Coming home and being out and being hidden and being with family of both kinds, and how I love my children

1 of 3 last posts before I put this blog on ice and re-think it and its existence.

My children are on holiday, which means that we all converge at home.  My wife flew with the kids, and I flew intercontinental, and both of our flights were seriously delayed, and for no apparent reason.  That meant in the end that instead of them arriving a day ahead of me, they arrived only a few hours before me.

It was wonderful to see and hug my children, and to feel their happiness back.  And even though we didn’t hug, my wife was actually warm.  A pleasant surprise.

As I waited for a taxi to the airport, I pulled a pair of trousers on under my skirt and then slipped my skirt off.  It was the beginning of putting an increasingly discomforting armour on.  In the taxi I removed most of my jewellery.  And I was struck that I had just spent a week of really and truly breathing.  It will have to sustain me for a while.

A very dear friend said that I look different, softer.  She knows how to talk to me…and I’m not even taking hormones yet, but I do feel a change in me taking place.  It feels divine.  I said to her that I don’t think I have ever been happier.  

I met a number of trans people and the feeling of mutual warmth does not need words.  I also had a beautiful conversation with a woman who described herself as “brown” and we both cried in each other’s arms as we discovered the parallels of racism, transphobia, and anti-queer.  On my flight and throughout the airport, I had so many positive vibes from the women that were next to me, travelling with me…and ostensibly I was presenting as male, but I could tell they could see me as I am.

One of my therapists a few months ago told me that during this awkward period of being inbetween, where I still need to be part hidden, and am still coping with my wife who hates what this means for her, for us, that I would need to compartmentalise, but suggested I find ways of keeping the flame alive inside of me.  Shopping has been an outlet, but for many reasons that is not viable right now.  Items of clothing or adornment worn.  I know my style signifiers, and gradually, I am orienting in that direction.

I am also gradually telling more and more people, and thus far, the reactions have all been positive…like its cool to have a trans friend.  One of my friends shared a picture of me with her adult daughter, and the feedback was very positive.  I came out to the builders working on two construction projects by just showing up dressed, and they were so cool about it they didn’t even look at me funny or say a word.  On the streets I have had so many compliments on my shoes, my clothes, my style, and from the most unexpected quarters—tough, tattooed whites and African Americans, especially women, have been so positive.

Coming out to everyone in person is preferable and I hope that this will be possible, one person at a time.  I know who I think is going to hate it, or have an inappropriate reaction, and it was those people that have made me hold back, but in the end, I am feeling like telling them first.

But as I landed, I felt myself having to step back into a world that I have already half left.  But this time I am ready for it, and know I can wait for the next time I can be free…and know too that not too far off is leaving the shadows altogether.

Bees as a Symbol

I have been a beekeeper for 20 years and have a deep passion for honey.  Pollinators are a cause for which I have done charity work and provided financial support for.  It is an issue I care deeply about.  I am also amazed at how bees are so responsive to human energy when you have mastery of it.  Last night, when my wife and children came home, they found 30 dead honey bees on the stairs of our villa.  The bee is one of my symbols and is the logo on my personal calling card.

Bees in dreams symbolize our fears and desires, wanting to be sociable, but also feeling that we don’t fit in.  Bees represent cooperation and growth; they are symbolic of community.  Community is the opposite of shame and rejection.

They also symbolize the emotional harmony in one’s environment.  There is a ton of stuff written online about this, and here is one such post:

What Do Bees In Dreams Mean? Bee Dream Interpretation

I have written quite a few times about how hostile my home environment has become, to the point where my wife and I try to never be at home at the same time.  But I can also feel her negative energy everywhere in the building, and even with days and days of cleansing the air with burning sage and palo santo, burning incense, and conducting ritual energy clearances on the home, it was impossible to get the building to feel safe for me.  And when I left our home to go to one of our other homes, one where her energy is much less present, I could feel the weight falling off of me.

Bees in Dreams

Bees in dreams are thought to be good.  They literally pollinate the field of dreams.  Dead bees in the home are more than symbolic.  They are a real statement of how my marriage and home life and what it represents.  The occult is real.  With every passing day, and the more spiritually in tune I become, the more evident it is.

Bees are governed by the feminine.  Because they represent friendship, relationships, co-operation, they also symbolise issues which need to be addressed in these areas.  Weird, right?  Because this wasn’t a dream.  And to put this in context.  How do thirty bees get into a house that was completely closed—velux double glazed windows everywhere, outer shutters closed, no entry or exit—where did they come from?  How did they get in?  Why did they come in?  Why didn’t they go back out again?  They came to die?

The same writer opines on the significance of dead bees found in the home.

Bees connect the spiritual and material realms.  They are alchemists and represent the sacred feminine.  The author notes that, “Spiritually, bees can represent the importance of setting boundaries, having energetic protection, and demanding energetic respect from others.”  Is it just me, or is that far out?  This is relevant to everything happening now in my life—both the end of the road in BDSM, on the home front, coming out…When things like this happen, who could not believe in God?  [In whatever form you choose to believe].

Bees are attracted to feminine power—they will go to places where they feel safe and protected, but where they will also find nourishment.  Before leaving, I spent a ton of time trying to re-imbue the home with healthy energy, which for me is mainly feminine energy.  But my wife, too, is a very feminine women, but in need of healing in her femininity [she has told me in the past that the reason she married me is that I have healing energy towards the feminine].  Perhaps the bees came to heal that.  I don’t know…she had been gone for many days, leaving a wounded home, and my newest therapist feels she embodies the wounded feminine very strongly.  No matter what, our family home needs feminine healing.

Bees in the home represent relationships, connection with community, shared goals and dreams.  Bees also represent compassion, collaboration, and common cause.  Bees are also connected to the root chakra, the earth, that which connects us to nature, provides our sense of security, family relationships, and feeling of home.  It is your root chakra which literally grounds you to life and the world around you.  Your sense of security, sense of trust.  The symbolism of the presence of bees and finding them dead is most definitely far out.

What to do about it

Over breakfast Miss Kim Rub said to me, “you don’t look for community, you create it,” and I think this is a profound life lesson, and one that I will take with me.  When the dominatrix I was seeing asked me what my goals in life were, I responded that it was around community, and a community organised around feminine energy.  [This was not a casual conversation.  It was formal homework that played out over several months of writing, thinking, and talking…as she helped me work through not just the central idea of community, but what it represented, why it mattered, what it looked like].  My newest therapist made this message to me, that community is the opposite of rejection, of feeling marginalised, it is the opposite of shame.  And so, my commitment to creating community around me is beginning to take shape, and actually manifest, and it feels great.

What do dead bees in the home represent?

Well, you might say that they represent the opposite of all of these things.  They represent isolation, a need to be alone.  Above all they represent transition.  You can’t make this up: they represent issues with a close relationship. When I first played with the dominatrix I googled how to find one’s own spirit animal, and this was after a lovely outing we had where among other things we talked about how we didn’t like social butterflies, false people.  And much to my embarrassment, after doing an assessment I found that my spirit animal was a butterfly.  But a butterfly represents transformation, and boy has that proved prescient.

So, now the dead bees represent another fundamental transformation, and I feel that it is already happening.  I don’t know if it is the energy I am putting out, but I already feel a fundamental reordering of my friendships and key relationships.  New people have been coming into my life, and old ones dropping off, and it has been incredibly enriching.

On a deeper level, the death of the bees represents our disconnectedness from nature, and from the natural world.  When I think about the meaning of my own life, it has always been connected to the land, to nature, to my garden.  Having just sold an estate where I kept bees, a vast extension of land which reminded me of the garden of Eden, I am feeling the absence of the land and nature in my day to day even as I find myself more and more practically engaged with the natural world and natural energy all around me.  I will take the dead bees as a message to me to reconnect and renew with vigour my commitment to nature.

Sex Workers and Community

I am drawn to sex workers.  Unsurprisingly, of a particular kind, the dominatrix.  It isn’t all about kink.  I said to a new sex worker friend who is a domme that if I had been born a girl, that I would aspire to be a sex worker dominatrix.  There is something poetic and empowering about choosing that profession in a patriarchal society filled with shame—both for the self, but as a beacon of change.  It is both life as art, but also a radical agenda.  

When I think of community, it is with the people on the fringe that I wish to make common cause.  And while I have discovered it has not been possible to be friends with someone I also sessioned with, I have been blessed with having met three sex workers recently, all professional dominatrices, but in a vanilla context, and all completely independently of one another, and am finding the tender shoots of friendship appearing, and it feels awfully right.

I think that I am so drawn to these people because I think that they are healers of the divine feminine…within themselves, but also within society as a whole.  Apart from providing refuge for the wounded masculine, they defiantly stand as symbolic of the need to redraw the lines, to dismantle patriarchy.  They stand for a kind of feminine power and healing which is like the cutting edge.  As they make society uncomfortable, the shift happens.  It is a kind of lived feminism, and it is no wonder to me why I am so in favour of it.

When I think of what kind of community I wish to be a part of, it is one that is unabashedly pro-feminine.  And thus far, some of the most articulate people I have met on issues of gender, sexuality and the patriarchy are the women who ply this trade.

Conclusion

One of my closest friends who also knows my wife said, “such a shame that she feels the way she does.  You’re the best of both worlds—she can have a girlfriend and a boyfriend at the same time.  I’d love that.  And I think I want a slave too.  Who wouldn’t want that?”  These are the joys of friendship—saying all the right things.  Sigh.

Well, it is there for her for wife if she wants it.  It isn’t too late.  But I can’t be with her as a lie any longer.  I can’t be with her if there is going to be shame. I grew up hearing the sting of the word “freak” applied to me, but now that’s my word, and so, I am ready to embrace my inner freak.

I love me and I’m proud of me.  I love my uniqueness, and the Divine is manifest within me.