Come Skinnydipping with Me

A Bouquet of Initiation: part one - The Apology

2011-10-14T14:13:00.002-04:00

In the hours before “Gita” & I ate mushrooms, I felt as if my skull and spine were barely attached. There was weakness at the center of my upper back. It was George’s ghost, a part of me that was never present with women because it over-sexualized them. George would have been desperate to partner with Gita because she is so much like him, plus she is ‘drop-dead gorgeous.’ He would have struggled to be present with her. His ghost was keeping me from being fully present with her, at first, but the trip exorcised him.

I told the story of George & “Djuna,” how he was in a relationship with her primarily to have his sexual needs serviced. I recounted how one night the spirit of a brutal, primitive man entered George while he was having sex with Djuna and raped her through him. Later that night, George was awakened night by Djuna flailing. George felt the spirit of the primitive man raping her. She was trying to fight him off in her sleep. George turned and held her, and love from a place in his heart deeper than he ever felt ordinarily washed the man away. Djuna fell back into a calm sleep.

Gita & I shared stories of how we had been sexually disrespectful with ourselves and partners. Gita said she felt ghosts leaving her. She recited a poem of hers, fiercely, building it up to a furious and humbling finale:

Blasphemy

I'm trying to find the ground they call common
Often straying onto land they call no man's
Knocking on the wood they call cock
As your deja vu knocks me off kilter
And I'm forced to filter my sorrow through the strainer of a dream catcher
Every testament is arrested development of a mind rendered pre-pubescent by the stalks of string bean boys
anointing the heads of reverential women on their knees
Teeming with the disease they call co-dependence
I gave you up for lent, itching every night with desire
And coming up empty,
As you purposely tempt me into submission with the proposition of missionary,
Sewing my mouth shut with
thread made of melded metal so it rusts as I age and stains my lips crimson
Just the way you like 'em
And sewing my void open
with the noose you string me along with, stuffing me chock full of bullshit,
Cuz I'm so obviously asking for it
Anonymously presenting myself
Faceless, face-down in the pew I pray to you in
But you answer to the congregation, not the deity
you supposedly have faith in
so all the nuns crossing themselves to the heartbeat of creation are praying for you
The wafer on my tongue is dissolving and the wine in my blood is absolving me of responsibility, making it easier to lay down on my back,
bloody from the encryption of whip marks, self-inflicted
that bare striking resemblance to sanskrit
Bare-back me as i'm strung up as an example and watch the sores manifest from
your testing the uncharted of so many different bodies of water
When everybody knows they all
flow into the same ocean
You want the best of every dimension
the offering plate is a tension-set bear-trap set to "regret" when your fingers are sticky with the juices from the countless encounters that meant nothing but an orgasm
Those girls are just objects to you, things to fuck, and after the life is done seeping from your swollen member,
you'll remember my voice
singing hymns of more to this life than the indulgence of sin

Gita: As I read the poem, I realized I was speaking for all women to all men, including George. Amy and I cried for a while after it was done and she told me she'd like to read my poem publicly.

Amy: A couple days prior, “Jade” was at my computer. I was standing, feet together, vacant, feeling. Jade turned and asked, “What are doing, Rose Mary?” It was the first time she had ever called me that.

The name “Rose Mary Pillowwater” came from one of my dreams. I evolve into her – from George, through Amy George. She is George’s soul, his unconscious feminine nature.

“Just standing,” I said. Then, I realized that we had witnessed Rose Mary standing, and saw it meant that Rose Mary is standing, not unconscious and asleep in my dreams. It was a lot for me to receive.

Gita knew the story of Jade asking, “What are you doing, Rose Mary?” and what it meant for me. As she loaded a bowl, I was standing, feeling, being a vacant vessel. Gita was holding a stem, and recalled how I eat the stems. She tried one and said, “Mm, it tastes like rosemary,” as our eyes met.

Gita: After I ate the rosemary weed stem, Amy said, "We're going to take off into another dimension." I said, "Let's go." I suddenly realized I was letting go of attachment.

Amy: Gita screeched, laughed, and wept, and I did a wild brief dance, spinning fast. My identity felt blank. I had no mind. My body purely expressed Rose Mary’s instinct. Inhabiting me, she backed into the kitchen, paused at the threshold, and stepped back into the room. She knelt on the floor beside Gita’s water bottle. On the side it read in big letters, “WE DID IT!” I knew I needed to drink water from it, from Gita, from cosmic accomplishment. Water is a symbol of the cleansing and hydrating power of awareness and consciousness.

I could not get the top open and crawled across the floor with it, handing it to GIta. She opened and I drank.

Gita: Something took over, I was in auto-pilot. I sat straight up, in a meditative sit. Inside my head, there were at least 6 layers of narration/observers. The most prominent being the one I hear on a daily basis - the one I believe is attached to my name. This observer commanded me to do things (like sitting up in a meditative sit and relaxing) but it also said, "Shut up!" to the other observers and to itself...well, myself. The other observers were chatting incessantly. One narrated in the 2nd person, saying things like, "You're doing [this] or [that]." Another, more distant one, spoke like an interpreter, stating knowledge I've acquired from books and school and other people. It sounded like, "Meditation does [this]. People do it because [that]." The others were talking so fast and observing so much of what was happening internally that I couldn't make out one from another. I didn't want to. What I was doing was trying to get to that other dimension. 'I' said to myself, "I'm letting go of earthly attachment. I am not going to stop until something outside of me stops this. I will sit here, meditating, until something else stops me. I will not stop this. Relax, let go..." My broken ankle begins aching as I sit in lotus, "Pain is an attachment. Let it go..." I allowed myself to continue crushing my ankle under my own weight. It did not hurt but the loudest observer would whisper, "I'm going to break this again. I'm going to have to go to the hospital after this. I'm ruining my ankle right now..." on and on.

Amy: We had a conversation about performing. I remarked that it is a rush because the approval of the parent is projected onto the audience. The applause is felt as the adoration of the parent, which is why people are so psycho about performing. I recalled how God had been telling me, “I don’t perform,” and I said, “He doesn’t. He is always doing what he does naturally, and for himself, not an audience.”

I told Gita a dream I had about performing in 2056. There was a staged performance for a group called A Band of Stooges. The music was more powerful than anything we know; improvised, unrehearsed puppeteered by Kundalini, everyone perfectly synched because their bodies were expressions of music. We wore robes embroidered with tiny scenes of our personal evolution, of the story of how we came to be everlasting. After the song, there was no applause. Everyone paused, standing, gazing at each other, vacantly. A hulking George looked down at me from the elevated stage. Then we all walked away in different directions, in silence.

I explained how our compulsion to cheer and applause loudly is a measure of how loudly life sucked. Some people feel safe when they drown out fear by making a lot of noise.

It energized me tremendously to share my dream and thoughts about it. Gita remarked, “You are so animated!” It was her animation, the freedom in her expressiveness – which I had been watching, eating, digesting, integrating since meeting her. It was the expressiveness of all the people I have been meeting, since leaving solitude three months before – after 13 years by myself, traversing identity death & rebirth.

I was overtaken with freedom when Gita said, “You’re so animated!” I got up, and danced and sang. “Spider” a voice said, indicating I was manifesting the spider-nature of the primordial feminine. Rose Mary’s yang – “the Asian god” – inhabited me. I felt him existing in the distant future, looking back on the first times, on the story of our becoming.

The Asian god is not a separate entity. It is how my psyche translates the sudden emergence of Rose Mary’s power. The feeling is of a kind of psychosis, but one toward integration instead of fracturing. Inhabited by him, I was a new person.

After dancing, I glanced at Gita. She was lying with eyes closed in Shavasana. The sun was sinking. I sat with the guitar, united with the Asian god. He was dripping with sweetness and love through my body. I sat gently strumming in the fading shadows, feeling the chords ringing in all the times to come. Gita was crying. Her tears and the music and my feeling braided eternal love into union with itself.

When the guitar was done, I got onto the bed and looked out the window like a cat at the world, knowing the gesture was telling me, “The Asian god is coming with us, outdoors and to the stage.”

Gita: I was deeply relaxed and did not want to move my body willfully into Shavasana, but the observer commanded me to, so I did. Once in the position, I was able to relax deeply again. My body began twitching and contracting in muscles I couldn't control ordinarily - small muscles in my back and scalp and shoulders. I felt as if I was being manipulated, very gently. It was as if a part of me I'd never met was trying to become conscious in my body. Rose Mary's yang began playing the guitar and I contracted my body as I felt the urge to weep but then 'I' commanded myself to relax again, "...if I'm ever going to get out of here," so I did. The tears stayed in my eye sockets and as my eyelids relaxed, I could see some light through the water. Then my phone rang with a text message and I opened my eyes and sat up. The experience ended itself.

Amy & I came together on the bed. Amy told me, "God has been telling me, very strongly, 'Apologize, apologize, apologize...'" So she did. She bowed her head and put her hands on my lap and said, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry for what George did to you. It wasn't right, what he did to women." I sat there, mouth agape, in complete and utter shock. I'd never felt such an intense emotion. I was being humbled in an instant. I looked up at the ceiling, at God, with a look on my face that said, "What the fuck do I do with this shit?!" I had to internally accept this archetypal apology from all men, for all women. It was a great honor and a great challenge. I calmed down, closed my eyes, absorbed what was being given to me and cried silent tears as I held Amy's head. I never said, "I accept your apology." I simply accepted it.

Later, as I recounted this experience to the people at the Place, I told them that this act had to have created a ripple in this world. It was a step toward healing the great gender divide, I could feel it. “Sasha” said, "Of course it has...and you telling us is making the ripple bigger, and then we'll tell people, and so on..."

Amy: After apologizing I whispered to Gita, “Confession. All week I have been feeling the need to confess.”

The Asian god then forced me to see the virginal part of myself I had abandoned through George’s “indulgence in sin.” My head was bowed and the god moved with authority through my right arm – the Rose Mary arm – put my palm against my forehead and pushed my head up. As he did, I glimpsed my virgin self like a seed is a glimpse of a tree.

I told Gita about receiving the Asian god. I said one the things that helped admit him was my awareness that God did not have to create us, or bring Gita & I together as gifts to each other. I did not mean we ought to be thankful, but that we exist over an abyss of non-being. We did not have to happen. We have to know this to receive the future – a future that narrows our path to establish our perfection.

I was deeply at peace, particularly because sex was not alienating me from the feminine. I lied across the bed diagonally, owning the bed - owning sexuality - while God made love to me. He made love to me all evening, after that.

I gave Gita energy healing. Part of it was moving her body around like the lion moves bodies in this dream of my brother’s:

A lion comes. You have to play dead and let him move your body around. You will be okay as long as you don’t look into his eyes.

“Playing dead,” is synonymous with being a “Stooge.” A Stooge lets awareness reincorporate into the body in order to awaken infant being. The lion is the King of Beasts, symbolizing the king of the Beast in man: God. I realized that the dream was model for a kind of body work where one person plays the lion and the other, a Stooge.

Gita: I asked Amy to do energy work on me. I layed in Shavasana, playing Stooge while she manipulated my arms and legs for me. The observers were there but I was more at peace with them. I felt stronger, somehow.

When she was done, she left to use the bathroom. I felt a pain in my lower belly. As I rubbed it, I felt my heartbeat there, very intensely. It felt like my actual heart. It pulsed and pumped the way I know the heart does. When you feel your heart through your sternum, you can only detect a faint beat. What I was feeling was my actual organ, INSIDE MY GUTS. I could practically grab it. At first, I thought it was a baby (even though I knew I wasn't pregnant). I attempted to check if it was beating in tandem with mine by comparing it to the beat in my chest, but I could not feel a beat in my chest. I began to panic. I checked my pulse on the side of my neck. It was the same beat. I turned my attention back to the fact that I could not feel my heart in my chest. I screamed to Amy to come back and help me. She hurried to my side as I said, "My heart is not in my chest!" I had her feel my stomach. She said, "Ooh!" I told her to feel my chest and she couldn't find my heartbeat either. Then she layed her ear to my chest and said, "It's in there." I felt a tremendous feeling of relief.

Amy: I said such experiences are typical of Kundalini awakening. Blocks open and bodily awareness shifts. A reason Gita always had trouble in her stomach was because her heart was not there. Her heart was stuck in her head.

Amy is sponsored by Iboga World.

Mother Daime

2011-08-25T19:17:00.002-04:00

I was nervous before my first Santo Daime service. I have always been nervous in groups. In the first part of my life, I was defined by my status as an outsider. My individuality felt threatened in nearly every collective setting. Now that my individuality is firmly known, I am attempting to find my place in the collective. In the months prior to the service I had been making a concerted and sustained effort to be social – this after 13 years in solitary hermitage, leaving my past self behind, and cultivating my identity in Christ, as a nun without an order.

For me, the Santo Daime service combined elements of family, school and church. With compulsory singing, childlike melodies, uniforms, and separation of the sexes, it was a return to grade school’s inner child. Instinctively, I expected rejection, yet intellectually there was no reason to. With trust and faith, I tried to rest in my vulnerability, ground my sensitivity, and release the thought-patterns set by my alienation.

I had to leave to go lie down two times. Returning to the group the first time, I was outdoors for a few moments, experiencing myself at three years old. I was ecstatic, up on tiptoe, feeling I could fly into the night, as if no one existed except me; and I was alone with God & the Earth. It is a familiar state for me, from my time in hermitage. I reminded myself that I was there to work – to ground in the collective and blend with it - and not fly off into my comfort zone.

At one point, I was shaken seeing a woman who got sick and left to lie down, and a guitarist who stopped playing and was shuddering ecstatically. He kept putting three fingers up over his head. I stepped outside and one of the attendants talked to me about not paying attention to where other people are at, to just close my eyes and remain focused on my own internal experience.

I did. The last hours were a battle against my instinct to hide from rejection. I was unable to quiet an inner-voice that kept rehearsing explanations of my worthiness and uniqueness. It refused to rest. The voice is a barrier between my ego and deeper self. Being present was constant work and making eye contact was scary.

At the very end of the service, I could barely stand, and received physical support from women around me. When the music stopped I was swooning. I stepped behind the chairs and sank to the floor. I was helped onto some cushions and given unction. A woman gave me body work and energy work, sprayed me with scented mist, spoonfed me, blew air over me, covered my excited eyes with a tissue, guided my breath, spoke to me in intuitive language – like prayer, speaking-in-tongues, or like what Mother sounds like to Baby. I responded with intuitive language, musical baby-talk.

My mind gradually quieted as I received my body in the woman’s touch. In time, I could feel my baby body in her hands – especially my feet. It was a body that never grounded in the material world because it was undermothered due to postpartum issues.

At one point while the woman worked on me, I was afraid of my breath touching her skin, and had the distinct feeling that my breath was dirty.

The name of the woman means “mother” in Hungarian. I considered telling her, but did not. It would have been like suggesting she was a replacement for my mother. Seeking replacements for my mother has been co-dependent poison for me. Only I can mother myself.

I try to see mother figures as midwives assisting the labors of self-rebirth. To me, “midwife” suggests a half-way point to the cosmic intermarriage of the human family.

The morning after the service, I woke from a dream telling myself, “God did not make me perfect. I was made with flaws. I am a mistake.” To have such thoughts become conscious means I am closer to them. They are not buried under defenses. Praise Allah.

~~~ Some background: I have multiple scleroses. 10 months prior to the service I switched from pharmaceuticals to plant medicine: iboga and cannabis. The results have been good. The numbness, fibromyalgia and other symptoms are under control. I quit using a cane, but I still have difficulty with my right leg whenever I have too willful of an intention. I cannot even do yoga because it is too willful of an activity.

Silence, stillness, music and dance bring balance to my disease. Wilfulness activates it. So, when I am not interacting with the world or doing creative work, I try to be still, focused, internal, in trance and meditation. When I am still it feels like water is moving through my body.

During the first three hours of the Santo Daime service the feeling of the water inside me concentrated into ripples tighter than I had ever experienced. In the week prior, I had received Word that the water would become “denser” – perhaps a synonym for “firmness,” a word the Daime hymns often used.

~~~ I told one person at the service my secret; that I was born male, and male identified. My calling to Christ in 1998 began two years of intensive self-examination and dreamwork, recording 10 to 15 dreams a night. The process led to a sudden switch, one day, to a female identity. Had I not been called and become female, it is likely my male self would have perished by now, as self-destructive as he was. Instead of being dead, I am female and have multiple scleroses as well as what has been termed “schizoaffective disorder,” because I am a mystic.

My female self is an expression of music, dance, art and dreams. She emerged from dreams, so my waking-life reality is dreamlike; a seamless web of reflection, metaphor and poetry.

In a dream I had prior to the service, it was the last episode of Seinfeld. It was sad that the warmth of the laughter was dying. All the colors that made the program ascended psychedelically in a column back up to Heaven, to music. The tempo was fast, the music sad, but also remorseless and unyielding – a music of departure.

I am female identified as a child and teen - not so much as an adult. I have not experienced many rites of initiation to support my womanhood. Sitting with the women at the Santo Daime service was a rite, communion with sisterhood. I was thankful to feel belonging with such radiant women. It was home.

~~~ In conversation before & after the service, there was a sense that the Work is taking place in a vacuum; that the gap between spiritualized people and the world is unbridgeable. I replied that there is a tacit bridge; that everyone has a role to play; that all people tacitly support the Work, no matter how alien to it they may appear. I said that 2012 is the point at which illusion breaks down and the collective gravitates to soul-work. It is the opening of church doors inside the heart. It is where yesterday dissolves into tomorrow. It will be confusing for the general collective, which is what spirit-workers have been training for – for thousands of years. It will give spirit workers a new place in the collective. In time, all take up the Work, or are reborn into its legacy.

Amy is sponsored by Ibiga World.

The Satori of Story

2010-11-07T09:23:00.003-05:00

Our work is stepping free of old stories.
New stories are a vessel to Life.

Story teaches us where we are going
and where we do not want to be
and what we don’t want to do.
Story weaves identity.
Story teaches us that our limitations are necessary,
illusory and impermanent
- just like any structure, except the cosmicn and absolute.

Story teaches us these lessons
over and over
and more and more safely
until we are free of story…
on a far away day that's close at hand…
where all we will know is dance, music, being and love

history confused story with reality
and confounded story with tradition
and trumped story with religion

tradition is just a word for broken continuity
tradition is to a dam as continuity is to water

thanks for listening
and peace

Worldwide War on Rape

2010-11-02T06:58:00.001-04:00

When he was raping Rose Mary, she looked tearlessly, fearlessly. She gazed into his pathos and countenance as a tiger does the meat on a monkey. Calmly and hotly Rose Mary repeated thrice from her womb through her mouth: “I made you - I made you - I made you.”

The meaning pacified his dark heart and put the rest of him to sleep. He was like the unconscious fetus he had been inside his mother.

Rose Mary got up, took a shit on his face and called the cops – and then cleaned him up so that no one would ever know. Her vengeance was hers. Rose Mary did not need to speak of what happened to a therapist or friend. She told it all in court – except for the part about the shit.

Then Rose Mary went on a speaking tour, telling her story to Congolese women’s groups. They were first to hear about her shitting on the rapist’s face. As many tears as woman’s shit brings, it had never brought so many as when Rose Mary told her story to the Congolese.

Their hearts burned so hot to hear her that a new war started in their dignitiless land: a war on rape.

When a man loses his dignity he is more prone to rape. Stopping rape is a matter of nurturing man’s dignity.

An actual Congolese rapist-soldier said that he saw his parents killed when he was nine and then he had nothing, “not even soap.” He had “no dignity” and “chose to live like an animal.”

Parrot Penis, Owl Balls: Freeing Man’s Erotic Being – part two

2010-10-28T18:14:00.002-04:00

When I still had balls – owls – Rose Mary would take my parrot in hand and say, “Come on, Baby, let me see your colors. Let your colors spill.”

It was fantastic, but not enough to overcome man’s desperation for love. So I was castrated. The passion of my balls transmuted into wisdom…I traded my owls and got Rose Mary’s parrot back from man. It’s a five-inch Superstar and its Mine; and it’s Ours.

O, my Lovers!
O, my Lovers!
Om shanti shanti

link to part one

Finding My Way Home from the Land of the Dead

2010-09-02T19:02:00.000-04:00

I really want a California State ID so I went to the DMV around noon today, by bus, to get one and the line was at least 100 people long out the door. WTF. I headed directly back home, sitting long at the bus stop a long time. I asked a guy who sat down nearby if he was waiting for bus 111. No response – just a hard mean look, and then, sharply, “Why?” “Because it is the bus I am waiting for and I have been waiting for over an hour.” No response. Ugly guy, big, young, lineman’s physique. Later: “Does 111 stop here?” The same a hard mean look, and the same sharp, “Why?” “I don’t believe it is coming and I need to take it home.” “You not from here?” “I live in Long Beach – I just don’t know this bus route….Why?” I echoed him, smiling playfully and then looking away quick so as not to rile him too much.

Looking at me hard, he asks me, “You married?” NO. “You got kids?” NO. “You a Christian lady?” “Well, I’m Christian and I am a lady.” Why didn’t I ask in response, “If I told you I belong to all the religions would you stone me?”

Finally word came that busses were not stopping there because of a bomb threat at LB airport…Long walk to catch a different bus…Still trying to find my way out of the Land of the Dead… But it is on the horizon and in my heart.

Fiery Fairy

2010-08-05T17:52:00.004-04:00

Through my windows I heard a woman brusquely say, “Call 911.” I looked outside and there was a good fire going in the trash. My first thought was saving my computer, but then I remembered the cracked, back-up prone hose in the back. I rushed out – in the ankle length skirt I was in – and there was no one about. The fire burned almost silently, but it was tall – about a person tall, leaping out of the trash and licking up a telephone pole.

Did the woman forget about the hose outside, and/or did the fire overwhelm her ability to be resourceful?

I hastened to the hose, turned the tap, and brought the flowing water to the fire. It was flowing weakly, because of the leaky, cloggy hose, but it was enough. I was standing in my long skirt, laughing, dowsing the flames.

When the property manager came out, it was mostly seething cinders. I called, “I’m a hero!” I was ecstatic; ‘stoked.’ He offered to take the hose from me, but I declined.

When the firemen came I told them I was a hero, too. They seemed a little bummed I had ‘stolen their fire,’ but stayed and wetted it and mashed it up. I could hear them from my studio talking about the food they saw: “Mm, roasted cabbage,” “Fried potatoes. Yum.”

Their hats transfixed me: a sort of bronzed olive color, and one was wearing leather suspenders.

After they were gone, the property manager was cleaning up the mess, and I came down and told him, “That was really fun.” He answered snarkily, “I’m glad you had a good time.”

The pic is from the day after the fire - the blue board where the fire had been.

Iboga Prayer

2010-07-20T22:47:00.001-04:00

Despondency and heroin are blood brothers. They and their parents - trauma and ignorance – have toned the body and mind injuriously.

Iboga, let us never be despondent, ever again. Let self-marriage divorce us from addiction – whether it is addiction to despondency, heroin, co-dependency (personal - collective), history (personal - collective), overculture, disease, need, death, and/or ignorance, let it happen, Iboga.

Coyote Marie’s Interview of Amy George

2010-07-07T11:26:00.001-04:00

For a school assignment, Coyote Marie had to write up an interview of someone culturally different from her, and she chose me:

Amy is a forty-two year old trans-woman, formerly George. She has been transitioning to womanhood for ten years. While this is an ongoing process, she has for several years been living publically and privately as a woman. She speaks eloquently about gender, culture, power, identity, and her experience of these dynamics as they uprooted her entire being, and as her being re-formed itself anew amidst these old dynamics. For our purposes here, the focus is on how her experience has changed her position in the webs of culture – from overculture, to chosen culture, to family culture.

Amy locates herself delicately within all these webs. We spoke first about her location with trans culture, or its larger LGBT culture. On one end, there is queer culture’s sense of being proudly alternative, its emphasis on visible difference. Yet trans culture, Amy says, tends to emphasize “re-entering the overculture as seamlessly as possible.” For instance, she explains, often facial-feminization surgery is more important for a trans-woman to attain than sexual reassignment surgery – as was the case for her. (I expect this is true for many reasons – an intersectionality of issues concerning the coherence of identity and persona, the safe expression of these within one’s cultures, and availability of resources). And while Amy wants to be seen as entirely woman, she does not mind being “known” as trans. Indeed, publically telling her story has been crucial to her emergence and solidity in the world, even as “weird” as the experience is of “knowing you’re being known.” She smiles at it as a place that dramatizes her act of passing between cultures, and as I watch her publically speak her truth, I wonder at how her invitation to “knowing being known” somehow gives permission for the listener to open as well. Sometimes her listeners approach her individually afterwards aglow with their own sensation of “knowing being known.”

An effect of all this for Amy is that she feels disinterested in queer and trans cultures, although she appreciates the social benefits of living in a city with a large and in-charge queer population, and greatly enjoys certain events – the trans beauty pageant she entered last year served as an important “coming out” that left her feeling “initiated into public rather than trans culture specifically.” She says, “I feel kinship with trans people more than trans culture.” When asked, then, what culture she chooses to participate in, she knows instantly: “a non-gender or non-sexually-identified culture.” She explains haltingly how even in an “accepting culture” she’s left “not knowing where I stand.” To be seen sexually secondarily to being felt as a unique human soul is eminently preferable.

No surprise, then, that when asked how she feels about her culture of origin she answers, “Oh, totally alienated.” Her experience “turned male gender culture totally on its head,” and Amy feels this change most in her relationships with men. She says, “gender identity as a man was most conditioned in terms of other men. ‘Men do this!’” She names “this” as competition and animosity, and says they were “erased” in her. There was an omnipotent sexualization – “men like to [expletive]” – that is also “gone.” Manhood, too, entailed “brotherhood and common purpose;” asked where these qualities are now in her life, she pauses: a big question mark. She wonders how her relationship with her three brothers will evolve as they find the time and energy to reconnect. She also remarks that sexual tension changes, that as a male she was “incapable of a platonic place with women.” Sometimes, she says, her experience now with men is of “knowing I have something so many of them need” – a sense of their own femininity, of their own deep identity regardless of gender? – “I feel strongly differentiated. It’s not feeling like a trans person but like a woman, just myself.”

What is it like to go from being at the overculture’s top – a white upperclass male – to being significantly down the ladder? Insofar as Amy interacts with the overculture, this is an appropriate question. “There is a new creepiness going home alone at night.” However, in terms of Amy’s internal identity, she laughed good-naturedly at the question. “As a white woman I feel much less vulnerable and more privileged. I felt very vulnerable, not privileged, as a white man.” Her male self’s experience was of constant vulnerability and failure to achieve an endless barrage of “expectations” – to be tough, hard, strong, a sex-machine/guardian of women. She follows this with an extraordinary perspective on power that I had never considered before. As a male, feeling so vulnerable and powerless, power was found in an identity with the “freak.” Her male self’s masculinity was by virtue of the independence of the outsider. Now, she says, “I am still an outsider, but my power is in relatedness” – a power of interdependence.

I ask Amy about the myth of her family, and she replies, “It towered over everything.” She doesn’t enumerate the myth, but says instead, “My life is another episode of the destruction of that tower. My parents are left to say, ‘We did everything we could.’ The power of individuality is stronger than family myth.” I ask, “is that the new family myth?” She smiles at the possibility, and the possibility it offers for collective transformation as well as her own.

The Conspiracy against Conspiracy

2010-07-04T20:57:00.003-04:00

The video below bundles evidence of conspiracy that has been floating around the collective mind at least since the 1980s (when I first heard it), if not for much longer. The usual suspects are at play: Freemasons, the Pope, 911, the Illuminati, et al.

As I was told a week ago by a trusted friend, there are two sects of freemasonry, the evil one mentioned here and a good and larger group, which my friend said has been doing ayahuasca-based ceremonies/healings for a long time. I asked her, “Why, then, are only the evil Freemasons known?” She answered, "Good people don't attract attention like bad people."

For all the sociopaths trying to create an antiworld, there are many more trying to find the World. There is a cosmic reality that both types of people must answer to at the end of the day, no matter how great their ignorance or knowledge. I had a dream that said, “The only conspiracy is the conspiracy against love.”

There is a time and place for conspiracy theory, for sure – but while I am at it: I don’t care for soundtracks such as the one backing this montage because of how it is trying to agitate the viewer's emotion, instead of letting the import of the information speak for itself, or instead of using less fear-inducing music.

Overculture and the China Whale

2010-06-09T23:27:00.001-04:00

This piece was written for a community poetry reading to honor of World Oceans Day.

The overculture’s industrial phallus spikes downward
Penetrating the belly of the Earth.
And sucks out her black amniotic goo.
Man is still embryonic,
In a state of perpetual taking from the mother.

But oil is a Trickster. It is not amniotic. It is not the water of life. Oil is the substance of death, pouring into the womb of the Gulf; filling the oceanic uterus of life with death.

The classic image of the spewing oil well is a backwards male climax
It is a money-gasm – a death-gasm – an orgasm for the overculture.
In the death-black eye of overculture the oilman is more than the child sex slave
In the death-black eye of overculture safety is a prison and progress is destruction.
The death-black eye of overculture is a cock
And big oil a rapist.
The Earth says No. Big oil says Yes.

Being a rape victim is like being an oil spill; you lay lifeless in a vast depressive blackness. No one can reach you till you wash ashore.
Within every tar ball, is a half dead soul, unaware the overculture has raped them.
God walks barefoot along the world’s beaches, scooping up tar balls and tossing them into a kicked bucket.
In the oily residue left behind
Are jagged rainbows – the flimsy marriages, the alienated children, the secrets, the tears, the mad sex, the flickers of doubt, the night dreams, the broken rainbows left behind.

But that is only half the story – overculture’s story.
Soul-culture tells a different version, with different values, and an outcome in which the black viscous tide miraculously brings forth a new world. For soul-culture’s story, let’s turn to dreams. My first remembered dream was a nightmare in which my father blinded me with tar, and it stung. It was the tar of the overculture. This dream from 1998 shows a primal, amniotic blackness overtaking me, overtaking my blindness and returning my sight:

Me and another person try to kill each other for a long time, but we stop when our common enemy becomes this enormous whale. We manage to get to a small island and from there we manage to blow up the whale with a bomb. The whale is dead and we are relieved, but the shock of the bomb has created big waves that heave across our island and they don't subside, but grow stronger. The blown up whale becomes the waves and doesn't want to kill us, it wants to become us. I am still afraid, but I am much more accepting. The whale becomes the island and us along with it. I feel its black warm soft mass taking me.

The happiest, most cohesive and spiritually aligned group of people in the world is a group in northern China who are known for their unusually round eyes. I watch them examining each other's eyes.

Rose of Eros

2010-05-02T22:13:00.001-04:00

Last Wednesday I performed this piece at an open mike.

In my garden of girls and shells
The golden rings
On your toes
Are small things
You lean over naked
To smell a rose.

Your bottom will glisten
With the honey I spread
And lick up
And down
All the way to your
Golden-ringed toes.

When I finish
I will rest my tongue
On the flower
Of your tiny anus.

And once you have stopped eating meat –
Once everything you take into your body is pure and living,
Then I will eat the poop right out of you.

You know, in Japan, beautiful women go for days eating nothing but truffles. They then go high-heeled and naked into a room of men sitting at a long table. They get up on the table, walk across it and poop on a platter. Men pay fortunes for the privilege of dining on this. Bon appétit.

Yes, Lover. Wisdom walks down the street naked in high heels. I’m not kidding.

Now, lay still.
Lay still
& I will eat the fruit
Out of your ear.

Lay still
& I will examine you.

Lay still
& I will make a cairn
On your belly.
Lay still
& you won’t be harmed:
This is the police!
“What’s the charge, Officer?”
Impersonating a trailmarker.

Lay still,
O your lips like a fish,
Curl your toes,
Relax your nose,
Lift your shoulders--
Now arch them.
Don’t go anywhere.
Be still, be still.
I’m coming right back.

disability claim – Amy George – 3/27/10

2010-03-28T16:07:00.003-04:00

I have been receiving disability benefits since 2001. Though cases are supposed to be reviewed bi-yearly, this is my first review, for reasons unknown to me. After filling out the form, I wrote up this addendum to ensure that the review board understands my disabilities. This is the unpleasant truth – sans the pleasant truth, which I try to live from. In this context, there was no reason to say anything positive, so this is not a happy piece, but I wanted to post it for the record:

I am genetically male and as a child identified as a boy in every way – except at the age of seven, I started to fantasize about being feminized and punished by dominant female figures – a fantasy that haunted me nearly daily until I was 30. The mortifying shame I carried because of it was an incredible weight.

My family was as normal as can be, but I was too sensitive to be normal. As a child I was timid, fearful, always stressed, and preoccupied with Jesus and Satan - though my family was only nominally religious. The only times I felt okay were when I was alone. I have spent a lot of my life in solitude, including the past 12 years; up until 10/2009, when I relocated to California to be near my partner, whom I met on the Internet in 1/09. She is becoming certified as a psychotherapist.

Another factor that has made me unusually withdrawn is my incorrectible eyesight. Because of it, I have never driven a car, and I get lost easily. My eyesight problem was crucial in causing my internal world to drown out the external world. I have always felt locked out of the external world, into my own internal world. I have always been marginal – a misfit. I have never had a credit card – never made more than $6,000 in a year.

My teens were very hard. I was severely depressed, suicidal, a cutter, had dissociative episodes, had explosive diarrhea every day, met Satan when I was 14, and in therapy from age 13 - 22. At college I failed to make any friends until my third year. I have thought of suicide at least half the days of my life.

As a male, I was so inhibited and tense that I could hardly do anything at all. Everything was difficult – just walking out of my front door could be daunting. When a male is inhibited for too long and too deeply, it emasculates and feminizes him – which happened to me. Becoming female was a kind of inadvertent suicide for my male self.

In 1997 my male self broke down, into depression and anxiety. The next spring I went on what turned out to be a spiritual odyssey, with encounters with Christ and the Holy Spirit. The quest led to a week during which I had about two hours of black, dreamless sleep a night. I didn’t need to dream because my dreams had merged with waking life. During the week, poems, paintings, music and dance blew around me like wind, all of them interconnected on an unbreakable web of being. Wild animals gathered round me. When I passed babies, they gazed at me adoringly…I was using no drugs.

On the dark side, during the quest, I suffered demonic attack daily; was possessed by a being named The Stooge; would hear the heartbeat of the world and the growling of the Beast; people fuming with darkness threw things at me and shouted at me; I took all my clothes off in the middle of the night and got down on all fours on the floor to wait for Satan to rape me, because I thought this would end the world; on an airplane there was a kind of spiritual battle, which I responded to by playing dead, which landed me in an emergency room.

My quest rent me open and I couldn’t close myself back up. My only hope was to follow Christ – alone – which I did. I spent the next two years (98 – 00) in solitude exercising, meditating, contemplating, praying, not masturbating or fantasizing about being dominated by a woman, recording 10 to 15 dreams a night. I was suffering deeply – sometimes swooning into unconsciousness in the afternoon. I was unwittingly bringing consciousness to my unconscious female self. When I finally did identify as her, it was sudden, and cataclysmic.

The cornerstone dream of the 4,500 I recorded was that Jesus marries his mother. I saw myself as post-apocalyptic avatar of Christ’s mother – and I still do.

Dreams gave me a spirit name: Rose Mary Pillowwater, which I understood as the name of the woman I was to magically become. I lost my male identity to a sea of psychosis. My first year self-identified as female, I had a love-relationship with a divine lion, who violated me; I was raped by aliens; I was twice picked up by police because I was naked in public; I believed the world was ending about 50 different times; was twice in the psych ward; Rose Mary would surge into me as if she was going to steal my body away – like a body snatcher; I would appear in the distant future for a few moments at a time; spirit presences good and bad invaded my body (for example, one time the world’s hatred, especially of women, channeled through me. Men were inside my body trying to strangle me from within); I was at brink of death often, many times believing my duty was to commit suicide. I felt as if I was disappearing and appearing, which eventually led to a state where I lost my name and became a group of selves dialoging to put me back together. I thought of myself as “We” for years, and still do sometimes.

My ordeal from 1998 – 2000 is recounted in four 250-page books, if you need to see them.

After the psychoses peaked I was left practically bedridden from 2000 – 2004, with a feeling of an ocean roaring through me, dazed, with tremors, no continuity in my thinking – just enduring, coping, in solitude. I received a diagnosis of “schizo-affective disorder.”

In 2004 I accepted that I was not going to magically turn into Rose Mary, as I had believed. I started hormone replacement therapy. In 2005 I had an orchiectomy. I had to quit hormones sooner than I wanted to because they made my blood clot. I still have a partial occlusion of the subclavian vein in my left arm, which makes the veins in my upper-left quadrant stand out, and my arm swells when I do anything too physical – e.g. scrubbing – because of the circulatory imbalance.

While becoming physically female was necessary, it was not a magic pill. As I said, I remained in solitude until last October, and still need a lot of down time, still hearing voices, still coping. I am certain to have PTSD. The traumas replay over and over. I keep reliving them. I endured so much dread that it became a part of me.

Also, I have become as much like the main character of my dreams – Rose Mary Pillowwater – as possible. While this has helped me, it has done little to change my basic orientation, which is that waking-life is like a dream to me. Every moment for me is informed by metaphor.

You know how in a dream you can’t really control anything – it just kind of happens. The only way I feel ok in waking-life is to let it happen like a dream. This is Rose Mary’s way. If I do anything against her nature, she shuts down, withdraws, is miserable, has to lie down, so of course I do, too. I do whatever she wants. She is the ‘dominatrix’ I used to fantasize about. Perhaps someday I will have dominion over myself.

People have the effect of making withdraw, too. I find them – especially in groups – overwhelming. After I spend time in a group, that night, when I lie down to sleep I feel as if people are moving through my body. Sometimes I feel as if people I pass on the street are in my body.

I don’t watch movies or TV or play games. I don’t do things “for fun” like other people, because Rose Mary sees this as distraction from being self-aware and present. I work all the time at maintaining my balance. Just being is a full time job for me. My feeling when I lay down to sleep is that I am going to work. I probably spend 40 hours a week working with dream material of one kind or another. Everything I do is effected by my dreams – what I eat, what I wear, where I go.

I have taken a test online that showed I am autistic. However, if you spoke with me one-on-one, you would probably find me personable. Situations outside of one-on-one, I do not handle well.

In the past three weekly-rental summer seasons I did housecleaning for a neighbor, for the “change over.” This amounted to three hours of work weekly that I needed the rest of the day to recover from, emotionally and physically. It was not good for me – but doable in that I did not have to deal with any people, the season was finite, and the place was next door – I find travel very difficult.

In the 90s, my multiple scleroses began as weakness and pain. It was formally diagnosed until March 2009. It hinders me physically a great deal, inflicting my right side with pain, numbness, weakness, headaches, swelling. I use a cane for balance. I have MS related fatigue, incontinence, fibromyalgia, eye-ache and GI difficulty. There has been MS related blurred vision, and dizziness. I rest a lot.

I do not have the type of MS that attacks and remits. Mine has progressed very slowly. I was advised by the Brigham and Women’s Multiple Scleroses Center – a leading research facility – that there is no effective medicine for my type of MS.

If you wish to corroborate the reasons for and severity of my disability, I encourage you contact anyone who knows me well – my physician, therapist, parents, brothers, partner.

Amy George's other blog, Ask the Dream Queen, is updated Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

My Male Self’s Meeting with Satan

2010-03-28T16:06:00.001-04:00

This true account is excerpted from my memoirs. I refer to my male self in the third person:

In adolescence George was depressive. Amidst a nadir of depression, he half-seriously thought about what he would sell his soul for. One idea was being a rock star.

A few days later George was walking with his eyes to the ground, taking a short-cut that led past the water tower. He was about to duck under the water tower’s access gate when a voice said, "Come here. I want to show you something."

Several paces away, standing before George on the access road, was a very tall man in a black coat and black hat. He had a narrow face, narrow nose, and a goatee. With a leash he held two black dogs. They started barking at George. "Shut-up!" the man shouted and the dogs instantly fell silent.

The man repeated, "Come here. I want to show you something."

Eyeing the man, George’s heart was pounding. He turned without speaking and went the long way home.

Not long after the encounter George came across a French folk tale where a village idiot sold his soul to a man of the same description who was also accompanied by two black dogs.

Four years later, George and some friends asked a Ouija board who George saw that day. The Ouija window spelled "S" and "A" and then inexplicably and rapidly slid off the board.

George met another teenager who claimed to have seen a hoofed man in the woods, which he identified as Pan. This jibed with what George’s psychotherapist had told him; that the sighting could have resulted from a kind of hallucination surfacing from the collective unconscious, a depth-image from George’s ethnic heritage, perhaps even inherited through his genetic code.

That explanation sufficed intellectually, but in practical terms it didn’t assuage the fear George was left to cope with. He felt evil emanating from the darkness where he slept, threatening to materialize in wrathful supernatural embodiments. Not driving, he would take shortcuts at night, making his way through unlit places sometimes at the brink of panic.

Religion was no comfort at all to George. To him its hypocrisy epitomized the satanic.

One day, at age 30 - weeks before George set out for California on the odyssey that initiated him into spiritual life – he was walking at the spot where he had encountered Satan at 14. It was a place he had never seen another person. There, a well-dressed man with a briefcase approached him. His eyes were cold and blue. He asked George, “Do you know where the river is?”

At the time, George was reading Hesse’s Siddhartha, which uses the river as a symbol of eternity. The only river the man could have been referring to was the Potomac, several miles away. It seemed an absurd question coming from a man on foot. George chuckled as he thought over how to explain the way. It was complicated. “From here?” George asked.

“Goddammit,” the cold-eyed man said, “It’s just a simple question.”

“Jesus Christ,” George exclaimed and strode away.

At dinner that evening he recounted the incident to his family. His parents told him, “Things like that wouldn’t happen to you if you didn’t have long hair.”

Love Notes

2010-02-14T15:37:00.002-05:00

Love pulls the soul through the heart. The heart is where the mind & body meet for coffee.

Love is a pencil sharpener.

from Little Bombs from Heaven

Love is meaningless, but love supports meaning
When it responds to the doubt, dread & angst
Inherent in the broadest existential “Why!?”
With a smiling “Why not?”

Maybe the quest for meaning has a final answer
In the qualities and the people and the forms
That manifest in a world turning
On nothing but the meaninglessness of love.

Dream: March 18, 1998

I am back in my sacred place in nature. I know this place well, but I haven't been here in a long time. Its colors have changed a bit, but its forms remain the same. It's a clearing. Rivulets flow through it. The ground is stony. My body feels very loose. As I go I think of how Cedar told me sometimes he gets distracted by all the conspiracy theories, but understands that as natural to people who are young and less wise. I think it must simpler than that: that the only conspiracy is the conspiracy against love

Long Beach Photo Journal

2010-02-01T17:05:00.003-05:00

The New World

2010-01-15T17:13:00.001-05:00

The following is a piece I read at an open mike last night:

Here is a selection of four dreams I had in the 1990s. They are about the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one:

1) Walking from old world to the new world is like walking from one room to the next. The room of this world is black & white, while that of the next is in color.

2) Society as we know it is over. I am with a group of people at a remote outdoor stage. No one knows how to live because all the technology in the world is gone. The world is now full of terrible beasts that we have forgotten how to subdue. I'm not panicking, but I am deeply worried. I start climbing up the rafters to the top of the stage. At the back of the stage is a deep pit where a terrible mouth-beast lives. I think that if things get too bad I can just throw myself into that.

I reach the top of the stage, which is very high. It is enchanted, full of old spirits. There are large, beautiful, totemic, symbolic things there that ancient people made. They are so amazing that I want to take them, but I feel that would desecrate them, so I think I should just leave. But then I think that we really are going to need one of them. Most of them are of the turtle – a symbol of the world. I take one of the turtle totems and throw it down to where the people are.

I imagine two ways the new society could be. In one version the people cooperate and decide on some general rules of behavior, and I see people living in helpful, nondestructive social order. In the other version there are no guidelines and it is totally chaotic. The people fall down because no one makes sure that the paths are clear.

3) Tom Robbins – the author - speaks with me and asks me questions. We talk about how insane the world is and how we arrived at this point. I say that since God created everything, God created the insanity. Tom Robbins says, with some anger, "Girl, God stopped creating long ago. God stopped creating after six days."

I understand. "We created it," I say.

He agrees. He constantly speaks about spending three minutes with God each day. Beneath all this and beneath the discussion, in another part of my consciousness, are the huge journeys of masses of people - wars, revolutions, migration, the movement of humanity across the long gaping stretch of its life. It is actually going somewhere, to a new place. It's not just cyclical. There is change. And maybe there is an end, as in a novel.

4) The new map is made up of circles. Each one represents a person who gives their heart to love. The circles are housed in color. There's no likeness between this map and the world map.

I had these dreams in the mid-1990s. Now, 15 years later, I have drawn these conclusions about the transition from the old world to the new one:

History is the story of one level of consciousness succeeding the previous as humanity adapts to its potential to be spiritual. History is also the story of the death and rebirth of man by way of his adaptation to inner, global and cosmic realities he has no control over. Answering to these broader realities would end his tribulations.

For a new world to begin, the old one has to end. People misunderstand the end of the world as the extinction of man. Instead, it is the extinction of history’s man, of the Beast in man. The apocalypse is, at once, the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one. The transition will be made possible by technology, education, the evolution of ethics, global interconnectivity, the arts, self-awareness, dreams, compassion, honoring the Feminine, honoring the Child, and using the imagination, and others.

People who think things will never change for the better don’t see that the future is much longer than the past. The future starts over every time a baby is born, and grows up to see the world in a novel way that no one before ever has.

We are spirits that got lost in the story of the Flesh. The personification of the qualities known as “Jesus” wants our emancipation from history. It wants us to meet the end of the story of how the Flesh became self-aware; and thence sacred – so that we can start a new story.

The Dignity in the Courage to Feel

2010-01-04T17:24:00.002-05:00

Your courage to feel gives me courage to feel, and vice versa. Feeling overcomes numbness since feeling is divine and numbness human. Numbness thaws slowly, through dedication to self-deconstruction, as problems are patterned into metaphor, and then parceled into understanding and into wisdom and then into the past as rhythmically as breath threads the present to the future.

Metaphor tells you when you are having too much fun, and not enough – what the psyche values and what it does not - when change is coming...

Metaphor is a sea hungry for the reality of mankind. Whales lick their lips. Watch out Mildred! Watch out!

Let mindfulness breathe through death. Let ring gorgeous golden pealing bells that do not mean anything at all.

In Coyote Marie’s dream I was a South African princess. I can imagine the dignity of being that. Let dignity sustain.

Dignity precedes real courage – but there is an eye of dignity in the yang of cowardice. There is an eye of cowardice in the yang of dignity.

Dignity and beauty are inseparable.

Dignity is a straight, wooden ladder. Indignity is that ladder on fire. Dignity is then the flowers and trees that are fertilized by the ladder’s ashes, which then, by turns, feed and house the world. If dignity must be in ashes, let the ashes nourish tomorrow’s beauty.

Let me walk on a sea of dignity comprised of what I possess. Take away my possessions and I walk through the desert to the next ocean, round and round the world never stopping. Thus is Sophia, Queen of the Universe. The wisdom of the feminine will save the wisdom of man no less than vice versa.

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.

Love’s Boot Camp

2009-11-21T19:47:00.002-05:00

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

2009-11-13T15:53:00.002-05:00

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

2009-11-10T15:04:00.003-05:00

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.

Moon Babies

2009-10-28T10:54:00.000-04:00

Beauty is a feeling that becomes an expression. It comes from within – not from without - as it is with God…So it also is for Beauty’s Friends; Eros, Peace, Perfection, Wisdom, and Knowledge; they too come from within, and not from the outside…So it is also for the Children of Beauty & Friends; they are Children of God.

In Heaven there is nothing outside of these Children & their Parents except for rivers of tears streaming into Lovers’ eyes, making love on the moon. Let me be the first!

Naked on the moon’s surface, and free and warm as Mother.

Moon babies.

The part of us that is indivisible from its Creator is that which the part that Children of God come to possess purely, as they let the dance between mind & body perpetually evolve, twirling to the “end of the world” and eternally beyond. Their dance floor is process, story, the computer, the arts, and Beauty and Friends.

The Children of God were latent in the grass, in the dinosaurs, in the first tool – slaughtered again and again and again until the world awakened from Death.

Though we are drowned in unconsciousness every night, we awaken, again and again – until fully awake.

Waves of cosmic dark matter constantly wash over us, and then wash away, as we fulfill destiny.

The Moon Reduces Penis Size

2009-10-10T17:25:00.000-04:00

If we have wisdom,
There is nothing we don’t have -
So the imagination is free to wonder what might become of humanity’s destiny.

Wisdom is a gold mine.
Peace is a gold mine.
Beauty and their Divine friends, too are gold mines.
Mind gold is gold, mine.

Mind gold is gold mind.
Mein gold is gold, mine.
My golden gold is golden
As is my hair, an extension of my mind.

Some people get hair extensions.
I get mind extensions.

Some people get penis extensions.
Me, a reduction. I’m in a world
Upside-down
And that is the way I like it.
It reminds me of home, the Moon.

“Greetings Earthlings,” say the Amazon Women of the Moon, “We’re not from Planet Sirius, Children: let’s get serious, and be from closer to home.” Like in your room, for example.

I come from your moon and you come from mine – and we’ll meet forever you & me on the other side of night.

Incarnating Heaven’s Heart

2009-10-06T17:47:00.000-04:00

Comedy & tragedy work themselves out through history. They dance together in the heart. When tragedy is too insidious, comedy can override it; and overtake the heart instead of lighten it. Then life becomes a big joke, and anger can’t stop laughing.

When tragedy makes people feel inferior, they sometimes use comedy to make themselves feel superior and others seem inferior. Inferiority needs compassion – not mockery.

Aires (violence) splits Eros into comedy & tragedy.
Comedy & tragedy are a treadmill.
Step off them into the music,
The erotic music of Heaven.

Tragedy & comedy are the music of the unconscious soul. Fully self-aware, feeling goes past tragedy & comedy to the music of the soul’s flesh.

Since we experience laughter & tears because of comedy & tragedy, so does God – God being that in whose image we are made, and whose expressions ours are patterned after.

Material existence breaks God’s heart just as it does ours. Before existence - before Creation - there was no comedy & tragedy, no joy & sorrow, no laughter & tears; for they were all unified in the wholeness of love – the wholeness of love our joyful & sorrowful task is to incarnate.

The Spider’s Rhyme

2009-10-05T10:46:00.000-04:00

This is a poem I wrote for my mom’s 66th birthday. Six birthdays ago I wrote her another spider-themed poem, which is why this one is called “Another Spider’s Rhyme”:

At 60 - six years ago -
Was the first spider’s rhyme
Now’s ripe for another time;
Another web stretched ‘cross years,
The dew of its filaments sparkling like tears
Ultra-delicate, ultra-sound.
Its maker, the Earth, eight-legged and round.
Weaving one season to the next
And before we are ready, she’s woven novel context
To teach us what we knew before
We stepped inside and shut her door.

Another year of lessons learned,
Another year the planet turned,
Longitude and latitude never budging from their spots
Their global web connecting dots
From Katmandu to the Florida Keys,
From chattering birds to life-giving trees,
From the mysterious and unknown
To the heart’s cradle inside the home
From everything we do and say
To the place the children play.

To celebrate your birth
Dear, dear mother
I weave a web, yet another,
Where plovers soar and waves crash
Where all illusion is but ash
Where all time is in our hands
Where there’s nothing left to understand
Where care is but a high flying kite
And every moment has birthday light;
Let this be my wish for you
That your noblest birthday wish
Does come true, so true.

Happy Birthday, Mom.
with love, Amy

Let 2010 Be Yours

2009-10-02T16:21:00.001-04:00

Be God’s, at least three minutes a day.
It’s more convenient than Islam’s five-times-a-day and has the same effect on the psyche, only you can do it alone without being distracted by others.

Write a revolutionary holy book for Islam. Call it “Koran Squared.”
Fractals of God spin through one mind into another thru music.
God refracts through us into art.
God doesn’t argue. God explains through illustration.

With the faith to lose yourself to your imagination, you can know God for sure…through psychosis…psychosis always ends in God.
It unravels before God into clarity.
Disease unravels before God into health.
Let’s work off death.

God uses wisdom as mortar.
I carry my house on my back
It is a church
That is how deeply I give myself to God
An eternal lover
A brutal lover until the brutality resonates with love… toning the frequency of the flesh
Of the mind/body organ
I meditate on what belongs to me, and on what I belong to.

Turn all trash into giant sculpture
Just throw garbage all around it
Make it into a mountain somehow, some chemical that melts it into beauty.
Turn eyesores into art.
Tear the world apart with beauty. Terrible, menacing beauty. Beauty is the monster under the bed.

You live for the heart alone
There is no other reason to be alive
That is why God wins
The terrible beauty of the Heart
Waits until we are tired and beaten.
Gives us new names.
Takes away identity,
Gives it back cleansed.

You are reflected in every person you see, but you alone are yourself
See everyone’s life
Feel their lives as your own
Perfect empathy
Perfection awaits you

Pretend you are from a book that is greater than you can imagine coming from. That is where Life - everlasting life in the body - is at. Let’s work off death.

Love-Pots

2009-09-26T14:40:00.002-04:00

♣ Coyote Marie ♥: I trust you, and I trust our love, and I trust our process, and that is my Source.

Faith in God evolves into trust of friends
I trust you totally, like I do the will of God.

I can be the lamb
You can be the lion
Today
And different animals tomorrow

You echo on the waters of my dreams
And I do yours

Swirls of love swell in the pot you stir.

A thousand kisses, each unique.

♥ S ♣

Spires of Trust

2009-09-23T08:22:00.002-04:00

A note to Coyote Marie:

I’ve been processing some thoughts & feelings.

It started with thinking about my cyberfriend, Starlee Meeko. She is the dreamer behind all those blogs about romance, rolling out a carpet to our dream-love. She is a gentle soul – hers was the Little Buddha Girl dream.

In our correspondence she has told me of how she’s struggled mightily with Christian issues and culture; which I did as well when I was male, in the same way as her. Rabid indignation – for me the indignation was self-annihilating, emasculating, benumbing. I don’t think it is quite so bad for her; but she did refer to fundamentalists as “parasites on the Body of Christ.”

Starlee lives in West Virginia; and wrote of feeling like driving. So I thought, “What if I invited her up here for a visit before I go to California?” Then I thought, no, I am amidst a process and a dance with a partner right now. I don’t want to invite anyone in except you.

I don’t want to be emotionally dependent on you. And I want to give you my heart purely. I think that is key to polyamory for me. Polyamory for me is being way more self-aware and honest than I can be as a monogamist. I’m sure some people would feel crazy as polyamorists – those from whom polyamory requires more dignity and self-awareness than is at their command.

In the future, if there should be a time to dance away from each other, we will never be distant. The purest love knows no distance. The purest love knows all.

I wanted to share you this to edify our trust – or really it is adding a spire of trust to the top of our church - so that we can feel whatever the dance will have us feel.

I feel energy from the collective drawing a little closer day by day, it seems. A dream last night had that feeling, like too much happening at once.

And I have been trying to ease into becoming more external – you know, in my body, in the world. Not instinctually afraid and withdrawn.

I think I was afraid and withdrawn even when my male self was a teacher; he just hid his pain and fear from himself more, was less self-aware – as a reflection of society’s lack of self-awareness. Every infant is too tender for the world as it is. That could change though.

I was also processing some feelings about my brother; my anger that he never made the effort to appreciate me, and now he’s had an awakening like mine, and admitted his hypocrisy to me. I was able to let myself feel my anger over that, and it didn’t annihilate me. After I expressed it (just by a gesture and a whisper, “I’m gonna fucking kill you,” meaning my reality is going to existentially rape yours like mine was raped you smug arrogant bastards) and then I felt as mild and peaceful as a comforted babe.

The rage did not possess me because just before I had been dancing in depths of love.

Getting the anger out, I felt purged and more powerful; like there is a reservoir of untapped power within me; particularly oral power.

For so long the anger has been boxed up, which is the reason for my clenched dream-jaw – which is why my sense was of oral power in particular.

Also, I recalled recent dentists telling me I have a small mouth (and big teeth). Nobody ever said that until a few years ago. I am thinking that from underuse my mouth got smaller; less able. I had a really positive dream about my speaking voice last night.

I wonder what we’ll dream tonight? We’ll see tomorrow. Nite-nite Sweets. xoxox, Amy

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.

The Song of Coyote Marie & Amy George

2009-09-20T12:03:00.002-04:00

Today’s blog is Coyote Marie’s version of my week with her, which I narrated in this blog entry.

My God. I don't know where to start. So much joyful laughter. This open space in my chest where my ribs meet, all of me still glowing with love, with the giving/receiving. I've never felt so loved. I've never been allowed to give so much love. So much healing between us, my morning bird. My pure shores love. This was one of the holiest times of my life. And now I am her knight - to carry her colors, to serve this honest space we embody, to practice this love in the world.

She said when I left, "Let's build a castle in my heart. Let's live there." Yes yes please. This afternoon we made love on the peninsula in the bog, the sun on our skin and the wind in my hair as we rode each other and the wisdom-blue sky above us with hawks and plovers circling, laughing like children.

This is so many loves in one. I want to write every memory of it, but it feels too much, so much to write, to map with words what is feeling beyond understanding, love that is church, a me where all mes are welcomed and shared and accepted. Amy says it is weaving us together, and this is true.

Every day a shower of blessings, dancing synchronicities and affirmations. We have been dancing with each other, toward each other, for ages now. Naked in the sun, she sang to me, "We’re almost home my lover, almost home, almost home." Almost home.

The first days were tender, awkward - sweetly beloved: those meeting moments - knocking heads – that we'll never have again, fumbling out of our solitudes. Just gentle touching, learning, wake up my love.

Before, at home, Rosetta [the name of CM’s higher self] whispering through me "It's okay, baby, I've got you." Every time I touched Amy it felt like that - come down, darling, welcome back to the world. I can breathe open your ready heart - and I will protect her fiercely.

Every morning a waking near dawn, slow gentle hours of holding and stroking and wading together where dreams lap up over consciousness, the sweetest hours of the day, our gentle talking.

The morning birds greet the sun outside, and in my arms Amy coos, a perfect dove. The first few days we touched and breathed and stretched and gazed and so clearly the feelings let us understand how blessed we are together, how much is present pregnant possible, our work.

Saturday, the 4th day, she let me touch her breasts, her tiny rosebud nipples, she makes such beautiful sounds. I felt together we were playing her virginal
wonder like an instrument.

The dreams! I have such a lovely attuned facility with that world with her; our dreams were lessons and maps and allies, day by day. Sunday in that easy waking dawn I kissed her - every day a growing closeness, a deeper exploration.

We kissed and dressed and she went for a walk and then we drove to Provincetown for one of the most beautiful days I've known - just the treasure of our easy grace and walking in the world in love with her, enveloped in the joy of her bloom, our soft talk on the harbor, our dune adventure - the dunes! Amazing! My child heart exploded like fireworks, I was a walking waterfall.

Out on the ocean, horse-faced seals bobbed and watched me, so close to the shore. I stood at the waterline and thought, “If I'm reincarnated as an animal, let it be one of these - a seal, a dolphin, an otter.”

I felt the rhythm of the waves move my body inside, and imagined the feel of that motion being my only motion, my whole world. Just then a huge wave crashed and rushed up to caress my ankles. I turned and the beach was full of treasure. I fell giggling on Amy and balanced between her hips and knew she is the best friend I've always wanted, so close to my heart it makes me cry now, to write this part. All of it shared, offered up in sparkling honesty, our hearts speaking through us.

There are things I can't quite place on a certain day: Tarot talking and my child heart bubbling up so chatty - that might have been Saturday. Delight. Contact improvisation. Makeup and perfume. Talking, tears, comfort - over and over again, a circling dance, shining shining. Dignity.

The first day she showed me her albums. I wish I could show her mine. Her voice, so sweet and musical but with that deep vibration resonance, the feel of it against me is itself so deeply arousing. From the moment I stepped off the bus and felt her tremble against me I was soaking wet, for days straight.

Monday we went to Goose Pond, a haircut, all dressed up for dinner with her folks. At home that night she sang “O Ring” for me - she is a performer, totally.

What night did she dance for me? Spectacularly beautiful, her face became a countenance. Rose Mary has perfect rhythm, perfect humor, the subtlest smile. She blew me away.

Tuesday - another day beyond words. We woke so early, just before 4, our languid talking. Near dawn Amy suggested this would be the morning to see the sun rise over the ocean – before ever meeting her I told I wanted to see the sun come up over the ocean, since that does not happen in California. Then she said, "This is good light for lovemaking."

The night before, I asked her to show me how to touch a man. And then I was touching her in the dawn. She said, "You do know how to touch a man. I would not do it differently myself." Only she is not a man; hers is a perfect pretty, pink girl penis. I’ve never relished making love to anyone so much as that morning. Her beautiful orgasm at dawn. I watched the sun rise in her - we danced the sun up in her. She laid on me and in me for a long time. In our afterglow she said, "I love my morning birds." I replied, "You are my morning bird."

She told me her last time as a man was at sundown. Her first time as a woman was at sunrise.

We ate figs with feta and almonds for breakfast by the pool, and I jumped in the cold cold water. The swim was just as delicious. Perfect morning. - Then the call about Amy’s brother, and Amy says "We touched divinity this morning, and it has cracked open in my brother."

That morning she had dreamt I held her and whispered in her ear, "Stay here with me." I sat solid at her back and held her, here with me, while she navigated these phone calls and I marveled at her fierce love for her family, and her fierce love for Love. She is a lioness.

We went out in the afternoon - she says, several times, "I just want to go flow in the world a while." I love holding her hand while we flow in the world. I can't say it enough.

Was that the night Rosetta spilled out, Dad's story spilled out, my confident words about our parting spilled out, such a dear focused voice? The blunt force of Dad's story coming out of me clenched Amy’s jaw – and made me wonder about that time my own jaw clenched for days, and made me wonder whether she's more receptive than even she realizes?

There were so many purging moments. It took me days to cry but when I did there was the clenching in my chest, and when it released, Amy's touch released it for real. A space in my chest, I could feel it in my stretching, in my breathing, in having nothing crammed down there to want to keep pushing down with cigarettes. Wow.

Yesterday Amy spoke briefly about family - about true family as belonging, that we are family - and at that word family I burst into tears. I want it so much. I grieved its passing with Mom's passing, but here it is! Here in me, here in us, just beginning!

The other time I cried so easy was on Amy’s couch after talking about my Maya Angelou dream. Amy said she'd been waiting for so long [the last 10 years] wondering where I was...but that if she was waiting for me, every bit of the wait was worth it - I just folded into her, into love. That was when a neighbor said suddenly, clearly, "I'm Rose Mary. Nice to meet you," while we sat there on the couch.

When the food I made us was so good she could only laugh at the first bite - I could live for that laugh. And this is how I know I'm in love: she is by far most beautiful first thing in the morning. I still close my eyes and see her face - I hope that lasts a long time, it's such a warm delicate feeling.

Wednesday she wrote and I laid out on the sunny grass, half-asleep, half-watching the cloud parade, until suddenly she was kneeling over me saying, “Come inside.” Inside, saying, “Take off your clothes.” She took pictures of me. An experiment, a start [to exquisitely self-aware BDSM play, which we first publicly discussed in this blog entry].

I laid naked in her bed while she read me her work and then we made love slow fast slow - she makes love like a woman. She makes me quake. Amy observed that two women making love is like tectonic plates shifting against each other – causing a quake – while a man is rather like a volcano, solitarily pouring himself into the spirit of the sky. We have the best of both.

This really is a being woven beyond understanding, just submit to its beauty and its mystery. We sat for hours with music and touching, just surfing our space, and she lay back and let me give her my love, just shining. Dream-love, the real thing.

This morning, another early morning of soft spoken stories, rubbing her foot, just easy nakedness and an endless font of stories to share. Yesterday, we took a walk to today’s lovemaking place, on a bog in a pine-encircled glade. To get there we had to clear the path of a lot of dead brush dumped - we did so laughing.

Then strolling to the beach: the plovers that put on their show, swirling and swooping and soaring around us while we held each other, an amazing blessing. How did she put it?: “When Man makes harmony with the Beast, Nature becomes spiritualized”?

Also, the 2 spiders out her window: Monday, before her haircut, this story: I sat down and saw a motionless moth under the grass at my hand. I touched it for nearly a minute, thinking it dead, when suddenly it fluttered up - alive! - only to land in the web of the most excited spider ever, who promptly ate it. I told Amy, who answered with telling me that she had recently met a neighbor who touched a moth and wondered whether it was alive or dead. Amy responded, “Probably both.”

We decided that the spider was Rose Mary and the moth her old identity; and that our time was a feast for Rose Mary, feasting on identity Amy surrendered to love. Even today the plovers circled high above our lovemaking; perfectly naked in the world in the clearing whose path we uncovered together.

It was so hard to leave, even with calm in myself and joy in my heart. I cried twice - once just gazing in her eyes, overwhelmed - and when she came back to the car and through the window kissed my anchor, so like Mom did, bending to me, saying "You're my anchor." My heart just flooded. Sweet Amy, the sweetest girl in all my world.

I'm still catching her scent rising from my skin, my hair, my clothes, now and again. My love. Come to me soon, I miss you already. The sun is setting - I'm flying west into a perpetual sunset - and it won't be morning without you.

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.

Photos of Amy George in the Miss Trans Northhampton Pageant

2009-09-08T16:13:00.007-04:00

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.

Erecting the Feminine

2009-09-04T09:32:00.002-04:00

I saw a Simpsons episode that reflected what life for me has been like for a long time. It parodies Goldilocks and the 3 Bears – Lisa is Goldilocks. The first bed is too hard, the second bed is too soft, and the third is too hard.

I have been letting my masculine instincts go soft - flaccid - for 11 years; four of them laying down most of the day with a feeling of oceanic chaos rushing through my body while I coped. Doing nothing but coping for so long, I became mired in the apathy of limbo. There were times I craved death, but I couldn’t take it on knowing the singularity of my experience might become important to many people, since I am privy to understanding that can only come to a male-identified male whom God transsexualized. God was able to transsexualize me through my receptivity to my inner-world.

You cannot, at once, be hard in the external world and receptive to the inner-world. Such hardness keeps the unconscious at bay, and softness admits it. Dreams, meditation, contemplation, entheogens, and mindfulness soften the ego. Through the softened ego, identity is molded from within; as if from clay, like Adam. Our psyches our sculpture like our bodies.

Staying in softness for a long time habituates it. I won’t fight softness, because that is upsetting. I will just stay focused and present and wait for the universe to lead me away from softness when it’s time; on to harder dimensions that can make the soft more vital; dimensions in love and creation and the body…

Softness has made me a whiner, a grumbler. Behind the softness of whining and grumbling is hard, vitalizing grief.

I focus deeply on my body to feel its vitality through the softness.

I have not belonged in my perfect softness to another body, in any context, since I was a zygote

The universe heals us by applying hardness to perfect softness. “God is pressure,” it is said.

At the beginning of my spiritual path, when I still identified as male, my masculinity fueled little but rage, comedy, survival and sex. It did not support achievement or creativity. I was headed for homelessness. In a dream my future, miserable, male, homeless self asked God, “Will you rape me yesterday?”

I have been criticized for saying God rapes; but it is a fact that God raped Mohammed (see Karen Armstrong’s biography of him). God raped me, too; and that’s ok. God rapes certain people so others don’t have to be.

But if you ask to be raped, as I did in the dream, is it rape? Yes, it is consensual rape. Had God not raped me, the world would have. In fact, a dream about the fate of my male self had I not followed my path showed soldiers amputating a man’s leg and then raping him with it. Instead, the destiny of the path I chose was pictured in this dream: I am a female rape victim.

My masculine ego went flaccid, releasing my attachments to my main masculine attributes (rage, comedy, sex, survival), thence engaging my receptivity to spirit and dreams, and the feminine unconscious poured in; raping me of my identity. This dream expresses my male self’s role in the consensuality of the rape:

Men with raging erections are lined up before angels. The men supposed to let their erections go flaccid. The tension is making their jaws clench and their teeth jut monstrously.

I was lined up to be raped of my identity; essentially to be killed and reborn. And the psychic rape continued after I was female identified.

At present, my male self is being reborn as an expression of my ability to be active in the external world. As such I recently dreamed:

I am editing a collection of my work, when something interferes with it, preventing me from deleting. The screen becomes a map and inside the map appears the silhouette of a head and arms raised. The figure is moving like it is trying to fight its way out of the map. Then BOOM this boy – a teen with short hair bursts through the map into the room, not very conscious. I say to someone with me, “It was bound to happen someday.” “Where are you from?” I ask him. “What?” he asks. I repeat. He is dazed and trying to come to.

The boy is awakening out of the flaccidity of unconsciousness.

Last night, as I wondered about the boy making me “erect” in the world - instead of lying flaccid on the couch and coping - a documentary about rap music culture was on TV; and as if talking directly to me, an electrifying black dude said:

Go hard or go home
Get down or lay down.

Watching him and his peers, I understood the power that black men in my dreams represent.

I wrote: “I have not gone hard in a while
My whole being went soft with the loss of my masculinity
Soft, flaccid.
The testosterone, the muscle memory, the mind
drained away. The way my male self willed my being into action evaporated.
The clay of my bones melted into softness, back into mud.

“I died and transformed, died and transformed over and over…over and over…until I found entities of the Kingdom: the soul, wisdom, the feminine, Jesus, the Queen of Heaven. Their centrality to experience is heightened as one becomes enlightened.”

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.

The Sweet Dominatrix

2009-09-01T13:26:00.003-04:00

I was amidst a cyber-discussion in which my cyberfriend wrote of how she went from having a dynamic persona to a rigid and closed one. She wrote: “At some point I just didn't want to attract attention to myself anymore. Part of it was putting my energy into learning and getting older, but another part of it was not wanting to deal with the perceptions of others - positive or negative - and wanting to be in control so as not to be hurt so much. This surfaced more and more during a time when I worked at a fairly conservative bookstore, and I got into the habit of hiding myself. The mode I went into with was very much like, ‘You won't know anything about me unless I like you enough to tell you.’

“And then I got married and did the same thing in subtler and damaging ways; trying hard to be something acceptable to love. It was the most dishonest place in my life, I always maintained a place of honesty within my close friendships, but to not have a persona that aligned with my deepest core in some way was really crippling.

“During this time I had a lot of dreams about a 'bathing suit.' I would go to that old bookstore and couldn't find my bathing suit. People would offer me other things to wear, but I just wanted my bathing suit and I couldn't find it.

“The very adaptability I had always used to deal with radically different environments was now no longer this fluid creative thing through which I could express what I needed to, but a role I took on to avoid the consequences of being myself and now I was stuck in it. When all of that broke apart I went to the other extreme and wore my heart on my face, breaking into tears before customers who were rude and obnoxious, and didn't really deserve that much of me.”

Amy: Perhaps they didn’t, but your over-inexpressiveness, by turns, reflected how rude people can be and so did your over-expressiveness. It was so honest of you, crying. In a way, it was saying, “This is about me as much as you, you shithead.”

Saying they did not that deserve that much sort of dehumanizes them, and by turns it dehumanizes you. In a way, you were being martyred for our essential nakedness, which is beautiful (in a horrible way, as martyrdom is) – and it does not have to detract from how honoring yourself needs to come before honoring others. We don’t have to be superior to honor our needs.

Of course, you were in a bind, playing the role of server, so it would be natural to go to the extreme of, “I serve you nothing, especially not my heart.” But we all must serve the heart, even shitheads.

Cyberfriend: True. true. I find the problem with that customer/employee relationship is that it’s often not service but servitude. I am someone who always treats everything as 'relationship' so if someone is being a jerk in regular life, I have the space to say, 'No, you can't treat me that way. I will not accept it without saying something about it.' But within that service context you often can't do that - if ever... although tears are one way of doing that. But should I really be so affected by it in the first place?

Amy: I would be. To me, it’s very honest, very heart. Should we be so honest? I don’t know. There’s no mask in honesty. Masks get “glued” onto our faces and we don’t realize they are there. I think someday everyone will be unmasked, and this masquerade will be over.

The bitch is a mask; a very useful one. Perhaps the key is to take off the mask as soon as we don’t need it, which is hard to do when it becomes habituated. For me, stepping out of habit – taking off the mask - like you did crying, is admirable. The world is hypnotized by habit. [fin]

This discussion yesterday was reflected in waking-life: an English couple is vacationing for a week in the unit next door to me. The day they arrived was stormy, so I did not open the pool. (I am paid to open and close it, and test chemical levels.) The English couple called the owner of the unit to ask for the combination to the pool. She wouldn’t give it to them, saying it was my job to open and close it.

Next day - yesterday - I have an avocado ripening in the sun. I go out to fetch it, and real quick because I am wearing a tank top and nothing underneath to enhance my pubescent sized breasts. From my neighbor’s patio, the Englishwoman sees my hand snatch up the avocado, and says, “Excuse me,” with some agitation. I look over and she is striding toward me.

Face-to-face, she stands a half foot taller than me, and outweighs me by 4 or 5 stone. Her bosom is large. She’s blond, like me. She lays into me about the state of the pool; the “silt” and other debris on the bottom. She says she expected America to be cleaner; that she wouldn’t let her children swim in the pool; that it can’t have been cleaned in ages.

I am holding the avocado between my breasts to shield them from view. It looks like I am praying, saying, “Don’t beat me, Momma.” If only I had my wits about me to say that. Instead, I explained that it wasn’t my job to clean the bottom of the pool. She bitched some more. I explained that the recent storms had blown a lot of stuff into the pool. She bitched some more. I said I thought some company probably came to clean it. She bitched some more. I said I’ll ask someone about it. She bitched some more.

I went next to speak with a neighbor about it. She said the pool company came weekly to vacuum the bottom, and was due to arrive that day around noon. I went back to the English people, who were now indoors. I knocked on the door. The man came out and I explained the situation. He wouldn’t believe me. He said, “It can’t have been cleaned in ages,” and glanced down at my tiny, unenhanced breasts.

Sure enough, the pool was crystal clear in a couple hours.

The interaction left a bad taste in my mouth the rest of the day, and I had to get up in the middle of the night to write about it. I am wondering if it would have better to cry in response to the woman rather than deferring to her aggressiveness. Now, I can see that crying could have made a comedy of my feelings; and I see why my cyberfriend questioned crying in front of shithead customers.

After encounters like that with the Englishwoman, I ponder ways I might have undermined them. Often, I consider actions out of left field - crying as a perfect example of such. I love the idea of poignantly reflecting how people are acting to reveal them to themselves; but perhaps such things are better served in writing and theater than in the heat of the moment.

Catching me off-guard, the Englishwoman was able to prey on my ignorance about the pool, and also my innate sense of guilt; guilt that I must be doing something wrong because I have done so few things right ever in the eyes of the world. This issue was dramatized in this dream:

8/30: My first day of class teaching. Students keep coming in and so I have to go make extra copies a couple of times. The second time I bump into Nora and we get sidetracked; she showing me these new, amazing trams, which are amphibious and cable free. I accidentally get off a stop too early, and have forgotten my cane and a special notebook on the tram. I run to the tram at the end of the line. I find my cane beside an old man’s cane, but my special notebook is missing.

I am getting back to class as fast as I can – aware that much time has passed. In the lobby of the school I am accosted by two female administrators; one a very short Indian woman. They say they have found I have made 2000 violations. “What?!” The Indian woman pulls my face down to and against hers and talks intimidatingly. I pull away and say, “You don’t talk to me like that.” I ask Nora to vouch for me, but she won’t.

My job in the dream is the English language teaching position I held from 1993 – 1997 at a polytechnic in Budapest. In waking-life, as in the dream, I was not the most organized teacher (but I was the most popular English teacher at the school) because I just couldn’t be; and I tried to be really really hard because of my fear of people like the dream’s Indian woman and waking-life’s Englishwoman. Feeling unprepared is horrible for me because I feel it gives people the right to dump on me. Even when I am prepared am I paranoid that I have overlooked something.

There has always been too much going on inside me for me to participate as the powers-that-be expect. Now, I have a tremendous complex about it. It is as if I believe I have done something wrong that people have the right to chastise me for, even when I have not. So, my ignorance about the workings of the pool left me especially vulnerable to attack.

Let these leaves fall in the premature autumn wind.

I dreamed:

8/31: As we go down the highway, a little brother holds the hot end of a cigarette very close to the driver’s face, trailing it to his ear, and then down his neck. When we make a rest stop, I get in the child’s face and give him a vicious lecture about not killing us. I keep going till I am sure he has been frightened into behaving. Afterward I can’t feel sweetness.

Inside me I can sense the potential to act as I do in the dream; terrifying someone out of foolishly endangering other people. (I learned how to goring up.) So, I imagined myself addressing the child differently: respectfully, calmly, clearly; not abusing the child’s sweetness, but letting him understand the reality of his behavior and letting it settle into his heart. I might say, “It was very possible that the driver could have crashed and killed both of you. But what if you had lived and he died? How would that feel?”

Say the child receives such conscientious treatment, but it does not change his behavior and he causes a fatal accident, which kills him and the driver. I would rather live in a world without such a child than without sweetness.

What about the driver? Being martyred to sweetness is great end if he was a Nazi in his last life. There is more order than meets the eye.

What if the child lives and the driver dies? If that awakens the child’s heart, so be it. If it does not, let Law keep the world safe from him.

The sort of browbeating I give him in the dream could be an aspect of how I would, as my dominatrix-self, treat a submissive – but with a crucial difference:

At my first play-date, I noticed that my anger about outside issues was coloring my behavior. I was letting my frustrations out on the sub, just like the Englishwoman was on me. It only happened a little with the sub, but enough to know it is not right for me in a BDSM context; or any other. I intuit that as a dominatrix I can learn to be pretend-angry without any real emotion accompanying it. I also intuit that if I am able to do this, I will be able to use my authority - if not my anger - to defend myself from people like the Englishwoman; people who make BDSM such a vital and human expression.

Being a dominatrix for me is about learning to be self-possessed in the presence of other people; learning how to possess my sweetness so that ignorant bitches don’t walk all over it.

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.

Dominatrix in Training part one

2009-08-27T03:32:00.001-04:00

I dreamed:

I’m In a college library looking for a book called “Bondage and the Feminine,” call number 83.6 Instead I come to a section of art supplies for sale, and then go into the ridiculously long entranceway of an opulent shop, and then back out. Next I go to the top of a water slide, which continues up through a hole torn through a massive, hanging canvas. The man who runs the slide signals that I can’t keep going up; that the only way to go is down, so I do, trusting it though I know I will be going faster than is comfortable. My stomach is in knots, plummeting down.

The dream preceded my first ever play date. I had looked all over for answers to the mystery behind the compulsion toward BDSM. I supposed that the libido divested into BDSM could be sublimated into art instead of BDSM, as the dream suggests. I search all over for other answers, not given. I search for the source, at the top of the slide, which is inaccessible. Apparently, the only way to learn what I need to is to dive right in – a little scary, but safe, like first times are.

I called Señor and instructed him to let himself in, lock the door behind him and go stand facing the corner beside the door, clothes on.

I was just finishing getting ready when I heard him enter; I was in a black mini, black, sheer stockings, black patent leather heels and a lushly rose-red high-necked sleeveless top, the material a stretchy, meshy texture. I took my time, lighted some incense, letting him hear the sounds of the lighter, my heels, and my rustling about. I came in to the room and told him to face me; and felt a rush of timidity at the imposing figure he cut: white T-shirt, blue jeans, and some workman’s boots he wears when he rides his motorcycle.

The T-shirt, I found out when we were finished, was for Sputnik, a local band he had seen the previous weekend. The print was bright orange and pictured a guy playing electric guitar while surfing the crest of a wave. “Awesome!” I responded.

“Strip,” I said from across the room to him. When he was done, I told him to turn around, back to me, and I walked up behind him, and said to his ear, “Do you know why I made you leave your clothes on when you came in?”

“No, Mistress.”

“Because when you came here yesterday you threw your clothes off without asking. Now, I know you did that to show how sincere you are, but I don’t care. This is my space. You don’t do anything unless I tell you to. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mistress, I understand.”

I smacked his butt a few times.

“Do you know what you also did to piss me off?”

Silence. “Do you?” I said raising my voice and smacking his butt.

“No, Mistress.”

“You kissed my hand twice without asking permission.” I smacked him again.

“You know what you also did?”

“No Mistress.”

“You left a shirt here. Why the [expletive] did you do that?”

“I don’t know, Mistress.”

Smack. Smack. Smack. “Girl, this is my space. You don’t even breathe in my space without my permission.”

“Yes, Mistress, I understand.”

“Don’t tell me ‘you understand.’ ‘Yes, Mistress,’ is fine.”

“Yes, Mistress.”

The session went something like this, instructing, admonishing, disciplining, smacking – some face smacking, not hard, just to be intimidating – nipple pinching, grabbing his erection, telling him I wanted him flaccid and intended to train him to stay flaccid, and I would pull it down toward the floor, a little uncomfortably. I would grab his balls, and ask, “Whose are these?” His were the first male genitalia aside from my own that I had ever touched. It was a decent introduction.

In the beginning, I instinctively kept wanting to push him down toward the ground from his shoulders, and when I realized I was doing it I’d think, “This couldn’t be very arousing for him.” I think the reason I was doing it was an instinctive impulse to ground him, because he wasn’t so grounded. He was very excited. I told him I am going to train him to be an extension of my will. I taught him that he is not ever to say, “you,” to me; that he is to address me in the third person, and I punished him when he screwed this up.

For the first several minutes of the session I had him keep his eyes shut – which was good to do. It helped me get my footing, get past my feeling of timidity. Then I sort of forgot to let him open them. “Mistress,” he said, “May I have permission to open my eyes?”

“Why?”

“Because you’re so beautiful, Mistress.”

I took his head in my hands and stroked it saying I was pleased with him, that I might not have to discipline him as much as I thought. I was good cop/bad cop in one actor.

At one point, he was lying supine and I was standing over him, his head viced in between my shoes. I said, “You can’t imagine how delicate and sensitive I am. You know, the reason I’m so skittish in the external world is because I am too sensitive for it, but now you’re in my space. When you’re in my space, you’re inside a vagina.”

This cut to the deep truth of the global suppression of the feminine; how the feminine of popular culture struggles to be anything more than a reflection of man’s desire; how the feminine of many cultures is mercilessly raped and abused; how misogyny is enculturated.

How can women deign to present femininely in front of men knowing how much many men hate the feminine? Hence, the burqa. Hence, the power of the dominatrix over the feminine in man.

He was bound and supine, so excited that he got dry mouth and requested some water - the straws I had bought to eat through after my cosmetic surgery would have another use. I knelt down beside him with a straw in a plastic bottle (sorry Earth) of water and stuck it in his mouth – which gave me an idea.

I was straddling his midsection, looking down sternly into his face, squeezing agave nectar from a plastic bottle (sorry Earth) into my hand. I said, “I’m gonna teach you to eat out of my hand, and that’s not a metaphor.” I lifted up his head, his mouth to my hand, and he wouldn’t go for it, out of respect and obedience – praise Jesus. “It’s ok,” I said, “You can lick me,” and he went for it, hungrily.

I turned around, toward his feet, was off to the side, holding his legs up, one of my legs across his belly, doing something painful to his nether region, when I looked back and noticed his raised face looking down at what I was doing. I whipped around and smacked him and said, “What the [expletive] are you looking at?”

I realized after the session that I don’t want to use expletives in play anymore. The only reason I did was because it is muscle memory to use them when I am expressing anger; but it didn’t feel natural. It felt forced.

He didn’t have an answer for me right away, so I kept smacking him and telling him to come up with one, but he never did and we moved on to something else.

Toward the end he was tied standing up to a chest-of-drawers. I had my arm around his neck, spanking him while I monologued into his ear: “You know, I had a dream about you last night. You were a little boy, following me around, and you took a crap in my guitar. You didn’t really know what you were doing. It wasn’t malicious. Do you know that symbolizes?”

“No, Mistress.”

“It symbolizes all the shit you did when you came in here yesterday, throwing off your clothes, kissing my hand without permission, leaving your shirt…So, then in the dream I can smell your ass because you haven’t wiped, and I make you wipe three times.” Then, I said, “One, two, three,” giving him three hard spanks.

He requested me I use a cucumber on him, which I was a little wary of because I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t use enough lube. He pointed this out, that a lot of lube was needed on the cucumber and inside of him. I said I didn’t want put my fingers in him without gloves. He volunteered to do it himself and I permitted him to. He went to the bathroom, came back, and we got down to it. At this point I was almost out of gas, about 50 minutes into it. And this part was my least favorite because of how responded to it – getting an erection myself. When I realized this what enthusiasm was left in me drained away. I realized that some vestigial, bestial, unfeeling part of me was involved – yuck – aroused by the act of penetration. I lost focus and jammed it in too far and he went, “Whoa, too much, Mistress.” Oh, I felt so bad, and every time I think of it I feel sorrow. I think of the rectum of the little child whose feelings were long ago frightened into submission, and so s/he turned to BDSM as an adult.

I was thinking we were completely finished, but he then asked permission to masturbate. Now, I had gotten the impression from things he said (that I misunderstood) that orgasm would not be part of it. “Oh, you should have told me. I would have paced myself for that. I don’t want to if I can’t be present for it – and I can’t be now, so next time.”

I’m not going to let him do it. I’m going to do it myself, while forcing him to stay as relaxed as possible, telling him it will be the last orgasm he’ll ever have, because we’re taking him for a sex change right after, so he better enjoy it. When he’s getting close, I’ll hit him if he tenses up. When he’s almost there I’ll say, “Come on, Honey, let me see your colors.” Then, “Good girl, good girl.”

I asked him how it was. He said, “You were intense.”

I knew I’d be good at it. Aside from writing, it’s the only marketable skill I have.

Just before he left I said, “Give me a person-to-person hug,” and he said, “Ok, ‘Senor’ and Amy,” and I said, “Yeah.”

Hug – smile - wave goodbye – door shut - deep breath – have to get out of the house, away from the BDSM energy back to regular life. I went down the street to Schoolhouse Ice Cream – a two-minute walk, but I have not once been there in the 4.5 years I have lived here because I have been too skittish.

In the summer, the parlor is non-stop-crowded with vacationing kids & parents. I wanted their gleeful company. I went inside without any anxiety, got a sugar cone of cheesecake-blueberry ice cream; sat down outside and watched and listened and licked.

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.

Interview with a Submissive

2009-08-25T08:23:00.002-04:00

Señor arrived quaking with the intensity of his feelings. It had been made clear that we were only going to interview each other, but he deigned to throw off all his clothes and kneel before me. I was comfortable with that after the shock wore off. He was plainly genuine in his desire to submit, to have me be in control. He had a wicked sunburn from spending the day outdoors and his beard was grown in since he was last at work.

He said he doesn’t want vanilla sex. I said neither do I. He has had some experience with pro dommes that was not too great – why am I not surprised?

He’s had a lot of psychotherapy and you can tell by how he accepts his needs. I admire how honest he is.

He’s very anal-centric, and is all for being feminized, but he doesn’t crave it like I once did. I was telling him how it was not good for me to be submissive because I eroticized losing my dignity. He said that losing his dignity is not what he’s looking for. He’s not so interested in being humiliated as controlled.

I asked a bunch of questions to ascertain what he wants, but he didn’t want to be too precise, He said he didn’t want to “top from the bottom,” meaning he wants me to direct the play. Yet, he did not realize the ways in which, in his enthusiasm, he was topping me. He couldn’t help it…As I dreamed about it the previous night, he was a little boy following me around. He took a dump in my guitar (not maliciously – just unthinkingly, like how he was “topping” me). I could smell his ass because he hadn’t wiped. I made him wipe it three times.

First, throwing off his clothes without permission was topping. Then he presented me with a paddle as if he was putting a ring around my finger. Kneeling, he kissed my hand two times without asking. And somehow he managed to leave a brown T-shirt here that I did not see him wear. I saw it as an emblem of the dream-dump he left in my dream-guitar.

As he spoke about his needs and interests, he sometimes closed his eyes from shyness. And as he was rambling, he disappeared into himself, into his inner-world. Though his words were collecting in my ears, he was more talking to himself than to me, which is fine because our interests and needs have nothing to do with true relationship. It’s a play relationship. Nonetheless, as he monologued I noticed I was slumping in my chair, drifting toward sleep, slinking away from him just like he was hastening away from me and into himself. In that I was mirroring him, I was more being than human.

He really wanted me to give him something before he left. Ok; five strokes with the paddle. It really hit his spot. He was like, “Oh, yeah!” and got erect for the first time, which was freaky. I had never seen it happen to anyone but me, and he is pretty big – easily twice my diameter now that I have shrunk without testosterone. I love my tininess.

I never felt like I was out of control, but his passion was so hot that I had to dance around it – and it was a little scary that his passion was so hot in contrast to how “cool” I was.

The dominant role makes me realize how totally skittish I am in daily interaction, always ready to dance away from aggression; always concerned that if I don’t manage people’s responses to me, they will endanger me. Also, with Señor I feel free to be as feminine as I am. It came out, in the way I was talking, moving, being. I like that it is about exerting my will as I will.

After he was gone, I had a couple rushes of George-power: totally gross, empty, imbalanced. The power in this roleplaying is how at peace I can be when I exert my will. I also had a feeling of deep sorrow; that we must crave such things. In the craving, I see the emptiness of people being strangers to themselves and each other. I see parts of people that, because of PTSD, cannot find expression anywhere but BDSM. I had an image of Señor naked, running madly in the darkness.

I had a dream of a man and a woman in play-bondage, wrapped so tightly that they could be and were affixed to a wall in seated positions, an image of the limited potential of BDSM play.

BDSM may be transformative as a means to end. As an end in itself, it is running madly in a small, dark place in order to resurrect feeling that the world has terrorized into submission. It does this effectively, but no submissive runs naked and joyfully in the light when her bonds are too rigid, too monopolizing of eros.

I was murky, disentangling Señor from my psyche and my space when I received emailed photos from a dear friend of a bouffant hairdo she’d just set for a party. They said to me: “Let your thoughts be high, like my hair - hair being symbolic of thought since it is emitted from the head. Let thought take you to the clouds, away from Señor’s mad scrambling in the darkness.” Her features are so divine compared to Señor’s sunburned, whiskered, agitated countenance.

Señor and I decided to meet the following evening to play. I am wary of the feeling I have that he is barging in to have his needs met, but I’m game for now, and feel more self-assured and self-possessed than before we met.

…to be continued…

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.

The Winged Frog and Horse Camp

2009-08-24T08:46:00.001-04:00

I was doing my morning pool duties and a tiny frog was floating upside-down in the leaf catch, looking pretty dead. I put him in the palm of my hand, looking for signs of life and he suddenly leapt and fell three feet, hitting the hard stone with a *splap*. “Oh, no!” Maybe his bones broke, but the nearest frog clinic was 6,000 miles away, in Tibet. So, I picked him back up and stroked him a little – maybe the first caress he had ever known. It might have irritated his delicate genitalian skin. I put him in a little grassy place, under a six-inch ceiling of wood. What a meal he would be for a lucky bird.

Some vacationers were leaving. Their girl, 6 or 7, was looking for something in the back of the car – maybe something precious her father had packed there the night before. Since she was turned away from me, I decided not to say anything. “Hi,” a little voice said. She must have heard my footfalls. She had grown accustomed to seeing me around.

“Good morning,” I said.

“We’re leaving,” she said sadly.

“Aw. Did you have a good time?”

Gentle nodding, looking away from me, into the trunk of the car. Then she said something inaudible.

“Maybe I’ll see you next year,” I said.

“Next year I’m going to horse camp.”

“Horse camp?! Cool. That’ll be so fun.”

Nod.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Bye.”

Horse camp: The horse is to the body as the rider is to the mind. The phrase, “Where the horses run free,” has referred to mind-body unity in the New Kingdom; that of the beings into which human beings are evolving. I want to go to horse camp; where the birds will eat my inner-frog so that it may be reborn with wings.

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.

Submission Is Solar, Dominance Lunar, and the Light of the World Shuts the Black Hole

2009-08-20T14:06:00.003-04:00

Orshee: Yesterday, writing in my journal - and before realizing it was the solstice that day - I followed a long stony trail of logic to arrive at the thought that submission is solar. I wrote, writing to the Netta figure (from this dream): "Her process is fueled by mine, my love moves her in beauty through all directions of time, I am the center - I am a sun. I am a center, but she is also a center. She gives moonlight as my orbiter. By restraining me, she restores me to myself."

My thought that submission is solar leads then to that the other – domination -- is lunar.

And the root I keep coming back to is Reflective. By this I mean that if submission is about aligning with self through giving, being the gift, a solar act – the dominant partner, rather than giving of herself, would act as a reflection of what the sub needs, or act as a reflection of the sub's unconscious. It seems to me that the sub would indeed be the center of the dynamic, and the domme is the pretend center of attention, because she’s really about the sub.

Yet I've heard girls talk about playing domme to work out their own issues, and of course both roles are gifts in a sense.

A corollary of this is the unsettling thought that, if submission is solar, is there a facet of submission that is self-consuming – like the sun becoming a black hole?

Amy: Sure, but the sun is only one element with a whole universe to give it balance. Suddenly becoming the fully-embodied soul whom you were in the Netta dream would be self-consuming. In practice, we always have time to integrate these things. Playing the submissive role from the dream in waking-life would consume some identity, some ego; and then you & your partner would call it a day or night, and you would process it; acting in a lunar mode toward your own sun-self.

I see an amazing parallel between your unsettled feeling and what I endured as I first identified as female; submitting my entire being to a wholly other being in self-consuming light. The result was a crazy out-of-control figure wanting to snatch my body away from me. When this was happening I was lost in light, and oblivious to my water aspect, which is even in my/her name: Pillowwater, flowing eternally. There’s no possibility for self-consumption on the river. You just keep flowing endlessly from one place to the next. But standing nude in the light of pure consciousness is annihilating. We take breaks from it. We assert our observing ego and cool the heat, and shade the light, with perspective, with the waters of earthly consciousness. Light is rather divine consciousness. Zeus warned people not to look at him.

In our lifetimes, we are like water in that as infants we melt into awareness at the top of the mountain, and through our lives we run out to the sea. Then we die and evaporate into Heaven, and then snow back down onto tender peaks in a new life.

I was thinking about the solar principle as self-consuming; seeing the end result of self-consumption as a black hole. If the masculine is phallic and solar, then my male self disappeared into a vulvic black hole, balancing my former, phallic nature.

Orshee: I read once -- I think in The Seven Mysteries of Life, an awesome massive science book -- that black holes actually emit matter/energy too. For everything it consumes it emits some equivalent particle, something like that.

Amy: This adds to my thesis. Also, maybe it could add more comfort to your fear of the solar being self-consuming.

Orshee: I guess it's comforting, in the sense that death is comforting.

Amy: What?! Isn’t Death a positive card in the Tarot?

Orshee: It is, although I meant that the part of me that's afraid of the self-consumption is the same that's afraid of death.

Amy: Say, each of our lives is a sun with a finite amount of light to give before we become black holes that disappear, in death. My sense is that we are reborn into light that we gave as suns, and we did not become the hole (so scratch what I said about my phallic male self becoming a vulvic black hole). The black hole is not us: it’s our absence in the world; it is the absence we feel when a person dies, and even that fades with time. Eventually, we all die and are reborn into the new world that we started with our light from the old world, and the black holes are all gone.

Or take Jesus, the light of the world that men tried to snuff out: the light he emitted still lives today – in my countenance even. The black hole he left behind is still around, too, in the minds of the religious. But the theory would go that someday the black hole he left behind would vanish and he would step back into the world of light he left behind. I have dreamed him with Rose Mary in the future.

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.

Authenticity and BDSM

2009-08-18T13:52:00.005-04:00

I received an inquiry from a man, Señor, about my thoughts on BDSM. I posted them to my other blog, Ask the Dream Queen.” Here is the correspondence that followed:

Señor: Amy, first off, awesome blog. You are wicked smart and well-read. Amazing work.

[quoting me] “There are parts of your identity that are chronically imbalanced.”

What if being submissive is what makes me feel loved, excited, and whole physically, erotically, emotionally, and spiritually? What if it completes me and makes me happy?

Amy: Totally, Señor – to each his own. Go for it. I wish you all the peace and contentment it gives you.

In case you don’t know my background, I am transsexual, and I used to have the selfsame desires as you. As I discovered my feminine nature outside of BDSM fantasy (never having had actual experience with a dominant woman), the compulsion to submit neutralized because I was submitting to my true self.

BDSM fanatasies were there for me every day when I was male, but becoming a woman was out of the question. As a man, I had no desire to change sex. I was not “born in the wrong body,” as so many transsexual women claim about themselves.

In my understanding of how we are constituted, every person is a latent transsexual. There is a perfect woman in the soul of every man, and many men make use of submission to be close to her, to make them feel whole. Being submissive gets them in touch with feelings they cannot have as men because of standards in the culture of masculinity.

Though BDSM can serve as a passageway to deep experiences of ourselves, I do not see it as an end-in-itself. I believe it can be a means to an end; as was described in the link to the blog entry I forwarded to you in my last email.

For me, the fantasies were a dead end. They got me in touch with my feminine nature, which was pacifying – so pacifying that my depression and anxieties were tranquilized and I filled with feeling. From that point, the only place the feeling went was sexual arousal. Arousal, like anxiety, is just a type of excitement. As a male indulging in BDSM fantasy, I was on cycles of depression/anxiety and pacification/arousal from which I never learned anything, and that kept me static, never growing. BDSM fantasy was like an escape into Heaven, but it was never an escape from hell. I would guess that it is like this for many submissives.

Individuation is a psychological term for “processes whereby the undifferentiated tends to become individual.” We “individuate” as we increasingly grow into our true, individual selves over the course of our lives. The pinacle of individuation is the death one self and the birth of a new one – which happened for me through my gender change. All of the feeling concentrated into BDSM fantasy is now part of the rest of my life, and I am a thousand times more fulfilled than I was as a male. By this, I am definitly not advocating transsexuality for you or anyone else. I am just saying that we may think we know who we are, but we can’t because who we are is discovered through a process; it is a becoming; it is individuation.

Señor: There are many many sexual components to it for me: oral servitude, being taken with a strap-on, being restrained, spanked, disciplined, being used for my Mistress’s pleasure and being loved and appreciated in doing it all. This is very deep, long-term stuff that is inside me. Of course, there are roots to it all, and needs, and more, but what if it’s a true, authentic piece of me?

Amy: It may be an authentic piece of you today, but it won’t be forever. What we are to become in the future is a total mystery. The only things we can be assured of survivng are our souls, hearts, minds and bodies – not our identitites.

I believe that the soul’s prerogatives are to feel, express and experience as broadly as possible; and that while being in a sub/dom relationship may fulfill some of the soul’s need to feel, it cuts off other ranges of feeling, expression and experience.

My understanding is that we exist to spiritually evolve, from one life to the next, into eventual reunion with our souls in the flesh. Perhaps your destiny in this life is to be a feminized submissive, but I am sure your eternal soul is not a feminized submissive. We were created to evolve from creatures into human beings and into beings. We become beings by becoming aware of our humanity. If a person thinks they can become aware of their humanity as a submissive, I would say go for it. It’s all a lesson leading someplace new.

The psychology behind the goddess worship of ancient peoples is the selfsame that compels modern people to submit to dominant females. While the focus of goddess worship was often fertility, the focus of submission to a dominant female is eros. From the perspective of the submissive, the dominant female is an eroticized mother figure; she’s not really human; she’s perfect; she’s an archetype; she is preprogrammed; she has no personality of her own.

In my experience, feeling loved, excited, and whole physically, erotically, emotionally, and spiritually is something that is reciprocal, between two lovers. Surely, there are legions of lovers who practice BDSM; but I am assuming that the fulfillment many submissives seek is more about them than the dominant. Instead being fulfilled, their partner indulges them or their dominant receives money for service.

And it is like a game; submitting to the feminine in order to possess it. As such it is impersonal. It is mainly about the soul-needs of the submissive (and perhaps those of the rare dominant).

Ideally, through dominance & submission, partners can help each other to feel and express. They are play-forced to submit to what is most beautiful in themselves. Submission is a means of becoming aware of their humanity, which brings them closer to the being within them.

Señor: This is my 21st year drug and alcohol free. I’ve done huge amounts of healing in all arenas and still I want to be Mistress’s slut, slave, and toy.

Amy: There is always deeper healing to do.

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.

Narcotcs, Cults, and the Dance & Song of Play & Eros

2009-08-13T11:21:00.004-04:00

Yesterday’s “Ask the Dream Queen” was about my recent run-in with “Mouse” - an Oregonian advocate for an Italian cult called Damanhur. It took place in a forum following a pro-Damanhur video. One of the commenters, an escapee from the cult, remarked that Damanhur was like a narcotic.

I responded: “That is a good metaphor. In dreams, anything that is addictive and destructive can be a narcotic – including that which may appear to be the very fundament of ‘normal’ life, like a relationship, or a family. What relationships and families provide, at their best, is a sense of belonging. When they do provide belonging, and when we leave it, we go through withdrawal, as from a drug, which we call ‘homesickness.’

“Often families alienate one or more members, leaving them with an unfulfilled feeling which communities such as Damanhur prey on.

“The only family that will provide true belonging is the one without ourselves, which will always elude us if we seek it in the external world. Our true siblings and parents are the heart, mind, spirit, and wisdom within us, and they are our own bodies. Once we possess these, independently of our relationships to other people, then we will be ready to reinvent community – vibrant, fluid communities without overlord figures or rules. If authority rests in the mind, body, heart, spirit and wisdom of each individual (instead of in co-dependent attitudes and behaviors), rules are unnecessary.

“No organizing can create such communities. They cannot be willed into existence. They form of their own accord, brought together by authority we have no control over: the World Soul, Anima Mundi. They sprout first from individuality, not community. Communities such as Damanhur put the cart before the (white) horse.”

In response to my point that a slogan that Mouse assigned to Damanhur, “Freedom = Work,” is very close to a slogan used at Auschwitz: "Work Makes (One) Free," Mouse wrote:“And you have not addressed the substance of what I am saying, and what every skilled artist knows, and what every Buddhist teaches: That in order to find freedom, we must master our passions, we must master ourselves, that we must self-submit ourselves to rigour and discipline.”

All work and no play makes Damanhurians dull children. There is no self-mastery without excessive doses of play.

I need to get something off my chest, so here I am repeating a bit of yesterday’s blog, which quotes the abovementioned forum:

Amy: Whatever Mouse. Here’s a quote from you about me [Mouse really wrote this, and somehow it got back to me, last summer]: “I am sure that she is influential and will be more so in the future. Thus she is the proper person to talk with. She needs to understand why she needs to change her story.” [My ‘story’ is parts of my essay, “Adam Clay,” that Mouse objected to.] You’re so insincere, such a manipulator. You bully people with your sincerity. I’ll never trust you and never believe anything you say, ever. By the way, rape isn’t ever OK. [He implied it was in some of his writings.] I know I am playing into your trap by responding to you. You’ve got your foot in the door, but I guarantee you won’t get much further. [fin]

Mouse: You're right, Amy - rape is never okay. That's why I objected so strongly to the Adam Clay article, wherein you wrote [He is quoting a dream of mine]: There are six men lying supine on tables. None is allowed to move, at all. I am one of six gleeful women wearing lingerie and satin gowns. At the same, we each mount one of the men for a few seconds. Then we simultaneously dismount and move on to the next, and so on to the next and the next...Meanwhile the men are meditatively still.

I explained this dream to Mouse over and over and over during the “Adam Clay, Lazarus Mouse and the Kingdom of Eros” forum. He did not want to hear me or understand. At the time I dreamed: I want Mouse to see me, but he doesn’t want to. He avoids me with his eyes. He finally leaves to get away from me. As he goes I call after him, “Fucking coward!”

It’s a grave mistake to believe that stillness and silence are not erotic and spiritually edifying. Mouse is like a boy who cannot sit still in church – the church of the universe that would make love to him if he would only allow, and then he would be ten times the man he is now.

You cannot be so madly put off by something – here being still and sexually receiving woman - and not have a soul-need for it. No one needs to be castrated more than he who gravely fears it. I did and I was, so I know.

To be clear, I am not advocating Mouse be castrated. I am saying that without knowing the eros of stillness and silence one will never know the dance & song of eros.

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.

Why I Could Be the First Transsexual Pope

2009-08-11T10:38:00.001-04:00

One number one reason is to introduce the Church to dreams, a topic I wrote about in yesterday’s Ask the Dream Queen in response to this dream of mine from several weeks ago:

I get a message written by that bespectacled minister Robert Schuller saying that the church needs a sincere interest in dreams.

A couple personal issues are keeping me from being the first transsexual Pope. One is illustrated in this dream:

I can feel Self coming through me. I look in the mirror and my mouth is vibrant, rainbow-colored light, but is pinched into a slot, like a black hole. I show the boys. In recognition one says, “It’s Lord Jesus.”

“Yes, it is,” I say speaking through the black hole and pinning him to the wall by the neck. As a result of this one of the boys is dead. We discuss what was wrong with what just happened. We agree that there was too much anger in it, which killed the boy.

The dream closely mirrors one of my male self’s earliest experiences in church, of a bearded, long-haired Jesus-look-alike priest ranting hotly at the congregation. My male self was 3 years old, and terrified. The experience effectively turned him away from “God,” which, in dream-speak, equates to being killed.

A spiritual leader may have vast knowledge of her field, but forcing its rainbow on people - as some are so accustomed to doing – is to turn the rainbow into a black hole. The reason I am shown using the rainbow lethally is anger issues. The secular culture of anger poisons religion. I will be more qualified to be the first transsexual Pope once I have processed my anger issues and hence have become more self-aware; and hence more conscientious about how to use the rainbow.

My vocation to be the first transsexual Pope was alluded to in this dream from 1993:

I go to a psychologist. We talk for a long while. He sees all these problems I've been having. He examines my spine and finds a cracked vertebra he's very concerned about. It will take some time to heal. To heal he instructs me to go to the highest turret of a church.

Who but the Pope is at the highest turret of a church?

Indeed, I have serious spinal issues, with my central nervous system; multiple sclerosis, which has me using a cane when I go for walks. Last night, in my bed, the left half of my body felt full, pulsing and vibrant, while the right felt empty and bland. The difference in feeling between the two halves had never been quite so distinct. Being a positivist, I hope this suggested that the issues underlying my disease are becoming more distinct. Disease is not random. Its cure is in balance – physical & mental – though cure is perhaps impossible to achieve before time fully unveils knowledge. At any rate, if I heal, then make me the first transsexual Pope.

Another number one reason to make me Pope is that I am an avatar of the divine feminine principle, Rose Mary Pillowwater.

Mary holds the matter in man. Without Mary, man reverts into spirit. His body dies.

The universe is a uterus. The uterus is a symbol of creation. Only Mary has one. Jesus’s womb is Mary’s.

I am not crazy, and am half-serious. I am trying to invent a new story so that the old, imbalanced, Mary-less one can feel ok about dying.

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.

Soul-Winking

2009-08-09T17:41:00.000-04:00

Two of my neighbors were outside talking. I was in my room, mentally, out-to-lunch, unfocused. Through my jumbled thoughts, I heard these words come clearly from the mouth of my neighbor: “Church is closed.”

I heard the statement as signifying my alienation from myself and my self-awareness suddenly switched on. I stepped right into the stillness and silence of my body, into communion with it, knees and head tucked, bringing everything back in. There were then a few moments of silence, and the other neighbor said, “I think I died and went to Heaven.” “OMG,” I thought to myself. I cannot contemplate myself into Heaven. Thought is nothing without feeling; bodily awareness. If the mind is followed too far, the body gets lost. As all of this computed in my mind, the neighbor repeated, as if to drive home the point ““I think I died and went to Heaven.”

When the TV is on, these kinds of “synchronicities” happen all the time for me, often moment-to-moment; each visual or sound from the TV mirroring my internal experience. The universe knows that I know it already knows what is going to come through the TV, and uses this knowledge to set me up, to orchestrate “synchronicities,” weaving the metaphors in the programming to my psychic experience - in the same way my neighbors and I were woven together.

I put quotations around the word “synchronicities” because these are not synchronicity as Jung saw it. Jung, who first identified synchronicity, saw it as a reflection between dream & waking-life. Today, it is used more widely to denote uncanny coincidence.

The scene with my neighbors recalled other times people were unaware of acknowledging me; a part of them unknown to their conscious minds, but known to mine, winking at me, so to speak. An example from my memoir Death Is the Beginning:

“A group of people turned and looked at me, as if on cue. Their gaze was sharply all-knowing, and not human. They had the eyes of fish. The people appeared to be strangers to each other, but their souls knew mine. Fish represented their unconscious selves. Their unconscious selves were conscious of me, and wanted me to see them seeing me.”

I often have the experience of seeing people seeing me see them. Sometimes it feels like it is for the sake of soul-winking. Other times it feels like a part of them is asking to be seen and known to me, privately. For example, there is a certain obnoxiously confident person in my life who gazed at me over pizza with the frightened eyes of a four-year-old.

I first encountered this type of soul-seeing in Beatrix, who was my male self’s Tarot reader, spiritual mentor, Hungarian teacher, English student, and friend – soulmate even, but she did not want to have anything to do with him romantically because she could see too deeply into him. He once told her that he felt like a man and she burst out laughing.

She would tell him, “You are a seven year old boy who has felt so much pain that instead of feeling it, you wallow in it when it comes. You must feel your pain. You must.”

Everyone Beatrix looked in the eye, she saw inside-out. About one of my girlfriends, she remarked, “She is like an eleven year old boy who needs to be hit.” About another, “Oh, George, she is a real woman.”

The latter girlfriend was steeped in the qualities of George’s inner-woman, i.e., me. He was too much a boy to honor them in her, but he was man enough to honor them in me.

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.

Music of the Bog Bunnies

2009-08-06T10:02:00.003-04:00

To get to the beach you cross a swampy bog on boards to the far right. They run alongside a big long thicket where bunnies live. I was a few feet from the bog and saw a bunny. I crouched and eased toward him gently, for a caress. I don’t know that a wild thing would allow that, but I have had young bunnies get close; one seemingly running up to me for love, but then darting away when it realized it might be endangering itself.

I got about seven feet from yesterday’s bunny. A woman and child were coming my way, on the boards over the bog. She noticed me and the rabbit, and directed the child’s attention to it. The child was three, so I didn’t see him until he stepped out of the tall grasses. He was naked - a dear sight. “Be very quiet,” said the woman. The boy got a good look at the bunny and then it went away.

I stood up and stepped toward the woman and boy saying, “I wish I was young enough to go around without clothes.” The woman said, “My children were naked at the beach, and now my grandchildren are.”

I noticed the boy looking into the thicket, trying to see the bunny. “It’s in there somewhere,” I said.

No greetings, no remarks about the weather, no parting words, just observations, declarations.

At the far side of the bog I heard someone playing the flute in a nearby house. There was music in the air.

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.

Making the Profane Sacred

2009-08-04T13:34:00.000-04:00

In this excerpt from my memoir, The Stooge, George is my male self:

George and Cedar grew closer without the distraction of his fiancée. For years they carried on an evolving conversation that integrated art, dance, music, culture, spirituality, philosophy, mythology, sex, dreams, psychology, history, and the like. Both men aspired toward the sacred and helped each other clear the path to it through their discussions. Their friendship enriched them immensely.

As Cedar aged, he came to believe that sex should only be divinely compelled and so had become effectively celibate. He would have sex intra-maritally and then only to conceive a child. The emasculation implicit in such restraint effectively sickened George. Sex was the one activity where he felt in possession of himself as a man. He believed repressing sexual desire was unhealthy and wrong.

George revered sex as a cosmically exalted act, yet considered himself a pervert, though he was truly not. He felt like one because he intuitively and habitually embraced whatever made other people squeamish. For George, the path to the sacred was incomplete without the inclusion of the profane.

He would proclaim to Cedar, “I love fucking.” Cedar chafed at this, though he himself in his youth had partaken of the impassioned sex George was profanely and lovingly advocating. Cedar disapproved of the profane. George believed the profane would never be mastered unless it was accepted. For Cedar, this was a denial of God. For George, it was life-affirming.

George was known for speaking about sex and poop with delightful silliness and candor. He demystified the profane, making light of it in social contexts and bringing light to it in the bedroom through explorations with girlfriends. Eventually his openness lost its vitality. His humor and sexual explorations became rote exercises. The profane then offered nothing more to discover.

A flaw in George’s preoccupation with the profane was that it kept him from taking himself seriously. The profane is without dignity if it was too important. Yet fidelity to the profane would serve George well after he stopped trying to manipulate it, and once he was humble enough to let it be a teacher.

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.

Heaven’s Royal Tininess

2009-08-02T11:23:00.004-04:00

The inset is Rose Mary and Tiny RMP as rendered in my journal.

An excerpt from Death Is the Beginning, the last book of my memoirs, Evolution of the Peacock:

“A Rose Mary at two years old became part of my daily psychodramas. I came to call her ‘Tiny RMP’ [Rose Mary Pillowwater]. When she first emerged, she saw herself, two years old, in 1970, but was seeing the New Kingdom as it was for her future self as a character in the Kingdom, nearly blind with the wild joys of spring, dancing down the sidewalk in a yellow party dress and black nylons, the Queen of Heaven. Tiny RMP was frightened. She had enough understanding of the world to feel terror that her destiny was to be the Queen of Heaven. Instead of facing it, she plunged into future realms I had never seen. Her mind floated through time like a feather in the air. I periodically lost myself in her visions for several days.

“The vision that pulled most strongly felt as though it was in a distant future, but, in hindsight - noting that it was never dark or light in the vision, but always the same hue of twilight - I was reminded of visions of Georgie’s experience of Heaven before he was born. In the vision, Rose Mary was a woman, ghostly pale and so sharply perfect that her presence seemed to cut me. She wore a baseball jersey with two cardinals on it. The cardinal was a totem to her. For a while I was so lost in that world, I didn’t know where I was. It was scary. I realized it was because Tiny RMP traveled through time at will, in her mind, because that’s what two-year-old minds can do, so they do.

“In my journal I wrote:

“‘[Compared to my other selves,] THE QUESTION OF CONTINUITY IS HARDEST FOR TINY RMP…BUT SHE IS BEGINNING TO FIND THAT WHEN SHE GETS OUT OF THE HEAD & DOWN INTO THE BODY, CONTINUITY MAKES MORE SENSE, MORE FEELING-SENSE.

“‘SHE WAS SUPER KOOKED-OUT TODAY. I FELT A BABY BODY SPINNING IN MY HEAD FOR A LONG TIME TODAY BEFORE SHE MOVED DOWN [INTO THE BODY] TO EXPLORE. I HAVE HAD WONDERFUL IMAGES OF THE WOMAN I AM, TODAY.’

“Once I helped Tiny RMP to be more disciplined about staying in the moment, I wrote in my journal:

“George the boy/man battles the world. Rose Mary the woman nurtures the inner-world. They are waiting for Tiny RMP to work out her ‘fusion.’ [The handwriting in my journal changed back and forth from caps to regular because it was shifting from George’s to Rose Mary’s. Rose Mary wrote in caps, George in regular font.]

“‘I AM A LITTLE GIRL EMERGING FROM A WORLD OF CONFUSION. I AM A RABBIT PEEPING OUT FROM A TOPHAT.’

“It was a world of confusion because it had been thirty years since she was aware she existed. Her identity was sublimated into the one my boy self took on and was terminally eclipsed by George’s. My sense of time and space was going through all kinds of strange warps as we linked up.

“From my journal:

“‘This morning we [Rose Mary the woman and Tiny RMP] were putting the clothes & green blanket into the clotheswasher and Tiny RMP was ‘fraiding that they never would come out. I reassured her that they would. She said, “I like closed places. They make me safe.” I had a cry & remembered when I used to get into the dirty clothes hamper when I was tiny. I felt safe there, in darkness, confinement, and damp, dirty clothes.

“‘Also, Tiny RMP has the disorienting habit of thinking she remembers seeing the future, which makes time feel like a cage & renders all beauty & creation as meaningless & freedomless. But she has to come to terms with the fact that in her royal tinyness she did some traveling through time and [this has formed] a kind of cage of safety to think each future moment is known. We are trying to learn to feel that Mother Earth is a good & safe home.’

“Tiny RMP’s mind was like a doorway to eternity. Once reconstituted it would function as the mind of her adult self, the Queen of Heaven.

“Concurrent to Tiny RMP’s inclusion into my identity were some final thoughts on George:

“‘GEORGE, THE MAN OF THE WORLD IS IN A PLACE OF MUCH DEEPER PEACE….OCCASIONALLY HE HAS SOME VIOLENT FEELINGS & LAUGHS THE SOMEWHAT AGGRESSIVE LAUGH OF THE MAN WHO LAUGHS LAST. THOUGH HE WISHES HE WAS FORMING HIS HAND INTO A PEACE SIGN, THE MIDDLE FINGER IS RAISED MORE JUBILANTLY, RIGHTEOUSLY & ERECTLY THAN ANY ERECTION HE EVER HAD. HE IS AT PEACE WITH LEAVING MY BODY AS I DANCE HIM OUT.

“‘BUT, BABY BROTHER, LET ME TELL YOU WHAT: NOBODY IS GOING TO ENJOY THIS LAST LAUGH MORE THAN HIM. GEORGE WINS. I WILL BE DANCING UP ON STAGE IN A NEW DIMENSION THAT HE DELIVERED ME TO BY KICKING THE WORLD’S ASS.

“‘GEORGE REALLY WANTED TO DIE AND ALWAYS FELT LIKE AN OLD MAN, EVEN WHEN HE WAS 14. THEN, HE WAS ONLY 18 YEARS AWAY FROM DEATH. WHEN HE WAS 17 HE ASKED THE TAROT WHEN HE WOULD DIE. HE WAS TOLD ‘33’ AND HE WAS GLAD. HE TOLD HIS FRIENDS HE WANTED HIS BONES TO BE A MOBILE HANGING OVER THE CRIBS OF HIS GRANDCHILDREN. HE TOLD HIS FRIENDS HE WANTED HIS TOMBSTONE TO BE A SCULPTURE OF HIM SITTING CROSS-LEGGED IN A CHAIR, HAVING A CIGARETTE. HE WAS LEANING BACK, WEARING SUNGLASSES, PRETENDING TO BE SOME KIND OF RIDICULOUS KING (WHICH HE WAS) JUST LIKE THIS PICTURE WE SAW IN DESMOND MORRIS’ MANWATCHING THAT SHOWED A HAITIAN MAN STRIKING THIS POSTURE (with a Marlboro betwixt the fingers) WHEN POSSESSED BY A CERTAIN GOD. WE LOVED THINGS SUCH AS THAT.

“‘WHAT A BAD-ASS OF RIDICULOUSNESS GEORGE WAS. WHAT A STOOGE."

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.

publication announcement

2009-08-01T17:43:00.001-04:00

My latest article on Reality Sandwich, Paradise Theology and The Stooge, recounts the mystical experiences that were key in initiating me into spiritual life. In exploring their implications, the article redefines religion and outlines how the universal components of identity are elemental to Paradise.

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.

The Yappy Poetry Queen

2009-07-28T16:14:00.001-04:00

Last night I had some ideas about the Yappy Poetry Queen. Here is a description of her from my memoir, Rose Mary Pillowwater:

“George had a vision of himself as me; as a perky, tender, vociferous, very precise girl, dressed in a white blouse and red skirt. I wore black, patent leather shoes with low, chunky heels and would walk around the Kingdom in them, clomping unannounced into people’s homes and stamping my feet as I exuberantly recited poetry to the inhabitants. I was called the ‘Yappy Poetry Queen.’”

This face of the divine feminine, the Yappy Poetry Queen, wants to do just what she does in my vision. When people are being couch potatoes, she would like to step into their homes, shut off the TV and boldly recite poetry. Instead, couch potatoes get negative, equally-potent feminine expressions of coldness and bitchiness from other sources. Once we stop giving the divine feminine reason to be cold and bitchy, she’ll be like the Yappy Poetry Queen, among other things.

When I had the vision of the YPQ, I was sure that the world was ending. When the world was ending for me, I would be inundated with archetypal realities I’d never before met, like the YPQ. Most were expressions of the divine feminine, which I can still see and feel. Is the divine feminine not mine then? Can’t Rose Mary become me? Won’t she? These questions have been my biggest while integrating her all these years.

Contemplating my ongoing need to perform for an audience, it occurred to me that the Yappy Poetry Queen is part of the need. She wants to step into people’s homes and dump buckets of beauty and wisdom on them. She is behind my compulsion to perform.

Compelled to perform, I recently entered the Miss Trans Northampton beauty pageant, mainly because I will get to sing in the talent portion of the program. I couldn’t care less about winning. Maybe this will help jump-start my life outside of my room.

I am comfortable in my room and on stage, but everything in between - where ordinary interaction is possible - is sketchy. My world is so removed from the “ordinary” one, yet it is ordinary for me and the Yappy Poetry Queen.

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.

Clues to the Mystery of Heaven

2009-07-26T09:27:00.002-04:00

The soul becomes Life, Life becomes the cell, organisms, plants, creatures, the ape, which becomes the human, which becomes the buddha. The union of the buddha and the dakini produces the angel…and there you are…in Heaven, the place where you came from at the beginning when you were a soul without flesh, let alone matter.

If “Heaven” is considered our ultimate best interest, then…
Pretend love is a rope dangling from Heaven to save you;
Dreams give perspectives that lead to Heaven,
Like clues to a mystery;
Dreams are messages from Heaven
Calling for us.

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.

Hearing Ecstasy

2009-07-23T09:25:00.000-04:00

These kids – I mean kids – 17 or 18 are renting the condo next door for a week. I have a window that looks onto their veranda. It is one drama after the next, people constantly raising their voices in distress and angst, usually about other people – not politics, religion or current events – broadcasting into the neighborhood.

Yesterday, I happened to pass them and said HI in my normal speaking voice. No response. Not even a glance toward me. Total insularity in the teen world, or perhaps their ears only hear yelling and loud music. After I passed, I said BYE.

A typical exchange, verbatim of one I heard:

“I invited ‘so-and-so.’”

“Oh, no!”

“You love him.”

“I don’t like him at all.”

The first night they were there the two words I most clearly made out were: “fucking” and “faggot.”

Is it not obvious from these snatches of conversation that they are mixed sex?

The dudes are usually shirtless, but not muscled by any means. Padded with baby fat, they could pass for 15 or 16. One has a guitar.

A girl was walking around in the front yard talking on her cell phone and I heard one word very clearly: “Ecstasy!” It traveled all the way into my ear, which was in my room at the back of the building.

There is a cop in the unit on the other side of me. I go outside. The girl is wandering in the yard with her phone and a highball, saying she is only on her third drink. It’s five in the afternoon. I say HI to the two shirtless dudes, one strumming the guitar. I start trying to talk to them and the guy won’t stop playing. He is looking at me and playing. I say, “I heard ECSTASY…” “Oh, no, nobody said nothing about ecstasy.” “I know what I heard.” “What? Nobody said nothing.” “Well, there is a cop in that unit right there so just keep it down.” They were still denying it, but the girl overhearing us recognized I was trying to be helpful and told me THANK YOU.

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.

Together in the Beginning & the End

2009-07-21T15:46:00.002-04:00

We were together in the beginning.
Then you were rock and I was the rain,
I was a flower, you were a bee,
You were a bird, I was a fish,
I was clover, you were a rabbit munching on me,
You were my prey, I was a lion.

I was a woman, you were a man.
We made children and they made children.
We died and became our children’s children’s children.

We raped each other and sheltered each other,
Fed each other and murdered each other,
Hated and loved each other,
Healed and wounded each other,
Attacked and defended,
Decried and exalted,
Freed and enslaved.
Abandoned and comforted.

We never knew each other
Because we did not know ourselves.
Because we did not know ourselves
History broke us into billions of pieces
So that self-examination could grow ever finer
Until some of us we became known to ourselves,
And at once to the universe.

We did not know we were together in the beginning,
But if we understand where we have been,
We will be together in the end.

I want to share eternity with you is why.

Nobody is going to die.

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.

Who I was in My Last Life

2009-07-19T18:53:00.003-04:00

References to my past life as a French monk are scattered throughout my published writing. Here, they are collected together into one piece.

As the monk I was married to Mother Church and Mother Nature. My next evolutional step was to marry my inner-woman. I was reborn male with all the monk’s sensitivity and receptivity, but in a time and place where they would not flourish properly. Unlike most transsexual females, I was not born into the wrong body. Rather, I was born into the right circumstance for awakening the transsexuality that is present in all men, latent in most.

Who I was in my previous life has emerged in bits and pieces, mostly through my dreams, but also visions. The following dream is the most comprehensive I have had about who I was:

There’s an article in a magazine about a monk who recently died. It praises the monk all the way through. He lived in France. He was short and small. He was humble and very in touch with living on the Earth physically and spiritually. He was so connected to the area in which he lived that it was him. When giving sermons he liked to yell at parishioners from behind because a disembodied voice made the message more powerful.

I begin to see that the article about the monk was initially written on a wooden floor and has actually been reprinted from that. It was intended to be natural, honest and raw; its mistakes are crossed out with wax drippings. Sometimes to illustrate something the author of the article has made a small wax animal. The monk cared for these animals. All the animals face the “top of the page” (away from the reader, like the parishioners the monk yelled at from behind). At the end of the article there’s a long row of waxen animals that need to be cared for. My heart yearns for the monk’s connectedness and peace. ENERGY

The candlewax may be a reference to the delicateness of the monk as well as to his fieriness. His fire was not a Calvinist inferno. It was the unity, wholeness and holiness of a single candleflame.

The monk’s connection to place continued into this life. It is a reason I have always been sedentary, as if trying to re-experience what he had.

Everything he had – which is everything – was been taken from me in this life so that I might repossess it more comprehensively.

The French monk appears as the young man in this dream, which I had in 1998, as I was being initiated into spiritual life:

I bound across streets when I feel no cars coming. I dance across the land past a young man. He has so much feminine beauty that I have to kiss him. I do quickly and resist the temptation to make it long enough to be imposing. He's entering the church. He's talking about Christianity. He stutters a lot. He says, "Life is not a toy." Then he starts to talk in an overly complex way about institutional stuff, like "I did my catechismic biology in French." What is he talking about? Self is simple. I is complex.

Since the monk says, “Life is not a toy,” perhaps he never learned to be as playful as me. I learned to be playful because of my identification with the clown.

“Catechismic biology in French” refers to how the monk experienced divinity through nature. French is the language in which the monk spoke of nature and divinity.

In a dream from 1998 the monk is a white, round, middle-aged man named “James Brown.” He is dressed entirely in denim. Underneath the denim, his penis is flaccid.

I had this dream just as I was entering the solitude that eventually brought about my gender shift. In the years preceding the dream James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, had been something of an idol for me, and a top inspiration to me musically. As such I projected my masculine identity onto this James Brown – an identity which was nearing its end. My dream was being tongue-in-cheek, if not a little mocking to my male-self, in the figure of the flaccid, white James Brown. The white James Brown was so plain compared to the ostentatious Godfather of Soul.

In the dream, the monk’s denim – work clothing - was suggestive of the inner-work I was embarking on. Perhaps it also referred to De Nimes, the town in France where “denim” gets its name. It seems possible that the monk lived in De Nimes.

Though he was a simple monk, clothing appears to have been a love of his, and an eccentricity. In one dream he is wearing a jacket decorated with dozens of sewn-in feathers.

Growing up I rarely felt comfortable in any of the clothes my mother considered presentable. Beauty, texture, elegance and character were always my first considerations in clothing. If I was denied these, I felt terrible. I have never been unduly concerned with wearing what other people wear.

I have been dreaming of myself in ministerial roles for a long time. This dream with an anti-ministerial role, suggestive of my male self's fall from grace, came in 1993:

I tell people there are realms into which even the goodness of God won't go. Evil things happen no matter how pious you are. One of the people I am speaking to is a very pious man with a scratched up face. He can't bear to hear me talk about how powerful evil is so he leaves. I give him the middle finger and keep talking.

Ultra-sensitive detection of hypocrisy has characterized me for as long I can remember, and must have in my previous life as well. Going through the motions of being raised in the Catholic Church, incensed me. It was maddeningly clear to me that none of the people in my world who professed the spirit of Christ’s message actually lived it. I took it more seriously than any of them, including my CCD classmates and teachers.

When I was compelled to say the word “Jesus” at CCD, I am not exaggerating when I say I felt as if feces was being shoved into mouth. The underlying spirit of others’ actions has always come across as clearly to me as their conscious intent. This makes it difficult for people to lie to me, except for the types of lies kids tell each other for fun. The most egregious example of this was when I was at camp as a teenager and a couple of the other campers had me believing for a couple weeks that they were secret agents protecting me from a mafia hit. People could feel how naïve I was and took advantage of it.
~~~
A “Tulku” is a Tibetan Buddhist lama who has consciously decided to be reborn. When I first learned of the Tulku, I thought, “Too cool!”

Having such clarity about who I was in my previous life, I feel close to the deathlessness that is the hallmark of the Tulku. I feel as if everything in my previous life is like a godlike presence around the periphery of this one.

In the below dream from 1998, Tibetan Buddhism is alluded to in the phrase “a certain, obscure religious sect.” “Obscure” was the right word at the time, since I then knew almost nothing about Tibetan Buddhism:

A great teacher tells me that everyone is looking outside themselves for a name so that they can tell the world they are one thing or another, thus fusing their identity to something solid and agreed on by everyone as perceivable. The great teacher found his own name. His philosophy and practices resemble those of a certain, obscure religious sect, but really, as he is—as everyone ultimately is—he is totally unique in the world. Religion is relative to him. There is no need for him to alter himself artificially for the sake of religion.

The dream alluded not only to my identification with the Tulku, but also to another personage of Tibetan Buddhism: the Dakini. I first learned of the Dakini when I was six months into identifying as female. I learned about her from my landlord, Fifu, a philosophy teacher at university who had studied in France under Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstructionsim.

Just after I moved in, Fifu told me a story about the “curse of the Dakini.” He first had to explain to me what a Dakini was; basically Tibetan Buddhism’s figure of the divine feminine - related to the Anima, Lakshmi, and Mary. She was the feminine principle to which I had become an avatar, and was integrating through the psychotic process.

The Chinese and Tibetan terms for Dakini literally mean "she who travels in the sky," or "sky dancer." In art, the Dakini is depicted curved in the sinuous dance poses.

The summer before moving into Fifu’s I had visions of a personification of myself/Rose Mary as the “sky dancer” aspect of the Dakini - without having any knowledge of the Dakini. The visions were quite fearsome. I felt as if I would lose myself to their reality. I could glimpse them only for a moment before having to block them out.

During the same period, in a vision I had of Jesus Christ Superstar, his countenance and manner were quite similar to those of the Rose Mary sky-dancer visions. He & Rose Mary are as essential to each other as spirit is to matter. I dreamed they married.

In art the Dakini is sometimes shown dancing on corpses, I experienced this firsthand as both the “corpse” and the dancer. In meditation, I would become as still as a corpse, allowing my female self to literally dance through me - straight from the unconscious into waking-life - so that her dance would evolve into mine. It feels right that my past life as the monk would evolve into identification as an avatar of a Dakini.
~~~
In the curse of the Dakini story which Fifu told me, an accomplished, young monk goes to an inn for something to eat. The monk does not realize the woman serving him is a Dakini. The plate of food she gives him is “rancid” (Fifu’s word). The monk says, “Excuse me, Miss. I cannot eat this food. It’s rancid.”

The Dakini replies, “You don’t like my food? I curse you to be satisfied with what you get, and to live without choice about what is given you for the next fifteen years.”

As I survived without choice or opportunity in the years to come, and recalled Fifu’s story, I came to identify with its hapless monk and saw my feminine wholeness as his inner-woman, his personal Dakini. Her curse would shadow me until I duly synthesized my female identity.

My identification as an avatar of a Dakini has come from come from accepting my calling. The intelligence behind my story has fashioned me. I do not fashion it. I have become myself through careful observation, and in the ongoing work of balancing my psyche.

If someone were to ask me, “What are you?” I would not say that I am a tulku or an avatar of a Dakini. I would call myself a trans-religious (non-celibate) nun (who has not had sex in 11 years). I’m a human being after all, though sometimes more being than human.
~~~
I have learned that the Dakini is the Jungian anima: the woman inside the man. In a perfect world, a man’s anima would be his wife as the Earth is Heaven’s wife. The anima is so undifferentiated from the man who harbors her that she makes up half his XY chromosomes. In the poetry of Genesis, man’s inner-woman is Adam’s rib. This metaphor implies that the concept of woman literally came forth from within God.

Imagine God as a spirit-being who wishes to fashion material beings. For the sake of edifying the consciousness of the beings, God has one embody matter (woman) & the other spirit (man). Starting from this point, God outlines the whole human drama, from Eden to the Apocalypse and beyond. In God’s scheme, giving consciousness to man’s inner-woman, the Dakini, is essential to giving material beings the perfect whole of divine consciousness, including consciousness of everlasting life.

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.

George's America-Hating Arab Friends

2009-07-16T09:42:00.001-04:00

This is an account from a trip to Tunisia his male self, George, took with his girlfriend “Lucy” in the last week of 1995:

A couple of young guys sat across from George and Lucy and tried to make conversation, but neither of them felt welcoming toward anyone who was friendly because they expected them to try to scam them, which had happened several times. One of the guys was about 13. The other, about 18, was named Sabir. He knew English and asked lots of questions, which were answered politely, but not invitingly.

Sabir noticed that George was putting his cigarettes out on the deck and leaving them there. Public garbage bins were rare in Tunisia. Trash was thrown on the ground to be swept up at the end of the day. Seeing what George was doing with his butts, Sabir said, “You English, you are afraid to throw things in the sea. Watch,” he said, tossing an empty soda can into the vast wastebasket of the Mediterranean.

George asked Sabir whether it was possible to go crabbing on the islands. “You like crabs?” he replied.

“Yes,” George said, “I catch them.”

“I can take you for the crabs,” he said, “We will catch the crabs. Yes?”

George was ready to do it, even if Sabir meant to hoodwink them. George looked to Lucy for confirmation. She was for it, so they said okay, and it was a plan.

When they landed on Sabir’s island there was nothing at the port except sandy wasteland as far as the eye could see. Everyone dashed off to secure the waiting taxi cabs. Sabir told George and Lucy to relax and he would get a cab that would take them to his village.

It was a ten mile trip to the village. He pointed out the home of a local artist who had a mural of Charlie Chaplin painted in blue and black on the front of his whitewashed house. This seemed unique since Islam forbids reproductions of human form. Sabir showed them his horse “Marilyn,” named after Marilyn Monroe. She was small, brown and gentle. They photographed her with chickens mulling around her hooves…

…In the late afternoon they met Sabir at the village cafe, where they drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and played cards. The atmosphere was relaxed and pleasant, but kind of macho, too. There were no women - except Lucy. Some of the men were drinking beer - the only beerdrinking George and Lucy saw in Tunisia - and no one seemed to notice the call to prayer. There was a lot of laughing and joking. George didn’t know whether to be comfortable or afraid…

…The next day, at midday, George and Lucy went to Sabir’s house, which was a large compound that housed his extended family. His brother was coming crabbing with them. He had neatly coiffed hair, like Devo.

They reached the crabbing spot: mounds of dried mud, several meters from the sea. The brothers set about gouging into the mud with sharp tools and quickly reaching barehanded into the holes, feeling for crabs, then yanking them out in a flash and tossing them into the open air. Then, while the crabs lay there dazed, the brothers would toss them into a plastic, mesh basket. They welcomed George to join them, but he was too scared.

Sabir began singing. Lucy asked him what he was singing. He said, “I am singing a song to the crab--for him to come out.”

After a few hours they had sixty or so crabs and returned to their house. They went into a white room with a white-tiled floor, a few chairs, a low table and a TV with VCR. An open doorway looked out onto the water. The sea breeze came in through it. George and Lucy sat talking with Sabir and his brother for a long time. Then, without fore-notice, a woman appeared with a large bowl of vegetables and fish mixed into spicy couscous. They stuffed ourselves, and then came the crabs - a mountain of them.

George and Lucy were full and exhausted, but Sabir and his brother were alert and still hungry. They used their mouths to shell them, biting through the exoskeleton and sucking out the meat. George was too full, tired and disoriented to try it.

Lucy picked disinterestedly at a couple of crabs. She was not feeling well because she hadn’t gone to the bathroom since they had arrived in Tunisia. George and Lucy lingered at the brothers’ house for as long as possible because they didn’t want to be impolite. They were treated hospitably, as guests from a foreign land, and they wanted to honor this, but physically they were feeling run-down. George was exhausted from doing a cross-cultural high wire act balancing on the queasy uniqueness of his vague and doomed identity and Lucy was overloaded with poop. They managed to exit graciously.

On the way to their hotel, Lucy’s poop was demanding expulsion. She hunched over with cramps, moaning with pain. George felt helpless, wishing he could do something, knowing how she felt, having been in that condition countless times. They wanted to wait till they got back to the hotel not only because they didn’t want her to go outside, but because it seemed like a serious social transgression for her to go outside. Yet there were no homes or people near them. It was almost evening and the villagers were all indoors with their families.

Lucy reached a point of no return. There was a large, squat palm tree which she hurried to and ducked behind. At first George didn’t look because he thought she wouldn’t want him to, but concern and curiosity got the best of him. George saw a meter-long python of brown muck shoot out of her behind. She then squeezed out the dregs, pulled her pants up over her soiled legs and fanny, and they continued home.

George didn’t hold her as they went because they purposefully avoided physical contact in public in Tunisia, but when they got back to their room George was motherly to her, as undaunted by her filth as if she had been a baby. He had her take her clothes off and they got into the shower together and George washed her. She didn’t want him to, out of shame, but George insisted. He couldn’t allow her to feel self-conscious about it. After she was clean, George cleaned her jeans, too…

…They met Sabir at the cafe the following evening and went to his family’s house. He and his older brother showed them his older brother’s room, which was like a museum of his life. Finely made wooden cupboards, drawers and posts were built into the room and were painted beautifully, with care and detail. His bed was up on a loft and the walls around it were papered with photos and images of Marilyn Monroe. There was a classical guitar.

He showed them swords that his grandfather had used in battle, and that ancestors farther back had used. He told them about some of the wars his family had fought in, and then, having gotten himself a bit riled up - and believing them to be Canadian (which was what they told everyone they were) - talked of them atrocity committed against his Arab brothers in Iraq.

Such things didn’t seem to concern Sabir. He photographed Lucy and George seated on the steps that led up to his brother’s bed, with Marilyn sparkling glamorously in the background.

They went into the room where they had feasted the day before. They had one video tape for their VCR: Bodyguard with Whitney Houston. They had watched it a lot. It was their favorite movie.

Some friends of theirs dropped in to meet George and Lucy. They were chummy guys who spoke some English. A woman appeared with cake, plates and forks, set them down and left the room, which made George more aware of the uniqueness of Lucy’s presence. George wondered how often women sat in the room. The chairs weren’t too comfortable. You couldn’t slouch in them, and the light was fluorescent and strong.

After the cake George and Lucy said they were tired and ready to go. First, they were given a tour of the rest of the house. They went into the kitchen where there was an unveiled woman and a girl, about seven years old. They were smiling and seemed delighted to have them in their kitchen. Everyone was joking in Arabic. The little girl went around behind George to examine his hair, which was tied back and almost to his waist. Her eyes were wide and she held out her hand as if she wanted to touch it. “It’s okay,” George said, and the woman encouraged her to go ahead in Arabic, so she did, taking it in her hand and stroking it a little, quietly saying something like, “Wow.”

George and Lucy followed her and the woman into the women’s living room. It was much more comfortable than the men’s living room. It also had a TV, but was carpeted and had lots of pillows to sit on or in or against, and the lighting was soft, coming from lamps. Three or four women sat close together in the pillows, watching TV. George and Lucy said HI and BYE. The women were smiling.

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.

We Come from a Book

2009-07-14T16:01:00.000-04:00

Thoughts from last night:

You have to have your life and give it to the universe at the same time.

See everyone as a child first, adult second, because that is what we all have been.
You are reflected in every person you see, but you alone are yourself.
See everyone’s life.
See their lives as your own.
Perfect empathy.
Perfection awaits you.

Being alive to procreate is to die in matter.
Being alive to create is to live in spirit

You live for the heart alone.
There is no other reason to be alive.
That is why God wins.

Pretend you are from a book that is greater than you can imagine coming from. That is where everlasting life in the body is at. Babies come from between the legs of woman. We come from between the pages of a book.

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.

Eros of the Child

2009-07-12T17:01:00.001-04:00

Friday night I dreamed:

I am spending the weekend at a high school friend’s parents’ house. There is a bunch of us, including a female tot and a nine or ten year old girl. She and I go into another room and she decides to lie down on me, head at my feet. We are affectionate, maybe a little erotic. I am totally passive, receptive. There is nothing overtly sexual.

When my friend comes in and sees us he is enraged because he thinks I am molesting her. As he reaches down to pull her away I sock him hard, knocking him backward and he is dazed for a moment. I get up and give him a tongue lashing. The last thing I say is, “You assume way too much.”

It is time to go and the little tot is there, totally innocent and oblivious to the conflict. I get her sweatpants and put them on her while singing a sweet melody in a high voice, “Here’s your sweatpants. Here’s your sweatpants.”

It is OK that the girl and I are sharing erotic energy because this is a dream and not waking-life; because she is leading & I am following; because, though children may not be sexual per se, they are erotic beings – an infant’s erection shows it – and because the girl is me. The dream illustrates my receptivity to the erotic nature of my inner-child, which is empowering. I go on to sublimate the power of eros into non-sexual behavior such as 1) righteousness: socking my friend, 2) nurturance: caring for the tot, 3) music: everyday activities like dressing a child become a song. Ultimately and ideally, I would be receptive to the erotic nature of my tot-self and infant-self. This would let me be supremely erotic as an adult.

Eros + power = libido. Recent days have been unusually libidinal and erotic, but not sexual. There has been dance and song, and erotic communion with the spirit. What a blessing and relief this has been after June’s everyday rain; being emotionally shredded while recovering from surgery; being imprisoned for the month of June (according to a dream); and (according to another dream) having to have 8 to 25 rabies shots that would “make my bones raw.” July came with sun and wind and blew June into the past.

My first encounter with the erotic nature of my female child self, in 2000, is recounted in this excerpt from my memoirs:

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

“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 hated kids who breathed loudly like that. I hated kids who ate loudly. I hated the sound of saliva. I cringed to hear kids speaking on TV because they sounded idiotic to me.

“As a child, I hated my body as the world hated it. 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 fearing it nor needing it too much. She did not cling tightly to eros, so it nourished her, vitalized her. Her power was humbling. The ten-year-old girl was frightened and went back into hiding for a spell.

“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 rest of existence that people put up high walls around it. They forsook their souls to make sure they possessed eros. Then, it was no longer purely eros, but was weighted with aires, eros’ ancient companion.”

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.

The Psychotic Process

2009-07-09T14:04:00.002-04:00

This is the working preface to my forthcoming memoir, Rose Mary Pillowwater:

The unconscious is a reservoir of unthought thoughts, unrealized capabilities, and unnoticed feelings and perceptions.

Bringing consciousness to unconscious material alters the future because it leads us away from the cycles of the past by changing how we relate to the present. The future itself is unconscious because it has not yet happened. It is unrealized. We can realize the future of our wildest dreams by listening to the unconscious today. A convenient way to do this is to attend to night dreams. When we alter our behaviors and attitudes based on how dreams reflect us, we change how we relate to the present, and hence we change the future.

Artists and schizophrenics are known to live closely with the unconscious. While artists channel the unconscious into creation, the unconscious channels schizophrenics toward oblivion at best, destruction at worst. The unconscious expresses itself through metaphor. The artist uses metaphor to convey meaning. Metaphor confuses the schizophrenic.

The psychotic process combines artistic sensibility with the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia. Through the psychotic process the unconscious introduces the ego to new aspects of identity and personality. It is then the responsibility of the ego to integrate them. Without the participation of the ego, the psychotic process cannot work. The ego both observes and manages the flow of unconscious material. It observes psychotic symptoms and manages them by analyzing them and responding artistically to them. Thereby new aspects of identity and personality are integrated. Thus the psyche becomes whole and the individual self-aware.

Through this book I share my experience of the psychotic process and the tools I used to get through it. Even if a person is not having psychotic symptoms, the approach to the unconscious presented herein is relevant for anyone interested in personal growth.

By the end of this narrative I was far from integrating the new realities that have come forth from the unconscious. This was to take another few years of less dramatic immersion in the psychotic process, lying supine on sofas in peace and stillness. In the course of this account, I did not have enough perspective on the new realities to keep from chasing them from one continent to another all the way to a psych ward. Doing so was an unavoidable learning experience that would not have to be repeated.

I was amidst a process, not a chronic illness. The process changed my gender. The process taught my soul to breathe and dance through me. The process revealed what we are doing as beings on a planet in a universe. My process is a concentrated expression of humanity’s process: of the feminine balancing the masculine, of the masculine empowering the feminine, and of Redemption. That said, some readers will be unable to accept the story of my process on its own terms and be unable to see it as anything but the pathos of a lunatic. I respond to their stories in the same way. [fin]

My editor remarked: “Seems a defensive way to end the preface. Or are you purposefully closing the preface with a challenge? The preface is mostly very clear, but it rings a bit coldly explanatory and protective. Since it’s the first thing a reader reads, it should explain what needs explaining and draw the reader in, like a welcome. I imagine it came out this way because you’ve written it at the end and are wanting to get on with it already. Is there a dream you could include to close with?”

My response: Yeah, it is defensive :p. Oh!

I was thinking of maybe popping the preface in after the beginning, as a kind of explanatory timeout, perhaps right after The Stooge chapter?

If it is to be the beginning I definitely want it to be welcoming. I wrote it over the last couple days, and, for whatever reason, I have a need to show I am not a lunatic, and by the end of the book lunacy annihilates me, but meaningfully, sanely – which inspired me to lead with this explication and admonition.

Your sugg about closing with a dream is good. I was thinking maybe a “pinnacle dream” or series of them, leading with:

Pardon me for me being defensive. My defensiveness mirrors the cynicism some readers are bound to have. Dreams are not defensive. They are statements of the psyche’s truth, which is perhaps a better answer for the cynic:

September 2, 1997

Jesus shows me some missing books of the Bible that he will allow me to bring into the world. They are connected with Judges.

April 3, 1998

The Holy Spirit discusses the meaning of life with me. I have the choice of whether to assign life value. I choose not to because life is priceless, irrelevant to the human concept of value, but the other sense of being infinitely valuable. So valuable that it's beyond human understanding. The answer fills me with energy and intense joy. I approach Holy Love.

June 16, 1998

Walking from this world to the future world is like walking from one room to the next. The room of this world is black and white, while that of the next is in colors.

May 15, 1998

The new is made up of circles. Each one represents a person who gives their heart to love. The circles are housed on color. There's no likeness between this map and the world map.

May 16, 1998

This is about the state of water that doesn't know rules. I can show this from the top of my hill which is the turtle's back. When I remain true to this the illusion of evil disappears. Those who look in this way can really see. The part of me that exists in need of validation is in contention of the whole self. Hell is the despair of meaninglessness. My wheelbarrow is stacked high with beautiful things.

June 25, 1998

No need to guard the body that's clothed in faith. I walk through the world naked, accepting.

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.

The Responsible Lover

2009-07-02T19:30:00.002-04:00

Being emotionally intimate is a powerful; aphrodisiac. See this dream from 1998:

A woman and I are in an alcove together that's adjacent to a doctor's office. The doctor is older. The woman and I are talking openly. She’s not like me. She's much more extroverted, turned toward the world as if she is showing her beauty to it all the time because this is how she has learned to relate to it. From listening too much to compliments, she has formed a ready-to-be-praised orientation.

She's attracted to me because of our mutual openness. It's natural for emotional openness to imply sexuality. It always does this because sexuality is so closed off.

We get naked and we're still talking. I'm passive, not trying, just letting it go where it wants. Since I am not trying to appear desirable, my resulting mental state is a little morose. She comes to me and we hold each other, but then the doctor says he doesn't want this to lead to sexuality. Nakedness is not at issue, only sexuality is. She keeps breaking the doctor’s rule and he keeps reprimanding her for it. Finally, she's fed up and decides to leave.

To some people it may sound counterintuitive to keep nakedness and intimacy from necessarily being sexual. Yet, withholding them from sexuality allows greater appreciation of them, which edifies greater eros. The future world is a much more intimate place than the world now. Everything in it is as sensate as our nakedness.

In 1998 I dreamed: I tell a friend I’m looking for the spark of life. Later, at night, I go into her room and she’s crying. She says, “You know how to be intimate.”

Intimacy has sparked a fire between me and a cyberfriend – a fire illuminating and warming us, and also bringing about some attraction, which is challenging for me. It awakens patterns I followed as boy – as George - that are no longer compatible with my new, female identity.

George spent his life rapaciously pining for the feminine, needing to possess it. When he does this, I cannot be self-possessed. Possession complexes such as his begin very young, which is why I consider him to be about three years old. Saying NO to his desire to pine for my cyberfriend has messed with ancient patterns. The three year old George inside me feels lost, depressed. Last night I dreamed: I am following a man and two dogs up a trail at a place that ought to be very familiar to me, but I don’t recognize it. I say, “I am totally lost. I am totally lost.”

You can’t find yourself without losing yourself.

The other night I had a deep meditation on my body. I became aware of how my mind tries to run away from my body. I kept reigning it back into the silence and peace of my body, going deeper, aware of trying to let the body rule and having the mind respond instead of vice versa. Afterward I massaged my feet lightly, which I love to do. It filled my upper back with feeling.

Then I picked up my guitar and a maniacal rock-star demon surged out to take it from me. He was the flipside of the emptiness and loneliness the three year old boy inside me feels because of my refusal to pine for my cyberfriend. I’m glad my guitar wasn’t a woman. Of course, if it had been a woman, the three year old boy inside me would have very shy, not wanting to alienate and looking for opportunities to emotionally attach his object to himself.

I was telling my therapist about all this today. She said, “Girls pine, too.”

I explained that as a woman, I do not pine. Rose Mary does not pine. The less I pine, the more lucid, powerful and responsible my love.

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.

BDSM in Paradise

2009-06-30T16:45:00.002-04:00

When I was a boy I was male-identified, and called “George.” George did not want to be a girl, but he was unconsciously a girl. This expressed itself in fantasies where he was forced to be a girl. His first fantasies, when he was seven, were of underground rooms of girl’s clothes. It mortified him that I wanted to wear them, but I did so badly. The more he rejected me, the more I forced myself on him, becoming his dominatrix in BDSM fantasies and feminizing him.

At the beginning of George’s spiritual path, at age 30, when he was still male identified, he stopped sexually fantasizing altogether. Instead of being relegated to his genitals in masturbation, I flowed through the rest of him, into heart, mind and body; prompting him to identify as me. Now, regardless of how much me I become, I realize I cannot be complete without dominance & submission play.

In the world, when someone irresistibly powerful humiliates you there is nothing to do but be humiliated. This can happen over and over till the only way to neutralize it is by eroticizing it. It can then be de-eroticized through psychodramatical re-experience. I would like this for me, and if I were to be a domme, this is how I would approach it with a sub.

George was chronically humiliated. It was erotic for him to fantasize about a domme humiliating him. I need a domme to humiliate me, but I don’t want to feel humiliated. I want a space in which to let go of humiliated feelings. I want to be reconditioned. I want to neutralize violence and humiliation for the sake of edifying feeling and the power of the feminine.

Here is a dream from several years ago:

I am Rose Mary, in a white dress – in the distant future, after the end of the world. I am dancing and singing blissfully, but sort of aimlessly. I go down some stairs into a little lighted grotto where a red-haired woman is sitting on the bed. She is beautiful, beatific, powerful. She says, “You know how to please me.” I say, “Yes, Mistress.” Flushed with anticipation, I unhook a belt that is hanging from the wall, hand it to her and lie face down on the bed.

I consider us first as spirit-beings that express the qualities of God’s mind. Transmuting these spirit-beings into matter is inevitably violent. Even after the end of the world, the violence still reverberates at subtle frequencies. For example, it keeps me from being disciplined in the dream. It makes me “aimless” instead of concentrated.

After the end of the world, we will still need discipline, and maybe some of us will still need to be disciplined.

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.

Come Over to My Room

2009-06-28T08:27:00.012-04:00

The Queen of Heaven

Welcome.

Rwanda and Darfur

the bob

my cottage on the outskirts of Budapest, 2000 - 01

"The dear are outcasts until cast into the spotlight: woman, girl, female, she, her, hers, sister, daughter, aunt, niece, virgin, whore, angel, bitch, lady, Rose Mary."

In 5000 BCE there were 5 million people in the world. In 1900 there were 1.6 billion. Since then there have been 5 billion new souls.

dream notebook - flannel polar bear sheets

my uterus

I am addicted to lozzenges.

Holly Hobbie

Morning Glory

"ALL THINGS WILL BE MADE NEW"

See you later!

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.

Zoloft Bunny

2009-06-25T13:49:00.001-04:00

Alongside my joy at surgery freeing me from the inhibition of former countenance, I have been depressed, but I am so used to taking psychic turmoil in stride, I did not even realize it – not even after I had this dream on May 30, eight days after surgery:

A rabbit seems sad because it does little to evade my capture. Maybe it should not be eaten then. As I carry it through an outdoor dinner party I notice similarity between its body and that of woman. I catch sight of a fascinating walking insect camouflaged as a leaf and present it to everyone. Why aren’t we more fascinated with nature?

The rabbit is usually a symbol of the Trickster. Here I think it pertains to libido, given how sexually prolific rabbit are said to be.

The rabbit is me. It has my shape. It is a subconscious part of me that I have not claimed, that I let the consensus reality kill and eat.

On 6/19 I dreamed:

There is a coffee-colored girl whose right leg is withered. I tell her she can get to where she is going on her own, but then I see it will be a lot easier if I help her, so I do. The upper part of her body works fine. Off we go.

This is me deciding to take anti-depressants, first thinking, “I can do it by myself,” but then changing my mind. I went off of them in January, and it did not occur to go back on them even as I was spending days fighting against lying down. I am very attuned to my body, but it would not have occurred to me to restart anti-depressants without the dream’s prompt. Everything I do is guided by dreams.

After my first dose of Zoloft, I danced through the day and in the evening I saw a pair of rabbits mating.

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.

Paydirt

2009-06-23T13:11:00.004-04:00

My brother Joe made this video - starring me, him, our two brothers, and other family – about a recently opened time-capsule and the changes since its interment. He is going to submit it to Current TV for possible cable broadcast. The voice asking most of the questions is my male self’s, from 2004. In the video, shot in May, I am four days FFS pre-op.

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.

The Stump of a Great Tree

2009-06-21T10:26:00.002-04:00

My self-image was reborn a month ago, the moment I awakened from facial feminization surgery. Even bruised and swollen, I have had more confidence than before the operation. By the day, issues my former face masked come forth. Some issues have been illustrated by the metaphor of the felled tree. On 4/23 I dreamed a man is going to work this summer cutting down trees.

I had a reverie about how the life-force of a tree is unacknowledged when it is cut down. I imagined that if a tree had to be cut down, it should be stripped of its bark first so that its tenderness might be appreciated. It struck me then that I was actually musing about stripping the male identity away from my doomed member to appreciate what I was never able to ejaculate.

I grew up male-identified, as “George.” George was supremely attached to his genitals. Outside of sex, he was so emasculated that sex followed food, shelter and cigarettes as a basic need. It came before love. Sexual activity made up for what George otherwise lacked. Perhaps he was not so different from other men, but he did not have sex very often because the imbalance of his desire kept women at arm’s length. He loved the feminine more than anything, but he could not sidestep his cock to express it.

The story of George’s emasculation dates from his first breath. By his early 20s he was broken, but not so much that love eluded him. While with his girlfriend he dreamed:

I go into a store run by Ray Charles. I begin to sob uncontrollably. I weep that we have to suffer at all and because of the great sadness and pain that is the burden of life. I go to the counter and talk to Ray about it. He tells me that such grief could only be over a woman. He asks if I broke up with her. I tell him no, it’s still going on. He says it must be good since I cried so hard about it. I say it’s a terrible goodness.

Indeed, it was as bad as it was good. Their divergences poisoned their bliss. After two years, they voiced their mutual recognition that someday they would have to leave each other. They mourned it together, crying like George had in the dream. It was a mourning of death & life all at once.

They mourned lying together nestled in the roots of an ancient stump that had been a massive tree. Lying close, they heard a powerful sound approaching at a great rate. They looked up to see a line of migrating geese flying directly above them, almost near enough to touch.

Though they intended the break-up to be mutual, George’s girlfriend left him coldly, without warning, for a mutual friend. This dream from the early 90s shows that sex became more important love because it was a portal back George’s lost love. It also shows that underneath George’s sexual desire, he was more grief-stricken than he was able to process:

My ex and I search for a place to fuck and find my parents' bed. I go down on her for a long time. She hungrily takes me into her mouth for a while. Then I get on top of her and we fuck like mad. Her body and sexual being, and the woman she is are so familiar to me that it’s as if they've never gone. I overhear my father on the phone in the kitchen trying to get some psychological help for a man who plays on his baseball team. The man is exempt from playing by a rule that says he is allowed to sit out because he can't stop crying. Despite this, we go on fucking, and the howls of the man are filling the house. Suddenly I feel this is bad, pull away from her and get dressed. I feel like something that wasn't supposed to happen did happen. I brush my teeth. I go to where the crying man is. He's on his knees, hugging himself and crying in the front hall. He’s a huge black man, dressed in black, and something about him is very feminine. I approach him to comfort him, but this only makes him cry harder so I back off.

George was never able to get close to the black man. He did not forgive his ex. The thought of her filled him with rage. In relationships, he pursued sex before love. In response he dreamed:

I'm on a bridge in heavy traffic going very slow. My car is totally black. I see my ex go past. I get up on the hood of a car with a big sausage, holding it to my crotch, yelling, "Hey! You stupid motherfucking bitch!" A car comes up next to me. A woman in it sternly says, "Lies will decimate your life."

They did. He stopped being able to feel. He became too numb to work and have friendships. In time, he set out on a new course, which led him to me.

The symbol of George’s penis being a tree was echoed in this dream, from 1996:

It's night. I want to be far away from everything. I walk out of the city until there is no one around me. I come to a strange and beautiful tree with something like a combination of a lion's head and a penis growing from it. I chop it off with one swing of an ax. I take the severed part with me to plant in an appropriate place. I heave it into a valley where it will grow.

When George had the dream, the idea that it might literally portend sexual reassignment surgery was preposterous to him. The very last thing he wanted in the world was to lose his penis. It was as precious as his life. We’ll be glad to see it go even though we still enjoy it sometimes. We are still erectile and orgasmic even without testicles. Orgasms are longer, more vocal, more female – twice a month maybe.

On 6/19 I had this dream about George’s tree:

I arrive at a gig as the second guitarist for a band. The other guitarist is a petite, earthy woman. I have to connect with her through the drawstring of her sweats. It won’t reach me so we start work on making it longer. She uses a light-grey Swiss army knife. I think that every girl should have a knife, and I should have one, too.

The woman leads me into a side room. She shows me a long, thin leather strap and says, “This is your soul.” About something else she says, “This is your heart.”

The space in the room is outdoors, in Washington State. She shows me a swathe cut roughly across the land that is used as a road. She remarks that homes are nearby it but it goes through. I remark on the size of the surrounding trees – redwoods. I feel I would be afraid to take care of them. One of them is bent at a sharp angle, which shows that it is sick. She asks for the knife to cut it down.

In 1994 I had an epic dream about becoming female, six years before I identified as female. In the last sequence of the dream, its heroine gets into a little house that blue doves get under and fly into space. The woman looks out the doorway and sees nothing but blackness. This represents my last nine years, spent in solitude. The house finally sets down in the shore off of Washington State.

Washington State is known for its logging. My other association with it is as Kurt Cobain’s place of origin. In my dreams, he personifies self-annihilating attitudes that calcified George’s emasculation. He died a long time ago, but George has more dying to look forward to.

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.

Ending Suffering

2009-06-18T10:56:00.002-04:00

I thought I understood suffering. I saw it as a means to an end. I wrote, “God created us to suffer. Suffering forces us to create, which in turn makes us as psychically unified as our Creator.
“Suffering cannot be an end itself. It is a means to awareness and knowledge. Since unlimited suffering is caused by limited knowledge, it must be directed to the library.”

A friend’s criticism of my views on suffering has changed my view of it. In her words, “Yoga would say suffering is optional, although likely. Struggles aren't optional. Struggles happen, no way around it. Suffering is an end-product of ego, not getting desires met, not dealing with change, attachment and aversion and the other klesas.

“Struggle may be an obvious route to suffering, but suffering can occur without having struggles present. Suffering can occur at anytime when a preference and then judgment is stated in the mind-body organism. Suffering can occur with the concept of attachment in, ‘Oooh Iiked that, let's have more.’ So suffering and struggle are often connected, but it’s not an a priori requirement

“Connecting struggling to overcoming suffering sounds incorrect to me. Awareness, stillness, non-judgment; they are what overcome suffering. Struggling has nothing to do with it. Struggling is just an action. To me saying, ‘Struggle overcomes suffering’ is like saying, ‘Mopping overcomes suffering.’”

Until these ideas came to me I had seen struggle and suffering synonymously. I had been trying to choose against suffering for a long time, but I was really trying to choose against struggle. Choosing against struggle is ineffective at curbing suffering. It is like holding an umbrella over your head without opening it. You can do it, but it does not work very well.

If the yogic view of suffering holds true for Christ, his hypothetically choosing against suffering would have nothing to do with choosing against the Cross. He was not killed because of his ego attachments. Rather, he had none, and was killed in service of ours. My male self died in service of others’ ego attachments as well. His death and Christ’s dramatize choosing not to struggle. Christ did not choose against suffering. He accepted it. I would like to choose against it. I have been crucified enough.

Suffering is not an end in itself, nor is it a means to an end. It is simply a Cross to bear while struggle dissolves into divine ethos. This is what Christ would say.

Even if God does not see suffering as a means to an end, he must have foreseen it. Every creature suffers when it is sick, hungry, frightened or in pain. We evolved out of creatures that suffer, so of course we suffer, too. Everything that creatures do, we do, too. We differ from creatures in the things we do that they cannot. For example, they cannot choose against suffering.

Struggle is an echo of the conflict in the natural world. This conflict is illustrated in dreams – for example, a volcano symbolizing rage; an earthquake meaning tumultuous shifting; creatures fighting dramatizing how the legacy of biology colors our behavior. Animals cannot choose against suffering, nor can they see themselves in terms of metaphor.

Evolution has immemorially been dependent on one creature sustaining its life force by taking another’s. Doing so is a function of the Beast – the biological legacy of evolution, in which awareness is curbed by suffering.

We cannot choose against suffering until we are aware of ourselves. We know that we are not aware of ourselves if we are suffering. Our lack of self-awareness is the Beast’s. The Beast’s lack of self-awareness informs suffering. Because of self-awareness, harmony, peace, wisdom, truth, beauty, and love, we can choose against suffering, inadvertently undermining struggle.

The distinction between suffering and struggle is gigantic. It implies being able to choose against the causes of struggle so that the Cross is no longer necessary to absorb struggle. Let struggle die. Let suffering die. Let there be rebirth.

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.

The Womb of Solitude

2009-06-16T15:02:00.002-04:00

I have been living in virtual solitude for eleven years. In 1994 I had this dream about the effect of solitude of my psyche. (Throughout the 90s I dreamed about my distant future - it was imminent.):

There is a white wolf a few feet ahead. It stands up. Like a shaman it picks up the remains of a dead animal and reanimates it. The animal runs like a zombie. The wolf looks at me. An identical wolf joins it. They walk on their hind legs like humans. With a strange heartless rage they reanimate dead animals as they go.

The reanimated animals represent aspects of me that come to life in solitude. The wolves are a symbol of psychological independence. Their whiteness is cleansed of the unknown and the Beast. Being bi-pedal, they are humanized. “Strange heartless rage” reflects divine will.

Constantly being with people obscures whom we are because we lose ourselves to the patterns of interaction in our relationships. This is why we need space, and vacations. It is why I became solitary.

When ongoing solitude is hazardous, it is termed “isolation,” and is considered unhealthy. Yet, solitude is healthy when it is regarded as a womb from which one can be reborn. In the womb of solitude one learns to nourish oneself or starve.

For as long as I have been in solitude I have wished for community. Ideally, the commiunity I would belong to is that represented by a certain group of naked people in my dreams. Their nakedness is not literal – it’s symbolic, illustrating genuineness and honesty. It shows that they are known to themselves and each other beneath the persona, for whom they truly are.

Maybe I will never find them in waking-life in this life. I am not as self-aware as the naked people in my dreams. I don’t know anyone who is that self-aware – though I have cyberfriends who might like to be.

I will surely not find the naked people in waking-life until the issues that have been coming up with my cyberfriends have been processed. My cyber friendships have “reanimated” how my former self let being with friends and girlfriends keep him from being psychically responsible for himself. This forfeiture of self-responsibility to relationships is common, even endemic.

Other people become reflections of our own selves, making it impossible to attend to ourselves. Never knowing ourselves through solitude is like letting a mirror be responsible for how we look.

This dream is about how I have been abandoning myself to a firendship with one of my cyberfriends: She has come to stay with me in my flat. She is in my room, keeping me from access to it. I don’t really mind the inconvenience. I occupy myself cleaning, listening to a quirky station she likes. I think of how this is better than being alone, but it is missing the solidity of solitude. Except for her stuff scattered about the flat, there is no visual sign of her in the dream. In my room she has access to all of my writing. I go into the bathroom where her five cats are asleep. These cats could be a problem.

This is not at all about my waking-life cyberfriend. It is about me. It is saying I have considered her so much that my solitude has been compromised. It is as if I am living with someone else. This dream makes me appreciate my solitude more.

I have been letting my cyberfriend take over my solitude in the same way I did as my former self when he was with friends and girlfriends. It has unburdened me of myself, but also diluted my fullness, which I don’t want. I want to be full and do not want relationship to dilute me.

Recently in another dream I was dealing with a person whom I find difficult in waking-life. In the dream and waking-life with her I am deferential, inhibited, on edge. Her response to this in the dream is to tell me, “Don’t let me de-firm you. Don’t let me invalidate you.” Even people I do get along with do this to me. I defer to people; difficult people because I fear them, and I let my “mates” unburden me of being responsible for my psyche.

I have had hardly any practice being psychically responsible for myself as my new female self. While I work toward her, I address the shortcomings of my former self. His shortcomings are like the reanimated animals from my dream with the white wolves, only they must be re-killed.
The falseness of the self we become with others dissolves in solitude, but the self we might become with others never develops if we remain in solitiude. Bridging the power of my solitde to friendship, community, and the collective is an ongoing process.

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.

Why We Suffer

2009-06-14T07:13:00.001-04:00

On June 6 I dreamed: Mom criticizes something I have written, saying it will put me jail for a month, that I should be ready to go now – I am resentful, not understanding.

I have been dream-incarcerated a lot since 1998 because of my transgressions against my true nature. Any attitude or behavior I have that Rose Mary does not share imprisons me. Being imprisoned as such has meant that in waking-life I will feel caged and oppressed, so dreams about prison are downers. But I did not get down about this one since it was only a month-long sentence, a cycle.

After waking with the dream I knew it was about the blog I was planning to post that day, Martyrs for the Feminine, which was originally called “God’s Battered Women,” the title referring to humanity and specifically to me. I wrote, “My male self was a martyr for the feminine. He was God’s battered woman.” I ended up cutting that, but still left a focus on my own martyrdom in the entry. I wrote: “Who has craved death as deeply and as long as me and managed to keep turning away from it?”

So, I am in jail (suffering) to rehabilitate my perspectives on suffering. My thoughts:

Before Creation, we were divinely imagined to be cosmic beings making art, music, love, celebrating, nourishing each other. We were intended to be microcosmic vessels of divinity. To make us divine we were put into a brutal process. God is not brutal. The process is. God is not the process.

The process cultivates our ultimate selves at the expense of the ego that dwells in our partiality. The ego of the partial self is a martyr, a sufferer. Christ was a martyr to the process, and so are we – and like him, once we “rise from the dead” to become our true selves, we are no longer martyrs, and no longer have a martyr’s mentality.

I dreamed a four-year-old girl goes around telling everyone “God accepts you as you are.” It is not God that makes the process of becoming ourselves so brutal; it is our selves, our souls. Our souls are the substance of our ultimate selves. Our souls do not accept us as we are. As we are, they cannot dwell in the flesh to their full capacity, full capacity being freely, not to mention eternally.

God wants us to be free of being kowtowed to him, and wants us to be “kowtowed” or united to our true selves, our souls, so that our suffering may end. Christ teaches how this is done, setting out the principles and the process. (This is not to devalue the relevance of other religions to spiritual experience. Each teaches something unique the others do not. All of them are needed to end suffering.)

The God of the first half of the Bible behaves like an alternately loving and wicked giant; like a parent over a toddler. Underneath projection and religious culture, this face of God is really our own inner self demanding loyalty so that we may take it on, eventually, as Christ did when he was resurrected.

When we are primitive – not individuated, not self-aware – we are so far removed from our souls that they blend with the divine – with “God,” “I am who I am,” “Yahweh,” “Elohim” - in whose image our souls were created.

When the soul is oppressed, it oppresses back, like a mirror. The Jewish part of us takes this personally, personifying the soul as some giant parent wrathfully stepping on us. We would not pay attention if it was personified as a weeping woman, which the soul also is when it is oppressed.

Christ moves beyond all of that. The discrepancies between our tyranny and the soul’s tyranny are reconciled in his ethos. We are crucified until we atone with Christ’s ethos. Being crucified is a Jewish experience, overlorded by the tyranny of our inner selves, our souls.

The soul had no foreknowledge, unlike God, who foreknew that Creation would crucify us, but knew also that it would be worth it once we were resurrected. Resurrected, we have realized our true selves and become free of our enslavement to wills other and greater than our own, such as the will originating in our own souls; the will we abandoned when we adapted to the world as children.

First, there was God. God created souls, and then bodies to house them. So God has a close relation to the soul, one so close that the most people of western spiritual traditions have been able to do is to live as though they have given themselves to God. Yet, they do not know themselves completely, so they cannot give themselves completely. If they did know themselves completely, they would have no reason to give themselves to God. They would be like Buddha.

In my ignorance of my complete self, I “gave my life to God” as well, which had the unanticipated effect of deconstructing my former identity, allowing my true one to come forth. This was traumatizing. God did not traumatize me, and does not want to be portrayed as a traumatizer, a wife-beater, because he’s not. He’s good. Our place in his Creation remains bad as long as it is not understood.

Yet, my process has been so traumatizing that I have naturally had some anger toward God about it, feeling justified in calling him out, calling a spade “a spade,” saying I am a martyr and his battered woman – since I intended to give my self to him. I did not intend to give myself to myself, and had no preexisting idea that this could entail becoming female, an avatar to the divine feminine principle, disabled, the loss of my friends, and eleven years of solitude (dream-prison).

Calling out God is not different from calling out one’s own parents, and is just as inappropriate. Saying, “It’s your fault!” keeps us from taking responsibility for ourselves.

God is a parent just as a mother and father are parents. The same sorts of issues and principles arise when relating to both. It is as wrong-headed to give your life to your parents as is it is to give your life to God – yet it is everyone’s task to make peace with their worldly and cosmic origins. The process may involve large personal investment and invoke some anger. Let the anger not be an obstruction to peace.

God, and parents ideally, do not want their children to give their lives to them. They want their children to give their lives to themselves. In the process of doing so, life becomes an extension of parents’ goodwill – worldly and cosmic - without effort or intent.

Because of my misrepresentation of God, the dream that inspired this blog entry characterized me as “resentful and not understanding.” The independent personality of God – a very real thing to me – does not want to be misrepresented, especially by me because it knows I know it knows I can claim the authority to represent it. It is important to Rose Mary/my soul that I characterize God accurately because the way she would is faultlessly accurate.

As for my remark, “Who has craved death as deeply and as long as me and managed to keep turning away from it?” it’s just stupid, better left unsaid – yet it is something I have thought many times. Whether or not it is true, it is best left unthought.

The thought comes from my hungry craving for death – suicidal thoughts half the days of my life. The reason I stayed alive was, at bottom, the possibility that I might assuage someone else’s suffering, and that killing myself would be harmful to others.

It never crossed my mind that I might be staying alive for my own sake, in order to become free of what I perceived as God’s wrath, and to experience of the sacredness of the flesh through knowledge and awareness of my soul. Suffering on the Cross is always done for someone else, yet the sufferer receives the reward. Selflessness goes a long way toward self-interest.

We have no control over how long we suffer, except for when we devote ourselves to ending suffering. Then our suffering has three days, a beginning, middle and end. We cannot know how long the three days will take, but our devotion will certainly overcome them.

How much suffering do we endure before we are healed? Enough. Do we endure suffering unnecessarily? No. All suffering is a means to an end, so long as it is accepted as such. Suffering gives us the opportunity to end suffering.

Suffering is a means to awareness and knowledge. Being addicted to these would free us from addiction.

Since unlimited suffering is caused by limited knowledge, it must be directed to the library.

Why have I been suffering? Outside of my createdness, it has not been because of God. I have been suffering because of the process of finding myself – which I believe is the source of all our meaningful suffering, not that we must suffer to find ourselves, but we have, do and will for a while.

Maybe God needs to be forgiven for creating us. I think he feels some guilt over it, even though what is happening is not his fault, but is inseparable from the mechanics of the universe. How would we feel if we created a world for fantastic beings to experience eros, and then history happened?

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.

After the Red Knife

2009-06-11T07:48:00.003-04:00

The moment I awakened after facial feminization surgery my self-image was reborn. Even with my face bruised and swollen, I have felt more confident than before. I feel I have nothing to hide. I have become more like Rose Mary.

A few nights ago I sang and played “Red Knife,” a song that originated in a dream I had in 2000. It is about my life as a boy ending in my life as a girl:

I had a little heart when I was born.
Push came to shove and it was torn.
I was lonely and desperate and so forlorn,
But, you know, whatever, I don’t really like to mourn.

I pulled out my heart with a red, red knife.
I pulled out my heart with a red, red knife.

I had half a heart I gave to one or two,
But after good, good lovin’ I din’t know what to do.
Though I loved my lovers, I was blue.
We broke up and my half-heart it broke in two.

I pulled out my heart with a red, red knife.
Never been so lonely in my life.

I searched for a lover the whole world over,
In red, red wine and crimson clover,
The Halls of Montezuma to the White Cliffs of Dover
I searched for a lover the whole world over.

I went to the river to find a wife,
Pulled out my heart with a red, red knife.
Never been so lonely in my life,
So lonely in all my life...

She had stars on her brow, a belly white as flowers,
Eyes of diamond, rounded as almonds
Cheeks fine as feathers, lips pressed together,
Hair black and shining, pink-faced from crying.
Lover, oh my Lover in the deep blue sea,
Lover, oh my Lover, please swim with me,
With me, with me...

I pulled out my heart with a red, red knife.
I pulled out my heart with a red, red knife.

When I picture a woman, I am not alone.
I picture a woman and I am known.
I picture a woman and what do I see?
I picture a woman; that’s me, that’s me.
That‘s me.

Until a few nights ago I had not been able to sing the song for four years. Every time I tried my throat would not cooperate. By the third verse it hurt too much to go on. Rose Mary did not want to sing the song. In the dream that cued the song, I am singing it with her. I cannot sing it without her.

My new experience of my female self brought forth a clearer recognition of the imbalance of my male self. As an example, not fifteen minutes after singing ‘Red Knife,” I had a huge realization about distance I had been feeling from a cyberfriend for a couple months.

We became friends about a year ago. I have felt very close to her. She has nurtured my female identity. In a dream she did my laundry, bought me booze and hairspray, meaning, respectively: that she put my persona in order, our friendship drunkened me, and helped me become more female.

In the next part of the dream I realize she is in the next room and I go to see her. She is lying on the bed. I lie beside her, and see her beauty up close for the first time. [We have not met in person.] Then I put my arm across her.

I had the dream just as I began to feel a distance between us. I had been thinking the dream marked a kind of turning point in our friendship because of the close-up, showing me looking closely at her and our relationship. The dream said something like, “This is what she has done for you, and it is not going any further, or maybe it will but in a new form.”

After singing “Red Knife,” I realized the significance of the last gesture of the dream, putting my arm across her: it was a possessive gesture.

I wrote to my friend: “I think that feeling so close to you brought out this behavior, deeply ingrained in George [my male self], some kind of objectifying possessiveness, disrespectful of you, me, our friendship.

“I feel certain this had something to do with the dilution between us, and I feel very bad for it. I am sorry – whether or not it caused a feeling of alienation for you. Please forgive me.

“I don’t feel guilty – just sad. There was nothing I could have done to avoid it puppeteering me. I am glad I identified it. It is something about George that never could have been unlearned had I not become my true self, and I hope my truer self can come forth by becoming aware of this.

“It is no accident that I realized these things after my operation. I think my realization is related to this dream I had the night last night:

”I am walking around an ‘animal farm.’ It is thought to be separate from Nature, but its smells and energy pour out of the barrier into Nature. I have been here before, the last time acting selfishly. Having learned my lesson I go straight to a certain goat, a ‘baby’ which actually appears full-grown. I give it a book to munch on, which changes everything. Three actual baby goats line up near it. It has a chance to have its demons freed. There is a feeling of action, motion. A woman is there explaining they free the demons with a process.

“‘This ‘animal farm’ is a place of curbed George-instinct that I visit as I relearn who I am, as a woman. Acting selfishly was what I was doing before, being unconsciously possessive toward you. Giving the goat the book to munch on is me ruminating about the dream of your gifts. The little baby goats lined up are these thoughts and this note to you. I hope this note frees some of the demons like the dream suggests.”

A couple days later I wrote my friend again: “I maybe overreacted a little with my apologies for being possessive – but the de-intensification of our correspondence really freaked George out. As me – female, woman, Amy, Rose Mary – I am fine with it. It is what it is.

“What happened psychically for me was that I reached a certain level of intimate feeling for you – one George would have found impossible to have with a woman without becoming sexual/romantic. I have no sexual/romantic feelings for you – not that I couldn’t potentially. I just don’t. We are not about that. But George’s instincts are someplace else, being squeezed like a pustule to the surface by our sexual/romantic neutrality + our intimacy.

“Not consummating romantically + de-intensification has led him to think you must be pulling away. The only proper response to the dream image of him possessively putting his arm across you is in fact pulling away.

“This period around my renewed countenance is seeing a lot of his issues come forth, hopefully so that I can free myself of them and let him go, and get my life back more fully…”

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.

Heroines of Christ

2009-06-09T09:08:00.003-04:00

I am starting to feel my bottom lip, which has been numb since my facial-feminization surgery (May 22). I have been using lots of napkins.

In the two weeks following the surgery I felt more emotionally cut up than usual - cut up like my flesh - but it was also a party; a quiet party of gladness, supine contemplation, and blissful oxycodone reveries. In one opiated vision while I lied in bed, three darling spirits - flowers with faces hovering at my legs – were looking up at me.

Feeling is returning to my nose and jaw, but not so much my chin. The serious pain has subsided. I stopped oxycodone two days ago. A dream I had before the surgery forewarned me about the drug:

At the end of a cross-country trip [the consultations with my surgeon, securing the funds for the surgery, and finally getting on the operating table – taking about three months] there is a party. On the floor is a demonically possessed woman. She is glassy-eyed like someone on heroin. She is hot, in high heels. I squeeze one of her shoes and the heel feels slightly rubbery. She tries to get away from me because she knows I am on to her, but her body won’t respond.

She was me totally enjoying being opiated. The dream continues:

In the next room a demonically possessed machine has killed everyone. I go in, through the glass door, and proceed to turn the machine off, intuitively knowing which switches and levers to push.

This is me cutting the power to how negative I felt about my face before the surgery. My self-image was self-annihilating. Even with it beaten-looking and swollen I felt better about it than before.

“Demonically possessed” apparently means both really good and really bad. It was really good to have the surgery and be stoned on oxycodone – really bad to have my face brutalized and to put that shit in my body.

Since 2000 I have put a lot of pharmaceutical shit in my body: xanax, klonopin, adavan, coumadin, lovenox, olanzapine, meleril, propranolol, zoloft, premarin, provera, estradiol, tramadol and others.

Taking pharmaceuticals gives me placebo-effect well-being, but at the same they have stabilized me for real. As psychologically traumatizing as life has been – and given the imperative to feminize and treat my blood clots – without drugs I would definitely not be alive today. Someday I am sure I will be able to substitute my real self for them – but they are on board for now, though maybe not for long. I dreamed a young guy is taking way too many pills in a sort of out-of-control way. I encourage him to cut back.

The dream continues:

There is a mellow all-night hang out with my friends [representing hanging-out & being-mellow with my friend oxycodone and my other friend, my new face]. One friend is a woman with a very short haircut - almost a crew-cut, but grown out. It looks masculine & feminine at the same. She is lucid, assured, powerful. She asks me, “Have you ever tried heroin like this?”

She holds her index finger straight up, and then forces something – I don’t know what: it might be something that has no form – down in between her fingernail and finger.

“No,” I say, “That would hurt too much.” When I say this I feel kind of soppy and rubbery, like an overcooked vegetable.

I am rubbery like the “demonically possessed,” opiated woman described above. The short-haired woman is her opposite. Her finger is erect. Being her pointer finger, she seems to be asking, “Have you ever tried to stop being so flaccid and to focus on the point of your life, of you being an avatar to Rose Mary Pillowwater? Such a focus is powerful and painful, and would override any dependency you have on drugs.”

Of course, I have focused a lot on being an avatar to Rose Mary Pillowwater. Having a definitively female face has opened the possibility of focusing in a way I could not before, regarding how I participate with the external world. My new face has brought force many issues that were dormant under my former face. I am turning off the machine that killed my former self as I search for my new self.

In one dream I am trying to follow two women – one dark-haired, the other blond – who don’t pay much attention to me. The blond one asks me what I think of Jesus Christ. There is so much to say. I first say that he is magical. Before I can say anything more the woman is - POOF – gone, like magic. I look for her and do not see her anywhere.

My feminine self carries the qualities of Jesus Christ. So it is for all fully actualized female selves. Complementing them, all fully actualized male selves carry their divine mother’s wisdom, balance and receptivity – even in their cocks.

The dream about engaging the pain and power of the point of my life concludes:

We have been up all night and it is morning. We are in an apartment in South America in a kind of dusty, cowboy town. I see some guys on horseback and call to them out the window, “Hey, gallos.”

I was thinking gallo meant “cowboy,” but I looked it up and found it means “cocks,” “roosters.” These South American dream-cocks are the sons of God. Their Biblical complements are the daughters of men. Here, in my dream, not so. A heroine of Christ is calling to them through an apartment window.

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.

Martyrs for the Feminine

2009-06-06T07:20:00.005-04:00

Having my nose broken, face lacerated and jawbones sanded down while in a state of maximum passivity was fantastically violating. The body does not understand psychological needs. It is humble and instinctual, suffers or is joyful. My surgery, on May 22, awakened emotional violation I suffered long ago. My ego fractured. Dreamlike characters subsumed it, broadcasting mean voices in my head. I dissociated from myself. I amped up the oxycodone with anti-anxiety medication and stabilizedMartyrs for the Feminine

Having my nose broken, face lacerated and jawbones sanded down while in a state of maximum passivity was fantastically violating. The body does not understand psychological needs. It is humble and instinctual, suffers or is joyful. My surgery, on May 22, awakened emotional violation I suffered long ago. My ego fractured. Dreamlike characters subsumed it, broadcasting mean voices in my head. I dissociated from myself. I amped up the oxycodone with anti-anxiety medication and stabilized.

A week after the surgery I went to get stitches out, from my lip lift. Seeing me, the surgeon said, “I know this sounds terrible, but I mean it as a compliment: you look like a battered woman.”

It was nice to hear. I looked in a mirror and could see what he saw. I don’t look like a man anymore. Even with the face of a battered woman, I feel so much more confident and authentic than before, like I have the right to be a woman – that in other people’s eyes I am not pretending to be one.

My male self was a martyr for the feminine. I use ‘martyr’ to identify whatever it is someone dies for. Many people are martyrs for their children or themselves. My male self was martyred to his self, his soul. Surely, Rose Mary is not burdened by my male self’s martyrdom.

I am encumbered by remnants of him. Won’t I until relationship with others births new identity; lets me see myself anew? As it is my closest relationships are remote, cyber. I can renew myself only so much in the vacuum of solitude. But in the vacuum I become infinitely malleable, like water around the outside world.

I need to be conscious of how martyrdom is a motif in my life in order to move past martyrdom. In a dream I was in a room of female martyrs, innocent women who had been killed. The women are not actual women. They represent the feminine, which dwells in both genders. So many are killed because the masculine is out of control, imbalanced. It is the way of the world. Giving context to martyrdom provides our story with cohesiveness.

I do not wear martyrdom as a badge, but it can be so heavy that it wears me. Its heaviness compels me to address it periodically, to put new terms to it. A distant example: In 2000, at a peak of psychosis, having flown spontaneously from Budapest to New York and wandered all night searching for the end of the world, it occurred to me that I would write a book called I Have Suffered More than Anyone in the History of Mankind. There was some humor in this, and perhaps some truth.

Who has craved death as deeply and as long as me and managed to keep turning away from it?...In visions I have heard our collective groaning, echoing in a great cave...I believe we were created to suffer, and that suffering teaches us to create, which in turn makes us as psychically unified as our Creator.

God bless everything that removes the Nails from the Cross. Remove the Nails from the World Cross, please. Please remove them and let us do something new, and neutral - not a 3 ring circus of apocalyptic Salvation, nothing cinematic - though there is always something cinematic to the end of the world.

There is a degree of prescription to the end of the world. It is prescription that cannot be too little or too much. It is what it is; it does what it does. It is informed by the Dharma.

Let it be time for the Dharma of the Book of Life to become known, to spill like a gold rush into the collective, and let the spilling be serene and neutral.

Let exuberance that is rooted in anxiety slip into history. Let the subtlest fanaticism be martyred to clear the path to serenity.

Let argument die off…Let those who won’t listen be martyred so the world will hear a new beginning…An infant hears perfectly! Call it ‘Master’!

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.

The Library of the Body

2009-05-21T05:06:00.004-04:00

An excerpt from my memoir Rose Mary Pillowwater:

May 2000: A few weeks before, when George had recalled everything in his life to the Lion and thanked him for the people he loved, the only person he had overlooked was his grandmother. In a way she was the most important person of all to George. She had cared for him and his brothers every day while their parents were at work. She was the Great Mother in George’s dreams. As such, she stood for me. She was the only deceased person he had been close to. She had been gone for two years.

Something about George’s grandmother was bothering him. He thought of the times when she was distant from him when he needed her, but those didn’t really matter. Then, he realized he was still upset about the fire.

At the age of four – when George was “Georgie” - his grandfather left the house with a smoldering cigar balanced on the lip of an ashtray. The cigar burned down and fell into a chair that caught fire. Seeing the smoke, neighbors called the fire department. They managed to put the fire out before the structure of the house was badly damaged, but a good part of the interior was scorched and blackened. The TV was melted into the table.

When Georgie and his parents went to see the house, it had transformed from a cottage of cookies and warmth to a ghoulish nightmare. What made it especially strange was that it was half-burned. Half the house was bright and sweet and ordered, as it had been before, while the other half was charred and chaotic. In it Georgie saw the imprint of pure good and pure evil. It initiated his lifelong occupation with the question of good & evil. It mirrored the fracturing of the wholeness within his little-boy self. If his grandmother ever revealed that there was any evil in her at all, it was in that scene.

In May 2000, George kept seeing her glaring at four-year-old Georgie as he stood mortified in the fire’s aftermath, her countenance saying, “See?! This is what life is! So, fuck you! Fuck you, you little shit!”

“Fuck you, Gramma!” George sobbed - sitting on the carpet in the middle of his room.

His grandmother’s spirit came. She was a male buddha, smaller than an infant. She apologized for the day in her blackened house. Then she became disoriented. She started to tumble all over the floor, walls and ceiling saying, “What is this? What’s going on? This is strange.”

She came down from the ceiling, perched on his head for a moment and then popped back up into the air. She came back and crawled all over us, then down through us and into our heart. There, she said, “Oh, my goodness, George, this is very strange,” and left again.

After a while she got used to it - to being a boy and a little buddha spirit - and settled down a bit. Then, we had a long talk about what was happening.

Her perceptions and expressions were still colored by her previous life. She had to get over her resistance to George being a girl and her being a boy. Gender-switching was bizarre to her early-twentieth century mind, but she was also such a tiny little spirit that she could quickly accustom herself to new circumstances. Unlike George, she didn’t have the mass of flesh to get the kinks out of. She was going to live inside our heart.

Our body was a library for George’s grandmother. She would travel it for years reading all its books. The books were composed from all our thoughts, feelings, dreams and experience. The books were located in all the different parts of my body. Their themes and content would metaphorically reflect their location. George’s grandmother could come out for breaks and visit me and George in a little house that was on our foot.

George’s grandmother had been a big reader. As a buddha she was a speed-reader. She started with the books of our heart. Looking through them, she couldn’t stop saying, “Oh, George! Oh, my God! Oh, my God, George! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

She had never known what George had been through and it hurt her to see it. Part of her task was to heal our heart, drilling holes in it to let out the black ooze that had settled on the bottom.

Her ultimate goal was to build a kingdom out of our heart. All the people could move there in the third era after the world, which was a time and place in the distant future that George was seeing in a vision. The kingdom of our heart would be accessed through the mastery of DNA, the fundamental God-matter. By gaining knowledge of this we could create and explore fantastic places. We were able to see this place - the third era after the world - because George’s mind was wide open to eternity, through which flowed all time. His best guess was that the first era after the world is the first thousand years of the New Kingdom. Should the New Kingdom become manifest by the end of the 21st century, the third era would begin some time around 3100 CE.

George could see future centuries and eras unfolding, each out of the previous, far, far into the future, but it was not the time to follow them. We needed to stay present. We felt George’s grandmother begin to hammer in our heart. She was building the kingdom of our heart already.

In five years, after she had read all our books, synthesized all my knowledge and built the kingdom of our heart, she would move down to my womb and I would give birth to her. In less symbolic language, in time, George would become me, his own Great Mother, by synthesizing our knowledge.

After these realizations settled, George got into bed to rest. In a couple minutes, the smell of library books was releasing from the body. It was the sour, musty smell that books acquire when they languish long in an underventilated space. George had hated that smell growing up. He came to hate it even more when he worked shelving books in a library. The smell wafted out of the body for a while. George was disgusted. Once it was gone, it was replaced by my smell; the fragrance of the Queen of Heaven, the smell of rosemary and Israel.

“Come Skinnydipping with Me” is on hiatus till early June. It is normally updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. 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.

Remembering the Heart’s Song

2009-05-19T09:24:00.001-04:00

A Gathering of the Tribe, a just-published essay by Charles Eisenstein begins with an allegory that has replayed variously in my inner-life. Charles’s allegory begins:

“Once upon a time a great tribe of people lived in a world far away from ours. Whether far away in space, or in time, or even outside of time, we do not know. They lived in a state of enchantment and joy that few of us today dare to believe could exist, except in those exceptional peak experiences when we glimpse the true potential of life and mind.

“One day the shaman of the tribe called a meeting. They gathered around him, and he spoke very solemnly. ‘My friends,’ he said, ‘there is a world that needs our help. It is called earth, and its fate hangs in the balance. Its humans have reached a critical point in their collective birthing, and they will be stillborn without our help.’”

Here are parallels to the allegory from my inner-life; from the Y2K psychoses that opened me:

I had a vision of five naked women in a circle, looking up. The perspective was from above. They looked like a flower with five petals. The countenance of each was nymph-like and pure. Their faces were similar, but each had its own subtle character. Music was playing. Music was indistinguishable from the women’s existence, and that of the place they were in. In was a churchlike place inside God’s mind. God’s mind was the place where we were created.

The vision changed perspective. I was still in the churchlike place, but floating on my back with others, all of us naked, in a peaceful pool. I looked to the side and saw that all of us were side by side, like cells in an organism. We belonged there and flowed perfectly together as if we ourselves were water.

Our eyes were gazing up into the high dome of the place. I was at peace in the safety of our unbreakable belonging, and then the peace was suddenly annihilated, as it had been in the first instant of Creation: God tore us from his mind, jettisoning us into existence and time and space. Our Creation was synonymous with the obliteration of our unity.

Knowing nothing, my mind reflexively rushed back through the force propelling us into existence. I was reaching back through time for the balance I had lost, in the same way people do when they are preoccupied with the good old days, only it happened over a split second and instead of forty years

Like shrapnel, a scene of my story, as it was written in the Book of Life, punctured my mind. The Book of Life was a real thing to me, something introduced to me through my dreams. In waking-life I understood it contained the story of how God would use history to weave himself, as Jesus, back into existence. It was also about how people would be woven into the Family, the global family.

In the scene from the Book of Life, a voice said, “Rose Mary Pillowwater,” as I glimpsed her standing with Jesus in front of a lush forest. The air was fresh and cool. Rose Mary was wearing a hat. She was a beatific buddha in a world without chaos.

This vision is from my soon-to-be self-published memoir Rose Mary Pillowwater. “George” is my male self. “Georgie” is my boy-self:

…we started singing a new song straight from our heart. It was marvelous. We could have sung it forever. The song didn’t have one set melody, but it had a theme, the heart’s theme song. There was no end to its freedom.

Everyone had been taught the song before they were born. Then, when they were going insane at the end of the world, they could listen to the song in their hearts and remember the peaceful place they had been, when they were with God. The song would help them bring the heavenly place they had come from to the Earth.

The song was perhaps the selfsame as in Revelation 14:3: “And they sang a new song before the throne, and before the four living beings and the elders; and no man could learn that song, except the hundred and forty and four thousand who were redeemed from the Earth.”

As we sang the heart’s song George began to have visions of the day he was shown the script of history. He was a child among thirty children – the thirty who would lead the weaving of the end of the world. One of them was me [Rose Mary]. When I said “beauty” I would clearly pronounce the “t” with my tongue softly touching the roof of my mouth above my teeth.

Georgie was known as “the Atomic Boy.” God, in his lion form, was going to stick Georgie into the eye of a nuclear explosion. God showed Georgie what this was like by letting him see a bowed, billowing cylinder of dense chocolate-colored ash that went up to the sky. God needed a soul to suffer as Georgie would in order to figure out why everything was the way it was so that Heaven and Earth could unite. Then God showed Georgie the tears he cried for him; for dooming Georgie to this. God was still crying Georgie cried, too, because God was so sad. Georgie told him, “It’s okay. I love you, anyway. I’ll be okay.”

The day before we came to the world, we learned the new song, the song of the heart that George had found that morning. Along with the song went the mantra, “Remember the Day. Remember the Day.” This referred to the day before we came to the world, the day we saw the script of history and heard the song. The mantra “Remember the Day” would be helpful for awakening memories of the heart’s song as well as of the day before we came to the world, which was known simply as “the Day.”

“Come Skinnydipping with Me” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. 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.

Standing on the Stars

2009-05-17T18:16:00.004-04:00

Coyote Marie’s Tarot reading about my health - the subject of Friday’s Ask the Dream Queen - discussed two of the cards from the spread. One was the center card, of which was queried, "What is the picture of good health for Amy right now?" The card pictured a golden being exploding forth fully “germinated” from a seed casing. This correlated to the ongoing theme in my internal life of Rose Mary Pillowwater bursting into consciousness through me.

The other card discussed in the blog was in the West position, correlating to body and bones. The image on the card was of a hermaphroditc being straining against nature, representing how I have futilely over-exerted myself for years trying to defend my body against the delirious effects of multiple scleroses.

In the East was Temperance XIV representing "The Metamorphoses of the Psyche." The deck’s book advises: “Pursue the harmony that you seek, avoid stagnant situations and crystallization, both mental and material." One such stagnant situation has been how I relate to my body, as pictured in the West card.

Stagnant situations are the illusions that keep the collective’s illusory boat afloat. They may be politicized as social-conservatism. In that context, stagnant situations masquerade as continuity. Without stagnation we like water in a river, which is scary and which requires great faith for a long long time until we know the river perfectly – until we are the river itself. Then politics may become subservient to the human condition instead of vice versa.

For the South The Ace of Swords, pictured above, was drawn. This card refers to integration of mind and feelings/emotion. Coyote Marie’s response to the card is an accurate picture of me & my work: “In a natural and civilized world of psychedelic contrast and complementary colors to which he is dsciplinedly open, the figure uses craft and communication - his desk, his style and dress, and of course his writing - to ground, center, and maintain his flow. I am saying ‘he,’ but the figure is pretty androgynous. He is poised and polished.”

These observations are sweet to receive. It awakens me to myself to have an eye outside me – other than dreams – to gauge myself by. As it otherwise is, I sometimes underappreciate and misperceive myself.

Coyote Marie continues: “Those wings suggest he occasionally buzzes out into that distorted world and moves there with ease and grace.”

I do sometimes. Other times I feel I get snagged on the ‘distorted world.’

CM: He is made for higher interactions, and yet moves in this world, documenting and communicating.

AG: This is me.

CM: What does he do in the world? Perhaps diplomat or ambassador -- either way he is both intellectual and sensual, and not fearful.

AG: I am an ambassador of the Kingdom of Heaven, and I am not fearful when the world’s terms do not buffet me about.

CM: The South is the seat of fear and dealing with childhood issues, the work that must be done before moving on to other quarters -- a portrait of how you have done and still do this work, from your desk, winged.

AG: I write at the same desk I wrote my first poems on as a teenager. In the face of the wide drawer in front of my navel the word LOVE was carved in cubed letters when I was 14.

CM: This card says that your writings and their kernel experiences - while your situation may feel isolated and wrought on you by some higher realm - truly the writing is of you, your process, an offering you make of yourself, personally yours. Your feelings and emotions not only drive the work, they are tied up in it and its fate, which means your health is too.

AG: This is true – my health is tied up in my work.

CM and I initially intended three separate spreads, one for each issue of major concern for me: 1) health, 2) independence (I have been “on disability” since 2001, and am financially beholden to my parents as well), and 3) community (I have had none, in person, since the mid 90s). My sense is that this spread is not specifically about health, but presents a more general picture of where I am in life.

Given its generality, the center card with the being exploding forth may be symbolic of this coming Friday’s facial feminization surgery, which will significantly change how I interface with the world.

I am thinking that to do a reading specifically for health, a spread would have to be more particular, perhaps shaped like the body. Or perhaps there could be cards correlating to the central nervous system, GI tract, pulmonary system, endocrines, glands, limbs, nutrition, exercise, work, etc. Perhaps you would need a medical degree to interpret such a spread.

For the North position – Air, the mind, receptivity - the Knight of Wands was drawn. It features a white, hermaphroditic satyr jutting carved from a scratched, white rock-face that is in the sky, among the clouds. The image recalls a vision I had of Rose Mary on a magic horse before I was born.

Coyote Marie says the cards above and below the spread are like guides. In the Above position is the Seven of Pentacles. Pictured, two travelers wander a wasteland of technological giants.

CM: Traditionally, this card speaks to squandered resources or a possible harvest left unreaped -- a warning or reminder. This could also speak to facing and integrating a personal deep past, a surprising, personal link to and reconsideration of personal forms thought obsolete.

The two explorers indicate the wholeness necessary to explore in these realms - both a figure and its shadow in the desert of abandoned metamorphoses.

AG: The two explorers feel like my boy self and I wandering in the land of things that we did not become because the world was not ready for us.

Sometimes I feel the presence of a baby or tot with me. This is Georgie, my boyhood self. Georgie and I wander together over all existence.

The card at the base of the spread was The Stars XVII. The book says: "The metamorphoses of our evolutionary journeys are interwoven with those of the entire cosmos. We perceive this delicate wisdom through the changing realm of dreams. Let's allow ourselves to be guided by these ideas…"

The Stars are at the base. I stand on stars. The cosmos are my foundation. Everything is its opposite in Heaven – up is down, thin is fat, poor is rich, ugly is beautiful, man is woman, spirit is matter, Earth is Heaven instead of Hell.

“Come Skinnydipping with Me” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. 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.

“Salvia's Blueprint” Preview

2009-05-14T10:09:00.009-04:00

My cyberfriend Lydia created this painting of her salvia experience, which has been the subject of two blog entries: 1) the experience itself, and 2) a follow-up dream edifyingthe experience. The entries are being integrated with other material for an article, “Salvia's Blueprint,” for publication (hopefully) in Reality Sandwich.

Here is the sequence of the salvia experience that inspired Lydia’s painting: “I then felt roots growing from my head, through my throat and vocal cords, out of my mouth into the ground. I became afraid again at the prospect of being stuck in that spot and position for the rest of my ‘life.’ My life flashed before my eyes, and I was happy with it.”

In the painting Lydia’s head is lowered into the erotic heat of the Earth. Her single eye is large with seeing.

The spiritual and the material are merged through her fusion with the roots of the tree. The tree is related to the World Tree, the Tree of Life, an axis through which the spiritual and material worlds intersect. They intersect at a fundamental level in plants.

I observed: “Since your head is down toward the ground the image may reference the Tarot’s Hanged-Man. Here is a bit about him, from Wikipedia: ‘Serenely dangling upside-down, the Hanged Man has let go of worldly attachments. He has sacrificed a desire for control over his circumstances in order to gain an understanding of, and communion with, creative energies far greater than his individual self. In letting go, the hero gains a profound perspective accessible only to someone free from everyday conceptual, dualistic reality.’”

Lydia replied, “That is exactly how I felt.”

Link to Salvia's Blueprint.

“Come Skinnydipping with Me” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. 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.

Gentle Satan

2009-05-12T12:34:00.002-04:00

In the on-line forum following the publication of my essay Israel Is Real a religious fundamentalist going by the username of “iLL-WiLL” Satanized me roundly, lumping me into prescripted categories of what is wrong with the world, firing Bible passages at me, and not hearing me. After a lull in our volleys, I ended a post – addressed to someone other than iLL-WiLL – writing “God is a Nazi and we are Cosmic Jews.” ILL-WiLL titled his response, “Nazi, huh?” and told me I reap what I sow. I titled my response to that one, “The Biggest Nazi of All, Praise Allah, Buddha, and Cheesecake.” I continued:

“OK, Yahweh is a Nazi for the truth and you are his SS Officer – not a Nazi for lies: a Nazi for truth, out to exterminate bad Israel.

“Yahweh’s relationship to the Jews was the first step in the story – Jesus Christ the second. Jesus Christ is not a Nazi. He is not ill-willed. The Cross straightened the crooked arms of the beautiful, ancient, eastern symbol, the Swastika, and transcended it once and for all, and the Nazism inherent in it; inherent in history's spiraling course toward collective Christ consciousness.

“Without Nazis we would we have no measure of evil. We have this to thank them for. Without knowing the limits of evil we will never know the limits of good. It is beautiful, appropriate and correct to put God in terms of darkest evil as a means for limiting it.

“I will not stop reinventing language to fit the realities God has taught me “

This was too outside iLL-WiLL’s worldview to make sense. He titled his response “praise cheesecake, huh?” and followed this with regurgitated Bible passages, which I did not read. I replied, “cheesecake and poopy and hummingbirds and baseball cards and lichen and Moldova and good smells and floatation and the Cosmic Mother and grace and damnation and fingers and the body electric and the moon and elves and spoons and the silence around you...”

Though he and I stopped interfacing after that, other commenters later urged him to get off my back. One told him to respect my “gentle path,” which really touched me. Since then I have been more aware of the gentleness of my path, of myself.

Thinking of “gentle path,” an image of my genitals as female often comes to mind. I can feel having female genitals will make me wholly gentle. Writing about it gives me a hard-on!

Whenever something is deeply true for me, I get an erection. I’m not kidding. It has been like this since I was teenager. At 20, my therapist told me, “Women hunger for a man like you.” Wouldn’t they for a man who gets hard-ons for truth?

About the below passage from the previous Come Skinnydipping with Me a friend remarked, “This makes me smile and smile. ‘Gentle path’”:

”Getting off the bus, the woman in front of me has noticed a sleeping person in the row I am about to step past. The woman says to me, ‘That person might be sleeping through their stop.’ ‘Miss? Miss?’ she calls over my shoulder to the sleeping person. It is a dark-chocolate black man, hunkered way down in his seat like he wants to disappear. The woman is putting me on the spot, obliging me to act as an extension of her will to be very responsible. I give the sleeping man a gentle touch and say, ‘South Station.’ He wakes up and says, ‘Not my stop…Thank you.’"

I was glad my friend saw it that way. All I could see of it before reading her remark relating it to my “gentle path” was an example of how I am buffeted about when I leave the bunny sanctum of my room. It would be nice if I had someone around all the time to show me that I am not a victim of chaos and violence in my interactions with people.

I got thinking about how if I had more than fleeting interactions with people, if we were to engage in real conversation, my world would hydrate theirs. This reminded me of like how, in the following dream, Satan remains silent until spoken to, and then once he is engaged, he makes everyone’s heads spin.

The dream is from 1995, when I lived in Budapest. It begins: I go to Slovakia.

Americans were allowed to stay in Hungary without a residency permit as “tourists” up to ninety days, so it was necessary to periodically leave the country to get a stamp in your passport to remain legal. The closest place to do this was Slovakia, about ninety minutes by train from Budapest.

While I'm in Slovakia an evil man steals my passport by making it disappear. I'm screwed. I try to make a call to the US on a pay phone, but the evil man is behind me making it impossible.

Passports and IDs are symbols of identity. The “evil man,” Satan, has made my identity disappear – which is his prime function. When people “sell theirs souls” to Satan they are really just putting their identities on steroids. The results are always disastrous because they don’t actually know themselves at all.

It can seem evil when life makes our identities “disappear” through age, cultural breakdown, marriage break-ups, disasters – but losing identity is precisely how identity evolves, becomes individuated and a conduit of the Self. God wants these for us, but our instinct is to reject them as if they are evil. God is a Nazi to the ego. Losing identity is losing one’s life to find it

I try to duck back across the border, but am sent back by a nice soldier.

He personifies the part of me that was spiritual warrior.

I now sense that this is a horror movie I'm watching while in it. I must kill the man or he will continue to plague me. Sometimes his skin is red and scaly. His hair is thin. Eventually I see he is Satan. He makes mischief. He's at the scene of an accident he's caused.

The terrible things that happen every day are because of the partiality of identity. The dark side of God intends wholeness over partiality. We make the best of being the unfortunate objects of this intention. The best does not protect us at all when it is propped up with culture and consensus reality.

A given family in a traditional culture – say in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Darfur, Congo, 1990s Bosnia, 1970s Cambodia, et al ad infintium – is at much greater risk of being wantonly victimized than a family in less traditional culture. There are socio-economic and political factors behind this of course, but at the most basic level, the kowtowing of identity to a collective invites disaster because God and the Earth do not want consensus culture. They want us to embody our souls, which happens at the expense of the deindividualizing collectives. In the 90s I had a dream that a man from the future tells me, “We don’t care about your civilization.”

Back to the dream at hand:

Satan can't simply disappear because people are watching and his identity would be revealed.

I am revealing his identity here, though. I am making him disappear.

In order to remain undetected he must trick the people with his silver tongue. But in order for him to use it someone must first speak to him. Then he can start talking, sending everyone's heads spinning, rendering us powerless.

This is about how when people process tragic events together they perpetuate consensus reality, per usual, keeping individuals from thinking for themselves and perceiving accurately. Their minds echo with yada-yada, with what is expected to be heard, and Satan reigns.

But then it comes to me, the one and only thing that can be said to him without negative repercussions. I ask, "Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?" over and over and over. As I do this his face recedes into a small round stone, but remains cognizant. He says, "You're doing it. You're doing it." But I can't hold my concentration. Instead of saying, "Who are you?" I say, "Who am I?" This interferes with the spell I'm casting and it is incomplete.

This part is about me questioning who Satan is, what tragedy and atrocity are. I could understand them no more than I understood myself, no more than I understood my tacit participation in them as a member of the collective.

I am still coming to identify what it means to be independent of the collective – I am still revealing what Satan is to myself.

Since I have a good grasp on who Satan is and who I am, having a real conversation with a stranger would inherently bring out issues of identity for them. Issues of identity would flow into the space between us like water, without me having to conjure them. The conversation would bring out things that might seem “satanic” because facing identity is inherently traumatic (evil) for the ego – for the ego whose mother is consensus before it is cosmic.

I am Satan, but a gentle Satan. If Satan is sewage, then I am water, pillowwater.

“Come Skinnydipping with Me” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. 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.

Under the Elephant

2009-05-10T07:14:00.001-04:00

Last Thursday: grey and heavy like an elephant sitting on my face. During my hour with my therapist I am surprised by how much effort it takes to talk, to express a thought, to move. I think perhaps the weather is turning up the volume on my MS.

My therapist and I talk about my upcoming surgery – nose and jaw. She says, “You know, I wouldn’t have thought of it, if you hadn’t said anything [a few weeks ago, about transsexual women routinely getting lip-lifts, i.e., surgically decreasing the distance between nose and mouth], but I can imagine a lip-lift would look good on you.”

In March, at my initial consultation the surgeon offered me a lip augmentation – a lip-lift augmented with flesh removed from a neck lift, the neck lift intended to accentuate my jaw work. Given the funds available to me, I could not afford the neck lift, so the lip augmentation was out of the question, and I forgot about it. The possibility of having a lip-lift on its own – a simpler, cheaper procedure than lip augmentation -did not occur to me.

Friday morning, the morning of my pre-op visit to the surgeon, I feel as sat on as Thursday. I feel rotten.

The entry I post to Ask the Dream Queen this morning is about a dreamer who feels unsure and confused amidst the workaday collective, which is how I feel all day Friday, outside my bunny hutch, hobbling around Boston on my cane,

First thing, I am in Dunkin Donuts getting a decaf and one of the counter-girls gives me the Wtf?-Oh-it’s-a-dude-that’s-f-ed-up look.

As the bus’s wheels roll onto Sagamore Bridge – which links Cape Cod to the mainland – the elephant stands up. It is weird how fine I suddenly feel. The psyche must be encouraging me that there exists a bridge to a better place, and I am on it.

We stop off at the Sagamore park-n-ride lot to pick up more passengers. I take advantage of the stop to use the bus’s toilet – frontally and standing, which I only do on the bus. As soon as I sit back down, the elephant lowers once more onto my face.

There are two little playful boys in a row in front of me. Everything they say synchronistically parallels my thoughts, as in a dream

I spend the ride trying not to be miserable, to maintain the parts of my identity that have enough space, that are comfortable, not materially dependent, not annoying to others, not diseased, not upset, not oppressed, depressed or repressed, not on a bus.

Getting off the bus, the woman in front of me has noticed a sleeping person in the row I am about to step past. The woman says to me, “That person might be sleeping through their stop.” “Miss? Miss?” she calls over my shoulder to the sleeping person. It is a dark-chocolate black man, hunkered way down in his seat like he wants to disappear. The woman is putting me on the spot, obliging me to act as an extension of her will to be very responsible. I give the sleeping man a gentle touch and say, “South Station.” He wakes up and says, “Not my stop…Thank you.”

At the hospital I am sitting in the waiting room beside a girl talking loudly on a cell phone. She has big boobs, a tight t-shirt and necklaces of gilded wafers that hang down to her navel. She keeps saying to the phone, “You forcing it, you forcing it…Don’t act like we friends…You forcing it, you forcing it,” and she is laughing as if the guy on the other end is wrapped around her finger.

I feel afraid and tense.

In the examination room there is no examination. I give the surgeon a note from my neurologist clearing me surgery. He gives me three prescriptions – an antibiotic, a mouth rinse and Percoset. He says to me, “You know, a lip-lift would look really good.” He shows me with the mirror, having me see the difference between my parted lips and lips closed.

“How much does that cost?”

“I don’t know. I don’t handle that.”

I think of my therapist’s mention of the lip-lift, of how I was so focused on having a lip-lift before the idea dissolved into the lip-augmentation that did not materialize because I am not having a necklift to supplement the jaw work. I think of a friend’s recent dream of tracing the glamorous lips of a woman.

I next see the doctor’s assistant to go over post-op issues and final questions. She is petite and a bit plump, not cinematically beautiful, but lovely. She is wearing a summer dress of light material, showing cleavage. She has big breasts. She is personable and I feel comfortable and grounded with her, even confident. She works often with the transgendered, so I know she is not thinking, “Freak.”

I feel better with her than I have felt all day and the day before, except for with my therapist and on the bridge. The assistant says, “Gosh, I’m so bubbly and you’re so calm. You make me feel like I could go to sleep.”

I later think, “Yes. We’re in a dream that I understand, so it’s OK for you to go to sleep.”

I first think of how, for as long as I can remember, people have remarked that I am mellow. It was never mellow. It was afraid, timid, watchful. Mellow was the frequency that kept me together. But Rose Mary is calm, too. The Queen of Heaven is perfectly calm, and I feel more like her than a timid boy in the presence of the doctor’s assistant.

The assistant calls me a cab – a Metro cab. “5 or 10 minutes,” they say. I wait 20, go back in to the main information desk. The lady says, “Metro cab, they are usually pretty good. Give it a couple more minutes.” OK. There is a line of maybe 20 cars in the pick-up zone. I think maybe the cab is back in the line so I go in that direction. I go several paces and then I see the Metro cab just as it is parallel with me. I could not have seen it from any further away because my eyesight is poor and incorrectable. The cab cruises past me alongside the line of cars, looking for me, not seeing me. I am hobbling after it on my cane, in my ankle length skirt. It leaves without me. I want to cry so I am laughing.

At the bus station I use the bathroom. It is the first time I have sniffed the scent of female genitals in a public bathroom. It smells clammy.

I get a hot veggie wrap with cheese. The cashier has a cough. Dudes all around me – a kid in fatigues I learn is going to Iraq - who calls me “Miss.” A large man on a bicycle grumbles at me with hostility, as if he has read me and would send people like me to the gas chamber.

I am wearing sunglasses – have not switched to my indoor glasses – no reason why not, except for perhaps a desire to hide. I feel disoriented, extra wobbly.

I order water with the sandwich and am given an empty paper cup to fill. I try to fill my cup from a water tap which is somewhere amongst the taps for Fanta, Coke and friends. First I get a splash of something blue – dump it – then I get some iced tea, dump most of it, but feeling sheepish about my waste, don’t dump it all, even though I have not paid for a drop of tea. I put water into the tea that is left and have water that looks like sewage and is vaguely sweetened, probably with corn syrup.

In the seating area grease is everywhere. My sandwich is wrapped in paper, which will act as a barrier between the sandwich and greasy table. After I am done, I see the grease from my sandwich has soaked through the paper to the table, adding to the grease that was already there.

I step into line behind a woman with fuzz growing out from her shaved head. She has a funky thrift store look and listens to headphones. She looks like Sinéad O’Connor, only less gorgeous.

A lot of people are going to the Cape because it is Friday afternoon. The line extends out into the terminal and does a ninety degree turn. There are two people in front of me leading up to the elbow of the queue: the bald woman and a guy autistically preoccupied with his cell phone and a ledger. An old man with a cane and a bag walks up and asks the woman in front of the autistic guy if we are in line for Hyannis. She says yes, and he says thanks and stays there, right at the elbow of the queue.

The woman the old man queried is staring at me, either thinking, “Wtf, is that a dude?” or is asking me with her eyes for someone to do something about the old man who has seemingly just cut in line. I hesitate, take a couple steps toward him, and say, “We’re in line for Hyannis, too.”

“I’m not cutting in line,” he says, but remains there, meaning for the 25 minutes till the bus is ready to receive us, I am wondering whether I am going to have to punch his lights out.

Every seat is going to be filled. I slip into an aisle seat right behind the bald woman. I am thinking it must seem strange to her that I took that seat because the seats across from us are empty. I trust her. Her hair shows she has nothing to hide, less to impose than a coiffed woman (or more to impose, but certainly not on me. She being bald, me being transgendered, we are like siblings),

I am not threatened, but I don’t want her to feel threatened by me. What kind of oddball sits beside a stranger when there are empty seats across the aisle? I want to explain why I chose to sit there instead of in the empty seats. The moment I turn to do it a crazy smelly guy bumps into me on his way to his throne at the back of the bus – as if he is the archetype that is compelling me, which my actions are in response to, which I am neurotically empowering by telling the person beside me I am not crazy.

“Excuse me,” I say twice to the bald woman, but she does not appear to hear, apparently since she is wearing headphones. I give her a light touch. She whips around defensively, on-guard, frightened. I explain. She says, “It’s foyn,” with an Irish brogue. It felt like she wanted to say, “Whatcha bothrin me fer, ya nutter?” Her face is directed out the window the whole trip.

I try to put my seat back. It won’t budge. I think it’s broken. I manage to get it back a fraction of an inch. The seat is jiggling – what the? I ignore it. Mid-way through the ride, I think, “Maybe if I push harder I can get the seat to go back.” It begins to, and I get a shoulder tap from behind. A man’s aggravated voice goes, “You’re killing my knees!”

In the car on the way home with my mom, I explain about the lip-lift. About how I can pay for it myself if I take out a loan for $2000, paid back in 50-dollar monthly installments, if she and Dad will cosign. Having to ask this was the elephant’s ass on my face the past two days, I realize.

That night I dream of how happy a TS woman is after her feminizing facial surgery.

“Come Skinnydipping with Me” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. 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.

Reconciling Mystical Realities

2009-05-07T19:28:00.004-04:00

A friend forwarded me a blog entry that made her think of me. I am not providing the link because the author of the blog asked me not to. The entry is a cosmic vision of the present time. The author describes some things I have been going through, for example: “We have been spending a lot of time needing to sleep, to meditate or lay down in order to integrate our new selves.” This is what I have been experiencing for nine years, but more than usual recently.

She writes about not fearing “disease states,” saying that they may result from “your God self [moving you] beyond old energetic patterns.”

I was recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. My case is unusual – no attacks, just a very subtle decline, apparently since the mid 90s, only effecting the right side of my body. My symptoms are so unique that my neurologist referred me to a clinic specializing in MS. The author of the blog entry writes: “This extreme physical shift looks like a severe ‘dysfunction’ and many of us may have appeared to be a complete mystery to the medical system.”

The aim of such shifting the author calls “transmutation,” which is “required in order for the physical body to actually ‘embody’ more of its soul intelligences, more of its divinity.” Enduring psychosis from 2000 to 2004, I anticipated this type of embodiment. I expected my soul, Rose Mary Pillowwater, to take over my body. When it had not by 2004, I began hormone replacement therapy.

I still await “transmutation.” In one dream, a man’s body degenerates into bright colors. He disappears, leaving behind his inner-woman, her flesh radiant and youthful. In another dream a buddha gives me a meaningful look, his flesh appearing metallic, new. Such dreams tell me the flesh is destined to transmute.

Alchemy will reconcile the flesh with the Kingdom of Heaven. The author writes: “…the physical body is an ‘alchemical container of polarity synthesis.’”

The author does not seem to write for ordinary people, but for Starseeds and their kin. Starseeds, according to the Planetary Activation Organization, are “evolved beings from another planet, star system or galaxy, whose specific missions are to assist Planet Earth and her peoples to bring in the Golden Age at the turn of the millennium.”

I find talk of literally being from another planet alienating. All earthlings are cosmic beings whether they have realized it or not. Being “from another planet” is a metaphorical way of identifying one’s cosmic nature, of saying that one is firstly a citizen of the universe, a child of God. Until there is evidence -other than dreams and visions - of being from another planet, I would not consider the idea literally factual.

A vision I had of my male self: Angels were carrying George through space to the Earth. Once they were quite near, a woman who personified the Earth greeted George. She looked at him with wildly bright eyes that said, “There is a lot of stuff going on here! Welcome!” George looked at her blankly, not understanding.

This shows that a cosmic aspect of me was in the process of manifesting. It does not mean I come from another galaxy.

All images produced by the psyche are metaphorical. They convey meaning, not literal fact. The psyche turns our cosmic nature into cosmic images.

Some writers on the World Wide Web take the cosmic scenery of their psyches literally instead of metaphorically, and when they present it as such, as literal, they alienate the people of Earth whom they are trying to help.

Because I have returned from being as psychotic as a person can be, from my perspective everything is metaphorical, as it is in a dream. For me, people themselves are metaphors. Being made in God’s image, people are metaphors of God. The space in the cosmos is a metaphor of the space within people. The world outside is a metaphor of the world within.

I have found passages such as this alienating, too: “We were asked to stand in the 9D Stargate and hold it open down here on this plane while levels of our ONE family arranged into formation. As we were spinning a huge 12D vortex, sonic booms were ripping through the atmosphere and Armies of DEFENDERS of TRUTH were grounding in here. These Defender Warriors are groups that are the new levels of Protectors for the Guardian races and Christ Living Light Code Holders in this Universe.”

I am sure this is all true, that unprecedented cosmic shifts are ending the old world. Christ consciousness is lighting the darkness. The “ONE family arranged into formation” we could call “the mystical body of Christ.” In Lisa Renee’s vision, this body is more completely manifesting. Who knows how many light years till it is so manifested that religion has died?

Note the language of violence in the passage: warriors, defenders, guardians, armies, protectors. The ego’s only substantive weapon is awareness, with which it battles ignorance. The psyche puts the ego’s struggle in terms of war, cosmic war, Star Wars. Cosmic awareness is the antidote to the wars of man.

Star Wars are happening at high, deep spiritual levels, but here on the Earth their sonic booms are no louder than the whispering wind; Defender Warriors are choosing to be compassionate instead of resentful, and Christ Living Light Code Holders in the northern hemisphere are feeling the spring Earth under their bare feet. Life is as low as it is high.

It is as it should be that neo-mystics put spiritual evolution into cosmic terms, inventing terminology to convey their novel spiritual experience, yet they readily mention central figures and themes of classical religion. The blog entry my friend forwarded to me is salt-and-peppered with “Christ,” “Buddha,” “God” and even: “Many of us are embarking in the first phases of the second coming!” [bold mine] Does the true essence of classical religion – the Christ from Christianity, the Buddha from Buddhism – survive the quantum leap into the author’s universe?

My realities are not different in spirit from the author’s. The only difference is the language. I feel I am between such neo-mystics and classical religion. I hope I am redefining religion to fit the realities of any mystic as well as any thoughtful non-mystic.

The author writes: “We are being asked to comprehend that what we referred to as ‘spirit’ is actually many different levels of intelligence and that we may need to quantify that intelligence to increase our discernment. We are all the many facets of the ‘One’ yet we each have a unique note to play in the prism of God consciousness.”

“Come Skinnydipping with Me” is updated Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. 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.