Would she still tell me that she didn’t want me to grow up to be a “faggot”? Is that why that word continues to hold such power for me? My wife, too, insists that I must be gay, a “faggot”, queer. Today, I won’t protest against that word; I’ve written enough about it.
About how I dream of a world of the divine feminine reigning supreme. I world where men barely exist. Toxic masculinity is banished, a crime for which there can only be death.
I’ve been reading a book lately called Another Kind of Intimacy, by the artist Karen Finley. It is a dark, disturbing, and powerful work. This is a gift to me from a cherished friend and guide into womanhood.
My mother blesses me now. She is dead. Her problems with my existence related to her own body, to her own shame, to the mother’s fear of my shame. But Mommy, I have transcended my shame. All of my men’s clothes are gone, given to my male children or thrown away. A few items of “boy mode” clothes linger in boxes in the basement, accessible for when I must don the garb of the “other” for my safety.
I asked one of my children yesterday whether he meant it when he said to me some time ago that my wife wanted to see me arrested. What kind of sick fxxk is she? An angry sick fxxk. I give her her anger. She carries my mother’s shame, keeping the flame alive. And I reject it.
What is my Power?
As I embrace my inner witch, I know that I am channelling my female ancestry. It is beginning to show. When our inner world’s become so powerful, they change us on the outside. I said to the guide through Ayahuasca, to my therapist, that I was there to ‘let her out’. Well, she is out.
At a funeral for one of my female ancestors recently, a woman I had not seen in perhaps 20 years stood before me, and said, “oh my gosh, I feel like I am looking at all the generations of the women in your family.” I felt good and powerful. And looking at me and looking at their pictures, at the pictures of the woman who passed, the resemblance is uncanny.
I am a direct lineal descendant through the matriarchal line of the last woman to be put to death for witchcraft in the USA, Rebecca Nourse. Arthur Miller’s, The Crucible, is all about that tempestuous time. Books today take pains to cast her as a victim, emphasising her posthumous exoneration. Are you still a victim if you stand proud and reject your accusers all the way to the gallows?
I know different. Modern writers seek to airbrush out the practices of healers, wise women. Erase her witchiness. It is just another form of patriarchy. Sweeping it under the carpet, or denying its existence, apologizing for it, is only another way of couching male discomfort with female power.
The World of Spirits and Souls
My crazy therapist that I had to fire was really far out in a wonderful way. I loved her as a therapist, but she was dangerously unstable in ways that didn’t work for me. I was sorry to let her go. She said two things to me over our months together which struck me then, and have stuck out to me ever since.
She was convinced that I had been somehow connected to ex-Mistress in a past life, in many past lives, over the ages. Okay, you have to believe in that sort of thing. I will call myself agnostic, though will admit that I hope that it is true. I am in the camp of Blaise Pascal, whose famous proof of God rested on the simple fact that the opportunity cost of disbelief is so great as to make faith the only good choice in life. While my faith is more fundamental than that, there is a reason that Pascal remains one of the most influential philosophers to this day.
I shared this thought with Ex-Mistress, a wonderfully spiritual person, but she was not impressed. That said, the idea has rattled around on occasion with me ever since like a bumble bee in a beer can. I mentioned once upon a time this girl in my class in elementary school in Rome who I think was my first conscious experience of a dominatrix. In my memory, they both look and act exactly alike. Another of my therapists, this one most resolutely not a crank, is equally out there on this topic as the therapist I had to let go. She is a New York Times lauded “Soul Retriever”. She astral travels with and on behalf of clients in search of soul fragments, bringing them back and de-atomising our existence.
I did not do this with her, as it is very dangerous to give another being the right to act on your behalf in the mystical half-world. Especially for someone as vulnerable as me? What makes me vulnerable? For one, I am a white witch. That means that anything else changes my raiment in very clear ways. The second is that my purpose is grace. Grace needs no strength other than that which comes from within. Third, I am weak in self-protection. I need to focus magic on this and have begun to ritually cleanse my space. [Incidentally, somehow my wife learned this and was deeply insulted that I cleansed our home after her departure. But other than installed cameras or other listening devices, there is no way she could have known]. And lastly, I am a baby. Innocence is not just an aspiration, it is something that I am born with, treasure always, and refuse to give up.
In other words, I must find my spiritual path on my own, without gurus, without dominatrixes, without therapists, without drugs. I will avail myself of all of these, but the process must come from within.
At the above-mentioned funeral, I met the most beautiful woman present. She stood out so much…it is rather extraordinary how a beautiful woman can utterly change a room. Her significance was amplified by the dog she carried…she is a small woman, but the dog was a mid-sized long-haired white, fluffy dug. A witch and her familiar.
Our mutual puzzlement and curiosity was aroused. Her private passion? Transgender shamans. You can’t make this stuff up.
“I’m a slave,” I said.
“Interesting,” she said. “Walk me to lunch,” she said. We had arranged our date at a Buddhist Temple, and I took her for tea to a witch’s apothecary. I walked her to her lunch date, with a guy she was interested in.
“Would you like to come in?”
“I cannot,” I said. “I must go.”
She has given me reading. My first Buddhist text. I am finding Truth in it. I am listening to meditation sequences most mornings. Short, daily doses of spiritual guidance through body and breath. This morning’s affirmations included the obsession of my witchiness: the etheric chords, the gossamer threads that guide us through life when we listen for them. That is my power.
Every day, those threads become stronger and stronger. I can see them more and more clearly. The transformational power of joy, of innocence. Perhaps someone may want what I “have”. But in truth, we all possess it. Wanting it from without is missing that we all carry it already within.
Beyond Non-Binary 
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