I Choose…
To live by choice, not by chance;
To make changes, not excuses;
To be motivated, not manipulated;
To be useful, not used;
To excel, not compete.
I Choose self~esteem, not self~pity.
I Choose to listen to my inner voice,
not the random opinion of others.
For too long
lassos and lanky lines
have spun round my neck
and held me to this dirt in time.
I listened, a few words here like grime,
a big fat echo there like slime,
up in the sandstone and
limp mountains like bars
around my world.
I believed them,
I let them choke me
tame and chain me
to plantations of shame
and fields of blame
Well, I am rearing now…
I smell water in the air!
My Mama tells me I am
Her work and She is
Filthy with loving me!
Streaked and smeared
with my red clay,
with my white heart,
Her hair standing
glowing, flying as
She works the treadle
and spins me loose
and into my shape yet born
but always known.
The dry skies crackle, and victory rumbles
in my throat like thunder,
in my heart like lightening
and the cowpoke slides sideways
and decides it’s time to go have lunch
and forget to ever come back here
and I will run on winds
my passion-fires will ever burn
in freedom so fine, so full.
The Difference Between Tolerance and Acceptance | Brynn Tannehill.
Constance, this article sums up perfectly what is happening to me at my work as transition gets further and further along…and it is a shame because I am truly becoming a better person everyday. It is also another article on a topic I have previously written about.
Deep down inside? If I am honest? I truly feel sorry for them…because my Mama has been helping me to believe that I am actually a pretty cool person, and that She esteems and likes me very much.
BUT: though I may be able to weather this, the fact is that this problem is due to the usual phobias and hatreds and superstitions that I have commented on here before and sought to dispel by open display of my own life and heart. And those things are power things…not good power things. They harm everyone who participates in them, not only the trans or LGTBQ humans who it’s directed at, but sadly it also affects the practitioners as well. It truncates them, stunts them, dulls them, and ultimately enslaves them to ignorance and darkness of heart and mind.
As always, Constance…Charissa sez check it out…and when you see someone who is on the outside, offer them a smile and a hand.
Love, Charissa
Constance, I just read this lil comment elsewhere…and the writer exhorted the reader to have faith, and then added parenthetically “not the dogmatic kind”.
Full Stop.
I knew what the writer meant…they were trying to distinguish between the kind of attitude that presses forward with courage and hope stronger than wistful wishing, and that sort of blind jaw clenching bull headed obdurateness that has come to be called faith in our times.
It is tragic that the word “faith” has come to feel like a dirty word in the modern mouth to the point that the need to make such a distinction is felt…and even the more so, because it is an inaccurate understanding of what faith truly is!
Listen…if there are dogmatic claws and paws on your faith, then you do not have faith…you have belief, and belief all by itself is just like gasoline, an accelerant and fuel source…a potential energy put in service of a higher purpose to accomplish that purpose. Right? The old saying tells us “even demons believe and tremble”.
Belief can be the jaw-clench, lip curl, chin raised, nose-pinched blind and maddening mindset that we have all bashed against like waves on rocks…the dangerous powerful set of blinders that can potentially narrow the field to the goal and just the goal…which might empower the beginnings of faith, and might empower the beginnings of hate.
Faith on the other hand…ahhhh…faith is a state of being! A living and active thing! By definition, faith precludes dogma! What is the old and tried and true definition of faith?
“Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”.
The substance of things hoped for…
things hoped for…
substance…
evidence of things not seen…
evidence of…
things not seen…
Oh my…now we see jaws unclench! Eyes open! Dogma flee, and wonder flood over souls! Suddenly the throne is empty and there is a possibility of turning one’s heart and will outward, to consider Hope…and to place that hope in things worthy of hoping in…
Used in the context of faith, substance derives from a Greek word which essentially denotes “that thing placed under”, or “foundation” or “substructure”. Very simple, and when combined with various connotations such as
“that which has foundation,”
“is firm”,
“that which has actual existence”
“the substantial quality, nature, of a person or thing”
“steadfastness of mind”,
“firmness, courage, resolution”
“confidence, firm trust, assurance”
Clearly, faith depends on a previous encounter with that in which you are placing it in. Boards, stone, cement, and blueprints all combine to give builders the (insert any of the above connotations here) to continue to build, and then confidently construct the rest of the structure….
…confidently construct…
Sorta like saying “hoping for”, no? Hoped for…this is rooted in that Greek word which conveys this:
“to wait for salvation in joyous full confidence”.
Ima stop there, Constance…but the many-faceted wonder of the place of faith…the state of being…well, clearly there is no room for something that is “not-faith”…such as dogmatic jaw clenching! That is just flat out stubbornness.
Now…here is the pay-off pitch, and the reason ‘Rissa decided to get out her harp and strum some strings:
In what do you place your faith (which would be the foundation of that state of being you inhabit without thought each day)?
In whom do you put your faith?
Is a what more appropriate to put faith into than a whom?
What is the track record of that in which you place faith?
All questions that are like can-openers, and boy are there some cans that need to be opened, cleaned out and disposed of, given some of the whats that have snatched preeminence from the whom…and some of the whoms who have masqueraded as the Whom, and made Them out to look small and mean, and miserly and cruel…or worse, as buffoonish backwards senile old uncles who need to be shoved out onto the back porch and eventually left behind in favour of…
Let me make a bold statement, okay?
If there is anything here, at Grace Notes…ever…that you like…
If there is anything here ever that is beautiful, or true…
If you find here joy, or wonder, or splendour spoken of…
If you find here consolation and comfort, encouragement and exhortation…
If you find here compassion, kindness…
If you find here grace…
That is all…all…due to They in whom I have placed my trust and belief, and it is the life lived fueled by that trust which has resulted in my entering into a state of being which is this: I have placed my confidence in Them, and yielded to Their living and active Presence within me…and all the things you may find here that stir you and make you hungry and feed you all at the same time…it is Them.
They are graceful enough to lift me up out of death…so if They will do it for me, I am confident They will do it for
whosoever will…
With jaw gloriously unclenched, and dogma sleeping in the “dogma house”…
Charissa Grace
I was talking to Mama early this morning…
…and as I was talking with her, I ran across this:
thanks, Mama…forever…for Your Love…
Thanks even more for sustaining me, and renewing my courage!
*Charissa draws a deep breath, sets her jaw, squares her shoulders and jumps back into the river!*
Why We Buried Our Awesomeness, and How We Can Get It Back – Dara Hoffman-Fox.
Constance…I cannot even begin to tell you how thrilled I am to have made a new friend in Dara…I have admired them from afar for just about a year, and somehow knew that we would connect and work together? Well, that connection has sparked and birthed…now we feed and let it grow.
In the meantime, I want to draw your attn to their blog and their fab writing. It really applies to all who would read it and dare to press in…I think that is what faith is, right?Pressing into what we know to be true instead of hanging back in what we fear is true.
Anyway, go check out Dara’s article…they’re a Champeen!!
Love, Charissa
Constance, one more quick post, and then we are off on the bikes! Yippeeee!!!
So…I am learning to not call my body/soul/mind/emotion clash a prison, or sentence, or monster, or any of those other things…Mama has been quite active and specific in calling me into account and showing me that far from being the result of the conditions of the fall, and something that went haywire as I was formed, my being was very intentionally and soberly purposed by Them! Ever single last aspect!
oh, I was well acquainted with the Psalms which tell us of Their involvement and intricate knowledge of us…but I had pushed these things to a comfortable place theologically…as in there are many things that the Fall mars and wrecks…things that They have not intentioned, but have indeed accounted for with Their Grace. And I had classified my transgender being as one of those things: a result of the Fall and something to be redeemed and eventually cured when all things are made right. In the meantime, I despised myself. My body and its awful clumsy and large power covered in blechy hair and muscle…and that. And my heart…”weak and overly emotional and on my sleeve at all times side by side with streaks of snot”…and my soul…unwilling to hammer down on someone who needs correction but instead draw close and win them over, much to the ire of all the males in my life…I despised my swings from knowing I could do all things thru Jesus to thinking that They literally despised me for longing to have the body I felt I was denied…
…and worst of all? I thought, in my most secret thoughts, that They had done this to me, to punish me for being so bad…They had made this as scourging.
I am so thankful that They are overcoming all my evil with Their good! Truly…
…but this latest round of talks…She has been very specific, and letting me see some of the backstory of what things I have said, or done, or written which have been helpful and life-giving and of service to others…and She has shown irrefutably to my heart of shame and self-loathing that not one of those things would have been possible were it not for the unique balancing of all the various aspects of my being which are seemingly in conflict but are in truth the warp and weft of the very tapestry of life and grace They are making me into!
My experiences in male roles, and the accompanying policing and disciplines (used in a putative sense), the intense efforts made by men when I was young in efforts to “make me tough” or “teach me to be a man”…and later being in male spaces in our culture hearing the naked expression of men to one another, witnessing the truly unconscious taking of privilege and the aggrieved hearts when denied…and hearing men talk, when one on one with me and thinking me male…just different or weird and yet strangely comforting to talk to…
…and my experiences on the outside, excluded by minds and bodies and actions…female roles and spaces and bodies…which heightened my observational skills, and sharpened my inductive and deductive abilities…and gave me an ear to hear…
…and the null…the razor place of horror and emptiness where everyone else had a place and a person, and I had nothing, like literally nothing…and my lil mind heard about the God shaped vacuum? and assumed that was this (it isn’t, by the way, that space is where our spirits are still born and in need of resurrection)…and so pursued God and was pursued by Them,…hey, it was either that or kill myself. Those were my options…
and now…to see…to feel the wisdom and the divine risk They took in intentionally availing themselves of the developmental processes in human biology to make me…and then make me…Charissa Grace…so see that They gambled on Their love and grace and mercy being enough, and They gambled on me to be so slayed by one glance that I would be hopelessly in thrall forever??
No…never again will I call it a prison…and thanks to my bff who asked me once if I could choose one or the other, would I choose that? Giggle…most of the time the Q is which would I choose…but wise wise DDH asked more would I choose, if I could.
I choose Them. I choose Their glory and Their Plan. I choose Their Indescribable Comfort and Joy.
And now to my topic: I believe that God intentionally has chosen Unknowing in regards to relationship with us!
Yes! I KNOW, right???? That sounds heretical, and sounds insane! I mean, God knows all, sees, all, etc etc…They are freaking GOD! And when the One God in 3 Persons and the 3 in One God decide to manifest in Their Oneness, Their THEM-NESS…why then we see that fantastical and indescribable Entity referred to by those who have been in Its Presence as “Lord God Almighty”…and it is too too TOO to the extent that the people who see this fall down as if dead, and their eyes perceive “monsters” with multiple wings and legs and eyes and mouths that fly around the Entity Lord God Almighty and scream at It louder than all loud “HOLY! HOLY!” (and other things…shiver).
So where do I get off saying that God chooses to not know vast portions of relationship with us?
Well, Ima tell ya a story…years ago, I was out and about on a rainy dark clammy morning, soaked to my bones and chilled, and miserable beyond words. It was Oregon rain, and my baby who grew up in Wyoming swears to this day that 38 degrees and rainy in Oregon is a million times worse than 20 below in Wyoming…and I was out in a loud, smelly, noisy truck! Driving it, using it to work with my body so I could provide for my darlings 5. I hate trucks. I hate machines, and they hate me too. They bite me almost everyday and leave me bloody and wounded…and they hurt my heart too with their bellowing and caterwauling.
And my mouth and mind were with God…hey, I had nowhere else to go, it certainly wasn’t because I was any paragon of virtue or spiritual giant! Lol! No…I was more like the bum at the off ramp of God’s freeway with my sign and tale of woe to elicit a few coins…
but I was trying to talk to the Father that morning…and getting no where, because I was so despairing and so frustrated…and Ima be blunt honest with you, kay? This is how I talk to Them, cus I figure They know my heart already, so if I fake it and talk all pretty then not only will I have the regular failures and sins to deal with but the additional sin of lying to Them!! (Cantcha just hear it? “Don Pardo, tell Charissa what she just won!!” <Pardo’s unctuous voice>”Charissa…you just won LYING TO GOD!!!!!!!! No new car for you, girl! Nope…you get the nannygoat prize!” lol)
So, being bluntly honest with Father that day (and you here)… I finally had the following conversation:
Papa, why the fuck do I even bother praying!! It is just a litany of the same fucking complaints, the same awful feelings, the usual puking Pity Party! And the most frustrating things about it is You already fucking KNOW EVERYTHING!”
(yes, I f bombed to Papa…not proud of it…but you all know yo have done this, whether you have said it outloud or not…cus our hearts ARE F bombs, in their deceit and wickedness apart from Their Redeeming love)
Now, this is the distillation? Perhaps this rant went on just a bit longer? Long enough that I was hoarse and in a wrack of sobbing tears pulled over in a wide area beside the road because I couldn’t see?
And then as my sobs subsided (as they always did), as the tides receded and there was still the beach walk with Them to continue, I heard Papa sort of clear His throat and make a very gentle sound…so I listened.
“What makes you think I already know everything?”
“PAPA! Please!! Don’t fuck around with me today…I am not up to Your jokes and tricks and double-back hidey-behind pranks which result in your Wisdom being spoken to this fool! Everyone knows You know everything! It’s in Your bible, even people who don’t like You or believe in You know that You know everything (and by the way, I get super pissed at those idjuts who say they don’t believe in You, and yet ignore that You must be in order to not believe in…but that is a different rant!)!
“Does it? Does My Word say that?”
Constance, I have learned that when They ask you a Q like that it is best to shut up…and re-listen!! For the Bible is living, and so are we…and as we live and grow, so too the Word unfolds to us heights and depths and breadths that are there always, but visible only when we are in just this place…at just that time!
Papa said “What if I made a deal with Myself, with Jesus and Mama (Whom back then I referred to very impersonally as “the” holy spirit, and objectified Her)…and in that deal I decided that I would agree to “not know” vast territories of you and your life and existence…so we can have the Pleasure of joint discovery? After all…We have “unknown” all of your sins and iniquities in Our gifts of Mercy and Grace and Redeeming Metamorphosis…
“Think about your own self, with your own children…which is better…when you drag something out of them, or when you spy from a distance and figure things out…or when they come to you, unexpectedly and all on their own…in just that moment when you are feeling lonely and unnecessary to them or their life…and they begin to tell you their insides!
“The way that feels…the joy and gladness…the sense of miracle and wonder…and the way those things are your treasures and in your forever treasure box?”
and as soon as He said this I was PIERCED!! Whole volumes of reality clicked in for me…experiences lined up, and a whole new way of looking at Them was before me…so I laid down my f bomb boxing gloves, and instead asked in my open-faced and heart showing way…
“..Papa, is this true? How can You not know…but it FEELS true to me!!” And essentially He spoke to me about something I have called since then “Intentional Unknowing”. They chose to limit Themselves in many ways in regards to us….They have given us Free Will, and given us many other things that They have the ability to take back, but because of who They are, They never will, and thus “cannot” take back!
When it comes to our lives…our fears, our hurts, our joys and hopes? They can only know the depth of our specificity if we tell Them!!
Well, the rest is very funny, cus as soon as I grasped all this, I told Papa that I was gonna chirp and chirp forever and He was gonna regret ever telling me He wanted to know me! LOLOL (Hey DDH, can you relate??? giggles…or my baby out there?? or my own Daddy long dead…he is nodding in heaven and knuckle-bumping with the Father in solidarity, having endured the never ending Charissa chatter-flow! lol)
And I leave you with this: God has filled His word with countless exhortations to pray…and we in our foolishness and religious dumbassery have turned these pleas to talk to Them into duties to be performed in order to merit Their activity on our behalf giving us what we think we want!
Well, see it a bit differently…see Them, as you would your own children, pleading with us to talk to Them!! Let Them into our lives, into our thoughts and heart! They are hungry to know us!! They long to be given something that They cannot have in any other way, than that we give it to Them!! And then when you go to pray, do not think of Them as big know-it-alls who are checking things off Their list and tallying our score and computing our “answer to prayer effectiveness quotient!”
No…They are moms, hearts bleeding joy that Their babies are speaking to Them! They are dads, who so deeply yearn for the sharing of Their children and that dialogue which makes every sacrifice an honor and every blow a privilege!
And you wanna know something more? You yourself will come to know yourself better…and Them better too, cus They actually like to conversate!! They will talk back, you know…you did know that right? Right??
“Pray without ceasing” can be read as “Whaddya do t’day ‘Rissa??? Huh? Huh? TellMeTellmeTellMe!!)
Okay…I’m outta here for now…so how bout this? Shut off the computer…go for a walk…and chatter like Charissa!!
All my love and heart to you, and I can’t wait to hear your stories!!
Charissa
Constance, I am going to do something, reluctantly…I am going to pull back the curtain and explain the deeper meanings and levels of one of my poems.
See. I have this friend and she loves my poetry, but I had her read “Her Door, Her Red Door” and she enjoyed the process, but had no idea what it was saying. Well, that presents a dilemma…on the one hand, it is my belief that poetry works in our hearts first, it haunts our guts, right? And then slowly, it bubbles up into our minds, and we make connections with the world via the symbols and metaphors that have fallen like seeds into the dirt, or sand into oysters to become pearls.
But on the other hand, if it is too esoteric and not accessible to the reader, then the poem ultimately is a failure. (I am not counting the cases where a reader is lazy and wants it all on a platter, instead of being let out into the garden, and then given access to the kitchen to gather and create their own understanding).
So for one of the very rare times, I am going to let you inside the form and foundation of the poem…it is gonna be sketchy in places, for I just cannot bear to strip her entirely of her mystery…but if it made you feel something, if it made you have an itch, or feel like you were getting one scratched, then you might want to read more of my things, and most of it is far more accessible, with much lower aspirations than this one.
Her Door, Her Red Door (Analysis)
Okay:
So my therapist is named _______. I wrote a poem for her way early on in our sessions, a wonderful lil ditty, small, cute, a lil skert and testing waters…she loved it as a mom loves a finger-painting of course…lol.
But last session, we were both morose, and we both had on our hearts the sad and beautiful exciting discovery that I was ready to “graduate”, and our times together would come to an end, and we would transition to friendship.
As I said, she was so struck by the changes in me, how I was become myself, and not stuck in between or ashamed of where I began, but was woman. I have very strong symbolic resonances with woman as living creature…for instance in the biblical creation myth, woman is the only being created of living flesh…all else is created from dirt. That, and many similar things have absolutely galvanized me with the truth that woman is the crown glory of all creation and that the patriarchy is so fearful and so jealous it tries to “kill her” (a topic for another day).
We discussed many things in my becoming, which led to discussion about why and what it was that brought me the final release in being able to become becoming…in the talking, ______ shared of her own journey thru womanhood, of being pre-menopausal and how hormonal imbalances are affecting her, how hormones have been so liberating to me as well.
So we come to the title “Her Door, Her Red Door“. First, I am talking about _______, and about how she has brought me to the doorway of being, becoming who I am. This door as I saw it was red…but at a deeper level, it is her heart. ______is all heart, and it is her door, by which she “enters” me, and I “enter” her as well…follow?
But then, and this emerged from the subconscious, I realized that “her” is me, too…my heart, and even more, my own red door “down there”…or for me “in there” (Isaiah 54 speaks to this btw!)…the one we discussed, and she shared so openly with me, woman to woman as mother to daughter, as teacher to student, as woman to prepubescent adolescent girl…
…and as you must certainly know, women have doors, are doors…men simply are not.
Next: in the poem she invites me, commands me, bids me follow her, and she has keys (authority, and conferred authority), the means by which doors are opened, for it is not enough to merely have a door, it must be accessible, traversable…
A woman’s booty is completely unique to women, that shape, that curve, perfect and echoing the curves of galaxies, built on Fibonacci sequences mathematically and the perfect mean geometrically. And she sails…there are only 3 capital letters in the whole poem…about the ship sailing…so picture a woman walking, confident and sure, as a clipper ship sails.
I also reference brick house and “back” and when I do that I am intentionally deriding the Commodores’ song “Brick House”…which reduces and sexualizes a woman and her miracle ship…and “Baby Got Back” which is even more blatantly egregious…truth be told? If men knew the half, nay a tenth of a woman’s desire and passion? They would run terrified and screaming in the night!!
And then the repetitive there…here…there…here, and leading into the honky…tonky…(which each start with t and h like here and there)…and that is the connector to the first comment about me directly, as ______has mentored me, drawn me…and so Hank Williams, a singer (building on the Brick house and Baby Got Back reference) moans, and becomes alcoholic, and “sees that end”…meaning Woman’s miracle ship intimidating, and also directly the male role I was imprisoned in is dying fast and is gone…Hank Williams symbolizes my birth name, and socialized role…and his music was wild and despairing as my life was then (not lifestyle wild, but emotionally wild and despairing, and self-destruction was always a siren song.)
Next stanza, it speaks of the new place _____and I were at that day, and had not been there before…she had been far more good and kind mother whom I wanted to be like…and we had at no time discussed sexuality or the deeper spiritual power it channels…it was about recovery and reintegration then…I picked the image of the Columbia river, because women are rivers, have rivers, channel rivers, and oh the power…and all others seek to harness that and benefit, right? Men, turbines in, and women turn them…
The lines about her walk (and remember I am speaking of me as “her” in a very distant sense as well)…and her swishing, ricocheting from gutter to gutter…what a hip swing, across the entire path of being, but also to tie in a pun about balls…”no gutter balls” Picking up a 7-10 split…that is nearly impossible…and becoming myself was to overcome that split in me, between who I am and what I am…see? And no gutter balls…eff yeah!!
Those keys…no sound, bunched…the image of power, seeing keys outlined in tight jeans, and the promise of power and entry granted, authority…also keys are in pianos, so you see the musical theme sowed back around again.
Teena Marie is the next musician, and she is as I recall of Portuguese, Italian, Irish, and Native American heritage…she was a soul singer, and omg was she ever amazing…as good or better than Diana Ross or Beyoncé, and I love them both…well she was also singing a lot about power in sexuality, and I loved her so when I was in my 20s, for reasons I could never articulate then…and I…”half” one thing and half another, and in some ways neither…and she grabbed her keys, her authority, her permission from street corner dudes…(think singers around the barrel fire singing a Capella…)
I also bring her in because Hank is passing, going, going…and Teena, who is dead, is also Marie, Mary, made pregnant by divine fiat…and so me made woman by miracle and Heather, and medicine which is the same as magic and miracle in so many ways…
…and then we come to the door…go read that part again…and you can see a living heart, or a vulva and vagina, and mystery temple of every single human being ever, even the Christ…
…and all the words are all shades and various hues of red…and how is a woman’s heart all that different from her glory? Her temple? Is not every child first conceived there, in her heart, who that child is and shall be?
And then _____gives me a philter, a potion, from her river, from her flow, from her heart, from her glory…
(of course not literally, as you read never allow those elements to do anything but drive the heat and passion of the poem…they are a moan of desire and lusty want…but only that. I assure you of that, but must mention it because I was so honest as to feel it must be there, for it always is there in every woman, if she is blessed enough to know herself, or to be shown like I have been, or strong enough to own herself from the start.)
And at that point we go to Aretha Franklin…natural woman (think of the lyrics, crooned as I drank the philter)…and Respect…
And then the touch of ______’s hand glowing gold (which in alchemic terms was a type and shadow of divine character in medieval times)…and “finger fragrant and savory” is definitely just exactly what it sounds like…but it is a vibrant and intensely earthy form of communion, and also a conferring, an anointing given to me…and I was thinking of ET, and how he had no home, and healed with that glowing finger…but Heather/Woman/Me so much more present and dangerous and contagious…
Me never “phoning home again” (never going back to that cursed male role forced upon me)…and then I swallow the key…(HRT…communion…permission, authority, the key becomes me and I the key…)
And then the door (whom I have been always) is opening and my male biology (the hinges, Hank moaning and dying, my body literally changing, swings open and there I am…being prayed over by the queen (Aretha) and I getting my own locks like _______’s…and Beyoncé with her combination of sexuality and independence, and she like Joan of Arc, divinely appointed to deliver a people (woman)…and then the key moved in me…my own “child conceived”…and then finally my “wad” is no longer this god awful bulge between my legs always haunting me, but instead a wad of keys and my own clipper ship.
OK…so that is the analysis…all of this is in me as I write, but I am not aware of it consciously until after I am done…I just write, and feel my way to it. After, I see it, it starts to emerge, starts to be birthed, and then it is easy to go back and help it.
Nearly every one of my poems operates in similar ways and layers…I invite you to go back and read…think of strange ones like “Spitting Bones” or “A-Maze-In-Me”
I wonder if this counts as a “Found Poem”? Or “Just a Fact”? Giggle…yep, I am still befuddled by that ignorant and intentionally short-cut thinking…oh, I have a poem about that sort of thing: “Bury My Head in the Sky“!!
Constance, if you are inspired to re-read some more inaccessible work, and this helps unlock it, please…let me know?
Thanks forever, and gratitude for reading!!
Charissa
Constance, here is something I have noticed…about myself and about people in general, I think:
We judge others by their actions…we judge ourselves by our intentions.
Is this true? If so, I think you are canny enough to turn that signpost in the direction it should go in order to better be generous of spirit and kind of countenance and compassionate in actions…right?
Deepest Blessings to you this day, and I exhort you to try out a new thing: a conscious search in each person you meet today, for their intentions which may put a very different light on their actions.
Love and grace to you…
Charissa
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
like a weaned child with its mother;
like a weaned child is my soul within me.
Psalm 131:2
Wean: to deal out bountifully to, to recompense fully, to ripen
Weaned: to have been dealt out to with bountifulness, to have been recompensed fully, to have been ripened
Each and every day, my Mama, the wonderful Lady Grace and Great Holy Spirit of the Almighty God of the Universe has dealt with me generously, recompensed me with great favor and grace, and has and is ripening me.
She has given me Herself, and ladies from Her courts as sisters, friends, and companions.
I am ever eternally grateful to you all
laying on the workbench, half carved.
clamps grip my “here and there”
there…here…anywhere I move or
slide away to from
under the chisel’s hungry bite.
wood shavings lay strewn about,
results of carvings complete,
curling locks shorn
from a recruit
on the first day of basic…or
from the denizens of Dachau
on the first day of chaos.
the view from here is clear by half…
…half:
done
undone
too smart by
falling short of the other
done with this
but incomplete, in the hole
of halfway.
a rocking horse, there, high up
on the shelf, intricate carved
curves sleek and defined,
It is there.
Safe and knowing its place done.
it is not here, clamped and halfway.
a train taught its shape
with that chisel sharp and knowing,
with that auger licking hungry
and this drill sublime and hole-y…
trained to whistle and to
click-clackity click-clack
down tracks laid by hands
and connected to ground
and come round again
displaying always it was here
but it is now there.
jaunty paint glistens red,
and yellow, and blue with glad
waiting for strings,
and plucking fingers
that move carved arms,
kick knife-hewn legs
and blink eyes saw-made
and staring…
staring at here unseeing,
staring from there.
and parts jumbled
pieces present and
full of purpose yet unfolded
sit still, calm and unclamped
I wait too, in pieces along with parts:
midst dry cedar shaving clouds scented
midst ordered clutter and stilled clamber
midst bunched silver sharp-toothed oily tools
sitting sleek, and sleeping with one yellow eye
open.
the chisel croons its tangy tangled song
in my ear which is indeed there
and waits to taste me…here.
it promises to take me
it promises to pierce me, rend me,
spread here splayed and waiting
to be taken…there.
i dread the coming dawn
and the chisel’s hungry bite
i yearn for it to touch me
and shiver with delight
because it takes me…there.
yes, at dawn,
the chisel’s hungry bite, oh…
the chisel’s hungry bite
She woke, arms reaching to the singing moon
that glimmered in soft velvet star-streaked air.
Her heart lept joyous, woken from death’s swoon
Her face wreathed by her effervescent hair.
She stirred, she rose by trees there, sentinels
of sacred sleep, of metamorphosis
who reached to resurrect her fulsome soul
and clothe her in green boughs and woody kiss
and there she danced, unclothed, absolved, untamed
and kissed the moon with hungry clear desire,
while ardent winds caressed her, unashamed,
and she took wing on tongues of Blazing Fire
Arise my love, leave sorrow’s crucifix
and fly to me, your Resplendent Phoenix
thank you Mama, for your faithful love.
thank you Dani, for walking the folds
Love and gratitude,
Charissa Grace
When I was sparkly fire and glow, and scintillating with insight
I heard from you.
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was prescient and perfect, precise and plenary
I heard from you.
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was funny and tickling and a madly capering jester
I heard from you.
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was torn and teary inside, and still like lakes at midnite
I didn’t hear from you,
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was thrumming stiff and stark, helpless in fear’s talons
I didn’t hear from you,
I wanted to hear from you.
When I was mute from sorrow and deaf from grief
I didn’t hear from you,
I wanted to hear from you.
I face unknown guillotines,
strange purveyor of power
whose lifted finger could be life
or the executioner’s twitch.
Does it mean life, or
death to my dreams and me?
Your words uncork my heart
unlocks my jaw
undeafs my ear
pour wine and set table
they calm, gentle me
I wanted to hear from you
I wanted to hear from you
The scent of our home,
funky quaint and riddled
with books and bikes,
and the long laid scent of family.
The scent of the kitchen,
yesterday’s dinner
and the overlay of croissants
like fierce french washer women
scrubbing away all other scents.
…the scent of our clothes,
and our laundry soap…
the scent of the air cooler,
that of the soft night air
waltzing in,
slow and sleepy
from her night out
amongst the stars,
and carried in drowsy
on cricket wings…
…the scent of popcorn
shared on the couch,
of our wine wafting
from bottles possessed
by only the last 12 drops,
our lil garden outside,
and the auto sprinkler
which has come on to water
in the dark and the cool…
the scent of your currents,
your deep distant observing soul
that hangs back and watches,
even in the midst…
i do go on…
from here…from now…
in the sweltering heat,
where you and I lay,
you sleeping,
me watching you sleeping,
soft face limpid and languid…here…
listening to tides of eternity
race round and round
inside our veins, our universe…
i do go on…
…watching our breath mingle unseen
as you sleep, and I
my many rounds to keep,
awake as usual.
in your world,
nothing is what it appears to be.
(i mean that “mirror sentence!”
nothing is what it appears to be and
nothing is what it appears to be and
nothing is what it appears to be and…)
well, as I think about it,
it seems logical
you were drawn here…
maybe I was
the one thing
you were supposed to get,
maybe I am
the one thing
you cannot forget…
or get shut of!
regardless…
you now have me,
writing here
my musings and childlike tears,
my laughs and my cold dark fears,
my forever fat and full
wet joys of today
(as long as it is still called today!)
Alas it will cost you,
(I will cost you)
but at least it will
only cost you
what is yours
to easily pay:
everything.
I am here, but you must
look in unusual places.
not in scents (innocence)
from bottles
and spray jars
and spritzers
and cream pots
or flesh pots.
I may be hiding,
laughing in the most
unexpected spaces.
It is time
to set the last croissants…
I am smiling,
and feeling that
wonderful joy that has
a tinge of sadness to it
because it knows
though joy lives forever,
its moments come and go
like the meals of our lives…
the scents of our home…
reflections of what was
and what is yet to be
She rides today, shotgun
in matters of heart and bloody core,
matters of blood, matters of bone,
her flesh become word and wing
and flight to wider blue skies
and pastures…
…rides shotgun atop
treasure boxes soon emptied
but not until
the very last second…God forbid…
please.
She sits, still shielding
but fingers open
and heart unclenched
in the green ritual of becoming
yet again repeated,
yet again echoing
those who flew before by thousands,
swarms searching for Capistrano
and finding college and career and clouds
gathered…and clouds parted.
She rides shotgun,
she, shotgun,
rides with diamond frozen tears
pinned back callous
behind both barrels
cocked and loaded,
her tender torn eyelids
primed with tearshot
(frozen tears rip as they sit
gathered, bunched, clenched)
Waves, washing by, wistful,
irritated, emotions
mendacious and mirror walking
around that carriage of connection
to futures unseen
swirl and caress her face
with terrible talking fingers.
Her heart is still,
on hold,
(she holds him in her heart)
what was once,
and is, and knows
what will be comes…
(Que Sera, Sera!)
…but not yet.
Because across miles, time,
her blood calls to bone,
her soul and spirit moan
remembering, loving, memorialized
and set in stone
forever.
Miles will pass. Time
will roll by, and that
return of body and bone
will glad at last be known…
and her laugh, her squint,
(shotgun)
her head toss
and still wonder
will echo to her heart
from babies to be born,
but still bone of her bone…
and heart will thaw and
throat unclench
at last and swallow
that diamond lump stark and
glistening with inevitability.
But now…
Across miles, time
she rides…
shotgun
A Dhé
le Caitlín Maude
Neither blood nor flesh
God
your conjured image
-the dreary mouthful of soil-
but I clasp it heart-wards
until it fuses into life.
The questioning is no comfort
(nor is the answer).
Why should I adore
the lifeless image
that will not explain away
and you
who felt my deepest pains
the way I do now?
And if it’s not the questioning
(nor the answer)
that’s the problem
(nor is the answer)
Oh no God.
I don’t understand.
I don’t know.
I’m convinced only – so far
Of that.
There or not
I am drawing towards you
and if you are
I call for one enchantment
to be saved
from those
who speak of you as
the cold man of the skies.
God,
my heresy is boundless
but would you not prefer this
to some intriguing lover of the world’s plenty
Who would fail to pay heed to you
from one end of the year to the next?
God,
The answer is far from the solution
There is no new mysterious revelation
You still have to travel the path of the thorns
No respite or homecoming at the bottom of the sea
Better the water on the forehead now
than after
My time has come to sow my blind pattern
on the gaping canvas.
I attack the contentious issues of the day
(body, heart and mind).
The temptation calls me
‘Don’t’.
What good is passing beauty?
What good?
But remember
that the answer is far from the solution
But the unsightly remains –
dead ashes of the night –
dirty dishes in the morning –
signs of my own death
and
constantly cleaning them
(dishes, heart and mind).
Forget for a while, God,
the dreary mouthful of soil.
(Worse is forgetting).
What can I do
but worship this bleak life?
I press towards me the curse.
I cannot say how long it will last.
But God,
I sneak, I comb, I tend to.
I hide in the fragrant cloth the ugly wounds.
Concealment is my specialty,
I smile
I stretch,
I kiss your lovely side.
There is hope in Spring.
I covet its pulse.
Constance, I want to tell you about a very important resource for your education and growth in matters transgender related. My new friend Dara (who getting to know is like coming back to a childhood home from long ago, and having memories flood back clear and full) is a therapist, specializing in transgender humans.
(I love this photo of her, because it shows the Peace she carries on her shoulders!)
Dara is a true bright light, and her energy and commitment is literally saving lives that otherwise quite likely would be miscarried and malformed, or even lost altogether. Dara has a sense of mission that is of the ilk I refer to when I plead to you cis-gender people to pluck up your courage and conviction and make a place for the dispossessed and stranger and alien.
I truly believe that real significant cultural transformation will only occur when the current possessors of power willingly insist on the inclusion of the outcast. Dara has that vision, that passion, and that calling, and dives in whole heart. I was fortunate enough to first encounter Dara thru a podcast. At the time, I was at the crisis point, that place where all has fallen apart enough for the power and life in the seed to burst the hull and come forth.
Just hearing Dara, this cheerful certainty that transformation was possible, was enough for me, and I began to nose up once again…and knew in my heart in that moment that sometime in the future, somehow, somewhere, Dara and I would cross paths. I was filled with the conviction that our nexus would be significant and that together we would be able to have great impact. I am mindful of that old prophetic declaration “…and one shall put a thousand to flight, but two shall rout ten-thousand!”
I signed up for Dara’s newsletter and went to the website where I found links to educational materials, resources for my own growth and mental health, and just that indomitable cheerful strength that Dara simply exudes. And then flash forward one year…
…and Dara is asking for input from readers regarding different resource ideas. Well, I felt that “baby” kick in my gut, hit the reply button, and jabbered away for 10 pages…apparently those words were a similar lil power bomb in Dara’s heart as that podcast and other writings were in mine! Dara liked it! Which thrilled me, obvi…it has been a struggle in my life to ever know I am liked.
One thing led to another, and we emailed in fun flurries of fancy and vision, and voila! I had an article written.
This article is aimed at you, Constance…you cis-gendered individuals who might find yourselves tapped by transgendered people who desire to have you in their life as a pillar of support. It lists a few points that explain why you are the one that has been chosen to come out to, it details what the trans experience is like from a transgender perspective, and finally it gives counsel in ways you can be present and help your loved one to live…and not die.
Please? Head over to Dara’s site?
There you will find a wealth of resource and support…and my own lil article called
Gender Transition: The Leap of Brave Beginnings, and 8 Ways You Can Help
Dara and I have been brainstorming in a beautiful serendipity over creating some things that would be available for a small fee with all proceeds going to those without anything so that they could live and transition without having to partake of destructive things just to survive. We have lots of ideas…
…but we are finding that when cis-gender people who are curious about things ask, well it gives us such good direction and focus…so as you read, as questions arise or topics surface, let us know? You can reach me here at Gracenotes and charissa_grace@comcast.net and Dara has contact information easily available over on her page.
Think of it…one snowflake sets off an avalanche…will it be you? And if not, will you take your place so that the “one” can have a place to land and set it off?
Thanks Constance, and blessings to you this day
(Dara and Charissa brainstorming! Lololol!! 🙂 )
Okay Constance…I am gonna confess a lil indulgence of ego: I really like my new poem “Her Door, Her Red Door“, and frankly I am a little disappointed there have not been very many likes on it…but I am also not surprised for it is inference, symbol, veil, subtly blatant while blatantly subtle…
I actually and for real think it is one of my most skillful poems to date.
But I get that it is not necessarily appealing…but consider, if you would, the poem itself in the context of the work of the poet: I once said “The poet is a desperater man than most. He must get it all down before the ages are up. Which, as any poet will tell you Is A BITCH!” (waaay back in 1982)…
…I was trying to say that there is a “job” in poetry, or perhaps a better word is quest? No matter…if you consider yourself a poet (and I do) then you find this inability to see life as any other thing but a poem and events/circumstances/happenings are all snapshots into the heart of the poem.
Thus, when I write I try to emulate the layers, hidden and revealed, that comprise this Mystery we swim in.
In “Her Door, Her Red Door“, you find me operating on a few very intentional levels…I do not want to just lay it out there. That is a bit too clinical, sort of like the difference between sex education class in Middle School Health class, and the wonder and poignant pain of Love’s First Kiss. But I do want you to have some sense of the structure, the themes and the interplay of them. I can be obtuse…lol.
First of all, consider that it is a poem written by a trans-gender woman who is in the midst of transition. This overall context puts the other elements in perspective and frames the picture.
Secondly, it is a poem dedicated to a person whom I have openly spoken of and the role she has in my life. That role has permutations and multiple facets when considered poetically. What is her “business” with me? What is mine with her? What is our mutual end? And more fundamentally, Constance, what is your position in all this as well? Are you somehow about the same things, in the salient areas of becoming that you face?
Next comes the unfolding of my view of our essential business: becoming. She is a facilitator of mine, and as I participate in her provisions I aid hers as well…and each of you, as you become day to day, may perhaps find touchstones in this poem’s point of view and approach to that becoming. You will, of course, have to make inference and feel your way under the sheet to the true bones of your own transitions in this life as a sentient, conscious being stuck between the macrocosm and the microcosm infinities, and with eyes…
I choose a physical aspect of her and invest that with meaning far other than the expected trope culturally in our pornography laced times…there are only three capital letters used in this poem. That is on purpose.
There are obvious references to musicians…why specific ones? Why them? What are the specific characteristics of those humans? (Remember to ask this inside the “frame” of the picture I mentioned earlier). There are single words that link back to lyrics, and those lyrics in turn echo back the essential business of this magic woman, which echo back to my own quest of becoming.
There are many puns laced throughout, intentionally slanted in relation to the core…that way they can make the connection and then…like leaves in early autumn, gracefully drop away once their purpose for the tree is completed, and reveal the strong and vital branches of the tree beneath that leafy veil…
The door: resist the temptation to skim over this, thinking it is obvious…no? Perhaps, like usual with me, it is a sonar reading on a larger diamond lurking in the dark of unknown knowns…but if you will try, you may very well enjoy letting those things bubble up inside you…from your heart.
Lastly, and remember that I have said before that wine and the process of creating it is for me the central metaphor of the universe, think about the poem again, in entirety (which means you can reinterpret the words on the 4 layers of existential being: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual)…and once you have that palate built? Start to pull elements from one read through, and combine them with elements of the other…sensual elements mixed with sacred elements…becoming and unbecoming mixed with living and dying…
…and always, always: Communion. Bread…Wine…in the presence of knowing knowers broken and shared.
We are given our birth…but we have to achieve our being, and enter in.
I hope these clues assist you into at least understanding why I am so proud of this one. It was “easy hard” to write down and weave, and it tested my limits at this stage of my becoming…as a poetess, as a prophetess, as a woman, and as a lover of God.
In heartfelt passion,
Charissa Grace
yeah. come with me she said…
she had keys in her jeans that
flexed outlined in tight relief on that
power…shifting, rolling, sailing, barrel housing,
brick house? gawd that is dollhouse up against this Clipper Ship Sailing
and back is just the half of it! forth is there, no–here, no–there, no–here
yeah you get the picture…honky, tonky, honky, tonky rambling roll
(hank williams moaned and climbed into the bottle, seeing that end)
of course i had never seen this, or this place…(who looks at their mom
when they are looking to her power, to tap into her smoulder glow
like bonneville into the columbia thrilling as she turns those turbines?)
…she prolly demurred, magic shawl in place concealing and entrancing…
but now she walked, swished, ricocheted gutter to gutter
picking up every 7-10 split every step without gutter balls and those keys…
…no sound, bunched and squenched tight there, those keys…
(teena marie had keys like these, yanked from the dudes on the corner)
her door before us fat, streaks-run-swirls-whorls, depth-breadth flowing
crimson coral flaming, cardinal glowing carmine cerise chestnut cracking
garnet sanguine scarlet and rosy…that door was thick and giving…it blowzed there
full, sprawled (like titian’s venus) and throbbing with certain promise.
she said (with eyes) drink this and blinked and shook that wild
living crown claret and blooming rufescent from her head
more precious than the curve of Saturn’s iridescent rings
(aretha conferred keys and fierce eyes midst natural woman’s smoky spell)
then her hand glowed gold, she reached and touched my lips with her finger fragrant
and savory with her her.… and cackled wild woman crone songs branding me, said
I’d never phone home again cus I was there, here, there, here, and she dug out a key
and told me to swallow it which i did, and that fulsome door
creaked open with hinges groaning (hank moaning and dying)
and aretha conferring shoutin respect on my own head of wild locks
and beyonce blazed jeanne d’arc and that key moved, and became
(my own wad, key tight against my ass)
I’ll tell you a secret, dear.
Let’s make this perfectly clear:
there are no secrets here, this year
Ouroboros
has been asunder rent
here in our own little tent.
Pish posh, we have no need
of eating our own tail,
we already recycle!
Instead, meet me here,
just big enough for us to sit
(but not stand, we learned
to eschew that when
we learned to not chew
our own tails).
Do you recall this place our tent is pitched…
on the bodies of two trees that were cut
from the nearby mountain and brought
in and stood up planted here?
Holding us on our platform so high
we must climb ladders, exhilarated by
heights unfolded, to sit serene
in settings spiritual and high
above the dirt and drama?
So many in our times
are bored with themselves
infected with the disease of self…
they look for things to fill
their inner emptiness
and it’s just over and
over more and more
again and again
Ouroboros
But we pray we are haunted
by moon-drenched thoughts
reflecting that Elsewhere,
filthy with light and love!
We have the sound of rivers
running in our veins
and the smell of wind
in our lungs and
in our flying hair
soaring on the wings
of our wild and precious life!
We pray in flutes and strings
and we wait answers
like fanfares blown
on trumpets of light
that sound like becoming,
like arriving…
For now though,
in our tent pitched
in the air on 2 trees
we take our tea and listen
to fragrant roses blooming,
to seaweed swaying,
to fish flashing
round rose pink ears
of shells (and always singing
the song of the sea),
to leaves stretching
luxuriously into
autumn splendour,
to singing silence
soft and low and
we finally understand why
Ouroboros so mistaken
is so named…
my mouth at your tail,
your mouth at mine,
and at last we are
our Our, our Us,
with no boredom
in the middles
and swelling reborn
again, here in
our tent on 2 trees.
Trans community can change minds by changing discourse – LA Times.
Oh Constance, I Love this article!!
It has a very similar p.o.v. to what/how/who I feel called to be and the manner in which I desire to influence and educate those people in my life who are most central to the overturning of an insufficient paradigm of bondage (the gender binary) and a harsh cruel paradigm of patriarchal privilege that enslaves both men and women.
To walk, my head held high, my inner self shining thru this shell like light thru a stained glass window…to be gracious in the face of ignorance and courageous in the face of misogyny…compassionate to the face of brokenness and kind to the face of need..to be resolute in the face of hatred and forgiving in the face of repentance.
Whew! That is a tall order…but then again, my Mama is pretty tall…besides, it is the heart and soul of why I took the name Charissa Grace.
Check out the article, and then join my legions in the armies of Grace!
Love, Charissa
My Son Wears Dresses and That’s OK With Me | xoJane.
Hi Constance…pretty sure I pressed this already? But just in case I didn’t, here it is again.
Mama, please bless this father…a true confident and faithful man, who refused to be his child’s first bully.
Love, Charissa
Raising a trans child is not child abuse...
Dear Constance…
It is hot, and sultry in the night. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and stumbled out to the lappy and I am sitting in the velvet thick wraps of heat and cool, dissipating, swelling, gaining strength and washing away.
I am thinking of the waves of years, like waves washed up onto the shores of my soul, and how those waves have all at once sculpted my edges and eroded my interface with the world…and yet left me untouched, in the deep hinterlands of identity and meaning.
I have always been drawn to the ocean, and its hungry sad roar, its insatiable throwing of itself onto the earth it loves, the constant assault on that mass which resists its efforts to billow over it, washing it down a hungry mouth and being unable to swallow such a juicy morsel…the high cliffs and stubborn trees, given shape and scope by winds and rains and time…and how time and the ocean are one and the same.
Always there. Changing everything. Changing nothing.
As I have worked to dig deeper and deeper into the roots and genesis of my origins, I have wondered…constantly…what would have happened if I had the chance to grow up in a time and place where being transgender was understood, accepted as something analogous to cleft palate or some other differently abled condition that we so easily and quickly address with modern medical understandings…could have been welcomed into that sphere that I was excluded from then, socialized and policed so heavily that even now, having walked out of that penitentiary of thought I find that I carry the prison bars within and they have managed to grow into the roots of my heart and entangle themselves there.
I am still in a cage, a horrorshow of entangled lies and terrible truths…lies regarding who I am…and truths silently standing in towering clarity of who I am not…what I am not, and what I always will be. And I must keep walking forward. The only thing that will keep me out of the penitentiary is forgetting what lies behind and pressing on towards the upward calling…
What ifs still linger though, and one of the greatest is what if my parents had truly known? What if my classmates had truly known? What if I had never been infected with the awful mentality that tells me I am ugly, and repulsive, and never shuts up even underneath smiles and during the recitation to myself ot the catechism of mental health?
If I could have had puberty blockers followed by the very hormones I am at long last taking which have brought me immeasurable inner peace and relief?
I will never know…but I see the efforts of people like my Hero, Kat over at Dandelion Fuzz, like so many (mostly) mothers and fathers who have grasped the simple basic truth that their child is a gift from God and needs only to be fed and watered, loved and nurtured to emerge as a unique and eternal embodiment of one facet of God’s heart…and I want to cry with relief that things are changing, and my prison is becoming like Alcatraz, shut down and decommissioned as inhumane and unprofitable.
And then I see the actions of wanna-be jailers, and listen to the wild and desperate cries of “gloom and doom, gloom and doom!” They are now classifying the acceptance and active care of a trans-gender child as child abuse!
I guess to them the spankings I received were nothing more than loving efforts to keep me in line with who everyone else said I was? The teasing I got just a jovial activity to “toughen me up and make a man outta me?” The forever nights of turmoil workouts to empower me to have no emotions and feelings and end up with strong muscles to resist suicide and depression? The guilt and shame that was thrown down on me from so-called people of God was merely the loving ministrations of “God’s Servants” to purify me and make me holy (read wholly oppressed and chained)?
No.
Constance, those things were child abuse! I deal with the fallout to this day.
But I have posted this link to an article about them, about those like me, in hopes that you will know better what we have gone thru and what we face daily, and what is available to be our help…and also what we face from our accusers.
Stand in the gap? Reach a hand, not of pity, but of support…and educate those you encounter whose minds are still chained to images of boogeymen and monsters.
In solemn longing,
Charissa
Mom confronts TERF bigotry aimed at her family | The TransAdvocate.
My friend Kat is a mom like this…Perhaps this article will not only educate you about a very specific form of trans-phobia, but show you the awesome power of a parent whose only lense for viewing their child is that of love.
Thanks Kat…
Your friend ‘Rissa
Good Morning Constance…ran across this quote, and immediately saw a converse to the acceptance and love and welcoming that the Love of God has and is.
Let’s try to simply love? It is amazing how much energy you will have, if you lay down trying to force everyone else into your image, which is the ultimate idolatry.
“Framing trans people and trans discourse as though it falls along the lines of “transgenderism”, frames the issue as though it is ideological.
“Trans people are not an ideology. There is no monolithic ideology that trans people share. There are radical trans people, liberal trans people, conservative trans people (though that is sort of rare), apolitical trans people, just as there are femme trans men, butch trans women etc.
“Trans people exist and are an eminently marginalized class of people.
“Trans people are, as well as being an oppressed class, individual human beings with their own idiosyncratic experiences, lives and stories to tell.
“Trans people, for challenging the institution of gender solely by existing, are treated with vitriolic contempt from all corners of society in a material basis.
“Trans people, most especially transgender women of color, are disproportionately affected by hate crime, poverty, police brutality, sexual violence, the prison industrial complex, are economically coerced into survival sex work, often have a lack of access to appropriate medical care, experience sensationalistic media depictions, constant hyper-objectification and so on.
“Trans people, especially trans women, are consistently dehumanized by wider society, all because of society’s preposterous obsession with gender and their anxiety, and downright terror of people who fail to conform.
“Trans people are not an ideology.
Trans people are f***ing human beings.”
Mama’s clothes are alive, like meadows over dirt,
like dew over meadows, like sun kissing dew,
like sky holding sun, like night holding stars,
and then there She is, outside the inside and
with me too.
Mama’s clothes move, like wind thru the trees,
like waves on the sea, like swans in the air,
like fish thru the water, like boats on a voyage,
like banners in the wind, like mercy over sin,
like gratitude in me.
Mama’s clothes rustle, swirl, and make my way
to snuggle close, tussle that soft edge to my face,
curl, close and hear the breath She takes, the
breath She gives, the song She croons, as She
sings over me.
Mama’s clothes glow, like rainbows in sun,
like silver in the clouds, like diamonds in my eyes,
like peacocks in their glory, like a single color story,
Refracted in Her eyes and a living quick surprise
to delight me.
Mama’s clothes, my refuge in the storm,
my anchor to the norm, my banquet in the fear,
invitation to draw near, so I do, I snuggle closer,
inhale Her strength, Her Kindness, Her Grace that
pours over me.
Mama. Strong…Soft…There, not “there”.
Deep, serene, intent, inquisitive, powerful
Grace Incarnate. Wisdom manifested,
Means of Creation, Healer and Nurturer of
Her daughter, me.
Mama. Charissa Grace.
A match made in heaven, designed from
the beginning, a leap within Her Heart to
spark in me and bloom, alive and growing free
my Mama and me.
Mama, can I wear Your clothes?
I wanna be
just like You.
Somewhere in the dark,
in the warmth of black-red
before we woke up swimming,
surfing sultry heartbeats and
waves of new bones growing
green and rooty-fibrous,
we navigated bold our
seas secure and buoyant,
our universe and listened…
to…things beyond…a world…
somewhere? Out there.
Sounds moving and flowing,
deep, high, in-between
and all things came to us,
there, turning in the tides
of the primeval pools
of ancient new beginnings…
and so we safely rested…sleeping skin to skin.
As time stood still, there always,
and we went rushing, tossing
thru cataracts and canyons
across the woolly wild-land
of years that tug us forward,
and push hard from behind,
we came thru like otters
in our wedded frolic,
our hurtling thru history,
unseen and secrets heard…
our buoyant whispers crossing
a…vast gulf…a schism…
something? Out there.
Thru skin so thin, translucent
like milk or bridal veils,
we felt, we knew for certain,
beneath the crystal cataracts
that cloaked our singing souls,
we ate at tables there,
delighted and so dizzy
from seeing with hands only
and feeling with hearts lonely
and then, content and answered,
and with our bright eyes open…
we lay together, mingled…sleeping skin to skin.
Now, in this shining dark-red
of knowing and becoming,
tethered strong and vital
to That shore over there,
to That bright land “Before”,
our food and drink comes foreign
and yet familiar, tasting
of places ever ancient yet
forever fresh and reeking
with incense always burning
from when the Song and Singer
ignited flames of union.
Our hands reach, grope, entwine
to mirror hearts and lives
that grappled with this grief
and grasped instead the Grace of
that birth, that dissolution
of two lives into one life.
We lay each night and cast away,
in practice for that Voyage
Last and Final, beckoning,
echoing births transcended,
our hearts become a heart,
and it is well here…sleeping skin to skin
Sleeping skin to skin
“As long as trans women are seen as less desirable, illegitimate, devalued women, then men will continue to frame their attraction to us as secret, shameful, and stigmatized, limiting their sexual interactions with trans women to pornography and prostitution.
And if a trans woman believes that the only way she can share intimate space with a man is through secret hookups or transactions, she will be led to engage in risky sexual behaviors that make her more vulnerable to criminalization, disease, and violence; she will be led to coddle a man who takes out his frustrations about his sexuality on her with his fists; she will be led to question whether she’s worthy enough to protect herself with a condom when a man tells her he loves her; she will be led to believe that she is not worthy of being seen and must remain hidden.”
-Janet Mock, Redefining Realness
“Of course, there are some segments of the feminist community that are vehemently anti-trans. But even aside from that, a lot of feminist activism and rhetoric is geared specifically toward non-trans women’s experiences.
“Much of it centers on women being able to do anything men can, and on empowering women’s bodies and biology, which is important and necessary, but it doesn’t resonate as readily with trans women because our socializations and bodies differ from that norm.
“And the whole unilateral feminist notion that men are the oppressors and women are the oppressed just seems so overly simplistic coming from a trans perspective. Male privilege is very real, but it is not the only gender privilege that exists.
“I think what trans women can offer feminism is a fuller, more holistic perspective on sexism than what currently exists.
“Part of this comes from our having lived in the world as both women and men at different points in our lives. Also, I think trans women can challenge the notion that femininity is entirely artificial or merely a trap to hold women down.
“I can understand why it might seem that way for many women who were coerced as children into a femininity that did not feel right for them. But trans women often have the reciprocal experience of naturally gravitating toward feminine expression despite being socialized to be masculine.
“Because of this experience, we recognize how certain aspects of femininity can be empowering for those who gravitate toward it on their own accord. We recognize the importance of critiquing anti-feminine sentiment both in the culture at large as well as within feminism.”
Fighting Back Against Anti-Transgender Talking Points | Brynn Tannehill.
Good Morning Constance. 🙂
I do not spend a ton of time (any time) questioning the legitimacy or reality of my being transgender. Too many things that never made sense ever in my life now do…too many good and fruitful things are happening in my life as I heal and integrate and actualize who I really am vs who I was “trying to be”, too many good fruits of the spirit are blossoming and coming forth in the last 1 1/2 years that were not there previously.
But: Ignorance is great, fear is greater, and their bastard child hatred is the most vengeful of all. As knowledge is the greatest answer to ignorance, and wisdom is the greatest answer to fear, I am reposting this article to assist any of you who might be “okay with Charissa:” but not so okay with other transgender people or their lifestyle choices.
I get that. It is definitely a brave new world outside the binary and learning about all the gender variations that have always existed but been shunted away to the side because they are not “convenient”
Well, Time Magazine just did some writing on Transgender issues, and it stirred up a bit of ignorant backlash. Brynn Tannehill does a great job of rebutting that backlash, and it should give you plenty of ammo to lay aside questions of legitimacy, and return to the essential question present always with all people:
“How can I live so as to embody faith, hope, and love?”
Shining in new life, and being changed by degrees, from glory to Glory!
Charissa Grace
Edited The Mist some more…giggles!! It woke up colicky this morning, complaining of inconsistent rhyming patterns and cluttered meters…
So I walked the floors with it and crooned soothing ministrations…and I think it might be okay.
This time, no rash promises though…lol The Mist
In capering silliness,
Charissa Grace
Why Do We Need Labels Like “Gay”, “Bi”, “Trans”, and “Cis”?.
Wowsa…Constance, this is a long, well thought out, and somewhat complex article on the necessity for words to describe our experiences…and also how power segments of our culture control words, define the ones allowed and the ones that will be known as “labels” and thus verboten.
The complexity lies in the need to keep a few ideas simultaneously in mind as you read, and to patiently assimilate the foundational things at the beginning to roll with understanding at the end.
Please…roll up your sleeves and give it a go. It will greatly assist you in having a greater connection to my life experience, and more effectively equip you to be a tower of kindness and compassion to those you meet each day, especially trans-folks.
Love, Charissa
(pic by Charissa Grace)
Mist floats and clings in vaporous veils,
tenuous, drapes itself in sails,
cross hillsides twined thru twig and tree,
ravines and over streams…and me…
arrives in sheets to swath dim swales.
I cling to dull rocks anxiously,
hands stiff and aching longingly
and stinky ‘neath that clutching throb
my fingers seeking comfort’s swab
with baking torn nails tipped bloody,
…but finding only edges, and
comfort none, not now, not here….
Does it conceal, overtake and choke, tenebrous,
sly in brumous cloak…and conquer with its murky stroke?
Does it linger and embrace, its hovering hazy slinking shrouds
arisen from graves of earth in clouds to blur, obscure,
entwine and coil in its seductive writhing smoke?
Or does it flee instead, heart torn and rent
by trees, peaks, light from heaven sent
to pierce and tear death’s veils away
and shatter dark with argent day
that slashes, straightening all that’s bent?
In mist I wait…in mist, I wait to see…
and coming or going, I am becoming me
Good Morning Constance Dear…gosh what a difficult night it was for me!
The deconstruction of my self in order to conform to who I must be in order to earn money is a very rough thing.
It tears me apart!
One of my helps that keeps me centered and knowing myself is the devotional writings of Jill Carattini…I share this morning’s here for you.
Love and Grace, Charissa, who is suffering
“Uncanny” was one of the vocabulary words on my sixth grade vocabulary list, which was to be found within the book we were reading as a class. I remember thinking Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time was exactly that—uncanny, peculiar, and uncomfortably strange. Yet I also remember that it stayed with me—the story of a quirky girl named Meg, her overly-intelligent little brother, and their time-transcending journey to save their physicist father with the help of three mysterious beings. Madeleine L’Engle, the writer whose books invite readers to see time itself differently, passed away not too long ago. But her stories will continue to perplex sixth graders, and stay with us long after we have set them aside.
L’Engle is the writer who first showed me the incredible difference between two words in Greek, which we unfortunately translate identically. To the English reader, chronos and kairosboth appear to us as “time.” But in Greek, these words are vastly different. Chronos is the time on your wristwatch, time on the move, passing from present to future and so becoming past. Kairos, on the other hand, is qualitative rather than quantitative. It is time as a moment, a significant occasion, an immeasurable quality. The New Testament writers use the word kairos to communicate God’s time, it is real time—it is the eternal now.
So it might be said for the Christian that when Jesus stepped into time to proclaim the kingdom of God among us, he came to show us in chronos the reality of kairos. “Jesus took John and James and Peter up the mountain in ordinary, daily chronos,” writes L’Engle. “Yet during the glory of the Transfiguration they were dwelling in kairos.”(1) With this story in mind, L’Engle describes kairos as that time which breaks through chronos with a shock of joy, time where we are completely unselfconscious and yet paradoxically far more real than we can ever be when we are continually checking our watches.
Whatever your view of religion, it is likely an experience you can recount; a moment so sweet or magnified it seems to stop time. But L’Engle presses the Christian to see it as something to be expected. “Are we willing and able to be surprised?” L’Engle asks. “If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”(2) If we have the courage to see it, the kingdom of God is close at hand,kairos breaking through like Christ into the world.
I imagine Jacob, too, discovered the difference between chronos and kairos when he set aside the past which was about to catch up with him, along with his paralyzing fear of the future, and found himself living in “none other than the house of God.” The prophets and poets describe similar moments of waking to the present and finding the eternal dimensions of time. The shepherds in Bethlehem were going about their ordinary work when the glory of the Lord captured the moment. “Do not be afraid,” the angel announced. “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you” (Luke 2:13-14). At this invasion of kairos into the routine of chronos, the shepherds chose to respond with action: “Let’s go to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened, which the Lord has told us about” (2:15).
Uncanny encounters with time are a part of the human experience. The Christian is given a language to explain these encounters. We live somewhere between the already and the not yet, caught by the eternal now and the one who dwells within it. The implications are both temporal and unending. Will we have the courage to look for glory in the ordinary? To release control of our calendars and watches and note the eternal in our midst? The apostle joins every prophet and poet who proclaimed the coming of the Messiah in history and the return of the king to come, “Behold, now is the time (kairos) of God’s favor, now is the day of salvation” (2 Corinthians 6:2).
Like Christ, glimpses of the eternal come quietly and unexpectedly; they come and upset our very notion of time and all we discover within it. Why should we be so unreconciled to time if the temporal were our only concern? Or could it be that the eternal Word stepped into flesh, into our bounded realm of time, and literally embodied the reality that time is meaningful because of the eternal one in our midst.
The Christian insists that kairos is breaking into chronos and transforming it. With Christ it proclaims, “The kingdom of God is close at hand”—and the temporal world invited to break in along with it. In ordinary moments that hint at such a radical invasion, might we have the courage to be surprised by one who comes so near.
Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.
(1) Madeleine L’Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art (New York: Bantam, 1982), 93.
(2) Ibid., 99.
(NOTE: If you wish, you can click here and be taken to a page where I emboldened certain words to try to convey the rhythm and meter of this poem, which is literally essential to it. But: if you wish to just wade in, first time thru and let the rhythms and meters rise and fall, fade and disappear and then come back, well that is ideal because that is literally written into the work as its own “poem of rhythm”. In either case, I hope you are able to read thru it…the things in this poem literally happened to me, with me).
Okay.
I get it. I do…in spite of what you might think, maybe
several of you, maybe dozens of you, maybe
hundreds, or thousands or millions of you
have endured deserts and mirage oasises
vanished in life when it comes to the subject of God.
I hear your stories, the bitter rants of some, the tired futility
of many others, I have taken venom, been covered in acid,
as I lead face first and I listen to tales of one
thing held in desolate common.
“God’s not here”.
“God wasn’t there”.
“God isn’t real”.
“God doesn’t care”.
I bleed when you cry in anguish, and weep as I
hear your recitals, and then in dark rage, and then
finally in grief, that pools on the dark other
side of the desert, in that null empty kingdom of
Ozymandias the great ruler of Vanity.
You might think I weep sanctimonious, sorrowful
supplicant of righteous standing, who’s crying for
those destitute and benighted, the distant, the stranger and
other, from my tower of ignorant pie in the sky…
You’d be wrong.
I weep in guilt.
Yeah…guilt.
For my tale of dark woe is so anti-tragic,
a Mysterium Tremendum, of a wretch so
shattered and shipwrecked in this desert island
…my body…
My story is different, and I feel so guilty,
confused as to why even in existential
despair I am still on the outside of
the common narrative swirling around me?
Contrary to you, in your longing and noble long
struggle to live, and to surmount desertion and
lost lonely silence by God in Their Heaven above…
I have always been
Haunted by a Lovely God.
When I was little and in my first dawning awareness,
and ageless, I recall that I always heard This Voice,
and at first I thought it outside me, I thought the wind had a
voice, or perhaps it was Trees, but it
never was dirt under my feet, no,
dirt is a tongue-tied dull mute.
As I grew I realized that the voice was inside me…in my heart, and I came to
treasure its company and the glad beauty of thoughts, and of musings. Then
I told my parents what it had told me, and,
flabbergasted, they asked where did I hear that?
And I told them “God. God told me”
(for that is Who the voice told me They were
and …Jesus like a Shepherd led me).
They laughed! LAUGHED! And while they were
not mocking, they merely thought
I was mistaken, had fantasized wonders.
So I cried then, and thought that
maybe my parents were right.
And then came the break, the thirsty sword stroke
that cut me to ribbons, my soft girly heart left in shreds…
then the slavery started with harsh words resounding, those
prison door words…and God was still there, holding
me in my tears, wrapped
around my hurt heart…and I longed for death, wanted to
jump in the river from that tall steel bridge I crossed
over each day but God asked me “please”, and…
well…
who can say no to God when They ask “Please?”
Then They would give me a joy for that day…and They
gave me a dog! Oh! How she and I bonded!
But you have already heard some of the tales of Millie…”Good Old Dog!” No…
this is the story of me being Haunted…
Haunted By a Lovely God.
One time, I was alone outside our house
(the one in the Pear Orchards down
near the cold creek where my Millie and me chased those
skimmer bugs and slippery pollywogs all live-long day…)
and it was warm in the soft early evening and dusky and glowing ethereal gloaming,
the good dusk…and wind softly rustling thru fruit trees so
heavy with life and the sounds of the living earth echoed around me…
…and then all was silent…
Suddenly, and it caught all my attention immediately! Slowly I
walked to the pear trees and stood, just to listen…and I heard it…something!
The call of a Mourning Dove
(or is it Morning Dove? I can’t distinguish the
One from the other, it seems to shift
back and forth always and ever).
It cooed and it called, and it seemed to me as if it spoke to me,
saying…”Come out to Me, Baby… Come out to Me. Come home to Me.”
(Lady Grace, She calls me Baby now, here today)
I was so skert! I thought it was a ghost! And this ghost it was longing for
my tender spirit and if I went out there, it would get inside me and
I would belong to it, always and be its flesh, its living body for
it to inhabit, its dwelling place then and forever.
I wasn’t far from the truth… I look back, I think it was Her, Lady Grace,
Dove come down, Her Voice was calling me, claiming me even then as Her own…
I wonder what would have happened, my life had I heeded Her,
gone to Her, run to Her heedlessly on that first day?
It’s not coincidence that our trees now, all around our house are filled with
Morning Doves (Mourning Doves too), calling, cooing…and pestering people in
our neighborhood, but so comforting to me as totems and emblems,
reminders of Mama’s first call to my hurt lonely soul and my soft tender heart.
Then: it was Veteran’s Day, fall, 1969.
We went to town several miles from home for the parade…I insisted that
Millie come with us, and after the music and marching had ended, we
went to the movies: “The Love Bug”. But Millie was left in our Volkswagen van.
(the one that was faded red
with canvas roll back top
and that relentless bamboo pole that
Dad used to poke us and hit us with
when we were clear in the
back and too rowdy and rude.)
and when we came back to the van…
she was gone.
I cannot tell you what that was like. I nearly fainted. I ran in the
street screaming her name, as cars screeched stop and Dad chased
me hollering “Get Back Here!”
We drove the streets hours and hours, me, head out the window, her name become
my tongue protruding and flapping and desperate in the cold wind.
I screamed that name loud, again and again until I was hoarse, and I kept
screaming, my grief-expiation for killing my dog with my stubborn insistence that she come along.
I tried to bargain with Them…in the sibilant cold and the darkness, I lifted my face:
“I will scream her name until I pass out and can never talk ever again, and then
You will receive my burnt offerings of me and give me what I earned with
desperate grief, what I bought with my service…my heart, Millie come back safe home.”
They remained silent, aloof (and I wonder if this is where They were in your tale of sorrow…).
Finally Dad said “she’s gone”…so we had to go home, in that cold rainy dark night of loss
on that day that we remember and honor the valor of
those who faced their fears and endured for me.
I threw up. I do that when I get distraught…I always have done…I cried, and
cried and I cried, and when I had no tears I groaned and keened, inconsolably moaning…
crying til dust poured from my eyes in place of the tears long drained empty by
grief so stark it was a terror strong, threatening to crush me forever.
My folks were hurting for me, so they used what they always had carved me with,
thought was the best for me, raw in my towering emotions and gaugeless deep passions…
words, stern and cruel, words so full of dark violence, and those words’ incarnated beast,
gawd…the spanking…well…yeah, the Red Raving and Hungry Beast.
I was forced to eat my dinner, and I threw it up…on the table, on all the food
laid there for others to eat. Then I got spanked and sent straight up to bed…
where God was silent and no where to be found… but hey, Ima talker, right?
So I cried out to Them into the darkness thick…
(now get this, and understand that I’d been thru the
wringer of Sunday School, Hellfire Sermons,
Damnation Devotions, and I knew enough to be good or the
devil would get me. I once was told: “I will not spank you…
I’m just gonna let satan get you”…and I roamed behind my mom
hours, and wailed agonizing in fear and stark terror, and
begged her to spank me, deliver me from evil on the cross
of my butt, and her hard paddle the hungry
propitiation for my sins and my wrongs…and
I knew that so many times I had done things,
hell-things like say “shit” or steal cookies, or
sneak out the window to sleep with my Millie and
her wriggly puppies though I was forbidden to,
or watch cartoons on a Saturday morning so
early and low before anyone woke up and caught me at it…and I’d
never been sent to hell…God had not bothered to notice or
even to thunder at me, or make trouble over me, and I
knew lots of people thought God was a fairy tale, which, frankly,
mystified me cus They talked to me so much when I was so little.)
That nite…I cried in a jagged blood whisper, my voice bleeding raw, and the
words, still they linger there, seared deep in me to this very day, now, here with you.
(and now, in this moment… I feel so damn guilty!
Why me??? Why did They talk to me of all people?)
I cried out “God…if You’re really there, real…bring my doggie home…PLEASE!” Then…
somewhere, somehow, I moved past bargains, and buy-offs and bribes…I had cried my way
thru the stark castle of filthy rags and entered into the place of no exit, the
inner sanctorums of grace, where there’s nothing to buy there with money, and
there is no bargaining, no supplicating, no pleas, there is just the
beginnings of Mercy Free…
and crying out the word please in that dark night, eyes
gummed shut with sorrow and tacky tears I at last faded off into sleep
dreamless as I grieved and wished I was dead, like I did every night, and at
last I knew nothing, released and insensate and absent within the lost
shoals of sleep’s gift of respite from my agony, sorrow and grief.
Until I woke, instant and on point, into an electrical dark of night
black glowing bright-black that cast light and filled the still air with a
presence, thick, substantive knowing, and threatening to
rend plain reality like the quick ripping of shrouds in the
hands of the dread faced and tall grim deliverers….
…and I heard scritching, and
(oh oh oh)
her whine (that lil ki-yiy-yiy she always used to call me heart to heart)
and I jumped from the top bunk with a thunderous thud loud enough to wake
even the dead and I got up and ran thru our house in that miracle moment:
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!”
“GOD BROUGHT BACK MY DOG!!”
Babbling over and over again like a babe, Bartimaeus had nothing on me!
Shattering slumbering sundering darkness and giving voice
to that One Thing that I am:
Haunted by a Lovely God
Fumbling feverishly I rolled the gravestone away in my heart and threw
open the back door where she called me eagerly whining in joyous returning at sunrise…
she’d jumped a 6 foot fence out of obedience so she could come in thru the
Eye of the Needle: the back yard garage door. She limped and jumped on me
and I went down to the ground, I was crying and kissing her and she was
kissing me too and I ran my hands over her, scarcely believing that she was real,
she was returned, she was home and alive, and my heart was restored unto me.
Then she rolled over, so I could scritch her tummy like she loved
and when I ran my hands over her precious side, my fingers slipped inside
her skin and I drew them back from her side which was pierced and torn open…
(I swear!
I know, the metaphor seems so damn cheesy, right? It really
happened this way! That’s the kind of thing I feel so
guilty for… it’s like They shouted it from the Bright Heavens that
I was not ever escaping Their Undying Love never ceasing and
new every morning. I’m telling you that I have always been
Haunted by a Lovely God).
She had torn open her side, and I’d thrust my hand in just like Thomas and drawn it back,
bloody and warm and changed and I collapsed,
(cus I can’t handle blood, even though it has
handled me, covered me, branded me,
marked and commanded me
forever Under the Mercy)
I murmured brokenly “God hear my prayers, God heard my prayers, God hear my prayers,
God heard my prayers”.
Later, my parents made sure I knew that this was highly unusual, God has more
pressing concerns than my dear dog, or listening to me scream and demand…
yeah, there are all kinds of other prayers over the years, that went up and bounced off…
you know the kind…yeah, those
…and life went on…went on…until
Puberty hit and then hell came home hard to stay…in hair and voice and a
horror-beard (and oh god oh god, oh god down there, oh god please no).
And life required again its cruel ransom, and I wanted, longed to lay me on the gears and cogs
that turned in schools and the church groups that seemed to me incomprehensible
strangers, in their innate knowing of how to move and how to laugh and to be… again
I longed, desired to do away with me…this gender-joke…absurd and ugly mistake, just an
ironic blight on “There” and “Here” because I was neither…here or there, just a null thing
…and then…
…I had another time, deep in the darkness of night and numb tears and dumb talking to Them…
…Them…
1973…14 and awkward and lonely and numb from the bashing I gave me to
un-know who I was and was not supposed to be, allowed to be, allowed…
On that nite, cold and alone in the darkness I told Them that I was not going to follow Them.
I was resigning from being a christian and that I was leaving Them once and for all.
“No offense”, I said. “It’s not you, it’s me”
(I’d yet to discover how this trope is used when we
want to abandon an unwanted suitor or
how its thrown out…to hurt and to wound a familiar dull
lover become coarse and rank and too shrill)
“You have done nothing wrong, You have not failed me, no it’s I who’ve failed You, and
what’s worse, I cannot BUT fail You…always, because I’m a
“horrible boy, I’m an
absent mute girl, I am
nothing, and I count for
nothing and I live on
nothing and I mean more
nothing, just more black
horrible, lost empty nothing.
“I am not going to church anymore,”
(for in those days I, like others around me, assumed that if
you went outside and climbed into the
chicken coop then such a fat happy bird you’d become.)
“…when school starts up again, I’m going to say yes instead of
no thanks when they offer me pot, and offer me drinking, and
offer me bodies and no clothes and company there in the darkness and then I’ll be
numb and feel wanted at least…
“I cannot do it, walk blameless and upright, for
I am a constant habitual wallower in my sin
all the time in my heart, in my mind as I fail ceaseless,
besides, I don’t even desire to be in on this world full of Leavenworth walls…
“I will not fake it! I refuse to be like them, sitting in their pews…
“with hallelujah on their lips and wanna screw ya in their hearts!
“I’ll stay alive, take my medicine straight and deserved and so bitter…and
maybe if I try I will even manage to conjure up a hearty yummy while
I drain the draughts of despair bone-dry…
“I know You’ll send me to hell…I deserve that, and even more so…I don’t
hold that against You, for You are and You always have been so Beautiful…
no, it is me, blight and curse, it’s just me, a disease in this world and pure poison.”
Fountains of sorrow again welled up, even as I wondered why they could
never be fountains of joy? And I cried and cried…softly so no one could hear me…
my brother sleeping…as always in these cut-off times…and
Millie was newly dead, gone to run free in the fields of her dreams, yet another cruel
tribute collected by Usurper death…that left me so empty,
so cold, so cut-off and bereft.
Until I heard it…the Voice!
Calling me gently (as always), so I held my breath, listened to be sure it was Them, then
I heard a soft quiet question asked so plaintively…
“What would it take?” (Ummm…whaaa? I didn’t get it)
“What would it take, Precious One? Child, what would it take for you to not check out,
not go away, but to come here and spend time with Us everyday?
Talk to Us, listen and just be for Us… just be Ours always,
just as your dog, Good Old Millie was your friend, and she belonged
only to you?”
This was a careful and startling question and it was quick,
coming at me curving sideways! So I had to really think!
Something absurd, something so damned unusual, that there was no way it
ever could happen, I mean, don’t get me wrong…I still wanted to be with Them,
wanted to share in Their sweet soft communion, cus I LOVED my Jesus, my Shepherd who
I always dreamed someday would leave the 99 and come to rescue me, I dreamed that
He was my Jester to make me laugh joyously, dreamed that He was my best Friend
…I just wasn’t…His best friend…and I couldn’t fake it. Nope.
So it was crucial I create conditions that even the Almighty God couldn’t meet
…you know…
God cannot make a rock so big that They cannot lift it, but They can do anything
so They can make this rock so big that even They cannot lift it…wait…
I was searching for that Rock that God couldn’t lift… right? So
I said to Them “If, when I wake this morning, and my dad says ‘Kids we are moving’…
if there’s a strange town so distant where nobody knows me, and no one has
seen me, and I can start over, start fresh and anew, then I’ll choose you forever and
give my heart freely…lock, stock, and barrel, completely to You… I’ll be Your Millie,
all of my days till I die and my sentence is over.”
Silence gave answer…then after a bit…I drifted away breathing
deeply again as my tears crooned soft lullabies
to my hot cheeks, they ran down in such ancient deep
canyons of sorrow…down my face, down my heart,
down my soul to end up glistening in sorrowful streamers.
When I got up the next morning, things didn’t sparkle or gleam, and I didn’t
remember the Voice, the Epiphany…I was just staring at breakfast my mom used to
“cook” me in those days…Shredded Wheat with skim milk…and feeling
…that gulf, that dark feeling. That feeling. Yeah… The relentless sharp
razor slash cutting inside my soul, forever aching and Constant.
I wasn’t list’ning, as Dad droned on talking of somethingorruther… until I heard
him say the word…“moving”…something about that word…
why did it stick out?
Then in a quicksilver windstorm of memory-shredded, each piece was
hitting me, sticking, unripping its way to become one
coherent experience, and I recalled my reply to Their inquiry…
so I turned quickly and asked my dear father what did he just say…and he
said it again! He confirmed it! Just as I’d laid forth, to a T!
Haunted by a Lovely God.
(I feel so guilty… why am I treated thus?
Why me? Why not the prayers of parents
whose children suffer and die in horrible pain for
nothing that they ever did?
Why not the prayers of wives for soldiers
Cain has already marked for death’s dark
gaping foul maw, prayers supplicating
deliverance, protection, but
they go unheeded and
Death eats again?)
And of course, we moved, and I did…commit myself to Them…
once all for always…yep, I was in…And I’ve hated it sometimes, and loved it at others.
I’ve grown and I’ve changed, seen Them change before my eyes as they were
opened and I could see other than my own idolatrous self and that
small god I fashioned, so stunted, blind, deaf and so mute in the
vanity of my self worship when my box, my image of Them I had
made was so gloriously broken!
I’ve sorrowed and railed… I’ve been outcast by mean so called
spiritual family, been stunned by the towering cruelty of those who should
know better, done blindly in the Most Wonderful Name of Them…
Lovely God to me, and so ugly and coarse, buffoonish in their mocking mouths.
I met my darling, and we had our babies…
she/they are amazing miracles…I watch the
lives of my college acquaintances shipwreck, their
marriages foundering on the black jagged rocks of their alluring
careers and blood money…and I watch the children of
hard working salts, such dear people around me, more worthy than I, better
people than I, quaff drugs like their hearts are on fire, and join themselves
numbly to anyone there in those earthquakes of loneliness,
wreckages strewn in their wake and their orphans tossed
careless like litter abandoned.
And I have prayed with these people, so passionate, supplications far more
suitable than my own bumbling tongue-tied petitions and tall ebenezers…
and seen them bounce off, with dust poofing, dry-cloudy in
dull drifting mockery…
…and I feel so guilty.
Such. Guilt.
Because They have haunted me… They’ve apprehended me… taken me…
They have not let me go, not let me drift… and I,
transgender woman held in such derision by
most of the offspring of the Blood of the Lamb…
The Holy Spirit has even shown me Her Name and Herself, Lady Grace,
and She’s drawn so near to me, to be ma Mère…my Mama, and teach me
my secret heart and my self, so young and emerging.
And yet still I ask myself why am I haunted?
I could go on, forever recounting the
stories of Their faithful presence and meddling hands…of
Yosemite Sacred, cathedrals where mountains became the
Triune God, and I fell asunder to claw at the dirt in despairing blood-guiltness and
crying for mercy… and wonder of wonders!
El Capitan: Papa…Half Dome, cut asunder became My Friend Jesus…
Yosemite Falls: my Lady Grace, flowing and washing forever until I am pure…
Bridal Veil Falls was me, shifting emotions and prevarications blown
lacey and wandring across rocky faces but always to Them…
rising up from the ground, clean and unsullied as
Waterdeep sang for me They have been nothing but
Good in my life!
Each time I hear someone’s tale of woe filled with despair or with cynical bitterness flowing,
or just fatigue and futility…I am worse than any teller, and merit less than the askers, more
toxic than anyone else whose had issue with God, or
issue with Their present absence, or make issue with Them because
“there is this construct God which has come
out of nowhere, seemingly and thus doesn’t exist
(unlike anything else which its knowing of testifies to its being)…”
I have not told you this tale to shame you… I who am shame incarnate for so long.
Nor to claim privilege or power, position… I do not have an iota of that.
…I have not told you to lobby, convince you… or
proselytize, or evangelize you. God No!
I have made my expiation to you, my confessors…
The sin I am guilty of? Of this I Charissa Grace stand blood guilty:
Being
Haunted by a Lovely God.
Night has Her reasons for pulling plush sloe shades around our borders.
Searing sun scorches, scours sharp gimlet hot relentless purging.
(He cannot but shine in piercing prying shafts into our corners.)
But Night, silent Singer of Mercies creamy and thick,
harbor of ships in shattered turmoil, nestles and hovers
and grants sanctuary to all who would pause and gather.
Take stock, in yourself. Weigh, scrutinize those rugged rocks
you took on as “ballast”, your hedge against the smothering dust of fear.
Cast off that one (or two) by means of which you inveigle you.
And rise, treasure sure, to float free, to drift amongst swimming stars,
ice-fire diamonds brilliant and glitt’ry in the tenebrous skies
with face open and pumping vital heart well emptied and smooth.
And Night, She shall lift you dark, hold you high and smoky
until you catch the sun’s arc long before weary earth wakes
and abundant you shine, displayed and cultivated
as the work of Night’s Soft Hands.
It all seems like a dream…like I woke up
into Real life and there you were, grinning,
that crooked lil smile and that small dimple
at your mouth’s corner, honey cupid bow.
It was as if we happy-laughed forever!
And cried for ever too, both all at once.
It was as if my torrid fever broke!
Things clear now to me, I’m in on the joke
regarding the us that we were…we are.
How I must have puzzled you, my dear!
Befuddled you and discouraged you too,
for you saw my real red and pulsing heart,
and underneath, the shade of deep dry rot.
From that mad carnival my wistfulness
and longing that you would be double blessed
sprang up to cover over my despair
and make a castle for you in the air
(I long for naught but glad good things for you!
Blessing and health, and most important Love.)
Capital L Love, vital and alive.
Thus my recoil from your beguiling ways,
from that slight space you harbor to survive
and aloofness you must have to thrive.
But passion, fire for you…remained and bloomed.
I give you those things, slight space, aloofness,
so crucial to your sense of who you are
and how you are…BUT…you… you must cast off
the boredom of the same old peccadilloes!
Soon you will find your true-north self again,
your way again, to walk the sacred spaces,
and haunts of ancient peace, familiar places,
to draw comfort from them, at rest within.
God placed such presences in this bright world
and lets them flourish, glad and glorious.
God’s threatened not by great manifestation
of beauty taken to be gods unknown…
God simply is not threatened. Pure and simple.
God’s given us Beauty, and this is Truth…
…God gives Truth, and this is our Beauty…
Alas! It’s we who fracture and dismember
with reason’s rule we drown out Beauty’s ember.
So…Walk those roads, the trails, the barren beauty
verdant with its own color and life…and way.
Hear the sea, she’s ever-always singing
her ever ancient, ever new swan song.
And let yourself come back home to yourself,
as torn, defiled places are knit together.
Cleanse all the places pain has hollowed out
with haunts of ancient peace…and grace throughout.
To treasure your words, modulate my own,
…“return to that self I have never been,
and yet I always was in breath and being”…
The trust to simply talk to you about
anything gone awry in innocence,
and you will hear my heart as clear as day,
and I will hear your heart as well…the warmth,
connecting, friends who’ve gone thru thick and thin.
So…we dive now into our sleep together,
and when I wake with terrors in the night
you’re there…and when I get up because sleep
avoids me like I haven’t washed for weeks,
You slumber on, and I pass time until
at last I sleepy get, and gently slink
back to our bed and you in graceful slumber
still know that I am there and slide your arm
under my head and pull me oh so close.
I fall asleep my cheek upon your chest,
hearing your breath unguarded, raw and new,
your heart, steady, flutt’ring on so different
than my erratic anxious dark contrast…
And you, temple of Love so tender-fine
comfort me…and I lose myself at last,
to be found…yours…and you forever mine.
‘Trans Bodies, Trans Selves’: A Modern Manual By And For Trans People : NPR.
My friend Bette Lu Krause alerted me to this…I offer it again in the spirit of further education.
I truly find that the more I get to know people and issues as unique people and general issues, the less likely I am to judge.
Give it a listen: it is good.
Charissa
G’Morning Constance! Another amazing mom tells her story of love and finding her girl inside a little boy’s skin.
I listen to these stories, and wonder what if…
This story is somewhat different, in that this Mom, Debi Jackson, experienced quite a bit of discrimination and trans-misogynist blame. She takes on the typical tropes that were thrown at her like stones in attempts to police her and her family…and her daughter.
She is a fabulous, poignant speaker. She is not afraid to show tears and passion…she is unashamed of her love of God, and knows biblical references to refute the hatred thrown her way by so-called christians.
Please…won’t you take a look? These stories are all similar, but each unique experience adds a special tile to the mosaic of the expression of God to us in humanity. I am excited to be a part of shining forth the parts that trans-gender people have to show for Them.
Love, Charissa
“My daughter is six years old. She transitioned, which means she changed her outward appearance from male to female and started living full time as her true gender, when she was four. Until that point she was quite a rough and tumble little boy with a buzz cut and a shark tooth necklace.”
And so begins the absolutely beautiful speech Debi Jackson gave earlier this year about her transgender daughter, AJ, at the Unity Temple on the Plaza in Kansas City. As Jackson continues, she outlines how her family came to realize that AJ is transgender, what happened the first day she went to school “in girl clothes” and the bigotry her family faced.
But the best part of the video may be when Jackson addresses the comments she’s heard about her daughter and sets the record straight about statements like you “wanted a girl so you turned your child into one” and “kids have no idea what they want or who they are — my kids wants to be a dog, should I let him?”
Spend six minutes and get to know Jackson and her family a little better. You’ll be happy you did.
(h/t A Note To My Kid)
Hi Constance…I found a cool article about yet another parent who has the vision, courage and love to raise her transgender daughter with love, acceptance, and support.
She made a statement in her article, and it so resonated with me, because I remember that fateful late March afternoon just last year (!!!)…after extensive reading about transgender people and lives…I was so lonely, and so separated from everyone and everything. Surrounded by people who loved me, but not me me…just who I posed as for their security and happiness, and yet I felt totally alone.
I was worthless. I had no meaning. They had actively and intentionally sought me, found me and time and again healed and sustained me…and I still just wanted to disappear.
And on that day, rain drizzling coldly outside, heaters ticking and popping, I read of the loneliness and alienation of my trans sisters and brothers…and I was soo struck by how their stories jibed with mine, how people whom I had never met wrote as if they were inside my head! My compassion welled up, and I wept for them, because I truly knew what they were suffering…and then the stories of the people who decided to transition instead of kill themselves, and such a longing consumed me…a longing to feel something normal, a longing to be “right”, a longing to know I belonged to someplace…
…belonged to myself…
and then I heard Mama say to me in my heart, that if I was totally honest with myself, I would see that I too was transgender, just like the ones I was reading of.
And that is where the statement that Julie Ross makes came out of my mouth…”No Lord…that happens to other people, but not me. I mean, I have always thought I was a girl trapped in this male body with no way out, but that doesn’t make me transgender! lol!
But She persisted, and besides…I knew, right then that she was right. All that had to be dealt with was the constructs of immorality and perversion that had been formed in my mind and heart due to the childhood experiences I went through.
All of that is going to be avoided for Julie’s lovely daughter! She will still have trials, and heartache like every human in this shattered world…but she will never feel the emptiness, the horror of nothingness where there ought to be life.
May Mama shine on each of our hearts with Her convicting love that upholds us, sustains us, and washes us everyday…and may we find the courage to go out of our way to ease the journey of someone else today.
Much love and rejoicing, Charissa
Eight months ago, my 9-year-old son tearfully shared with me that “his whole life, he had wanted to be a girl”. Pressed by the therapist (who, thank G-d, was in the room with us) to clarify whether he wants to be a girl or is a girl, George immediately replied that he is a girl. And so began a crazy-ass adventure that I never, in a million years, expected to find my child or, frankly, myself, on.
To be clear, my husband Rich and I always knew that George (who is now Jessie) was different from not only our older son, but from other kids — male and female alike. With sparkling eyes and a wildly observant and funny personality, he was known by everyone everywhere we went. Never one to shy away from a conversation or situation (particularly if it involved dolls, dresses, wigs or mermaid tails), he captured the attention of anyone he came into contact with. When behaviors that concerned us in preschool and kindergarten — including, but by no means limited to his self portraits (a frequent drawing assignment) consistently depicting a girl in a dress with long, flowing hair — continued with even greater vigor in first, second and third grades. We concluded that he was probably going to grow up to be gay, yet didn’t quite buy it ourselves. He was a boy who greatly appreciated a beautiful girl and what she was wearing. He never met a doll, wig, dress or mermaid tail that he didn’t feel a total compulsion to own — no matter how strongly he had to fight for it. And despite the fact that he was not even slightly effeminate, there were several occasions that he harassed and harangued me for hours on end requesting everything from hair extensions to wigs to dolls. It never added up. And then he asked for (and by “asked for” I mean “demanded”) a pierced ear.
Our initial reaction to the earring request was that “little boys don’t wear earrings”, but he was having none of it. As he obsessively pursued this request, it became increasingly clear that it was not a desire, but a need. Since growing out his traditional little boy haircut was going to take some serious time (we had agreed to allow him to grow his hair — anything to stop hearing about hair extensions or wigs), a single pierced ear seemed an easy enough allowance in hopes of placating him. Of significant note was, just prior (and I mean as the alcohol was being rubbed across his lobe) to the piercing, he implored the piercer to be sure to do it in the ear that doesn’t mean “gay”… clearly he was building up the courage to tell us something, we just didn’t know it yet.
It was not long after the newly-pierced ear that our confusion was put to rest and we were told of George’s truth. It took me about a minute and a half to absorb what he was saying and to give myself a virtual whack upside the head. It all started to make sense now, except for the part when I told myself that this happens to other families — not mine. Wrong.
We continued along with our “if-it-was-ever-normal-it-isn’t-now” lives for a few weeks, noticing a huge change in our child’s mood and temperament. Clearly, an enormous weight had been lifted. And then there came what we refer to as “the article”. It was a Sunday in December, which also happened to be George’s tenth birthday. On the front page of The Boston Globe there was an article about identical twin boys, one of whom had identified as transgender and was now living fully as a girl. I, not surprisingly, was raptly reading the story when George came up behind me, noticed the photo and asked who they were. Upon telling him he responded, with his mouth agape, “You mean I’m not the only one?” It was at that moment that Jessie was born, moved in and has since made herself comfortable in my house.
The following day, I dropped George off at school and told him to be cool; we would come up with a plan. He was cool. Until 11 a.m. (not bad considering the school day starts at 8 a.m.), when he simply could not keep the truth to himself and, without fanfare or drama, told one of his teachers about his “secret”. The cat, ladies and gentlemen, was out of the bag. The next day, as it happened, was pajama day and, after a hasty, late night trip to Target, I successfully outfitted my “son” in head-to-toe pink, purple and green polka dotted pajamas in which he ran (not walked) into school with zero hesitation and without so much as a glance over his shoulder for support. Jessie had been waiting her whole life for this day. I almost wonder if that was why she felt the need to share when she did… just to ensure the perfect little girl pajama ensemble for what will likely (hopefully) be her last school sanctioned pajama day ever.
Since those first crazy days, we have had her second ear pierced and have had countless meetings, discussions, questions, plans and concerns hurled in our direction. At times we have laid low: mostly at the beginning, when we were nearly immobilized by the mere thought of what it meant to have a transgender child. Other times we have been “out there”: when, for example, we announced on Facebook (with her encouragement) “George becoming Jessie”, complete with a photo of her in her inaugural dress. This was a means of survival for us and done mainly so that we weren’t forced to explain the situation to everyone, everywhere, every time we left the house. But no matter how people learned of Jessie having identified as transgender, the response has been consistent: total acceptance with a healthy and appropriate dose of trepidation — both for us and, frankly, themselves.
Our family has been lucky. We know that we are just getting started, but are grateful that Jessie’s social transition, thus far, has been as seamless as we ever could have hoped for. She has that sparkle in her eye and a new confidence which is the envy of many an adult. We take each day as it comes and have as little an idea as to where this will land as we did eight months ago… but at least now her self-portraits make more sense.
PS: At this point, it is noteworthy to tell you that it felt strange to refer to my child as George or to call her a “he”. “New normal” surprises me every day…
My children,
we shall not turn back!
Until the DAY.
Even we in this night
Shall know and see
Who we are and
Where we go
Suzanne Grossman
via Why I Chose Grace as a Gay Christian.
I love this young woman’s faith, courage, and orientation to grace!
Hang in there Suzanne…there are fellow believers who realize that Faith thru Grace in Love is the winning recipe for connection with Them!
Please…read the article, and then think if you had those obstacles in your faith journey, in addition to the common difficulties we face.
Grace and Peace…
Charissa
I have just been overcome by the sweetness of this moment, this day!
Outburst of devotion concluded (for now, lol)…
We now return to our regular programming!
❤
Charissa
Listen
I who have dwelt for a season
at the root of a scream,
I who have read my heart like one
with no hands reading a book
whose pages turn with the wind…
I say Listen, hear me.
When you play at “strife-in-eyes”
and you stare to see which will go
under first–PLEASE PLEASE
be the first to smile.
Do not harden yourself…yourself…
Though it mean surrendering all
Turning yourself out
To Be Known at the world’s mercy
You may lose your name, you may not know
your shape, even the words
you breathe, spoken out so clearly
will loosen and disperse
possibly forever
all given over to the wind crying upon distant seas.
Moment of terror, should the
Moonlight name you a profile
Among Fallen Flowers
Yet you may survive, for many have done so.
You need only to close your eyes…
(Beautiful, Feminine Gesture)
And do not be afraid of the strange woman you find
Lying in the Chamber of your throat
So it will be: Dark. A Long Vigil.
far among splendours of despair…but
everything will be true, pure,
your love most of all.
But now, please, open your eyes.
Have we not said, down with all tyrants–
even our own?
ESPECIALLY OUR OWN!
OPEN YOUR EYES!
They will glitter with knowledge of the other side
of the moon–their light of such
a quiet intensity that smiles and frowns
will fall away like shadows of
wild birds flying over–
Yet a degree of affection remaining, like
when you find an old Bible in an
old cupboard in an
old empty house–so it is.
Freedom and Beauty. Do not be afraid.
Assume the freedom of those
born in captivity
who find the purity of being.
Do not be over-modest.
Wear the delicate beauty of those crippled
at birth who earn the grace
of their maiming.
You must look and you must seek
in the dreamless dark.
But I await you there…
The Dark Light Of My Eyes Burning With Patience
And then, my eyes will answer…
but they will not command a summons.
This poem is by another friend from my spoken word group…I bought his book, and was reading along until I hit this poem like Thelma and Louise hit that cliff…over the edge I went and into the gulf of wonder regarding how someone could write a poem that was about me, but yet had not met me when the poem was written!
I read it over and over…and over again…and cried…yeah, huge surprise! Charissa is crying again! LOL
Seriously, I was soo amazed. So I wrote to Josh to tell him about how the poem was mine! 🙂 In the process of that, though, I recognized a poem in the email that I had composed, so I pried Prose’s fingers off Poetry’s slender ivory throat, and “Deaf Earth’s Denial“ was the result.
I give you now the genesis poem for that one…
Grace dreams in the shapes of clouds
Of the spaces between
Here and highways
Willing to wilt in the sun
On the thirsty river roots of cypress
Whose bows, living between her
And her dreams,
Decide to shade her anyway.
Grace dreams in the movement of dust
Climbing the sun that sneaks through curtain-covered windows
Swirling in ghosts
In dreams she twirls with them.
The mattress beneath her smells of second hand
Like salt-water, grass and motor oil.
Some dust settles over her heart
When it sees she has no blankets.
Grace allows form to the formless.
She calls out the names of shapes
Yet to be invented.
She remembers: Between every space
Is the note that binds spaces,
And behind every cloud is the shadow she casts on the sun
Carried up on sun dust song wings
When she sings.
When she sings.
When you look from the tops and the corners
of your glance at the walkers thru deserts
of this world full of pain-gilded glories…
Use Soft Eyes.
See, they may be on journeys much longer
than the scope of your heart can consider
bearing burdens of mute tongue-tied stories…
Use Soft Eyes.
Under placid and neutral expressions
that deflect any prying mean fingers
lives eternal unending awareness…
Use Soft Eyes.
Let your countenance radiate kindness
like Niagara gushing relentless
with a laughing voice full of compassion…
Use Soft Eyes.
Travelers talk, and the story
will spread of the human oasis
who generously sees, so determined, to
Use Soft Eyes.
Charissa's Grace Notes 
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