Tomorrow, November 20th, is the eleventh annual International Transgender Day of Remembrance. More information about it can be found at http://www.transgenderdor.org.
Since 1999, I've attempted to spend TDOR away from public events held to mark it. I spend much of my time and consciousness on community organizing, advocacy, popular education, social justice work, etc. The few TDOR events I've attended over the years, while certainly memorializing in tone, included a How-can-we-turn-tragedy-and-pain-into-action? capstone. I don't condemn this, but it doesn't work for me. The only focus, the only emotion, I can summon on this day is love...love for sentience, I guess...and also grief, for the destruction of it. It is a difficult and willful act for me to maintain that focus, actually. The call to action is so tempting...because it is a turning away from loss.
So, I take a day off from action and am simply in love and in grief. In some ways, it's an annual reminder of my daily disassociation. It takes this day --and a couple others like it during the year-- to knock me into...what...I'm not sure...that particular layer of vulnerability that is an ache for the triumph of kindness, of collective access to awe of knowledge, existence, connection - of being. To stay there, hopeful in that vulnerability, it helps for me to be alone.
Clocking out now...see you soon...
20091115
"Sadly, in search of, and one step in back of..."
I'm the oldest of three siblings. My sister is almost six years younger than me, and my brother is seven and one half years younger than her. Since my sister was little, it's been espoused in my family that she's much like my mom and I am like my dad. Some nod to the Law of Averages --or maybe an unstated rural Plains belief in an Everything-Comes-Out-In-The-Wash sort of fairness-- has dressed my brother in a mixture of the two.
Never having been much interested in the divination of the qualitative or quantitative "greater" influence --Nature or Nurture?-- on a person's development, I relaxed into these assessments over time as just another thread of family narrative. I find place in the storytelling, the marking of the intersections of experiences as a way to give context to perspective and depth to personal history; so, the existence of these assessments has become the meaning.
Lately, though, I am returning to this book again and again - envisioning some almost irritatingly layered Venn diagram of family players building to an intersection of my mom and dad that is barely readable. In the small white space contained by the intersecting lines, I search for my brother, my sister, myself. At thirty times magnification, the space balloons, making it easier to see the complexities possible within it but overwhelming to attempt an investigation of the layers that created it, the history that built it.
Given the limits of linear time and the ability to identify or embrace potential, I find this...frustrating. I notice I waffle between a search for the essentialized --purpose, right (vs. wrong), etc.-- and a siren call into the depths of design via chaos. Then again, sometimes I am just depressed and return to a third reading of poorly written fantasy literature for adolescents.
More to come...
Never having been much interested in the divination of the qualitative or quantitative "greater" influence --Nature or Nurture?-- on a person's development, I relaxed into these assessments over time as just another thread of family narrative. I find place in the storytelling, the marking of the intersections of experiences as a way to give context to perspective and depth to personal history; so, the existence of these assessments has become the meaning.
Lately, though, I am returning to this book again and again - envisioning some almost irritatingly layered Venn diagram of family players building to an intersection of my mom and dad that is barely readable. In the small white space contained by the intersecting lines, I search for my brother, my sister, myself. At thirty times magnification, the space balloons, making it easier to see the complexities possible within it but overwhelming to attempt an investigation of the layers that created it, the history that built it.
Given the limits of linear time and the ability to identify or embrace potential, I find this...frustrating. I notice I waffle between a search for the essentialized --purpose, right (vs. wrong), etc.-- and a siren call into the depths of design via chaos. Then again, sometimes I am just depressed and return to a third reading of poorly written fantasy literature for adolescents.
More to come...
20091105
"You've got to stand for something or you'll fall for anything."
Maybe it's time to actually post something to this blog.
I have been contemplating paths...a.k.a. choices, context, and/or circumstances resulting in particular positionalities. Take your pick.
"Paths" might be more poetic a shorthand...or maybe just pathetic. Regardless, I won't fill this post with that debate.
When experiencing love -contemporary or that reached through waxing nostalgic- I sometimes hear the refrain present in multiple conversations overheard, "If I'd never...I would never have...and thus never...which lead me to [insert here: my soul mate, you, my one true love, etc.]"
I hear this like a sci-fi story based on a worldview foundation absent from my brain. I can explore it and understand it, but I cannot find myself within it. I could probably speak it, and maybe even fit into the conversation without an accent if careful...but why?
It's too obvious to pin this all on an exploding of the "I," since a collection of moments and contexts could be argued to perfectly sync with another collection of moments and contexts, and only that one - if of course those collections could be somehow suspended from influence or without trailing stories anchored...elsewhere. Well, maybe it's not too obvious. Nonetheless...
I guess I'm searching for a metaphor that's...off the beaten path, if you will. Maybe I'm visioning areas of temperature in a body of water that morph and overlap, influence each other and move away. Maybe it's a field of alfalfa rushed with wind right before a thunderstorm. How can such a small section feel turmoil next to complete stillness, then wave gently in the face of fury, then fall...all the while anchored to dirt, immutable by the wind only because of the crop that leeches its very strength?
Maybe a seemingly destined endpoint, a culmination of singular love, is a salve to festering of a futility so frightening when control is the goal. What if control is not the goal? Anyway, goals are for field sports, right?
Finally, an appreciation for "nonetheless" - how did this guy sneak past the rules? Why does he get to be one word, clearly comprised of three? Nobody -nothing- cared to involve control, maybe? I have no idea and no desire to research him, actually. Instead, I will bask in the glow of his impossibility.
I have been contemplating paths...a.k.a. choices, context, and/or circumstances resulting in particular positionalities. Take your pick.
"Paths" might be more poetic a shorthand...or maybe just pathetic. Regardless, I won't fill this post with that debate.
When experiencing love -contemporary or that reached through waxing nostalgic- I sometimes hear the refrain present in multiple conversations overheard, "If I'd never...I would never have...and thus never...which lead me to [insert here: my soul mate, you, my one true love, etc.]"
I hear this like a sci-fi story based on a worldview foundation absent from my brain. I can explore it and understand it, but I cannot find myself within it. I could probably speak it, and maybe even fit into the conversation without an accent if careful...but why?
It's too obvious to pin this all on an exploding of the "I," since a collection of moments and contexts could be argued to perfectly sync with another collection of moments and contexts, and only that one - if of course those collections could be somehow suspended from influence or without trailing stories anchored...elsewhere. Well, maybe it's not too obvious. Nonetheless...
I guess I'm searching for a metaphor that's...off the beaten path, if you will. Maybe I'm visioning areas of temperature in a body of water that morph and overlap, influence each other and move away. Maybe it's a field of alfalfa rushed with wind right before a thunderstorm. How can such a small section feel turmoil next to complete stillness, then wave gently in the face of fury, then fall...all the while anchored to dirt, immutable by the wind only because of the crop that leeches its very strength?
Maybe a seemingly destined endpoint, a culmination of singular love, is a salve to festering of a futility so frightening when control is the goal. What if control is not the goal? Anyway, goals are for field sports, right?
Finally, an appreciation for "nonetheless" - how did this guy sneak past the rules? Why does he get to be one word, clearly comprised of three? Nobody -nothing- cared to involve control, maybe? I have no idea and no desire to research him, actually. Instead, I will bask in the glow of his impossibility.
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