Two Spirits

About five years ago I was sitting on the balcony outside my little garage apartment. I lived with my Leather family, and my little suite above the garage was my solitude, my sanctuary. I wasn’t sober then, I hadn’t found the strength yet. Having the drinks that always sat at my side, I was perched in a light rain, watching the clouds pass overhead, sipping to try to get back to drowsy and sleep. Dreams still swirled in my mind, as I’d just awoken from them and there I was, half-in, half-out, still existing in the in-between of the waking world and the one I’d just left behind.

In the dreams I was a man, long of limb, dark skin reflecting moonlight back at me, my black hair long to the middle of my back, I could still feel it stroking my waist as I walked in the night. In my hand were a feather and a stone, in the other was the branch from an oak. The elements threw off their energies, and they felt so different yet all the same. As I walked through the tall grasses I knew deep inside that this home wasn’t just a random landscape. It was the Americas before they were colonized. And I was native to this land, just as much belonging to her as I belonged to myself. More so even.

My legs strode, bare feet kissing the ground beneath them as I walked toe to heel, quietly blessing the earth with each step, quietly feeling her welcome me with every movement. And how the energies shifted…the stone and feather and branch were all so unalike yet they felt similar, in ways hard to express. I knew that even though in the world they presented so differently they were of the same atoms, same make, same origins. And my body felt the same. In walking I could feel the pure depth of what became Me, and it was small and diaphanous and all-encompassing and so very alone at the same time.

That feeling didn’t change as I walked. But my skin did. I lit up in different colors, yellows and blacks and reds and whites, but still felt the same. My hair grew longer, shorter, my arms and legs changing as well, I grew breasts, I felt my genitals shift, I was woman, I was man, I was everything in-between, until there was no longer a divide between any color of my skin. There was no longer a shifting of gender, I just was Me. I was, I belonged to the earth, I belonged to the birds that slept, the insects underground, the wind, the trees, I belonged no one and the stars above, I belonged to Me.

As I sat awake in the whispering rain I could still feel the light that was every color and none at the same time, the one that burst from my chest as I shifted, it alone stayed true.

Growing up I never had words for being more “boyish” than any other girl I knew. Jehovah’s Witnesses only believe in two genders, and I was a girl, that’s it. But when around other girls I felt “other”, not like them. I was a bull in a china closet, completely out of place and just as destructive. I was clumsy (still am) and awkward (never went away), and felt like an alien in human skin. There were no words for any of these things in the world I knew, and so I read and read like mad to try to understand myself and the world around me. I went through the motions of expectations piled upon me by my gender role, my place in my family, the place chosen for me by the congregation that was my entire world. And never did I feel that I truly fit in, be it with the JW kids I grew up with, or those “worldly” ones at public school.

It has stuck with me well into adulthood, the feeling of “other”. What can we do when we only have a few choices to choose from in which to identify ourselves and nothing truly fits? For years and years I struggled with it.

An iconic memory as a young teen was seeing Orlando starring Tilda Swinton for the first time. I remember I was at my Aunt’s house in the Austin area, and there stood this ethereal being who shifted roles and expectations and genders through centuries of living. Orlando took to each one as if the changes didn’t matter, only they as a person mattered, and whatever they chose for their life in each role was right, because they were purely Them. Their Me didn’t change, even though to the people around them everything seemed to.

And then I realized that I don’t have to fit, I don’t have to at all. That I have remained constant and myself this whole time, even as I tried on different suits and expectations and roles. They’ve all shifted and changed, as my skin and hair and gender did within my dream. As in the dream they just don’t matter, only that bright shaft of light that is Me matters.

Sitting in the rain that night, as I saw stars peek through the moving clouds, I realized that in past lives I must have been two-spirited. That it felt so right and pure to me, since childhood, and the feeling stuck with me, so I must have been before. I cried happy tears as my soul sang This Is Right, this is Me. I felt a true sadness that it didn’t apply to me now because I am very much a woman with curves and movements so fluid I could never pass as a man. I felt so lucky that my soul had experienced this before, and thought I didn’t deserve to feel it now because I very obviously am very obviously female, but how good it felt to know before in a life I was so very free.

But no longer can I rationalize that in this life I don’t “deserve” it. It makes no sense to deny something that feels more and more real and Me as days pass by. In the two and a half years of being alone and without a partner to have to wrap my mind around I’m learning to listen to my inner voice more deeply. To believe that I deserve what I love and know about myself, and that the body I inhabit now is just as much truly Me as I have been before as star dust. I’ve been inching my way solidly here for years now, and how dare I assume I don’t deserve it. It was as if I was dangling a treasure just out of my reach and satisfied to leave it there because I didn’t earn it through more struggle and tears.

This morning when I went for my usual dawn stroll I felt it echo, that dream. I was Me and everything shifted around the light at my core as I watched the sun peek out and climb. I saw the moon changed from full to waning glory the past few mornings, and smiled knowing she doesn’t change, only our perceptions of her do. Again and again there are signs, feathers lying in my path that I take and tuck in my hair for as long as they’ll stay with me…stones who call my attention from the trail…oaks that sigh my name as the wind tangles with them. This morning I walked in that dream again, and knew even if I didn’t think I deserved it I know who I am and what I have always been and always shall be. I am two-spirited. I am Me.

Only My Eyes

The edge of you

Brushed my skin so lightly

It bowled me over

Hair spinning a torrent a tumbleweed

Wild as the gusts that roll it

And just as prickly

You gave me goosebumps

I wasn’t ready for

And whirling to catch my breath

Dry eyes dusty white

I stood in place rooted,

Cuts still weeping I couldn’t reach for you

My arms still too full of my grief

To hold and touch and need

Still learning to hold myself, it’s rending me

In strips of someone I used to resemble

And I’m not sure who that is anymore

Knees knocking I’m still

As limbs growing underground

Holding me in place

As you blow by and by and by again

And only my eyes can follow.

When I Am Among the Trees

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”

-Mary Oliver

Transactional Relationships

There was something I read recently that had the opinion that men look at relationships differently than women. That men look at them as transactional, as that’s how society as a whole has trained them. That their partners exist more as meant to serve and give their bodies and constantly give of their time and energy in exchange for a home and protection. That any person could fill that role, in the end. If a woman got fed up and left then the man would simply replace her with someone else to continue that transaction.

I’m not saying it’s true of all men of course, I’ve met a handful that aren’t that way, that buck the set tropes society has instilled in them. But the thought has never left me.

In my own experience it was quite quick that I was replaced in my eleven year marriage. And this relationship was nothing if it wasn’t transactional. He provided the home, and if I wanted it clean then I was the one to clean it. We both worked full time in the beginning, but I soon was swamped with traveling to and from my workplace (as he did), then when I got home I was expected to prepare and cook a meal, as he wouldn’t. I wanted a clean home, and he didn’t care, so I was the one to (after a full day of work) continue to work when I got home. I’d rise before he did, pick up his clothes he tossed ON THE FLOOR AT THE FOOT OF THE HAMPER (seriously, how hard was it to get it in there?! The thing didn’t even have a lid), clean up his hair shavings off the sink, put away the dishes left out the night before because goodness forbid I clean up after working then coming home to work immediately after. Come home, clean, prep, cook, clean, go to bed, wash rinse, repeat. He of course would come home from the day, sit on the couch, and leave water rings on the furniture. That was the summation of his contribution to the housekeeping. So as it was already transactional I made it further so. It got to a point where I refused to work full time just to come home and work full time while he sat on the couch. He would work full time and I’d be his full time maid/wife/mother, and work part time to help with finances. Only one of those roles was one I’d signed up for in the beginning.

Honestly I don’t even blame him for it anymore. I blame society and I blame the religion I was raised in since birth. Even though I was brought up by a mother who read Women Who Run With Wolves and was a former flower child, who took me on women’s only camping trips, and told me empowering women-can-be-independent-and-run-their-own-lives things, my religion taught very much the opposite. And I bought into it. I was raised to believe it. I was brainwashed. There were periods I just wanted to run off to the woods and be my own person, yes, but just as much I did fantasize about white picket fences and 2.5 children and a husband and all the other things we women are told to want as children. And he had the conditioning as well on his end, how could one escape it? Not in the eighties, when we were growing up. We were children when we married, barely nineteen, playing the games of grown-ups without even forming ourselves whole as humans. We hadn’t had the college experience, as a Jehovah’s Witness born and bred I knew that was not an option. I did have a few courses at a small university in middle Tennessee but I didn’t take it seriously really, I was too indoctrinated into believing that we didn’t need an education because this “system of things” wasn’t going to last long anyway. Why waste our time?

So there we were, forming our adult selves while surviving on minimum wage jobs, and being pressured on all sides to be what was expected of us. Me the dutiful wife, keeping house, and he the breadwinner, keeping me safe. I’d exchange my body, my time, my will and my dreams, and he’d exchange his work outside the home. It was transactional from the start and I made it even more so, purposefully, even though I didn’t realize it at the time.

And when our marriage laid broken on the floor between us I went my way, still forcing transactional relationships out of those I fancied, and he replaced me quickly with my best friend. They married less than a year after our divorce was final. I sought out the same things in partners, thinking This Is The Way Things Are, and didn’t question it for over a decade. Men traded us security, a home, their work and time, and women gave of their bodies, their labor, their devotion, their homemaking.

This Is The Way Things Are

Until they simply aren’t.

It took me another decade to get to where I didn’t feel like I had to seek out a relationship. Where I didn’t care if I shared every beautiful wild thing I found with someone I loved. Although I do still share through my stories and photographs, it doesn’t feel empty to enjoy them on my own. I find it never really did, I just felt the pressure from society to pair up, that the enjoyable moments were cheaper if I didn’t have someone else there to experience them with me.

Now I shrink at the thought of entering into transactions again with anyone. After my Last Love I’m done with feeling incomplete or alone with my adventures. I don’t want to transact with anyone, preferring instead to focus on providing for myself in every way possible. It’s been a long time realizing that I came out of childhood codependent (abusive childhoods often result in this), lost, and completely unaware of who I truly am. Relationships always ended up transactional by default, and some very toxic. Every one of us is capable of toxicity in the right environments, and I very much am. Becoming aware of this has been one of the most important realizations of my adult life. So instead of looking to become “whole” by finding my “missing piece” I’m making myself sit in my solitude, which has proven invaluable for the development into a complete human.

I’m not there yet, not sure if I ever shall truly be, but I’m trying.

It’s still difficult to remember that relational connections, truly rewarding bonds with people are possible. That they can be rooted, reciprocal, and rewarding to everyone involved. To me, relationships have forever been transactional, self-serving, temporary, and exhausting to my mind, body and spirit. Perhaps that’s part of why I tend to keep away from anything resembling a romantic relationship these days, or at least that’s what I suspect. Romantic love has always been conditional, a trade of time and services, you use me so I’ll use you. Give me the equal to what I hand you. And it never should have been. Finding my way out of that sort of thinking will take time, and so I remain solitary. I like it here. I truly do. I don’t miss that empty sort of love that left me knowing something just wasn’t settling right. And realizing a lot of that was my own doing is humbling.

For Pack

Last weekend was the second time our woodshop has vended at a big event, and absolutely exactly what was needed. Not for the money made, which was less than I anticipated, but for being surrounded by people I call home. Being a solo person by choice makes every human interaction quite interesting, and with an attendance of over five hundred people I was swamped and overwhelmed at times. I couldn’t take shelter in the arms of a lover, nor would I have wanted to. And yet this standing alone I’ve been doing isn’t truly standing alone after all. Being surrounded by those I call family, those I call pack, makes all the difference in the world. This weekend was truly a family reunion of sorts, as SPLF always is.

It’s interesting to have familial or familiar interactions with people and not have to worry about what they may expect from me later, or what they expect of me in the moment. Before I chose to remain solo for a few years I was generally always taking the expectations of society for granted, and just doing what I assumed was the norm. Just as when growing up, I knew that people got older, partnered up, had kids, grew older, and followed the “normal” relationship escalator. I didn’t know there could be any different way of living. And those I did know of who were alone or solo weren’t in that position by choice. All they wanted was to find someone to partner up with. It was expected. Finding their other half was hoped for and wished, and being alone was one of the worst states to be in. At least to my cis-normative very religious background and the people around me who supported that.

Even in the community I’m a part of now, finding a partner (or more than one) seems to be quite the focus for most of the people. Which is completely understandable, and I respect that. Humans are humans, no matter where or when they are. But one thing that struck me this weekend was that I can exist with those I consider family/pack without having other expectations from them. I’m me, and all I need to be, and no one is pawing at me with their energies for more. It’s unbelievably refreshing. Instead of using alcohol like I used to within the community to make my social anxieties ease, I’m just fully me, with lots of walls and boundaries, I’m Stone and immovable, and yet I’m loved and accepted exactly as I am.

It’s emotional to realize. I sit here choking on my decaf tea with tears steaming on my flaming cheeks, seeing through blurry eyes. Quite revelatory.

My entire adult life I’ve felt all of my interactions had to be somewhat transactional. I give, they take. I bend, I break, I serve, my body and what I could do with it was all that they cared about. Be it sexually, or from providing an income, or cooking dinner, waxing poetic, telling stories, running errands, doing chores, giving them my body and mind in exchange for the security of being accepted and loved and wanted. There was always something I had to give in exchange for something I needed from them.

But this existing for the sake of just being me, this realizing that I don’t want to give more than that and don’t have to, and still I’m loved and included…it’s something I’m still trying to wrap my mind around. For the first time in my life _I_ set the boundaries and hold them and don’t have to down drinks to allow someone to push past those walls. If I don’t want to open my doors and arms and legs I don’t have to. If I want to simply exist I can.

And I always could have…I just didn’t know it yet.

Speaking up for myself, sharing my opinion for the sake of it being valuable, those are the harder parts. Still getting used to those. Thing is though, I know deep inside that what I need and want isn’t unreasonable…and if anyone can’t handle my boundaries or opinions then they aren’t my people anyway. It’s OKAY to have boundaries. It’s necessary to honor them. For myself. Yet my natural people-pleasing, codependent, completely-too-empathetic-spirit still tries to temper each word I say and every thing that I do.

Which is why being alone has become so very precious to me. And also why the community I am a part of is invaluable. Consent is the most important, highly valued thing in this community and no longer do I have to push my sensitive spirit to belong.

For I DO belong. To myself. And that is the most important thing. No longer is it compulsory to be anything more than I am or do anything more than I truly want.

In the middle of this all…I’ve found my pack. My family. Those who love me just for being the smartass, lone leopard, neurodivergent person that I am. Those who will open their arms for me should I need it, but also give me the space to be the person I fully want to be. No pressure to mask, no pressure to give more than I’m willing, or to bend my Stone self to their desires.

Finally I’m coming to realize that they always were there, waiting…waiting for me to accept the person I truly am, for they already have.

I love you, my family. I love you, my pack. And most of all, I love me.

We all die

Mortality is so difficult. Even at my age. For someone who was raised to believe that “Millions Now Living Will Never Die”, my fondest hope was that I’d be one of those people. And yes, I was raised to believe that, truly. It feels like I was robbed of my immortality, to accept that I never actually had it is conceivable to my brain but hard to wrap my heart around.

I was raised to believe I’d never have to lose my parents or sister to death either, that as long as we remained faithful to Jehovah God that we all would have a chance to “live forever on paradise earth”. My fondest plans were that someday, when the work of cleaning up the earth and returning her to paradise form, I’d be able to walk the entire planet and sail all the seas. To explore and take my time, to settle down in a little perfect spot should I find one, and when I was ready a few decades later, to keep walking.

Perhaps that’s why I still long so dearly to leave the cities behind and get on the road. And I will. Even if it’s for limited stretches of time. Because as much as I hate it, I am mortal, and some day will be worm food.

For years I’ve struggled with being mortal. Life is too precious and full of possibilities for it to be so short. But perhaps the fact it ends is what makes it even more precious. And none of us really just go away, either. Energy never dies. In ways, I am the life of every one of my ancestors and millions of nameless people and animals and trees and other living things. We all are.

And then we go back to our nine-to-fives and the daily drudge of working to put food on the table and a roof over our heads and forget how interconnected EVERYTHING is. And will always be.

So if I can make a difference in some lives, if I can help someone see the brilliant illumination they are when they shine under the stars, then my days can be innumerable. If someone smiles at the full moon and thinks of me I still live.

So I hold my wildness close to my chest and try to bury an ember of me in the hearts of everyone I love, and have a glimpse of immortality.

Ocean

Just was watching an episode of 1883 and reached a part (no spoilers) of a character dying when they shouldn’t. In grief, their partner sat beside their grave with a gun in their hand, wishing to join them. Then came the captain of the wagon train and he said something I likely will never forget:

“When you love someone you trade a piece of your soul with them, and they with you. That’s why losing them hurts so much.”

I still can cry at the drop of a hat when I think of her. The hurt and missing my best friend is worse now than missing the rest of it. She knew me better than anyone, or so I thought.

But she didn’t know how much I loved her. She didn’t care that I risked my life traveling across the country to be with her. That I gave up being close to my child so we could pursue our dreams. That I sobbed every day for leaving him. It didn’t matter, how much I showed her I loved her, and insecurities won. Her fear of my past won.

And now I wonder if when I live my days going forward if the part of her inside me still breathes. If she will see the absolute glory of my happiness when I take to the wild alone, without her.

The tug of the piece of me I placed inside her still pulls from half a country away. But it is the little slip of a wave after the ocean crashes a tidal gush upon the shore. Just an echo that slips a few bits of sand, nothing more.

I’ve a hurricane building within me and it’s all of my own making. Soon I won’t even notice the bit of her water trying to drown me, for I’m the entire ocean.

Quiet

I treasure these days accompanied by silence

When everything is breathing,

The walls holding a sacred quiet

So loud my ears ring.

When I can put aside the thoughts for others

Feed them, entertain them, talk with them, bring them out of themselves.

Only I exist in a selfish security

One not breached

My fortress stands solemn

Stoic the trees are thinking only thoughts of sunbeams and wind whispers

And I can return to myself.

Not melt into another and disappear.

Humans consume all of me, leaving me nothing for myself

Because that is how I love

That is how I family, to give all of me

I am left transparent, a film on glass,

My heart put inside another.

Still not seen as love by the very ones who carry me,

They do not feel the weight borne in them

And I am indifferent in their eyes

Selfish

Detached

While I beat inside them.

I am learning, have learned,

To secret it within myself,

Where it is always felt.

So I grow and bloom behind my gates,

Watering my own garden

Quiet.

Mama

So many times in every day I think of you and thank your guidance in becoming the person I am. For every part of me that was encouraged to love nature as myself, to embrace my wild. I just wanted you to know, even though you don’t really know me well these days, I’m a pretty awesome, independent, flame of a person with many who admire the woman I have become, and so very much of it is because of you.

I heard this song and it reminded me so very much of you and I ❤️I love you,

Your Savage Daughter