durm und strang of fallen souls, set free of weights unbearable, interminable, mighty, proud and fell and flawed and haughty.
And then, look…out there, thru yon window broken, there!
Behind that dingy jagged pane of brittle separation,
see the Cross so Stark, transcendent, final ever resting place
of all our sin and wrong, and also Final ever new beginning
of this race, we human butterflies set free from chrysalises left behind,
discarded casually forever…yet never left for death to feed upon or to devour,
for they will someday be raised again to catch up with us and to be made one again…to be made whole… again…at last…again… amen, again… amen.
after you’re dead, there’s a funeral, red.
i discovered this recently, except i wasn’t
invited to show up, new, old or otherwise.
in my place was piled up wood, grey,
and lotsa brush all crackly-brown,
a stand-offish, prickly thorny-crown.
they set that half-truth fire blazing and incendiary,
mis-remembers and other (missings) hidden inside
curses, excuses, judgements of indigo echoing depth.
they thought me bound and captive but epithets
were synonymous with white-washed choices made-unmade,
were effigies hanging in flames, in smoke, in spirits.
then that noose just snikked up tight around their heart
like a golden curtain drawn but never rising on a play
written and rehearsed but never actually performed.
just as that funeral, red, was really never
held for me, but just that phantom never-was,
that effigy.
Constance, I stumbled over a singer of deep soul. The other day, when I wrote about dysphoria and wanted a version of “On the Willows”…I had just youtubed for On the Willows, and that one intrigued me. It is now the one that is my go to version.
In his youtube video playlist there are several fabulous covers…this one is of By My Side, from Godspell.
I invite any and all who would have the courage, and count the cost, to join me…
“I know now that we never get over great losses;
we absorb them, and they carve us
into different, often kinder, creatures.”
— Gail Caldwell, Let’s Take the Long Way Home: A Memoir of Friendship
Underneath the make-up, powders, paints, colors bright
there beneath the pretty words and funny sayings light
the blood pools red, the bruises throb beneath my cheery grin
and ruin overflows, and spreads its pain and hurt within
Mama heals, but often heals with pain’s sweet overthrow
She will let the woundings come to deepen healing’s glow
Still, it really breaks my heart to walk alone so long
I must dig still deeper, be brave, and just sing my song.
“Stop giving people power to control your smile, your worth, and your attitude.”
—
Mandy Hale
Constance…yes to this, sort of.
But know that this doesn’t absolve you or anyone else of the responsibility for what you do with that gun inside your soul…you know the one, that gun that you use every single day, and that you have killed people with:
the tongue.
Yesterday? I did not ask to be called what I was called. I did not unconsciously draw that term to myself. It came to me for a lot of reasons of very mixed motive and origin. The person who said it did not intend to shoot me. She had made a mistake, one I knew nothing of, and did not want to be underneath that burden so she brought it out to me in the name of asking forgiveness…
…sort of like one sister plays with a gun and accidentally shoots another.
That bullet took my smile, seriously wounded my attitude, and inflicted great damage on my sense of worth. It is not something I gave away, and not something I asked for or wanted. It is going to take some healing, and some outside medication from somewhere…God knows where in our world of isolation…Mama will find a way of this I am convinced.
My point is this: do not deceive yourself that you do not bear accountability for what you choose to say and what you choose to leave unspoken. Spoken words can be bullets and silences can be flamethrowers.
Now…my responsibility is to get to “the Doctor” and do my rehab…and somehow find ways to be safe while living trans.
Whoda thunk that I could be shot in the heart of a daycare for children under 6 years old?
Life and death are in the power of tongue…
Some speak rashly, like the thrustings of a sword,
but the tongue of the wise promotes health.
Constance…make a distinction with me? Let’s look at the point below as a mirror. Miley Cyrus is absolutely right in what she says…at least in terms of the double standard that is applied to males and females. Soo many of our issues culturally in our society stem from this disconnect. But catch my thoughts down below, after:
“No one ever talked about Robin Thicke after the VMAs of 2013. It was all my fault and I was the one who was acting like a ‘slut’. And that isn’t the only example of a woman being put in a box. I’m just speaking out for women to be yourself and I think I’m doing something to break the double standard that has been created over the years.”
whether you like her as a person/an artist or not, one just HAS TO admit that she’s absolutely right about this.
***** ***** ***** ***** *****
Okay Constance…now that I have agreed with her, I want to ask:
Why?
What happened to us, these Glorious Ruins Divine, who used to glow with the God-Light so fierce that clothing was not something any mind considered, for we were clothed in Eternity Resplendent…and now we compete to see who has more “freedom” and right to rip the mystery away and put it all on display?
It is as if it wasn’t enough for the God-Light to go out…now that it has we, all of us, want to wallow in our Unclothed-ness.
Please resist the temptation to write me off as a sexual prude, or sexually repressed, or any of those things. My arguments are similar in outward appearance only to the moralists and repressive people who seek to bind up and punish and rob humanity of the incredible wonder and power and gift that our sexuality is.
If you are unfamiliar with my point of view, just use the search field, and search sexuality and you will find just a few posts about sexuality, the most comprehensive being this one: Love in a Sexual World.
I am all about restoring the Image…I am all about the huge and significant metamorphosis humanity is in the throes of…from death to life, from empty to Full…from piles of sensient animated clay to the very incarnation of Divine.
I think this is why Mama made me transgender, so I would experience this in such a personal tangible way so as to be bent and marked forever, dedicated to this transition of all the lost “trans” humans with eternity encased in bodies bound by time and decay.
Yes, Miley…you are indeed right. I pray that someday you will take the next step and understand the secret mystery of sacred sexuality.
Being called he/she, and having it justified by a spiritual comment, well it smacks a bit of feeling like getting groomed for other, deeper transgressions.
It is a true reality that I could get murdered, just for walking transgender.
As long as you cis people read and feel all bad and stuff, and then see what’s on tv, we will keep being killed. No one will stop killing us until they are forced to stop…a bit like the police force and their wanton slaughter of young black men.
Please…we really are not doing anything to you. Just let us live.
…I was called this today. It wasn’t malicious in intent…but it was vicious in result. Apparently this person had referred to me that way behind my back and felt guilty about it. So they confessed to me today…
The reason given? Apparently they say that they “see Jesus in me so much that I am a “he” to the person.
Hmmmmm. I wonder if she calls Beth Moore a he/she? Or any other woman leader in church? There are a ton of cis-women far more full of Jesus than I.
But even more, I wonder: why even say that? Like it is so deadening, so numbing. And I feel empty inside already.
Thanks, person. You really must be lightened in your conscience, confession made straight to my face and words used 3 times in explaining why it’s okay.
But hey why should I care? I am dead so big deal.
Honestly, sometimes I wish I were. So many lives would have so much less to deal with.
Tonight the wind smells like memories…
I am mindful of Mary
They hated her…but they hated Him more
I imagine the language of lilies
But there are ashes from the desperate fires
We built frail fires from those brittle branches
And it is only at this place, in ashes
And we must choose the place that we will walk:
Regardless of the gods you say you follow,
I am never going to be “pretty” in the sense of how human eyes grown in the world in which I live perceive beauty. My only possibilities for beauty lie within my soul…in my heart…in my spirit…in that inner life that my spirituality and theology teach me is the truest reality anyway and the only one that extends eternally.
It is far,
YourTango.
Idols stand resplendent in their regal good deed rags
This is that tableau displayed of our lost searéd conscience,
to be remade and molded, gripped and filled, to be enfolded
Eat and drink, remember! Then forget the past and rest within those ruins
to be made whole…
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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