scraping for magic

it’s been a tough year.

a year ago i had a nasty staph infection at the base of my skull that took two months to clear up.  doing that made me face the diabetes that left me with peripheral neuropathy and all the rest.

since june, i’ve been blind in my right eye.  third nerve palsy.

and in august, while getting ready to take my mother to a few doctor’s appointments, i found my father having a stroke.  in hospital an mri confirmed the stroke and also showed that his prostate cancer is in a vertebrae.  this week he went for bone scan and all, to see how much it is the cancer that has left him weak enough to appreciate help in undressing at the end of the day.

between that, there has been a universe of details to prioritize, with many not rasing to urgent while others just loom like the hurricane clouds that caused hundred year flooding around here.  i basically have a bit of time between one and four pm on some days, but mostly i need to be around my parents.

in all that, i lost.  i lost magic.

i don’t know what you define magic as, but i define magic as the transcendent.  its what we do to transcend the mundane.  maybe it’s beauty or faith or art or stories, but whatever it is, it is what reminds us that we are connected to something bigger than the grind of living.  magic is awe and insight, connection and creation, transformation and miracles.

i might not have been able to be beautiful in the world, but i had my voice, had my creation, had my art.  i had something that let me see and speak beyond.  my life had the asthetic discipline of a nun, without the performance, but at leasy i had a way to open my vision and share my deeper experience, beyond the mundane.

and i lost that.  it’s still gone.

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“In the end, it is vitality and not virtue that makes characters in novels engaging.”
Sebastian Faulks, Faulks On Fiction.

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i have traded vitality for virtue. And i have lost energy, spark that might make me engaging.

i do the virtuous thing, like dan savage demands of transpeople.  and the virtue trap means that people believe they can demand even more virtue, for what level of self-sacrifice is ever enough for those who demand virtue?

the poetry is gone, the song is stilled

and i am dessicated.

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Hurricanes, and the turning of the year, are simply events, they are what happens. And yet, they also are symbols, and messages, And of course this doubleness is hard for so many people to understand–either they are random and therefore meaningless, or they are designed by God personally to tell us things. But you know, with your deep and painful perception of life’s subtleties along with life’s crushing burdens, that they are both, and the messages are within us.  How sad that the farmstand, one of the things you could give your father, is now underwater.  What a strange sad symbol for you, as well as the overwhelming shock for the stand’s owner.

Ms. Rachelle, a magickal transwoman herself.

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magic.  for me it has always been in the voices.

i know what i know, i hear what i hear, i imagine what i imagine.

and i know how hard it is to communicate the truth of the voices in the world.

i speak, i write and i am erased.

too.  too challenging, too queer, too intense, too cerebral, too dramatic, too thoughtful, just too much.

i know i have always had the voice of a trans-woman, a shaman, but i also know that there was no one around who knew what the hell to do with that.  in other places or times, they would have taken me to the temple and i would have learned from the wise old priestesses, but that wasn’t really an option in my time.

but the spirit is strong, and the feelings always pull me to what feels natural and powerful.  jenna elfman in “friends with benefits” kissing her dementia challenged father.  justin vivien bond singing from a connected place.  varla jean so playful and funny from deep inside jeffery robertson.  images and wisps of pretty and potent, resonating in the world that call to me.

but i do the work here, and my own immersion is in service, not in expression.  it is in virtue, not vitality.

i do not transcend the mundane, but I am mired in it, as those around me cannot engage magic.

and i miss my life.  i miss my magic.

and it calls to me.  callen the name of my fathers nurse up on the board, the social worker at cancer expecting a woman.  it calls.

without magic there is no context for struggle.   without  the possibility of transcendence, there is no hope.

a therapist told gene simmons that because shannon tweed is in relationship with him, because she loves him, that she knows what is good for him.

people around me aren’t in relationship with me.  they are in relationship with themselves, and that means relationship with their limits.

they know what they want, what they can see.

and that’s not my magic.

i need magic.  playful, engaging, transformative, joyous magic.

i need transcendence.

it’s the gift my mother in the sky put into my heart.

to hold open the space for transformation beyond the mundane.

and now, all i can do is scrape for it beyond the service that they need, need so much.

and come up empty.  though i know it is still within me.

happy birthday to me.

(oh, and if you can avoid having your birthday fall around 9/11, i would very, very, very much recommend that.)