When everything just falls apart, but in exactly the right way
I’ve been on a roll lately, and part of that has been a punishing schedule. Meetings in Texas, Pennsylvania, and New York…family gatherings…and a dinner with a new and cherished friend who is blossoming before me, but who is also a very powerful teacher and healer. But that also means being away from home, and that takes its toll. Even when you are incapable of travelling light, so a good deal of home is around you when you unpack your four suitcases.
There are times in life when we have organised things so perfectly, so mind-bogglingly sequential, it just gives a feeling of sliding through silk. “Gosh,” you might say to yourself as you contemplate just how much you are going to get done. The joy of being efficient, enhanced by a good dash of chance and heaps of creativity.
The best laid plans
And then your car won’t start. At first, it is an unreality. Then you kick into problem-solving mode: “I can take a taxi.” Problem solved. Right?
You push out the thoughts like ‘hey, I just got this darned car back from the garage’ and other choice little morsels.
Never mind that where I have to be is a one-hour drive, followed by a one-hour appointment, and then another one-hour drive. I call my old driver. Miraculously, for the first time in over a year, he answers. He is too far away. Then another. No answer. Then the taxi company. Nope, nobody wants to go where I need to be with ever less time to get there in.
Things begin to fall away. “Well, I won’t be able to do that anymore,” I say to myself, and “cancel” that first appointment. Actually, it is more like I just hope they aren’t angry with me and will let me rebook soon. No answer. I send a message. When she does call me later, she is more than okay with it.
Then I call back my driver. “I’ve changed things around. Can you just take me to the airport?”
“Now?”
“No, in 3 hours.”
“Perfect.”
Sometimes what’s inside the parentheses is the most important part of the sentence
And then you suddenly realise life has given you back three hours. Three delicious, blissful hours. You make yourself a delicious cup of hot cocoa. And then you sit down and do delicious things. In my case, it was an unboxing. I unwrapped my first crystals and then I could feel their energy. I had chosen them well and will have to share with you one day what I am learning about them, and the ones I have chosen, but for now, let’s just say that I have the chakras covered.
I do lots of other fun things, for after all, three hours is a long time. I enter a lively text conversation with a dear friend who is teaching me about being female. She is convinced that my car not starting was just one more way that the universe has opened 6for me to have the path I am on take place in the way the universe wants it to. She felt the same way about my weekend plans, dashed as my Reiki instructor came down with COVID. Yup, you guessed it, I will “soon” be certified to practice Reiki.
The Universe really does know better, though we may never be let in on the secret
It seems oddly amusing that the universe is arranging itself so elaborately to postpone this process (this will be the 3rdtime), but that is okay, Reiki will come when I am ready. It is a bit impenetrable, however, to feel ready, to want it, but to be told that I can’t do it. I am reminded of the times as a child at the beach when we went to race on Go-Karts, and height was the determining factor of who could ride the darn things…my older siblings all qualified, but I did not, and the rules were strictly applied. I hated that. The curse of being the youngest.
Never mind. The truth was that just the evening before I had said to my friend over dinner that I wished I could postpone the Reiki, that I was overwhelmed by my over-ambitious schedule, but didn’t dare ask as I had already moved it twice. That was shortly before my friend/date “confessed” to me that one of her closest friends, a person with whom she has never discussed sexuality, out-of-the blue gave her the contact details of a person who teaches women how to be dominatrices. She said, “the universe keeps telling me that this is the path I need to take.”
“Will you take it?” I ask. She knows I am a slave.
“I am afraid of it, but I know that I need to. Afraid of what I will find in myself and what I need to confront.”
“I’m not scary,” I said, “I’m just a baby.” She smiled.
“I know you’re not scary,” she said. D’you know what? There are few compliments greater.
I am a submissive virus
I told her about two people in my life who have become dominatrices because of getting to know me…my therapist and another friend. Wanting to dominate me has brought out the best in these women. Clearly it is contagious. Wouldn’t that be something. I’ve found my calling. Every woman I befriend ends up wanting to become a domme. I need to hurry up. What a deliciously changed world it would be!
As I drifted off to sleep later that night my reverie continued, “is that possible? That these women become dominatrices after feeling my slave energy? What a good boy/girl/it I am.” I slept most deliciously. A constant in this slave’s heart is just how fulfilling it is to nurture domme energy.
Still at dinner, she asked, “if I tell you to drink that, will you drink it?”
“It’s complicated. I don’t know who I will obey, or even why. Sometimes I do and it just happens and then once it starts, I am in subspace. And rational thought is gone. I can’t really hear anymore; I can’t process things in the same way. I mostly just feel. Feel this deep comfort and safety, but also this ache to please.” She asked me to explain my “kinks”, the things I do with the various dominas I have seen. I focus on the healing and spiritual aspects.
Perhaps ten minutes later, she picks up the glass and tilts it towards me, “drink,” she commands.
“I will,” I say, taking it from her, looking at it, realising what just happened, and then drinking it. Later that evening, after I had fixed her a cup of tea and we were in my home, and we had hugged goodbye for the second time, she said, “who knows where this will lead us.” I knew what she meant.
I had told her that as I leave behind my masculinity, that I am no longer submissive. I don’t understand the apparent contradiction, but I am very much still a slave. It is even now growing stronger. For one, there is no longer shame. I can be with a woman and not be ashamed of my gender, and this has positive repercussions in all aspects of my being.
My interest in the sexy play parts of BDSM has plummeted with my libido, but I also think it would be changing…recognising that what I liked, wanted from BDSM is to be around the female archetype I admire most…I love the dominant woman. I love the dominatrix not for what she does to me, but for the kind of person she is able to become. I realise that I cannot do what they do to their clients, it is delicious enough just being around them. Serving them is fulfilling on a deeply spiritual level, and that aspect of “what I always wanted” is the part that has emerged. Like the prospector panning for gold, all these explorations with gender and sexuality, my hormone regimen, has shown the flecks of gold to be female empowerment and self-awareness. It is my life purpose to get closer to that, to encourage and nurture it, to celebrate it where I find it, and to be surrounded by a world founded upon it.
I may even begin to understand what that means, but it is too soon to say as things need to happen before they can be spoken of. This is the witch in me speaking. I am a white witch. I am very careful with the powerful energy that courses through me. I never look to, or ask, about the future. It is too dangerous to play with. I do see things. I have always seen things. I often see an unspoken reality, straight through words to thoughts, to events, to situations. The number of times I see something fall before it happens, and already have my hand there to catch it…they say, “oh my gosh, that was fast, how did you do that?” And I am just thinking that ‘I could see where to put my hand before it happened, it wasn’t fast at all’.
A (brief) Aside
When people speak of carrying ancestral energy, something new to me, I find it is very true. Although I felt a witch since I was a child, knew that I could see and do things that others could not, it was only recently that I discovered that two branches of my mother’s family were known witches, coming to us through history. One was the last woman executed for witchcraft in the early US colonies. The others were wiped out, generations, families, friends, protectors, but for the one who got away…
I don’t bring this up to toot my horn, or to give bona fides. It is more to say that with any gift comes danger. What people don’t understand or don’t have, can lead to resentment. For many, hiding is the best choice. As an example, Arab culture with its sense of fantasy, myth, and the divine manifests in architecture towards the hidden–it is a no-no to show the wealth of your home. [I get the irony, as many Arabs epitomise bling–but it is not culturally thus…instead, that is a sign of something seriously wrong in Arab society, but that is another story…okay…I can’t stop now. In the West, we like to say how backwards they are, that their thinking is medieval, and that they will catch up sooner or later, but it takes hundreds of years to evolve to where the West feels itself, Enlightened after our Enlightenment. Consider this, however. The fundamentalist waves which have gripped Arab societies for the past several decades could be a reaction to the decadence of the West…and just as we are experiencing our own waves of fundamentalism–the Christian Right, the anti-trans movement, the anti- Roe v. Wade people–this is something that has been gripping Arab society for a good long while. They are not behind, they are presaging what lies ahead.]
What was my original point before the digression? The learning is not being a witch, or feeling special, but understanding that envy can get you killed. Being willing to die for what I believe is just such a thing. I am at a tipping point. To be utterly and totally out, and to fight for my trans sisters and brothers, to fight bigotry and injustice wherever it is. At the risk of life itself. That is what witches do.
Back on earth…
When my driver pulled up, he didn’t say a word, but just put my suitcases in the back. I was wearing skin-tight black leather pants, a white silk top open below my lovely bra, and my breasts were clearly in existence…I had a handbag. My hair was pinned up in a geisha-style, unsurprisingly my favourite. He clocked me. I could tell by how he didn’t engage with his eyes. As we rounded the first corner, to pre-empt the anticipated small talk about the family, I offered, “Divorce.”
“Already?”
“Working on it.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“That’s okay. It’s good. Just can’t happen fast enough.”
He has known us for a decade.
“I’m also trans,” I said. “And there you have the years since I saw you last in two streets or less.”
“I was going to say, but then I didn’t want to say, because, well, you’re a client. But if you would allow me, for a moment—when I pulled up, I thought are you XXX [the wife]? but no, I could see that you are taller, that it’s you, but you wear it so well.”
“Thank you.”
“I thought you were always so male, but here you are. Gosh, you look good. I don’t think I have ever seen you so relaxed and happy looking.”
“Thank you. It’s true. I feel great. It’s insane how good I feel.”
“You are being yourself. It must be a huge relief. How long had you known?”
“My whole life. I used to think I would transition when I was 80, but suddenly I couldn’t wait even one more minute.”
“It’s amazing, really amazing. You look so good.”
“Thank you. Life is very full right now.” We laughed, talked about life, and just like that, one more blessed soul has joined my tribe.
Conclusions?
Sometimes the random threads that weave the tapestries of our lives do not have obvious purpose, we might not even notice them. I don’t think that random is as random as we are taught. The series of conversations and snippets here, how my schedule was so profoundly re-arranged to allow for a meeting with someone important to me, to force me to think about and to confront things, to have the time to realise what is in this post and knowing that the realising would never have happened without those three hours, is a gift. It helps to see the gifts when they come as it means we will listen for them more carefully the next time.
That’s the way the universe works, it is a universal principal. She likes to be thanked just as the rest of us do.
What is the answer? To bend like bamboo in the wind.
Endnote: the reference to God in the title is not meant to be representative, religious, political, or controversial. It is a way of saying Karma, being, divinity, Holy Spirit, the All One.
Beyond Non-Binary 