Love’s Boot Camp

This blog is in reply to this one.

You are in solitude for 11 years, drinking and redrinking the poison that nourished you when you were male – the poison of putting sex before love, mind before body, thought before feeling, numbness before pain. In solitude, you become a woman who patterns herself after the divine feminine; after the matter that holds that which never dies. As such, you need pure polyamorous love to become yourself, yet, when you were male this love was so alien that your femaleness has no structures for receiving it.

When you were male, society taught you to date, fuck and marry – replacing your mother with your partner, so that you and she may take your parents’ place; forfeiting your right to your own life to your parental and spousal responsibilities, to someday join your ancestors in the grave. Now, that you are female, polyamorous and alone, you are in limbo. Dating, fucking and marriage are nothing more than a coffin to you.

Thank goodness for the Internet. A woman reads your blog and contacts you because she likes it. Over the next months you & she fall in love. It is a dream-love that carries a perfection that boldly announces itself as beyond understanding. It tells you that you are to Heaven as your dream-lover is to Earth.

You leave solitude to stay with her – for how long you don’t know. You share a lot and work hard. You call this time together “boot camp.” Military images reflect this in your dreams.

During the first weeks, patterns of the male-identified person you were in previous relationships fall away. You rest in the darkness between you instead of resisting the demons the darkness may produce.

You each learn to be parent & child to the other – quite consciously navigating roles most people are unaware they are re-enacting. Your lover says that there is a realer way of being than this; a way of being in which the instinct of the child & the wisdom of the adult are integrated into a more complete form of being.
You learn to be quiet and peaceful in your lover’s presence; nurturing a kind of solitude within your companionship. Your lover says this is, “really really really really really really really really really really really important.”

Your lover says that it is not good to melt too much into the comfort of being lovers; that there need to be boundaries.

You draw closer and closer. Your male resistance to the feminine dissolves into intimacy. You never thought you would ever again feel so close to a partner. It is a closeness that was sacred to your male self. He did not understand that this closeness loses its sacredness when lovers sacrifice spiritual self-interest to it – when they are committed to each other more than to their own selves.

One night you go to sleep beside her ensconced in amorous bliss and the next morning she awakes from a dream in tears – in the solitude of her grief; grief she has been processing heroically since her mom’s passing 9 months prior; grief elemental to her being, that creates a path through which the Earth herself mourns through her. Through her, the Earth mourns the life her people have not learned to live – the life that finds no fertile soil, that is squandered, wasted and raped; that is traded for romance and children. Your lover will not trade this life for your love, nor anything else.

Animated with this life - the life of the Earth - she burns with a passion no one who is less self-aware than the Earth is of herself may touch, or even glimpse.
For days, you have been overhearing mention of “fire,” and now your lover is burning with life no commitment ring may contain. She is glaring at you with eyes that say, “Stay the fuck away.” Mercifully, she takes leave of you, driving into Nature, which receives her as a lover more true and ultimate than any human being.

You honor your lover’s process like you honor the Earth, and God – but you do not know how to stay clear of her fire when it is time to. Her fire burns you even when you are trying to give it the space it needs – and she acts like she cannot trust whether you are up to this task.

Her fire brings light to your deepest codependency issues; “Only if you are OK, am I OK…If you are OK and I am not, and your love cannot ease my pain, you will take it personally, as if I have done something wrong to you. And then you are not OK. When you are not OK, it is always because of me. When you are not OK, you are going to take it out on me by being short with me and giving me a cold shoulder - acting like I am cancer, genocide, rape, schizophrenia, heroin, the 20th centruy, and your sexually abusive parent wrapped into one - and you will do this until I am so miserable that I will submit to whatever you want. I will act and say whatever you want because you mother me, and I have no other mother.”

Only, everything is new now, because you are own mother, for whom there is no substitute. In honor of this awareness, you let your lover leave you for as long as she needs to; to serve the life within herself that she shares with the Great Mother. Without sharing the depths of the Great Mother’s sorrow, the heights of her joy are unreachable – and the river of eternal love must be dammed by the tick-tock of marriage and/or divorce or death.

Your lover gradually cools to a more relational place. Once the fallout has settled, you more clearly see the boundaries you need so that relationship does not to devolve into a disease that only drama may remedy.

Some lovers pretend the vows they make will conquer drama. No vow is up to this task. Your lover & yourself have a vow that serves drama well. It reads:

I trust myself.
I trust you.
I trust our love.
I trust our process.
And that is my Source.

You trust that neither you nor your lover will exchange the life you each share with the Earth for the comfort of the other’s bed – because you trust that Heaven & Earth will not allow it, since you serve them purely, and with awareness; and since you & she are not less than vessels of Heaven & Earth, amidst a process you trust, that is part of the eternal river neither of you may lose.

My Super-Fancy Sexuality

I first identified as female in 2000. The female I identified with was a spirit-mother that manifested through dreams and emerged through my body during meditation - after I let go of the male identity I had formed in response to the world: one of lust, numbness, rage and comedy; and without dignity. Underneath that, I discovered I was a child, male & female, and an “all-powerful being” named “Rose Mary Pillowwater.” There was not much of me that was acting as an adult in the world. My adult self was serving my inner-world. Although, glimpses of my adult self came frequently in visionary states, for example:

“A naked, ten-year-old girl emerged inside me. She was missing her glasses. Her hair was blond. Her body had been unloved. She was alienated from it and knew nothing about sex. She had been cocooned in my male self’s lust and fear of feeling for a long time. She was my body. I let her explore it.

“To let her feel her face, I had to let it completely relax. She was slack-jawed, like the sort of kid who is unaware of how loudly they are breathing because they are so involved in a book. When I was a kid, I had hated kids who breathed like that. I hated kids who ate loudly. I hated the sound of saliva. I hated my body as the world hated it.

“In 1979, when I was eleven, there were a lot of kids on TV because it was the International Year of the Child. I cringed to hear kids speaking on TV because they sounded like idiots to me, and I felt embarrassed for them.

“As a thirty-two-year old, I loved the ten-year-old girl inside me. She began to explore herself erotically and became lustful her own self and clutched at the new feeling, trying to hold it close so that it wouldn’t go away. In response, my soul sent forth an adult version of her into my body; a blond woman in her twenties, wearing colorful, sexy clothing, in command of erotic life – not needing it too much or fearing it. The woman was nourished by eros. She did not need to clutch it. Her power was humbling. The ten-year-old girl was frightened and went back into hiding.

“The woman lived in the World, where eros is free. In the world the ten-year-old girl was from, eros was illicit and pornographic. It had to be since it was so magnificent in contrast to the rest of existence. In her world people forsook their souls in exchange for eros. Then, it was no longer purely eros, but was weighted with aires, eros’ primordial companion.”

In the last weeks this woman has been awakening through me, as I have sexually active for the first time in 12 years – and for the first time without testicles. It gets erect, is received into the vagina, has orgasms; without testosterone, with eros pure.

I dreamed I was going down on Coyote Marie and something small and hard came out of her, into my mouth – a baby tooth – a reference to vagina dentata; the toothed vagina. My mature, female eros is ready to grow in, as adult teeth do

I had another dream referring to the immaturity of my former self’s sexuality:

I am in a supermarket looking at peanut butter. There is super-fancy peanut butter that usually costs $65, but is on sale for $49. Beside it is kids’ peanut butter, with jelly and banana mixed in, for only $0.59. One seems too expensive, and the other too cheap to be any good.

The cheap peanut butter is my male sexuality, sexuality any boy can claim just by showing up. It’s ingredients are the banana (penis), jelly (semen) and the feminine peanut butter; all mixed, gloppy, confused, not so nourishing. The other peanut butter is smooth, creamy, delectable, nourishing, highly valuable and feminine.

Another thing about peanut butter is that the oil in it makes me sore and a bit slow. Sex will do that, too, leaving one in a pacified stupor if it is too frequent.

One thing I love about being a woman with a woman is the absence of urgency. There is nothing in the back of my mind thinking, “Ok, let’s cut to the chase and get on the penetration.” Sometimes intercourse happens – sometimes not…I am exquisitely aware of my scrotum empty except for the sensuality of labia…Eros is no longer visual – I keep my eyes closed most of the time. Instead of seeing what I am getting, I feel what I have. Erotic sensibility is self-renewing, erupting in slow-motion.

Coyote Marie had this dream:

I’m at school. The dorms are spacious – a big building with library and computer lab – grander than in waking-life. Amy and I lay close on a twin bed, on our backs, our legs up and out, resting there. And two girls are laying supine on the bottom half of the bed, their heads beneath our uplifted thighs.

Amy and I make up little games to play – sweet learning-playing games. One is a spinning mobile with charms, toys, dolls, etc. We play by spinning it and then reaching in and taking out one of the hanging things and showing it.

Then it’s time for the morning line-up. I step out into the hallway, outside my door, Chippy sits in a chair. We’re having a lovely chat. All around people are rushed – rather amok, and we’re all, “What’s the big deal?” We’re right where we need to be, on time, here, now.

The door opens again and Amy steps out. Chippy and I look at her and see how beautiful she is. She stands with shy confidence. Her outfit is stunning: a shiny cream shirt layered with a shiny spring green top peeking out, and a wrap of peachy-orange – all of it silky and flowy and light. Behind her right ear is an open peachy darker-orange hibiscus.

The day after the dream I felt deeply in touch with my erotic being – not in a horny way, but in a self-possessed way. I told Coyote Marie, “I want to give you my body,” something that would not have occurred to me to say when I was male.

As it turned out, she was called away to make a delivery of flowers. I told her, “I still want to give you my body.”

“When I get back,” she said.

The delivery was of flowers – of the exact colors I was wearing in her dream, and they were to a “Rose Mary.”

I was humbled.

The next day I threw out the old, kid-sized toothbrush I had been using, and unpackaged an adult-sized one.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.

Popess Sophia to Excommunicate Cultural Christianity

Transwoman Jo Clifford stars in a one-woman performance called “Jesus: Queen of Heaven.” A synopsis of the performance reads:

“Jesus is a transsexual woman. And it is now she walks the earth. This is a play with music that presents her sayings, her miracles, and her testimony. And she does not condemn the gays or the queers or the trans women or the trans men, and no, not the straight women nor the straight men neither. Because she is the Daughter of God, most certainly, and almost as certainly the son also. And God’s child condemns nobody. She can only love...”

In 2000, a couple days after I first identified as female, I went into a ten-hour meditation during which Rose Mary Pillowwater emerged through my body. At one point during the meditation I heard “heavenly people” calling to me, “The Queen is here!” This was before I had a sense of who or what a “Queen of Heaven” might be. But later it was plain that they meant the Queen of Heaven; the post-apocalyptic vessel of Sophia, the wisdom of Christ’s inner-woman, through whom Christ must first be reborn if he is ever to be reborn in the flesh as he lived in the flesh as Jesus.

The Queen of Heaven is the essence of receptivity, life-force and balance in every man, accentuated dramatically in those who change sex.

Predictably, “Jesus: Queen of Heaven” has met controversy, about which The Independent wrote: “Protesters lit candles, sang hymns and brandished placards saying: ‘Jesus, King of Kings, Not Queen of Heaven,’ and ‘God: My Son Is Not A Pervert.’

The Sunday after reading about the play, Coyote Marie & I went to church – my first time for a Sunday service in nearly 30 years. Poignantly, the sermon was based on Matthew 7: 1–5:

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.”

Our Sunday morning, churchgoing preparations were remarkably similar to those of my youth: angst, strife and hurt feelings (not between CM & I). I wondered if Sunday morning could ever be any different while spirituality remains alien to everyday life.

In preparation, a scab got torn off my right shin and blood soaked through my white tights. Hot chocolate and lipstick stained the bottom of my white blouse – blood, chocolate and lipstick. It felt sacramental.

One reason we went is because we are planning a performance of our own, to be patterned after Mass; but rescuing Christ from it, revisioning him through the eye of Sophia.

The service was held at Wayfarers Chapel, pictured above; a wondrous place. One of the opening readings was from Thich Naht Hanh, about awareness, compassion, and being at peace in the wholeness of mind & body. This was followed by a silent meditation that lasted perhaps five minutes – long enough to really feel the silence. I thought of how in the Catholic church, moments of silence were short and perfunctory, tolerated impatiently without being received.

And there was man without shoes. I said to Coyote Marie, “How can you be barefoot in church?”

She replied, “This is California.”

It is – and here in Orange County, Christian conservativism is entrenched. A man two pews in front of us wore a t-shirt that read, “You know it. I know it: Rush runs America.” In God’s stead?

The minister was a young guy, just getting his bearings. Citing his youth, he read a collection of wise sayings from a 90-year-old, which may have appealed to Rush fans in culturally-condoned moments of humility. My least favorite was, “Don’t take yourself seriously. No one else does.”

Not taking oneself seriously is how one is able to cope without possession of one’s innate dignity.

Perhaps the axiom would be better stated: “Take others seriously, even if you cannot take yourself seriously.”

Afterward we went to a farmer’s market by a harbor, and bought dates, apples and spinach pie that we ate in the sun.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday updates are posted to Amy George’s other blog Ask the Dream Queen, for which she interprets reader-submitted dreams.