Reading that sentence makes me giggle with delight.

The combination of gender dysphoria and a (literal) puritanical family lineage created a certain narrative around nakedness in my upbringing. Yet, as I have learned to live in this gender expansive body, the restrictions placed by other outside forces have also begun to give way.

I’d been visiting a partner in Portland, Oregon which has, among many other things, a variety of clothing-optional offerings. My partner grew up in Europe, loves being naked, and often feels stymied by the rigidness of US norms around clothing. I love this about them, and enjoy the terror their freedom in this regard brings up in me. It’s the kind of terror that always indicates a growth edge - the discomfort that invites me to lean in, knowing transformation awaits.

We spent the morning at a spa that is fiercely protective of trans people. Knowing my body was safe moving between saunas, steam bath, hot tub, and cold plunge, I felt my self gently exhale. Toward the end of our session, I laid on my towel by the hot tub gently churning and felt the sun blanket my body in warmth.

I felt my breath soften into the safety of my own body as my right hand gently patted the space on my chest directly over my heart.

I heard my higher self cawing with the crows in affirmation: I am here. I am safe in my body.

The afternoon’s outing was to a beach in the Columbia River Gorge which, once again, was clothing-optional.

As we approached the moderately-populated beach and the rendezvous point with our friends, I saw people of all shapes and sizes, in various states of dress, existing together. There was beach volleyball. Kites. I chuckled at the ordinariness of it all. I peeled off my shorts and left my bathing suit in the bag, opting instead for a towel around my waist.

After an initial hustle in and out of the water with our group, I spent time on the beach snacking and chatting, eventually settling into a restful ease as the sun once again bathed my body in light.

Then the river called; and I answered.

Discarding my towel, I traversed the 100 or so feet to the water, shallow enough at the edge that people looked like they were walking right on top of the river.

Chuckling, I repeated a phrase I’ve adopted in recent years in those moments when I am up against something that is shaking my resolve: “This is how we walk on water.”

This is how we walk on water.

When I am truly present in my body with the world around me, the holiness reveals itself. It’s not in separating ourselves from our humanity that will show us the miraculous beings we truly are, but in being so fully present in the fullness of being that we recognize the ongoing dance between physical form and infinite consciousness.

Feeling no shame in my nakedness, I waded deeper in and felt the water moving around me. Holding me. Taking with it everything I no longer needed. I closed my eyes and imagined every syllable of the old stories I’d been telling myself wash off my body. I offered gratitude to each direction, aware of the profundity of the moment and the courage the water was instilling in me. Standing in the river, I was aware of my aliveness, awash in gratitude.

I am here.

I am living in this transformed body in this water among these people and this creation.

I am alive.

As the sun started to set, still basking in my own courage, I asked my partner to take a picture of me. As I stood up for the photo, suddenly aware of my nakedness, my confidence dwindled. I gestured to my partner to wait, saying I wasn’t yet ready (which, of course, they disregarded). I quickly posed, and just as quickly turned around and hurried back to the safety of the blanket.

When we got back to the car, I scrolled through the pics from the beach and one hit me so hard I gasped when I saw it.

In the photo, I am standing with my legs facing the sun which looks as if it is perched at the top of my crown. My torso is turned back toward the viewer; my hand reaches out in such a way that the rays of the sun pass through each finger.

I look powerful. Embodied. Present.

Of course, it’s not the pic I posed for, but the one my partner took when I wasn’t ready. The one where I was aware of my nakedness and yet still present enough to be in the pic.

Looking at it, I realized I am actually gonna get free in this lifetime.

I have been through so many gauntlets in life; I have fallen on my ass more times than I can count. I’ve learned how to get back up, when to ask for help, and when to stay down a while. And I am still here.

I love being alive. Even when I hate it, I love it. Even when I am so buried in my ego that I struggle to see the goodness right in front of my face, and certainly in the mirror.

It’s not about being holy; it’s about being present, and loving our humanity and this existence so much that we realize it’s not who we are or how good we are, but celebrating the gift of embodiment we’ve been given this time around. It’s knowing life is a game and playing it anyway.

I have a hunch the universe and I are just getting started. So I’m gonna keep playing and see how good it can get.

May it be so.

I am 42 years old.

The world is just over 18 months into a global pandemic.

Millions are dead; very few given the gift of grief. It’s there, of course, the grief, but is partitioned off, coming out sideways. We have become desensitized to death; desensitized to life.

Late stage capitalism has little room for grief. Or anything embodied, for that matter. No time for reflection or imagination, for curiosity or pleasure. Nothing but scarcity and separation, fear of our neighbor. Fear of ourselves.

Covid has impacted each of us and all of us. The pandemic has revealed more of the underbelly of the systems that have been defining our lives for millennia. Something sinister has emerged from the brokenness, and also something beautiful. Things are crumbling. We all know it; those who are honest with themselves can feel it. Yet, those who are naming it are still dismissed as outliers: if not quite fanatics, definitely fringe.

Things are crumbling, yes. But things are also being born.

This we have known. This we have felt. Every ending is a beginning.

We are changed. We are changing.

Quarantine has revealed us to ourselves.

Our responses to that revelation have varied.

I am six months into a healing journey that has recently taken a decisively sharp turn. A few weeks earlier, I left a job I loved, much more abruptly and painfully than I’d anticipated or been prepared for, and the loss gutted me. I’d experienced enough grief in my life to know the way it can catch you totally off-guard, sweep you off your feet and leave you planted on the ground somewhere new. Someone new.

But this was deeper, older, like something ancient rising to the surface through a spring of grief I could no longer contain. The rupture of losing my job opened something within me finally ready to emerge.

I feel like our recently-adopted bearded dragon in the aquarium he would soon grow out of, scratching against the rocks to shed the layer of skin peeling from his rapidly expanding self.

I am itchy with the discomfort of knowing I have outgrown the skin I am in.

My job ending has forced open the floodgates that will bring both my undoing and my rebirth. But I don’t know that yet. All I feel is the pain of the rupture. It feels like the universe knocked me flat on my back and is holding an invisible, yet weighty hand on my chest, while a disembodied voice from God leans down and firmly, yet lovingly whispers again and again in my ear:

Heal.

Heal.

Heal.

The hand is so heavy on my chest, yet I know that it is also massaging my heart into beating with the rhythm of a gentler way of being.

When I lost my job, I didn’t yet know that healing will become a full time gig, but I knew enough to know better than to argue. I needed to feel it all.

So, I surrendered to the grief. Again and again, I surrendered.

I wept and wailed and fell apart. Again and again. I surrendered to the grief that needed to move through my body. I surrendered to God and to my higher self as generations awakened within me.

My life is one that has made sense largely in retrospect up to a certain point, after which I began to trust the unknown as it is being written, and to see my own capacity for co-creating with the divine.

It was at that point that I became a more active participant in my own story.

That day in October, 2021 is that point. Or, the first part of it, at least.

Faith, it seems, is a practice, and we have a way of dismissing even the most extravagant displays of God’s continued beckoning us to see the wonder of what it means to be alive. Sometimes moving on faith means doing things that don’t yet make sense - even for us. But that beckoning continues, eventually breaking everything that stands in the way from the person we are becoming.

That day with my heart broken open, I stood on the back porch following a nudge to make a video that would change the entire trajectory of my life; which, of course, I didn’t know at the time.

I had no idea what lie ahead, I just knew I wanted to feel more at home in my own body, less swayed by the volatility of an unpredictable world. In the face of all that was falling apart, I needed to connect to the part within me that could not be swayed.

I knew this meant connecting with the truth of my story, and doing so as an invitation to others to do the same.

So, I made a video.

No. I recorded a prayer: an honest incantation to the divine from the purest part of myself.

I shared it knowing I needed to tell my story as an invitation for others to tell their own.

In the video, my head is shorn and my face is tired, but my eyes are bright. Standing on the second floor porch of my house, a can of soda water sweats in my hand as I name my desires into the universe:

I want to delight more. I want to have more moments in my life when I am caught in a moment listening to the birds and when my fingers stop and feel the coolness of the can in my hand and when another bird sings and joins the first. I want to delight more in my body. I want to live and to feel the breeze and to know I am loved and I am part of all of this; that we all are.

Amen.

October 30, 2021

A week later, I am at the 8th birthday celebration for a child in my kid’s class. The host parent, Shannon, greets me warmly among a swarm of children and parents, and introduces me to her friend Jessica, who’s visiting from California. The two of them had moved out there together from Virginia years before, and Jessica still calls it home.

We’re moving through the typical small talk when Jess and Shannon share that they went to “psychic school” together while living out west. Curious, I ask them to tell me more. It turns out that, while in their 20s, they attended a school of metaphysical teaching where, among other things, they trained to read energy and to communicate with the spirits of those who’ve left their human bodies.

I take it in stride. I’d seen enough by then to know

Later in the evening, I’m sitting around the fire pit outside with the parents. One couple in the group has been having marriage difficulties, and a tender moment arises in the conversation when it becomes clear how much they’ve been struggling. Both had lost their mothers years before, and the longing for the maternal tenderness both deceased women embodied is tangible as they express the desire for their mother’s wisdom in this particular season of life.

“Well…let’s call in the parents,” suggests Shannon.

I then watch, somewhat passively, as Jess and Shannon invite in the deceased parents of those seated around the fire. I am mildly drawn in as they have a conversation with the couples’ deceased mothers, who share, through Shannon and Jess, their support and unconditional love - all of the things I’d assume a parent would offer from the other side of the veil.

Shannon then turns to me.

“Now, I’m sensing a paternal presence here” she says, and gestures generally just over my right shoulder.”

“Oh. Umm. Yeah, that would be my dad. He died in 2011.”

“Was he kind of a gentle, wise person?”

“Yes. Yes, that would definitely describe his soul.”

Shannon knows nothing of my current circumstances. She doesn’t know I’ve lost my job, or even that I’d lost my dad, who died in 2011. We’d had a few conversations by this point, but we were more friendly than friends.

“He wants to let you know that he knows it’s been really difficult for you lately, and that he loves you and he is proud of you. . .”

“Ok. Thank you.”

I accept all of this with gratitude, if not a whole lot of emotional resonance.

“Oh. . .He also wants me to let you know that he was in the birds . . .?”

I am struck.

Shannon has no idea what it means, but I do. A current jolts through me, as if I’d pressed a button the week before that suddenly switched on.

It hits me like a ton of bricks.

Just as I’d known to make the video, I know exactly which birds she means.

I watch the video again as soon as I get home.

	I want to delight more. 
	I want to have more moments in my life when I am 
		A bird’s song rings out above the others in the background;
		my finger gestures out as a smile comes across my face
		a train horn blows
	caught in a moment
	listening to the birds
		my face brightens as my eyes move back and forth
		as if I’m seeing something new
	and when my fingers stop and feel the coolness of the can in my hand
		a new bird joins the song
	and when another bird sings and joins the first.
		a train blows its horn in the distance
		my eyes glisten
	I want to delight more in my body.
		my eyes glisten and my face becomes more serious
	I want to live
		another train horn, closer
		I close my eyes as
		more birds join the chorus
		a breeze comes through
		a smile breaks over my face and I look upward
		then a laugh
	and to feel the breeze
	and to know I am loved
		a horn honks
	and I am part of all of this;
	that we all are. 

Watching, I realize I am having a conversation with the world that I had been totally unaware of until that moment: a call and response between myself and creation where I name the desire to come home to my self, and love answers through the birds and the wind and a sense of internal knowing that I am part of something more.

That recognition was the beginning of my belief becoming knowing.

My broken heart awoke the part of me that needed to live; my voice spoke that part into being.

November 26, 2021

It’s a month later, and I feel no better.

I’ve begun to realize that saying I want to live is not the same as actually living. The universe has responded to my desire to be alive by revealing all of the things that have been keeping me from fully doing so. This, too, is part of living, but I don’t yet know that. What I know is that it still hurts. Days are rough and I am tired of holding space for the parts of myself I’ve spent my lifetime convinced are unwelcome guests at this dinner party of one. I am weary of sitting with my sadness, of the unspecified shame I wear like a sopping wet sweater I’ve not yet given myself permission to remove.

I’d surrendered to the universe, but I was still trying to tame the beast within me, rather than giving it room to breathe. Mornings were particularly challenging; that morning at the end of November was no different.

Ashe, my partner at the time, and I were staying at a hotel off the Interstate near Lexington, VA, a couple of hours outside of Richmond. We’d driven down for the weekend to do some day hikes at a favorite state park about half an hour further down the road.

I woke up feeling a searing pain through my solar plexus, burning past my heart and flaming up through my throat. Ashe asked me something innocuous, and I barked back a short response.

It was nothing especially harsh, but it was delivered with a force that hit a soft spot, and seeing the hurt they caused hit me again. The shame came over me like a wave. I was trying so hard to move through the pain that felt like it was bursting out of every pore.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “It all feels like too much and I just want to die. I really just want to be dead.”

And then I crumbled into the pool of tears that had become so familiar.

About an hour later, after I’d found center and made amends with my partner, we ventured into our day. We were about 2 hours from home, out for a few days to hike and enjoy the mountains. On our way from the hotel to the start of our trek about 20 miles away, we pulled up to a red-light and stopped behind a gold Prius: the only other car at the intersection.

On the back of the Prius was a single bumper sticker, reading “Along for the journey.”

And it hit me. Just like it did when Shannon told me my dad was in the birds. I knew in that moment that, God was speaking directly to me.

The bumper sticker wasn’t just a bumper sticker. It was a bumper sticker I designed 5 years before, while working as the Youth Programs Director at a local organization serving queer and trans youth. I designed the bumper sticker specifically as a way to remind people - particularly queer folks - that they were never alone on their journey through this often painful world.

The bumper sticker was a mirror I could not unsee, my own words looking back at me, telling me I was never alone.

Sitting there, something shifted. Softened.

I could argue all I want that it was some sort of coincidence, but I knew better. Doubting would have felt like an affront to the gift looking me right in the face.

In that moment, I knew I was held by love.

I knew I was seen by a presence that knew me well enough to put my own words right in front of my face, inviting me to see how much I am loved.

That November morning was the last time I said I wanted to die. Things didn’t magically feel better overnight; that’s not really how it works. Healing is an ongoing, lifelong journey. But it was enough for me to stick with my self and to keep looking up.

That Fall was the beginning of a conversation. No, it was the beginning of me seeing a conversation that I’d been having all along.

With who? With God, of course. Which is to say, with All that IS.

God is all of it.

I pored over old journals and videos, awestruck again and again as I found a treasure trove of journal entries speaking specifically of the life I am now living. Seemingly innocuous details suddenly took on new meaning when seen through the timeline of my whole life. The broader perspective reveals a tale written with such specificity, it would be unbelievable, were it not true.

I now move through the day with the assertion that the universe is communicating, beckoning me to see the majesty of what it means to live in this body and the love interwoven through every ounce of it.

My story has shown me that life itself is an invitation to live: to see and experience the ways our time in these fleshy skin suits are so much more than we have been led to believe. It is about finding the magic in the everyday and the abundance that appears when we authentically claim who we came here to be.

47.

Daaaaang.

It keeps dawning on me that I’m a grown adult. I don’t mean old, for old and grown are not the same thing. In many ways I feel stronger than I’ve felt. . . well, ever.

I was born the day before Mother’s Day in the spring of 1979. Growing up, my mom would tell me about how they delivered flowers to all of the new moms on her floor that year, and about her sister, who desperately wanted a daughter, coming to visit and crying when she saw that my mom had given birth to her second.

I came into the world like all humans do: as an infinite spirit living within a tiny frame, born into flesh without a clue as to the magnificence existing within. We all come in without a clue in terms of worldly knowledge. We don’t know how to speak; we can’t yet walk or feed ourselves. We don’t know the expectations people have for us, or what we want to be when we grow up. We don’t know about bank accounts or mountains or clouds. We know nothing of the expansiveness of the cosmos, or what it feels like to fall in love or to have our hearts broken. If we live long enough and go through those experiences, we may go out realizing we still don’t have a clue, and yet we are somehow much more content with that understanding at the end of life than we are coming in.

The part between the coming and going is where the magic really happens: that space between birth and death when we learn all we learn about life and mortality and wounding and joy. Living life, we learn that these fleshy incarnations are not the extent of who or what we are. Whether we live for 100 minutes or 100 years, the point of life is to live it - to be so abundantly here for all life brings that we eventually see that this life is not all there is. Our fleshy skin suits do not define who we are, but are merely vessels for experiencing what it is to be embodied.

Growing up, I didn’t think I’d make it this far.

It’s not that I struggled with suicidality in any active sense; it’s more that I never saw myself as an adult. There were no models for gender expansive identities growing up in East Texas in the 1980s. I didn’t have the words for my identity growing up, or even the visual imagination. I knew something didn’t fit, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Anytime I tried to envision the future me, it was like an empty frame without even a silhouette to define the person I would become.

For the longest time I thought it was me, as if my own humanity didn’t fit. I fumbled a lot, and fell on my face more times that I can count. But, I kept going, and life kept meeting me along the way. Things made no sense, until suddenly, they did.

Sitting here now, on a Friday afternoon as the birds sing their songs and a gentle breeze blows through, I look down at my own human form and I am in awe. I have traveled so far to find home in my self.

To be alive in this body that was beyond the wildest imagination of my childhood self, I know anything is possible.My current embodiment is so much more abundant than I could have envisioned as a child because it literally didn’t exist when I was growing up. Things have had to emerge in their own time and fashion, each stage of becoming revealing another layer of the story of this incarnation. I wasn’t living life wrong. There is no right or wrong way to live life; it’s all in the living. I am here because I trusted the inner compass that was willing to step into the unknown again and again.

Looking back, I can see the thread; every step guided by a higher purpose that even my conscious self couldn’t know until it was time to know.

I’ve held this lesson close these last couple of years. As we move through this time of seismic transformation, it can be tempting to say everything is ending because we cannot see the future. Yet, perhaps we cannot see it because the future exists beyond our current imagination.

What if the invitation before us is to dream together as expansively as we can, with the trust that what is coming to form is far more abundant than even our wildest dreams?

We have within us everything we need to bring to form the world being born; we only need the audacity to dream it, the tenacity to share it, and the willingness to do it together.

If ever I am tempted to disbelieve creation’s affirmation of my gender, I remember the events of April 20th, 2022. It was on that day that I was bitten by a raccoon during a magic mushroom trip, which then paid for top surgery later that year.

The story actually begins a few months earlier, in December, 2021.

I was contacted by a woman named Christa, who’d been given my name by another woman named Patience, whom I’d met once years before, but with whom I’d seldom crossed paths since. Christa was looking for someone to lead a memorial for her dear friend Francis, who’d just succumbed to a 2-year journey with cancer. Francis was Scottish and an atheist, but had a certain spirit to him. I heard more than one person describe him as someone who “lived in the astral plane,” and I understood the reference. I’ve met a number of people who seem to have a special kind of connection with Spirit. It’s an energy they give off. They’re often not religious, as their knowing is much too embodied for most religious spaces. Francis’s left behind three children and a spouse, Clare, who’s a plastic surgeon and had been performing top surgery for trans masculine folks for years. It was important that whoever officiated the memorial could respect both that Francis was both very spiritual and very not religious; and, was affirming of trans folks.

Cue: me.

I met Clare a week or so before the scheduled gathering, which was to be at their home on some acreage, among the trees. As Clare described him, I felt a familiarity with Francis unlike many I’d experienced up to that point. He felt like a sibling I’d once known, familiar in ways I couldn’t quite put a finger on, but by that time I’d learned to trust.

As I planned the memorial, I got to know Francis, talking with him as though he were there in the room with me, and his passing was merely a transformation of his energy from one form to another. I felt his guidance planning the gathering, suggesting I offer space in the service for people to turn toward the trees and scream their favorite curse word in their loudest voice.

It was at the memorial that something shifted for me in my thinking about top surgery. Up to that point, I’d been relatively ambivalent about having a double mastectomy. For a long time, I said I didn’t feel like it was necessary, and that I felt comfortable enough in my body that I didn’t see the need for an invasive surgery. All this as I jokingly referred to my chest as a “dead zone.”

Comfortable enough.

Comfortably numb.

Thank God Creation had other plans.

My body was ready; it was time for my brain to catch up.

After the service, I was talking with Patience, the woman who’d originally recommended me to Christa and Clare. Patience has a trans son who’d had top surgery, and watching her face light up as she talked about her journey as the parent of a trans person lit something within me.

There is a certain way families of trans folks are transformed when they watch their loved one evolve. For those who soften, they begin to question the same boundaries their loved one refused to live within. It’s not about being trans, but about seeing the ways rigid norms and expectations about how to live in our bodies stifle our inherent creativity that connects us with the divine within.

It was clear in our conversation that Patience had allowed herself to be transformed as she watched her son claim the fullness of life being offered to him in his trans body.

Leaving the memorial, I texted Ashe, my partner at the time, saying it was time for me to seriously considered top surgery. Between the conversation with Patience and meeting a doctor who not only performed top surgeries, but who was an advocate for the trans community as well, something became possible that wasn’t before.

By listening to my body, and naming I needed, the dead zone in my chest started to come alive in a new way, softening something that had grown hard and defensive over time. I was finally in a space where I was safe enough and knew myself well enough that I could explore the possibility of top surgery.

Once I named that possibility, my dysphoria around my chest became much more intolerable. By referring to my chest as a dead zone, I’d cut it from my awareness. Once I let myself see it, the disconnect between what I felt in my soul that my body needed to be, and what I saw when I looked in the mirror, became overwhelming.

My healing necessitated that I see myself fully, and in order to do that and to live in my body in the way I was being called to live in my body, I needed my whole body to come alive. No more dead zones. Which meant I needed to take top surgery seriously.

About a month later, in late January of 2022, I reached out to Clare to ask about a referral for top surgery. She replied and said she’d happily refer me out, but that she was also willing to do the procedure. I said ok, realizing it still wasn’t that simple. Even though Clare took health insurance, which is a rarity among plastic surgeons doing top surgeries, I had a health savings account at the time, with a $6000 deductible. I was also barely employed, making about $10,000 / year, and definitely didn’t have the resources to cover the cost out-of-pocket.

I shelved the conversation in my mind.

A couple of months later, I went to visit Barb, an octogenarian who’s lived a robust life as everything from a Camp Director, to a licensed clinical social worker (LCSW), and Reiki Master. I see her every few weeks for some conversation and Reiki.

That March, as I was leaving her home office, she took my hands in hers and looked me right in the eyes.

“There’s a part of you waiting to be born,” she said.

“Ok.” I replied, with an earnest nod. “I think it has to do with top surgery.”

“Whatever it is,” she commended, “call it in; AND call in the support for it.”

As I left Barb’s that day, I said a prayer out loud. “I am here and I am ready. Send in whatever part of me that’s waiting to be born, and send in the support for it.”

I then put it out of my head, got in my car, and started the 20 minute drive back home.

Within the hour, I received a text message from Clare. We hadn’t interacted since the text exchange in January, when I’d asked her about top surgery. She was reaching out because she hand’t heard from me, and wanted to be sure I had the right contact information for her.

I told her I did have the correct information, but that I was trying to sort out insurance stuff before reaching back out.

Clare suggested I go ahead and get an appointment. Between her busy schedule and the time it could take for insurance to get everything authorized, the process would take several months from the initial consolation to surgery. To get the ball rolling, she said she’d go ahead and have her scheduler contact me. Within an hour, I received a phone call from the scheduler, who asked me for my name and date of birth.

When I gave her both, she chuckled and said, “Oh, that’s wild. I have the exact same birthday. Same day, month, and year.”

So, within two hours of telling the universe to send in the part of me waiting to be born, I had an appointment scheduled for a top surgery consultation, which was made by someone who shared my exact birthday.

Now for the support, which brings us to April 20th.

Ashe and I were both celebrating vocational milestones. They were doing some eviction diversion work with clients, and had a successful day in court, and I’d posted a picture of myself wearing a clergy collar with a joint in my mouth. Given that it was such a robust 420, we decided to celebrate the evening with our favorite homegrown herb from the garden.

We were out of rolling papers, so we took a walk to a shop a couple of blocks from our house to buy more. At the end of our block, our path converged with a young from the neighborhood stud named Destiny. . . walnut-colored skin with cornrows and a tattoo of a kiss on their right cheek.

We chuckled as we followed Destiny into the shop, about how it must be a fated meeting.

There were a few other customers, so the three of us were casually chatting when we turned around and noticed that, among the various other offerings, they were selling magic mushroom bars.

This was in the time shortly after cannabis had been legalized in Virginia, and the law was still unclear in many regards. Some shops were selling coupons for certain products to take advantage of a legal loophole by not selling the actual product.

Looking back, I can see that there were flags. But, at the moment, it didn’t feel like that. It felt like we’d walked into a portal of sorts - as if we were there and also, somewhere else. I mean, we followed Destiny into the shop, for fuck’s sake.

My experience with psychedelics up to that point had been minimal. I’d been utilizing cannabis as part of my spiritual practice for about a year at that time, and I’d seen and felt the ways plant medicine invited me home into my body, and to a new perspective on the world. I’d taken one journey with magic mushrooms, about 9 months before, and it was beautiful. I’d spent days preparing for the journey, and spent most of the trip laid in bed weeping, repeating “it hurts to be born” and “anything is possible” over and over again. I emerged from that journey with a new sense of connection to myself and the world around me.

This time was different, as if the sacred was making itself known, inviting us on a journey right in the middle of an ordinary day in April.

The chocolate was made by a familiar company, and it seemed safe enough, so, we called our friend Charles and asked if he wanted to take mushrooms with us. He happily obliged.

Charles came over a little bit later and the three of us chatted as we made our way through our respective chocolate bars. As the mushrooms began to to make their presence known, we settled into the living room to watch Midnight Gospel, an animated series that sets interviews between host Duncan Trussell and his guests within surreal settings, creating a wild juxtaposition between the audio of the conversation and the visuals in which they are set. It’s a show that could make you feel as though you’re on mushrooms, regardless of whether or not that is the case.

It all became a bit too much for me after a few minutes, so I stepped outside to my garden.

I laid down on the green grass, as the scent of geranium and rosemary filled the warm spring air. Looking up at the sky, I watched in wonder as the planes overhead completed arcs across the sky, enthralled by the typically invisible line of their path, which the mushrooms made visible. My attention then turned to two celestial bodies. They could’ve been planets or stars; I don’t know which, but I suddenly had this feeling that I was being invited to meet them in the sky.

Looking up, I curiously and earnestly asked, “Am I . . . coming to meet you?”

Then, to myself, “Am I…going to meet the stars?”

And right as I was caught in this moment with the cosmos, I felt a bite at my ankle.

I looked down abruptly and made immediate eye contact with a raccoon. He was sitting up, looking at me with his hands folded in front of him as if he was so pleased with what he’d just done.

“Well, that was rude,” I said, suddenly jolted back to the reality unfolding on the ground.

The dog immediately came running out and chased the raccoon back to the corner of the garden by the compost heap.

Still a little awestruck, I sat up and found my bearings. I walked inside and reported to Charles and Ashe that I’d just been bitten by a raccoon.

They were appropriately unnerved.

“That’s a big deal!” They declared in unison.

“We should take you to the hospital.”

“It’s alright” I replied, “it didn’t break the skin.”

The next morning I woke up, and it turned out, it had indeed broken the skin.

I texted Clare, asking if it was something worth getting checked out.

“Yes” she replied, punctuated by: “It’s a really horrible death.”

The “horrible death” part had me convinced.

It turns out the rabies vaccination process happens in four-parts, with a couple of shots on day one, followed by subsequent shots on days three, seven, and fourteen.

They also aren’t cheap.

A few weeks after the first round, I received a bill for over $1000, followed by another for about the same amount. And then another. All total, the bills for the shots ended up being about $4000. I was no more employed by that time than I had been in January, and had no way on my own to pay the bill.

So, I reached out for help.

My mom’s journey to accepting me as a trans person has been circuitous. As I write this, she is in a much more supportive space than she has been in the past, even without fully understanding my gender. In 2022, when I was bitten by the raccoon, she wasn’t yet in a space where she understood my need for top surgery, but she definitely didn’t want me to die from rabies.

My mother’s generosity meant that not only did the bills for the rabies shots get paid, but also that by the time top surgery rolled around that September, the $6000 deductible had been met.

When I got the bill for top surgery, it was less than $200. Looking at the bill, I realized the raccoon bite was the support I’d called in all those months before, delivered in such flamboyant fashion all I could do was laugh.

Looking back, I think Francis was behind all of this. As if that day I left Barb’s and put the request into the universe, he heard it and nudged Clare, who then contacted me. As far as the raccoon goes, that tracks with who he was in life - playful, mischievous. Francis was someone who would loved a good story, and would have loved this one.

At other points in life, I would have been skeptical about someone communicating through animals, but I know better now. I’ve experienced enough over the last several years to know there is so much more happening all around us than we can see with our eyes.

Clare and her children continue to miss Francis. Of course they do. They miss his magic and the light he brought into the space on those days he shined most brightly. The heaviness of the grief has made it difficult to remember the warmth of his presence.

Last fall, Christa moved to a place right next door to Clare and the kids, so she sees them much more often, bringing with her memories of Francis. Christa’s storytelling has lightened the weight of the grief for the family, letting the shine come forth brilliantly again.

This spring, a young white stag has started appearing around the land. He’d come through with his family and was easy to spot among the bare trees and darker peers. He’s continued to come around, hanging out on the leaves - just being there.

Creation is playful (not to mention gender affirming).

Gender is playful.

Life is playful.

Creation pursues us, flirting through the trees, the elements, other people, even raccoons, inviting us to see the fullness of what it means to be human. And creation has a way of affirming the wild audacity within us that knows something must be born.

Ask for what you want and watch the universe show you just how good - and weird - it can get.

How does our capacity to experience joy, pleasure, and expansive connections with ourselves and the world around us serve us in this moment?

Trans joy is essential, now more than ever. When I say that, I am drawing from the wisdom of Audre Lorde, who asserted, “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers. . .For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from all our lives’ pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of.”

adrienne maree brown talks about how “being able to feel pleasure is connected to being able to feel everything else about our aliveness. . . one of the things I’ve come to understand is that . . .one of the ways we are most easily controlled, is when pleasure is taken off the table or made to feel like it’s not even a part of something that belongs to our lives. And so the reclaiming of pleasure in the here and now [especially for people with marginalized identities] is an important part of reclaiming the wholeness of our lives.”

There is something alchemical that happens in the process of claiming one’s existence as Trans. The willingness to look at one’s self, and to have such an intimate conversation between the body and the soul that you begin to see the relationship between the two in a whole new way, changes something on a core level. My journey of claiming my trans identity has connected me with the divine in radical ways, and shown me more of what it means to be an infinite soul living in a finite vessel. It has taught me the power of co-creating with the divine, to trust the infinite within me.

Releasing the shame of feeling like I was somehow fundamentally flawed for being Trans has given way to a joy at what it feels like to truly come home to myself. It’s redefined how I live in the world, inviting me to examine the ways I was taught to live in this body at all of its intersecting identities.

Trans joy is an embodied threat to the status quo which tells us we need an external source to define who we are. It trusts that deeper calling that says, “I need to live in this body in a way that does not yet make sense to the world around me, but which my higher self knows is true. I know who I need to become in order to be who I came into this life to be.”

There’s a lot of language in public discourse right now that paints trans people as a threat to the values of this nation. And the reality is that we are a threat. We are exactly the threat the world needs right now.

The systems which have defined our way of being for millenia have relied upon the message that our salvation comes from something external. We have been told again and again that we need the church or the state or some other authority to define how we exist in public and private life.

Being trans has shown me the playful relationship that can happen between the body and soul when they learn to move together. It has been a process of coming home to my self and trusting the inner voice saying, “this is who I am, and this is who I need to be in this lifetime, despite what the external world is saying.”

I have had to die to myself many times over on the journey to becoming who I came here to be. Each death has shown me the gift of surrender and the exhilaration of rebirth.

This experience of listening to the deeper self within is the gift we all need right now. It’s not about being trans, but about coming home to the self, regardless of what the world around you says, and knowing the truth of your authenticity is the truth the world needs right now. It may not make sense in the moment; that’s because we are in the process of dreaming a new world into being. As we learn to trust this inner voice, we find it within a chorus of others learning to sing their own songs.

We are living in a time of radical transformation where the things that we are, the structures that have upheld our systems for millennia are crashing down around us. We are seeing the depths of depravity of the system built upon the notion of human capital and externally defined worth. We are also finding our way back home into the rhythm of things, in relationship with our bodies and our souls, our communities, and the planet. We are stepping into a new way of being, and defining anew what it means to be human. Trans people are key in unlocking the power of this moment.

“. . .sometimes I hear my voice and it’s been here silent all these years” - Tori Amos

I’ve got a big nose. Not a huge one, but it’s a defining part of my face. Looking directly, it’s kind of wide, and accented by deep smile lines that move down to frame my lips. From a profile, my nose is kinda flat, with a small depression towards the end.

Though I didn’t realize it until 2023, I didn’t always have this nose.

In 2001, I had septoplasty: a minor surgery done to repair a deviated septum (the section of bone and cartilage that separates your nostrils). I was in my last year of college and was having some breathing issues due to an s-shaped septum. I was still on my parents’ health insurance, so it seemed like a good time to go ahead and have it done. The surgery was fine; they straightened my septum and inserted two stints on either side to keep my airways open and help my nose begin to heal. It was an outpatient procedure and took less than an hour.

About a week after the surgery, the stints were removed and everything seemed good-to-go. That night, just before bed, I lightly brushed an itch on my nose and almost immediately felt like a balloon had been inflated inside my head. My nostrils were closed off and my nose began to swell. My younger brother sat with me for a couple of hours and eventually roused our dad, who was a surgeon. After taking a look, he casually commented that it looked like residual drainage and there was nothing to be concerned about. (I think his precise words were, “it’s just snot. Take a Sudafed and you’ll be fine.”) I followed his instructions and about 20 minutes later, heard a pop in my ear and, well, let’s just say that the Sudafed helped with the swelling, but did nothing to stop the gush of blood coming from my nose. Luckily, I was hemmoraghing enough that my nasal cavity promptly swelled back up and stopped the bleeding.

The next morning, my mom drove me to see the doctor at his office. It turned out, my septum had ruptured, causing what’s called a septal hematoma. After the doctor was unable to stop the bleeding with the tools he had in his office, he sent us directly to the hospital’s Operating Room. I can remember my mother asking if we had time to join the rest of the family at lunch before going to the OR, and he looked at her and said, “No, you need to head right over to the hospital. I’ll meet you there.”

One thing about being part of a doctor’s family is that you learn to downplay most of the medical things that happen. Neither my mother nor I realized something serious was happening until pulled up to the Good Shepherd Hospital and found I’d already been checked in and was shuffled promptly to the OR. Much of that journey is a blur now, lost to time in both the intensity of the day and the decades since. The second procedure took about 90 minutes for them to stop the hemmoraghing and do all they needed to do to ensure it didn’t start again. Somewhere between the rupture and the second procedure, my nose took a new form.

I didn’t see it, though. I didn’t see that my nose was different.

It wasn’t until 2023 that I realized the surgery had transformed my face.

It was then that a new friend who’s a plastic surgeon jumped with excitement when I mentioned that my septum had once ruptured.

“I’ve actually been wanting to ask you about that,” she said. “It’s called saddle nose deformity and is actually a pretty standard question on plastic surgery exams.” I could tell she was excited to talk about it.

It hadn’t occurred to me until then that my nose was different than it had been prior to the surgery.

I went looking through a box of old photographs and, sure enough, I found one from a couple of years before the surgery, during an internship with a photographer, when a fellow tech snapped a photo of my profile while we were testing the lights for a shoot.

And there it was: a whole other nose. No flattened profile. No bump at the end. It was a cute nose, if I do say so myself. And a whole other me.

My nose - the centerpiece of my face - had changed, rather dramatically, and no one noticed. Not even me.

It’s hard to describe the specific kind of sadness I experienced when I realized this. All those years of not being seen. Of not seeing myself.

I wanted to go back to that 22-year-old and say, “I’m so sorry! I see you now!” Not only myself at 22, but to all the versions of myself I have been in this lifetime: to all the times I had to make myself small, to remain unseen, so that I could move through a system that had no room for me.

It turns out, though, that part of me did see me.

I was recently looking through old artwork from college and found some lithography prints I made in my last semester, which was also the semester following my ruptured septum. As I leafed through the various pieces, one of them absolutely froze me in my tracks. There I was, looking back at me. The print is a self-portrait, with a triptych of cropped drawings of my face underneath a row of four monochromatic source photos. In contrast to the photos, the drawings are layered with color, revealing a more careful treatment of the subject than was given to the quickly-shot photographs, and keeping the viewer’s eye focused more on my interpretation of the content than the source images themselves.

In the center of the triptych is a direct portrait of my face, cropped in half and showing only the left side. Flanking this center drawing are two more me, each in profile. The darkened pupil of my direct gaze is in the center of the print and, compositionally creates a triangle with the two noses in profile.

Spiritually speaking, our left side represents our inner, nurturing self. It’s the side that connects with our higher self. Looking at the print now, that strong triangle right in the middle of the print, from my left eye out to my nose, feels like my higher self saying, “I see you, love. I see you and I am here. One day you will see yourself, too.”

At the time, I wasn’t able to consciously connect with the eternal within me. I was clearly looking, but I didn’t yet see. Regardless of this, my higher self saw me, and nudged my subconscious mind to put in that extra shading around the bridge of the nose, to deepen the blue I used for my pupil that saw far more than I was able to see at the time.

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I’ve had so many experiences over the last few years like this: moments where something is revealed that offers a new perspective on an often painful experience from earlier in life. Each of these moments of reflection has been in itself a gem from the universe. Taken together, they form an illuminating path that has defined this incarnation. Memories of isolation are reframed as points of connection in ways I was couldn’t have recognize at the time.

Back in 2001, I wasn’t yet safe enough in my body or in the world to name the fullness of who I am. I was disembodied and clueless in so many ways. My higher self was keeping me safe by holding stuff I wasn’t yet ready to know. I was still deeply in the closet, even to myself, still denying my sexuality and had literally no language for my gender identity. I was wearing the corsets I’d been told were mine to wear, even if they were sucking the holy breath out of my lungs.

The thing is, we can’t really just wall off parts of our identity. When we cut off access to deeper truths about who we are, we cut off access to the parts of ourselves that are key to who we came here to be. My inability to incorporate an understanding of my gender identity and sexuality made me unable to see the things in front of me literally as present as the nose on my face.

Though claiming my gender identity and sexuality has been key to finding home in my own body, the journey hasn’t been about any one identity marker, but about integrating the parts of myself that have been key to me re-membering what I came here to be. Claiming the fullness of myself has shown me what it really means to be alive in a body at this time in the world.

The experience of re-membering has been my anchor these days. The process of looking at my life and seeing how the eternal has been here all along, remaining with me through every struggle I’ve encountered; and, even more, has shined most brightly in the moments when I felt most alone, has given me access to something that cannot be swayed by anything external.

Like so many other things, we are often fed a binary dynamic between body and spirit. Many of us have been told that to love the flesh is to deny the spirit and, in extension, to deny God. These are often the same voices telling us we need an external source to connect with the divine.

God is All that Is, which means God is everywhere. All of creation - including each and all of us, is an expression of infinite consciousness experiencing finitude. We come into this world forgetting what we are, and life is about being present with experiences that point us back to the reality of our being. Coming home to our bodies means coming home to the divinity within us. It’s not about prioritizing the body or the soul, but about learning to utilize the two in collaboration.

Jess is my outfit this time around - my individualized self. My purpose here is to live fully into being my self while maintaining the awareness that Jess is just the outfit. The more rooted I remain in this knowing, the more I connect with the infinite within me that cannot be shaken.

And it’s like that for all of us. When we learn to be present with the stillness, we each discover a trail of gems throughout our lives, that sometimes only we can see. Yet, they make sense. When we begin to listen to the parts of ourselves that were whispering into those moments when we felt most unseen, “I am here, love, and I see you.”

As things continue to collapse, more and more people will give themselves permission to go within, and to embody the authenticity they came here to embody. As we come home to ourselves, we will find one another and tap into that within us which in infinite.

May it be so.

What a week.

While things continue to unfold in Minneapolis, many of us are holed up inside as a winter storm passes through. We’ve been told this storm is one for the ages, so we’ve done the things we do in these moments: spent money many of us don’t have emptying store shelves with supplies we may need in the face of the impending storm. We know we are out here for ourselves, and we act as such.

Or, do we?

One of the striking things about watching things unfold in the Twin Cities is the contrast between opposing sides. One is frantic, moving from a place of distrust and fear, refusing to see the humanity in those they’ve deemed “other.” The other side is organized, courageous, clear in their devotion to community and to the shared humanity among us.

No matter which side of the ideological divide you may find yourself right now, it’s likely you’d agree with me. We can no longer take for granted a shared interpretation of the facts as they are presented. We are living in different realities, and that is only going to get more pronounced.

We are moving through a time of transformation unparalleled in our recorded history. We are all part of one infinite consciousness, here living in this particular time and place, moving around the world in bodies without a clue as to what we really are. We have lived for millennia under the control of systems that have kept us veiled in the illusion of separation. These systems have been sold to us under the guise of being civilized advancements for humanity, under the banner of religious ideology, though they come at the cost of humanity itself.

Our oneness is the most certain thing about us, the core of what it means to be part of creation.

You say that to most people and they look at you sideways. “There is no way I am part of That.” Part of being human is to live in the dream of separation. The collective journey is about finding our way back home in the oneness of our being.

The systems that have sought to govern our lives have convinced us so thoroughly of our separation that we have lost touch with the essence of reality itself. We can only know ourselves in community. The further we dive into the illusion of separation, the more detached we become from our neighbor and ourselves.

We are living through the collapse of the illusion and all of the things that have upheld it. Because these systems have been built upon the illusion of separation, they have been terminal from the start. As they come crashing down, the scaffolding is being revealed. And it is ugly.

The things we area hearing in the news and seeing on the streets right now are connected to the things we have seen settler colonialism do around the world. It’s Gaza; it’s Sudan; it’s Venezuela; the Congo. It’s Minneapolis. It’s the things Black folks have been saying all along. The fact that it’s now happening to white people on US soil is evidence of its end.

The system is eating those it has been designed to protect. Like a wounded animal, it strikes at anything on the growing list of potential threats.

The brutality of these systems is on full display. The question for each and all of us is what we will do with what we are shown.

I am not a binary thinker in any way, shape, or form, but we are in a moment where we have the option of choosing whether we want to continue to live in the illusion of separation or wake to the reality of our interconnectedness. Waking to the dream is not pretty, but it is honest. It is also already here. New ways of being are already emerging, in big and small ways all across the world. You just have to have the eyes to see it.

A friend and I were recently discussing the theology of The Highlander: a movie in the 80s and two later series in the 90s, one of them animated, about a group of immortals who battle each other one by one, until eventually there is only one remaining. This is definitely not a recommendation of the movie. Like many others, it hasn’t aged well, and includes a character played by Sean Connery who’s supposed to be Egyptian, but stick with me. . .

Each time these characters battle, they absorb the power from their foe, drawing into themselves the memories and abilities of a whole lineage of other immortal beings. Eventually, the final vanquisher absorbs all of the power from every previous immortal. The final prize is mortality, the capacity to procreate, and the ability to connect with the mind of every human being you meet, bringing forward the wisdom of millennia to help world leaders to govern from a place of oneness.

A frequent phrase on the The Highlander, especially before and during battles, is “there can be only one.” And this is where the theological underpinnings of The Highlander both hit and miss the mark. On one hand, it is true that there can be only one. But, that “one” isn’t limited to one person, but one creation. The movie, like so many of the narratives we’ve been given all our lives, still holds that this one needs to be an external savior.

There is no external savior. We are the people we’ve been waiting for, and we are the ones who will create the way ahead. We will do that by leaning into a belief in our shared humanity: by living in community together, by showing up for one another, by refusing to uphold the systems which have gotten us here, even if it means putting our bodies on the line.

Moving forward together means a willingness to die to the systems which have brought us here, which is to say to die to all that white supremacy likes to uphold, in favor of the oneness that is our true reality.

The tide is turning; you can feel it when you tune in. Yes, the moment is bleak, and yes, we are tired - many more than others.

But, we are here.

We are willing, and we are living lives of abundance in our communities that will far outlast this moment.

We are not only planting, but embodying the seeds of our collective.

We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

We are here.

Here we are.

This post originated as an email I was writing for Every Table. This is an extended version of that post, with more details about Audrey.

I love Epiphany. The stories of the Magi and of Jesus’ baptism are two of my favorites. I appreciate the expansiveness of holding both as moments of divine revelation. Both the gifts delivered by mystics and the abundance embodied in baptism show us something of what Jesus was about.

As I was writing an email about Epiphany on the afternoon of the 5th, I read a text from my friend Justin, whom I’ve known for over 30 years. Justin started dating one of my best friends, Audrey, in high school. They started dating our sophomore year and have been a collective fixture since.

“Audrey is dead” was all the text said.

I read it and put down the phone, turning it over as if I could somehow erase what I’d just read. As if I could somehow erase not only the minutes since reading that one of my longest friends had died, but as if I could go further back and change the preceding 24 hours and somehow put her soul back in her body. Or change the years before that which led to her relatively early departure from this planet.

Besides, I also had an email to write. Usually I can be flexible with timelines, but Epiphany comes on January 6. It’s kind of a one day shot.

I tried to write.

Nothing came.

I’m at a point in my healing journey where I can now see my responses to stimuli much more clearly than I could in the past. I laughed at myself a bit as I moved between trying to find words for my email and picking up my phone to re-read those three words which I knew weren’t going away.

Audrey is dead.

My friend is dead and she will not be coming back in the body she just left.

I know she will visit and will make her presence known in ways only her souls would; and, yet, loss of the body-ness of her specific form is gone, and it needs to be grieved.

I closed my computer and decided I could get to the email in the morning. I had a noon lunch meeting that offered a hard deadline. “Great,” I thought, “I always work best with the pressure of a deadline.”

Only then, as I opened my computer to write the next morning, there were still no words. I cut and pasted some stuff about Epiphany from other notes I’d written, about how it’s both a celebration of the Magi’s arrival after the birth of Jesus and, in the Eastern Church, a celebration of the baptism of Jesus and the start of his ministry. But, no words came.

This is a thing I’ve had happen over the last few years. I’ll try to do something I’ve always done, often done under pressure or expectation, only to find I cannot do it. It’s like I literally cannot move from the space of urgency that used to fuel my days.

I sent Charles a few texts hinting at my feeling of overwhelm and the necessity of meeting the deadline.

Charles: “You should take time to rest. Honor your body and y’all’s friendship”

Me: “We can’t afford that lol” I somewhat sarcastically replied.

Charles: “I think you should take 45 minutes today and go sit in the sauna.”

I resisted until it became clear that I wasn’t going to get anywhere with the email until I came back into my body.

I made an appointment at a local Sauna and sat in the heat for 45 minutes. I let my breath soften. I thought about Audrey, and the joys and many tragedies of her life, and the gift of knowing her.

Audrey was one of those people you meet sometimes whose life seems to be marked with a particular kind of loss. We met in 3rd grade, but became close the summer before our freshman year, the same summer her oldest sister was killed suddenly in a car accident. Claire was about to start college, and had taken a day trip with a friend to get dorm supplies. They were in a head-on collision, and both girls died. It wasn’t ever specifically named, but the loss of Claire felt like a lead blanket the family carried with them.

This weight didn’t leave the family. Since 2017, Audrey had lost lost her father, her remaining sister, and then her mother. At the time of her passing, she was the only remaining member of her family of origin. The weight of grief was undoubtedly a defining feature of her life; whether she ever found spaces to talk about that, I do not know. This acknowledgement adds to the weight of my own grief.

Audrey and I were part of a small group of friends in high school and stayed in touch loosely through college. She had a particular kind of enigmatic energy. I have an MFA in photography, and my work explored expectations of gender, class, and race from my hometown through images of this same group of women. Audrey emerged as the central subject in this body of work, and I spent a good bit of time photographing her and Justin in my last year of school. As I wrote in my final statement, “Audrey surfaces time and again as a stillness amidst the chaos of the settings in which she participates. Though a willing and active participant in each of these activities, it is as though Audrey is experiencing these events in a quiet, passive way that is distinctly different than the other women in the group. It is as though Audrey functions as a photographer without a camera; she is always there, engaged and watchful, but remains separate and aware of the idiosyncrasies of each activity as it develops.”

The process of photographing my friends became a way for us to get closer. Their trust felt like such an intimate gift, and eventually helped me feel my own belonging within the group. I often wondered about the weight I senses in Audrey’s eyes (which was easy to miss in person, but which came through strongly in photographs), and whether the loss of Claire had something to do with it. Looking back, I’m sure it did. I’ve also seen enough in the years since my MFA to know that our eyes say much more about us than can be experienced in one lifetime. The depth in Audrey’s eyes wasn’t just grief; it was wisdom earned through lifetimes, embodied specifically in this one.

Audrey was my friend when I didn’t have many friends. I was an awkward middle-and-high schooler; but, so was she. She was one of those people I could talk to and pick up like no time had passed. We’d recently re-connected and had been chatting more regularly. Our paths coming back together had the same mystical energy that I’ve experienced over the last few years, when something that has always been there suddenly takes on a new light. More than anything, it was nice to talk with her, to feel the ease of being known with such an old friend.

Sitting in the heat of the sauna, I let myself sit in the grief of losing her. I breathed in the heat of the room, watching my belly rise and fall. I am breathing. I am in this body.

Audrey is no longer breathing.

Audrey is no longer in her body.

No tears, but I let myself sit with it, to move past thinking about it and towards just being with the moment.

Sitting there, I had an epiphany of my own: Grief is essential for healing, and grief cannot be rushed.

Over the last few years as I’ve been focused on my healing journey, my relationship with time has been one of the biggest adjustments I’ve had to make. I realize how often a sense of urgency served as my motivator in the past: a nagging I couldn’t quite identify always keeping me go go going. I spent so much time trying to get to the next thing or replaying past things that I never sat with the one thing I could truly experience: the present moment.

Grief has a way of drawing us into the present moment unlike anything else. Grief can be messy and raw, hitting a live wire within ourselves that demands our attention. However painful it may be, grief has a way of releasing energy that needs to be cleared.

Grief is a way of remembering and honoring the love that connects us with the things we have lost. In our willingness to grieve, we are releasing the energy that binds us to the material and trusting it to the eternal. We are letting that relationship take on a new form as we honor the death of the old.

Every significant period of grief I have moved through has changed me; I always emerge as a fuller version of who I came here to be. Grief requires unabashed honesty and a willingness to look foolish for the sake of love transformed. My father died in 2011, and I’ve often said my relationship with him got so much easier without the weight of human existence. I know not only that he is with me, but that he loves and unconditionally supports me in ways he was not able to do from this side of the grave.

Another epiphany: the Epiphany we celebrate on January 6th didn’t happen on one specific day.

The day itself means different things even within the Christian tradition. It’s not about one specific day, but about what Jesus showed us in and through his life that we can access in our lives.

Jesus did not take on flesh and come into this world so that I would freak out about a deadline. Jesus took on flesh so that I would know the kind of abundance we embody when we are fully present to all that is - including but certainly not limited to my own grief.

As I write this, I have yet to experience the well of tears still waiting to spring from my eyes. I am still sitting with a layer of denial which I know will be washed away by sobbing.

I don’t want Audrey to be dead and I’m ok holding onto this feeling for a bit longer.

I know this denial will yield, and the tears will come.

The invitation for me is to slow down enough to let the grief wash over me, to remain present with whatever emerges and to honor that as the love that will always connect me with those who’ve passed on.

The other day, I woke up and saw that the little toe on my left foot was blue, as if bruised. I didn’t remember hitting it on anything, and it didn’t hurt to move or touch. I was trying to figure out what happened when it occurred to me: I’ve broken this toe once before, back in 1993, on the day Claire died. It felt like my body was making a reference to that day when the heavy blanket was cast over Audrey’s family, as if to say the cycle is closed. Healing can begin.

Another epiphany: God is present in our grief in a wholly unique way.

Grief is a necessary part of healing. It is no surprise that we have so little room for grief in today’s society. You cannot think your way through grief; it has to be embodied. Embodiment is a threat to systems that thrive when you are always looking outside yourself for the answer.

So much of our dis-ease in today’s world is because we’ve been taught to look for our reason and motivation for being outside of ourselves. Most of us are taught a false version of history to keep us in a state of anxiety about the future, without much time or attention given to the present that is the only true reality.

God is All that Is. When we allow ourselves the experience of grief, we allow more of All that Is. When we invite God into the mess, we find that God is already here; has been here, and has indeed been here all along. When we bear witness to one another’s grief, we both offer and receive a sacred gift.

I’ve had so many conversations with people who’ve lost loved ones recently. I’ve heard the sentiment echoed more than once that it feels like people are dying at a more rapid pace than usual. I don’t actually know about death rates, but I do know we are collectively sitting on centuries of unprocessed grief. The lies and half-truths we’ve told ourselves for centuries are catching up to us. You can see it coming out sideways in the ways people treat one another, in the way we treat ourselves.

Our capacity to be present with grief is directly connected to our capacity for joy. We need spaces to express our grief so we can open ourselves to the new possibilities being born in and through us. As we as a society claim space for grief, we will see how much time and energy we’ve spent avoiding being present to what is; and, in that process, we will find room for transformation.

Written upon this trinket are the words “I open at the close.” The main character has been carrying it around for almost a year at the time he finally understands that the closing is also the moment of his own opening.

“I open at the close.”

Over the last few years, but even more in the last few weeks, this is a phrase that has been coming up again and again.

In the midst of all of the turmoil in the world, and more acutely with the increased acceleration toward criminalizing trans people’s identities, it has become clear that his message is precisely the one I need right now.

The character knows that his kiss will open this trinket and reveal the stone inside that will connect him with his loved ones. By the time his lips touch the golden sphere in his hand, he is clear on his reason for living, and even more, clear that accepting his own death is part of the deal.

“I’m ready to die” he says, not knowing that he is about to be more alive than ever.

It’s wild how accepting the truth of our own mortality is so often the thing that enables us to transcend that mortality, to become the thing we have come here to be.

I open at the close.

When I was in seminary, mentor Dr. Brian Blount used to encourage us when interpreting confusing texts, to remember that it is often the more difficult interpretation that is correct. A scribe would be more likely to smooth over texts that seemed out of alignment with the tradition; yet, it is often those texts that expand our understanding of God and reality.

Sometimes the thing that makes absolutely no sense is the only thing that makes sense in hindsight.

Throughout my life, there have been so many things that only make sense from my current perspective. My life has been a circuitous journey, full of steps that confounded not only my family or friends, but often myself. I declared art as my major in college without ever having had an art class. I just knew I wanted to study photography, and can remember telling my confused mother that I was pursuing a BFA that it felt like a leap of faith I was supposed to take. I didn’t know the ways studying photography would give me the exact foundation I would need to understand light and energy from a theological perspective.

Only now, as things in the world continue to escalate, and as the systems around us fall, it is clear that I open at the close. The administration’s push to criminalize trans identities has me more invigorated than ever. I know the risk in being loudly and unapologetically trans, even more so in proclaiming that in the name of Jesus. And yet, I feel strangely equipped to meet this moment. Like I’ve been waiting not just this life, but for many lifetimes to open to meet this moment. And it’s not just me; I regularly meet people who express ambivalence in seeing the terror and destruction of this moment and also feeling like a part of them has been waiting for just this moment to be born.

I have said many times and will continue to say that we are on the verge of the most profound awakening we have known in our recorded history. The pressure of these systems crumbling is the crucible of our collective becoming.

So, if you’ve been feeling similarly invigorated by this moment, consider this an invitation to lean into that becoming. Be as weird as you need to be; you will you find your people and you will find the support you need.

Now is the time for radical authenticity, to claim the fullness of who we came here to be, on an individual and collective scale.

We open at the close.

It is time, my friends.

It is time.

It’s not about avoiding the body but about knowing that it’s part of the game I am here to play. The more present I am in my body, the more I connect with that which is eternal within me, and the more I see that eternal self is the place where we all meet.

Yoga challenges me to stay in the moment, to listen to my body and let the noise fall away. It is a mirror showing me where I am on any given day, and invitation to stretch just a little bit more into the realm of what is possible.

I am here to live as abundantly as I can for as long as I can. I am undeterred by what the world says is impossible. My body is a testament to redefining what is possible.

I know who I am, and I know what I am here to do.

Gah…What a fucking gift it is to be alive.

When I think about the human condition at this moment in history, I imagine all of humanity existing together in a maze of glass. The glass is slightly obscured, so we can see one another, but we remain separated. The walls of the maze get higher and thicker the closer you get to the center. Even though we are all at the same base level, the light moves through this looming tower in such a way that it gives the illusion that those who are closer to the center loom larger than the rest of us. So, we spend our days looking upward, at the only thing that takes us out of the monotony of our cramped surroundings, towards the center of the maze. We spend all our resources and energy focused on the center of the maze. Some spend their lives striving to achieve it, some resent it and spend their days speaking against it. Yet, this looming tower of illusion and separation remains the focus.

Those in the center of the maze also look upward, confusing their own exaggerated image with an equally grandiose achievement. Only, the achievement is as lonely and empty as the system that created it. So they spend their days in an ongoing Sisyphean task of climbing higher and higher, only for the walls to get thicker and thicker around them. The higher they climb, the more disconnected from humanity they become. In order to uphold the projection of power that’s ultimately built on an illusion, they establish exploitative systems to keep everyone dependent on the very thing which is killing them, including themselves.

After millennia of being stuck in this maze, we’ve been so conditioned that we’ve convinced ourselves it is our true reality. Even though we sense there is something more substantive connecting us all, the idea of tearing down this labyrinth of illusion seems far too dangerous. Too difficult. Too dangerous. Too much glass.

Of course, there have been those who’ve realized the whole setup is a sham, and have created more sustainable ways of being. These folks have remained tethered to their humanity amidst a dehumanizing system and have embodied liberation throughout history, modeling for those stuck in the maze that there is another way to live. Often because of their proximity to the margins of this maze of glass, they’ve created lives beyond the reach of the looming tower’s gaze, serving as proverbial hammers to those who know there has to be more than this prison of glass. These folks come along - prophets and mystics who show us the way out, and are often killed before their message takes hold and threatens to topple the whole setup.

We are at a moment in history where the towers of illusion and separation are crashing down.

For thousands of years, systems of dominance wearing the cloak of religion, nationality, and racial superiority have exploited the experience of separateness to keep us afraid of ourselves and one another. They’ve drawn boundaries around everything from land to identity, taking the inherent abundance of embodied possibilities and codifying them in order to maintain power and control. Over time, our connection with creation and with our true nature has been nearly severed. But that is coming to an end.

Because the systems have been built upon the illusion of separation and the lie of individuality, they’ve been doomed from the start.

Those who are deeply invested in these walls remaining are doing all they can to maintain the illusion: the lies get more grandiose. It’s almost comical watching the news some nights, listening to the ways commentators spin web after tangled web, selling the same old story about the greatness of the very values which reinforce the lies which maintain our separation from one another.

The inevitability of these systems falling is certain. How they come down is not.

The invitation before us in this moment is to turn our gaze from the looming tower long enough to look down at ourselves with courageous honesty; to see one another and let ourselves be seen. While empire wants to keep us as distracted from ourselves and distant from one another as possible, the healing work comes in slowing down, finding our breath and our center in community with those who long for a more authentic way of being. As we engage this work of reconnection with ourselves and one another, we will realize that we all have our own hammers: those flashes of authenticity that connect us to the truth of our own being and our interconnectedness as a global community. Not only is these hammers of authenticity the tools that will tear down the walls of separation that have divided us for so long, but they are also the ones we will use to build a new world, together.

As we bear witness to the death rattle of the systems which have dominated our lives for centuries, we enter a new era. It is time for radical authenticity. The future is unwritten; we are dreaming it into existence as co-creators with one another and with the divine. Yes, there will be broken glass. Yes, there will be uncertainty. But there will also be authenticity, healing, and connection beyond our wildest imagination; not only with one another, but with all of creation.

I was recently called “the T word” for the first time in a long time. It was by a Presbyterian executive in a meeting with other Presbyterians. It happened so fast, I almost missed what happened. It wasn’t said with any malice; it sounded more like a joke by someone who hadn’t realized the impropriety of what they were saying. Or perhaps a Freudian slip, where someone accidentally belts out the very thing they aren’t supposed to say, but which is in the forefront of their mind.

I posted a video about this experience on my various social media platforms, mostly so people know it’s a thing that happens. A number of folks reached out to offer support, and several suggested I move forward with pressing charges against this person within the judicial system of the denomination.

In all honesty, my first thought was to chuckle. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the care; I was moved by the ways in which people wanted to act in response to what happened. Yet, I am regularly in conversation with people who believe trans people are an offense against God who only made men and women. These folks will either directly or indirectly tell me that my identity is a farce and an affront to God, and that I should not, in their opinion, exist. Does the church intend to bring charges against those people as well? Of course not, because they are using the Bible as justification for their perspective. Nevermind that this reading of scripture is rooted in a colonized perspective that seeks to take the inherent diversity of an abundant creation and reduce it down into a restrictive, binary understanding of the human condition.

While I truly appreciate the care implicit in the desire to hold this person accountable for their use of a slur, this response misses the bigger picture, and the complex ways in which restrictive assumptions about gender and about how we live in our bodies have permeated our lives for centuries. People jump to a desire to punish someone for calling me a slur, but do nothing when their colleagues or parishioners rant about the “transgenders (sic.) taking things too far by letting kids be trans.” It also misses how deeply gender norms and expectations have been baked into the culture of the Institutional church.

I often wonder if the desire to punish such displays of transphobia is a way of avoiding seeing the transphobia within ourselves. White folks do this with racism all the time: we will rush to punish and call in the person who says the racist thing out loud, without ever taking the time to look at the ways in which our own actions and assumptions maintain an inherently racist system. We then become more focused on policing other’s behavior than examining our own. We’ve been taught such a punitive way of being for so long that punishment in the form of “accountability” is our only response to harm done. We love pointing out the splinters in other’s eyes, never seeing the plank in our own. Our well-intentioned selves want to make right the wrong we’ve seen in another’s actions, often avoiding the ways in which we perpetuate the same assumptions they are embodying in doing so.

I’m not saying we don’t need systems of accountability. Quite the opposite: I envision a world in which accountability implies repair and healing, not only for those harmed, but also for those who’ve done the harming.

We continue to try and fix, when the only way we will ever truly be free is to heal. Fixing leaves us in a state of perpetual lack, looking for problems that get all our time and energy, keeping us busy without any room for self-reflection. Fixing prevents us from stepping back and seeing the bigger picture, of asking questions about whether or not this thing we are spending all of our time trying to hold together really needs to fall apart. It’s difficult to separate this from the larger conversations that are happening about how to fix the Institutional church. It feels like we’re saying on one hand, use of slurs is inappropriate. But on the other, we are going to do all we can to keep together the system which laid the foundation for people feeling justified in using that slur.

Healing takes humility and acknowledging that we don’t have it figure out. It means going slower, building in time for listening and reflection. This process means learning to hold space for ourselves and one another where we can cultivate true vulnerability and tenderness.

This doesn’t mean we do not act; it means we learn to act from a space of abundance, rather than scarcity. Once we find the stillness within ourselves and with one another, we will know the right steps to take.

People often ask me what they can do to support trans people right now, and every time I will say the best thing you can do to support trans people is by looking at the ways in which gender norms and expectations are preventing you from living in the fullness of your being. Because gender norms and expectations have been so deeply ingrained in our society, they can be especially difficult to see within ourselves. The desire to fix circumstances for trans folks comes from a righteous place; yet, is ultimately is ineffective without any self-examination around ways those norms and expectations inform how we see ourselves and move in the world.

This is not to say we don’t need advocacy or protection for trans people - we definitely do. But any advocacy which fails to acknowledge the interconnected nature of our struggles for liberation will be insufficient in creating any real or lasting change. Deconstructing the ways gender norms and expectations prevent us from living into the fullness of our being reveals the depth of infiltration these norms and expectations have made into our psyches. This process also reveals the interconnected nature of our struggles on a global scale. If someone is outraged about trans folks not having access to healthcare, for example, but cannot manage to say anything about every hospital in Gaza being destroyed, their advocacy is little more than a noisy gong or a clanging symbol. By taking off the rose-colored lenses of a white-washed history, we begin to see how deeply we have been indoctrinated into a binary way of thinking that maintains separation and the illusion of duality.

The healing work of decolonizing our minds is messy and rigorous; yet, healing will only happen through an honest examination of the ways in which these systems have forced us to forfeit the fullness of our humanity. When cisgender folks begin to unpack how they’ve been taught to see their embodiment, we will see exponential changes in how we live and relate to one another. This is when the magic really starts to happen.

One thing that gets me in conversations with cisgender folks about gender, even with those who are genuinely accepting of trans people, is how often they miss that we are actually the gift. So often people want to see us as victims in a particular way, which can entirely miss that trans people have claimed who they are despite the overwhelming and incessant noise in a society that tells us that we shouldn’t. Trans people are the embodiment of a way of being that shows humanity how to do something new and truly co-creative with the divine.

By claiming home in our bodies despite the overwhelming noise that tells us to do otherwise, we are revealing the lies of biological determinism and inviting others, cisgender and transgender alike, to do the same. We aren't victims or charity cases; we are among the leaders and guides inviting humanity into a new way of living.

We are at a time in history when all ties to an imperial way of being are crumbling. For thousands of years, all of Creation has experienced the brutal effects of systems built upon domination. A combination of theocratic imperialism, supremacist ideology, and exploitative economic systems have ravaged the planet and anything connecting us to Her. Because they have been built upon the illusion of separation, these systems have been doomed from the start. We are now bearing witness as they live out their natural lives.

The Institutional church is central among those institutions which are crumbling. One of the things the church has done most successfully is convincing humanity that God is something that exists outside of ourselves, and that we need an external entity to connect us with the divinity that is inherent to our very being. As the walls of separation come crashing down, something new is being born. Everything that has supported the illusion of separation is being washed away as we begin to see the ways in which we are connected as a living Body beyond the boundaries of any human-made institution.

There is a phrase in the Presbyterian Book of Order that says the Church is to be a community of faith, entrusting itself to God alone, even at the risk of its own life.” (F.1.0301). I get so excited sometimes when I imagine what it will look like if we took that seriously; first, by acknowledging the reality of what’s happening. Whether we like it or not, we are living through the death rattle of the Church as we know it.

It is up to us to decide how to meet this moment. Rather than denying the reality of what is happening, what would it be like if we embrace it? If we took this time to dream together and imagine a world built on connection, vulnerability, and true accountability that enables everyone to see not only that they are held in love, but that they are an indispensable part of the community? What would it be like if we leaned into vulnerability and entrusted ourselves to God and one another, without the big endowments or arguments over property or church attendance?

We don’t need money to be the Church; we only need one another. As we lean into the abundance that is inherent to our very being, we will see the gifts we offer one another when we step into the fullness of who we came here to be. Because the reality is that, just as something is ending, something new and more beautiful than we could possibly imagine is being born. I am certain that as we begin to lean into that certainty, we will experience more abundance than we could possibly imagine.

I woke up without realizing I was on the wrong side of the bed. I didn’t hear the trigger, but I felt the bullet searing through my solar plexus, flaming up through my throat, but not without burning past my heart.

Within 5 minutes I was stuck, lost, wondering how it could be that the 42 year-old ass holding me up is the same one that by age 4 had already learned the sting of leather, the lashes of generations of unacknowledged trauma coming out across my 4-year-old backside.

Only, I’m not 4, but 42, and my words carry a sting in the way they didn’t then. My partner asked me a question, and I barked back a short reply. It wasn’t anything particularly harsh, more just my tone. Yet, my words hurt, and seeing the hurt they caused, as I was trying so hard to move through the pain that felt like it was bursting out of every pore, became too much.

“I just want to die,” I said.

“I really just want to be dead.”

And then I crumbled into the pool of tears that were so common that year.

About an hour later, after I’d found center and made amends with my partner, we ventured into our day. We were about 2 hours from home, out for a few days to hike and enjoy the mountains. On our way from the hotel to the start of our trek about 20 miles away, we pulled up to a red-light and stopped behind a gold Prius: the only other car at the intersection.

On the back of the Prius was a single bumper sticker, reading “Along for the journey.” It was a familiar bumper sticker to me because I was the one who designed it, while working as the youth programs director at a local organization serving queer and trans youth.

I designed the bumper sticker as a way to remind people - particularly queer folks - that they aren’t alone on their journey through this often painful world.

And as I sat at that stoplight staring at my own words, I was awestruck.

If the universe knows I am stubborn enough that my own words are the only ones I will hear in those moments when I am most overwhelmed, and if the abundant life that created all life will then use my own words to remind me of my belovedness, the least I can do is keep on living.

This memory hit me anew sometime in the last couple of years, when I uncovered a treasure trove of goodies from my childhood that have illuminated my years growing up in a new way.

Among old journals, school projects, and photos from the early 80s, I found the tattered red folder that held the poem. My jaw dropped as I remembered the poem I read: a Shel Silverstein classic called “The Long Haired Boy.”

The poem tells the story of a boy who has long hair, and is endlessly mocked by his peers because of it. The boy goes to his room and begins to cry; he cries so hard that his little body shakes. Not only his body, but his hair starts to shake as well, eventually becoming wings.

The boy then takes flight, leaving the solace of his room and circling overhead as the whole town, whose cruel mockery had just moments before sent him away crying, now cheered him on, pleading with him to come down as their newfound hero. The boy drops a few gentle tears as he looks upon the villagers below, smiles a gentle smile, and flies away.

In that red folder, just above the poem is an introduction, in my 4th-grade cursive, which says, “The poem I have chosen to read is about a boy with hair so long it makes him the town hero!”

Right there, in my own handwriting, my 9-year-old self knew not only who I was, but also saw that the very thing that set me apart - specifically with regard to my gender identity - was the very thing that would give me wings.

If you’d asked me in the early stages of my coming out if I’d known about my sexuality or gender identity from a young age, I would have said I had no idea. I could’ve named a certain ambivalence when it came to being a girly girl, but when I was growing up in East Texas in the 1980’s, there was no language for a non-binary gender identity.

In many ways, not knowing was a blessing. I didn’t know at the time that the ever-present sense of anxiety, isolation, and undefined otherness was pointing to a larger conversation between my body and my spirit that I was not yet ready to have. I didn’t know the feelings I had about my body had a name, that this sense of otherness I felt while looking at myself in the mirror was actually dysphoria. I didn’t know that feeling could ever be dissipated, or that all the parts of transitioning would invite me home into my own body in a way that would connect me to the infinite within.

I certainly didn’t know that coming home to my body and claiming my gender and sexuality would be so closely tied to claiming my call to serve in the world. Yet, to try and separate out my sense of call from my gender identity is like trying to separate hydrogen or oxygen from water: you can do it, but you’re not going to have the same thing in the end. Claiming my gender identity has been essential to fully embodying my call to healing in this world. My experience of being trans has shown me that living fully into our human experience is the way we learn to live here, and as we learn to live here, we discover the magic that already exists and the kind of magic we can create in collaboration with the divine.

And yet, looking back on my experiences and seeing through the eyes of my 9-year-old self, I can see clearly that I knew exactly who I was. Not only that, but I knew that opening myself up to the tenderest parts of my own experience would be the ticket to not only my freedom, but an invitation to others to experience theirs as well.

Because we have such deeply embedded norms around gender and sexuality, many people go their whole lives without ever asking what it means to live in the body as a gendered being. Trans people coming out can trigger people who’ve never examined the harmful narratives they’d been taught about gender and sexuality growing up. We are cruel to people who represent a part of ourselves that we never allowed to exist.

The presence of someone living freely in their body when you’ve been punished anytime in your life when you’ve tried to do so can be painful in unacknowledged ways ways. And unacknowledged pain too often comes out sideways on those who could otherwise show us a path toward our own freedom.

Trans folks are willing to ask the scary questions society so often tells us not to ask. Going to that space - where we ask the questions we’re taught never to ask - transforms you. The person who emerges is different from the one who went in. Not only that, but that transformation has a way of expanding to the communities around us, who’ve seen us grow and bloom and claim who we are and who we love. Folks see us do it and start to see that they can, too. Not just trans folks, or even queer folks, but all folks. There’s nothing more beautiful than a cisgender man giving himself permission to be tender, or a cisgender woman finally claiming the strength she’s been told to push down all her life. That’s where the real transformation happens: when trans people are no longer seen as either outcasts or heroes, but inspirations on how to live so abundantly within our bodies that we claim the divinity that’s been here all the time.

At the end of the poem, the long haired boy doesn’t heed the pleading of the townspeople to come down and save them. He does something better. By flying proudly, he models for them that they, too, can fly. Even at his young age, he knows that true transformation will only come when the people below understand that they have within them exactly what they need to fly, just beyond the limits of their own expectations.

My experience in November, 2024 was different. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the election results. After an initial moment of finding my breath, I found clarity and resolve I hadn’t yet cultivated eight years before. I feel prepared and am more certain now than ever of the importance of what we are doing at Every Table. The work we have done over the last three years has transformed the way I understand myself and my calling here. While not reducing the potential impact of this administration on myself and so many people I love, I know I was made for this moment. I look forward to the next few years as a time of deep transformation and healing of our communities and the world.

I have been saying for years that we are going through a time of transformation unparalleled in our recorded history, and I will continue to say it. The systems we have known and relied upon are crumbling before us, to give way for something new and profound to be born.

The next few years will be chaotic, but they will also open our eyes to new ways of understanding and living in relationship with one another. We need one another more than ever right now. As we learn to lean into our vulnerabilities and into community, we will see the abundance that is already here and will carry us into the future.

We have before us an invitation to claim a fuller life: a way of being beyond the oppressive systems which are killing us all and destroying the planet. We are being called, collectively, to step into that future where every child born has what they need to live into who they came here to be. The only way answer that calling is is together.

Over the last few years, I’ve been practicing being still, doing meditation consistently and I am humbled every time by the kind of focus it takes to just BE here and now. And what’s striking is how often, when I am meditating and my mind wanders off, it goes to the same thoughts or behaviors that I have been doing to avoid being present elsewhere in my life - the same things that reinforce shame - that fear the moon.

The more I am learning to just BE, the more I’ve been thinking of myself as part of this place - this boundless beautiful creation and the tragedy and joy and abundance and hope and rage of it all. I am part of the earth and everyone and everything on it, and the moon pulls the tides, and the oceans become sky, become rain, and the water covers the earth. The water pours down on me, every raindrop a reminder that I am so very loved.

And it’s then that I realize the moon has not been bringing out a monster all this time. There never was a monster.

The moon has been patiently and consistently beckoning me to dance.

.

I was born in the Spring of 1979, the day before Mother’s Day. My mom will still talk about the flowers they delivered to all of the new moms on her floor that year, and about her sister, who desperately wanted a daughter, coming to visit and crying when she saw that my mom had now given birth to two. I am the third of four children born to my parents who were both simultaneously young and old beyond their years. Like most Baby Boomers, they’d grown up in homes with parents still carrying the very real effects of trauma from the war, yet without any resources for how to process their pain. It wasn’t until my adulthood that I was able to see my parents as 3-dimensional humans with their own set of lived experiences that made them complicated creatures. I came into the world just like humans do: as an infinite spirit living within a tiny human frame, born into flesh without a clue as to the magnificence existing within.

All of us come in without a clue in terms of worldly knowledge. We don’t know how to speak, we can’t yet walk or feed ourselves. We don’t know the expectations people have for us, or what we want to be when we grow up. We don’t know about bank accounts or mountains or clouds. We know nothing of the expansiveness of the cosmos, or what it feels like to fall in love or to have our hearts broken. If we live long enough and go through those experiences, we may go out realizing we don’t have a clue, and yet we are somehow much more resigned to that understanding at the end of life than we are coming in. The part between the coming and going is where the magic really happens: that space between birth and death when we learn all we learn about life and mortality and wounding and joy. I love meeting people who’ve lived enough life to know that these fleshy incarnations are not the extent of who or what we are. Whether we live for 100 minutes or 100 years, the point of life is to live it - to be so abundantly here for all that life brings that we eventually see that this life isn’t all there is, that our fleshy skin suits are not all that we are, but are merely vessels for experiencing what it is to be embodied.

Though we come into this plane without a clue in terms of worldly knowledge, we are much closer to an understanding of what we truly are when we are born. Birth and death are liminal spaces, where the veil between this plane of reality and that which transcends this plane is particularly thin. As my father was nearing the end of his two year battle with cancer, he began asking for his mother.

“Mama” he called out, in a voice that had by that time become little more than a whisper. Yet, he gently cried out still, not as if asking for her to be with him, but as if to tell her, “I’m here, Mama. Here I am.”

As he lay dying, my dad reached out his arm and wrapped his hands into a gentle fist, as if grasping fruit from a tree. He then brought his hand down to his mouth and slowly ate a piece of delicious fruit only he could see.

As I move on day by day

I see many a face.

With each one I ask -

Where is my place?

I look to the girl

Sitting by my side.

Is she my long lost friend,

Whom I long to be my guide?

Yet, as she stands up

and goes her own way

I know I won’t find my place,

at least not today.

I then come upon a boy

sitting alone on the grass.

And I ask to myself,

Could my place be with this little lass?

But, as he rises from his seat

and walks to his own home,

my heart begins to sink

as once again, I’m all alone.

Then, standing before me,

With their arms open wide,

a young couple invites me in

to join them by their side.

What could it be,

this new thing I’ve found

has indeed always been there

just waiting for me to come around.

It is indeed my church

with its mighty steeple.

Yes, the one that opens up

to all the little people.

Only, it’s not just the building

that I should make myself a part,

But the hope of [hu]mankind

that I will hold in my heart.

My place is kindness.

My duty is love,

And to spread the word

of our God above.

Whether it be on the street

or in a hospital that I teach,

I must set an example

for all of those that I can reach.

Each day may not bring laughter,

each night has not pretty dreams,

but it is all a part

of a much bigger scheme.

A scheme where each thing has a purpose

and a plan fills every space,

where everyone is able to find

their own special place.