An encounter with the High Priestess and the many faces of the Divine Feminine

The setting of intentions and finding a seam in the universe where life happens with ease

In exactly one month, the most important person in my life will be holding my hand as I slip out of consciousness for the last time as a man to wake up many hours later as a woman.  I say she is the most important, because in her capable hands, will be my past, present and future.  She is my surgeon.

That a human can have such earthly power is rather extraordinary.  It speaks of a life of dedication, hard work, focus, and talent.  I can’t help but think that part of her selection was also her beauty, something which is never far from me in all of the choices I make in life.  One of my children thinks she is gorgeous and can’t to wait meet her—should they be so lucky.  I know that I am in very good hands.

I also have a growing sense of certainty that my body is ready.  That I will heal quickly.

A few years ago, teetering on the edge, suicidal, experiencing a loss of control which manifested in all manner of unusual ways, including sexual, I assembled a posse to help me get through intact.  I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t know what else to do.  I was lost.  There is a French expression which is particularly apt.  “Coincée,” meaning stuck, trapped, cornered.  It is a perfect word for how I felt.

The posse, primarily a group of different kinds of therapists plus a sequence of dominatrixes, both consciously and unconsciously helped me through.  We must own our own outcomes.  This is something that runs counter to the narrative that many therapists insist upon, indeed, many dominatrixes as well.  After all, you can only have one Queen, one boss, and to avoid confusing messages, mixed messages, must choose.  But my main therapist, who is the only member that is still in my posse who was there at the beginning (there are a few inactive members who will rejoin should opportunity or circumstance allow for it), said to me, “why isn’t that you?  Why look outside for the Queen.  Be your Queen, the Queen you need, and be her slave.  You can contain it all.”  And this is true, and I am making giant steps towards this goal.  And everything about my life is changing.

To be ‘enough’ for the self is the essence of self-love.  This much I know.  It doesn’t mean we don’t need others, crave others, cherish others.  It just means we are finally whole.

I am assembling a new posse for a new challenge.  The challenge is one of becoming a woman.  Surgery is just one step in this process.  The woman who will be holding my hand is a prime mover in that mix.  She is teaching me much already, and much more will come.  She is the creatrix of my clitoris, my vagina, my vulva.

The artist who decorated my body, who was given and took full artistic license to tell my story through her art, on my skin, has placed a womb on my back.  It is a Japanese motif, a circle, as one sees in much of Japanese brush painting.  I asked her to fill it, but she refused, for it is the gateway, the portal, the symbol from the ‘here’ to the ‘there’, the spark of creation, the moment of being, the door between life, death and the liminal space in-between, the home of the Divine Feminine, giver of life, medium through which we all become.

I have a womb.  It has already given birth.  She gave birth to my inner child when I sat with the medicine, Ayahuasca, two years ago now.  To the day.  I retell parts of the story.  My communication with the spirit world on that journey was intense.  The ‘she’ that I am becoming found her way out through the thick fog and many layers that she was hidden beneath.  And as ‘he’ left the stage, and she made her first tentative steps in the world, there was a judgement of sorts.  It was not just a waltz.  Consequences.  Open eyes.  I was forced to accept everything that lay before me: all the joy that I had kept pent up, yes, but also much pain that I had yet to confront.  And that night, I was raped by an angry, thrusting, spirit God.  The product of that union was me, boy me, my inner child, the little boy that I once was.  The little boy who longed to be a girl, to become the mother that she never had.

I became a woman when I accepted those consequences, when I was assaulted by a God, and gave birth.  And that night, and for every night thereafter, I knew that the baby I carried and gave birth to, was and is me.  It is okay for the man I became, and all the days from my childhood as a man, and who acquitted himself well, to leave the stage.  He is gone now.  He exists in photographs on my walls, in memories of friends and loved ones.  The she I have become is ready to take his place.

And she is strong.

The posse I am assembling is walking with me across the Rubicon, that river which, once crossed, marks the point of no return.  It is the same as burning the bridge behind us.  I am not walking this path alone, nor am I walking quietly.  I walk with intent.  I walk with ceremony.  And I walk with an army of animals, spirits, angels, priestesses, therapists, shamans, healers, family, and friends.

Who are these people?

I have chosen my new name.  Names.  For I am changing all of my names.  I have chosen names from my own book of names, the names of all of my direct ancestors, at least those which I know, stretching back in places as far as 30 or more generations.  My children have been involved in helping me to select my names.  There is a beautiful symmetry to that, having named them.

The names I have chosen have not been because they are pretty names, but because they belonged to women who matter.  They are all my grandmothers.  Some of their names are not nice sounding at all, and others are quite beautiful.  I cannot say why I chose them, why those particular ones spoke to me, but they go beautiful together, and the first time I wrote them down in the sequence that they have settled into, the first time I had actually chosen, I knew instantly that they were perfect.  

As I prepare for work with a shaman on ancestral memory, guidance, trauma, and joy, I discover more and more about these people.  The names picked me.  What I learn shows me why.  Every one of them is proving to be a woman of significance in some way or another.  One was raped and taken as a lover while her legitimate husband was imprisoned in their home…the history books spoke differently of this truth and made her out to be one who was cuckolding her husband, who chose this younger, virile man.  The intrepid sleuthing of a historian, however, has uncovered the truth.  Another lost her parents at age 1 and became the ward of a woman who arranged first one, then another marriage to men for purposes other than love.  My new surname comes from a woman who was able to found a title but could only vest it to her husband, and thus founded a House.  Women of consequence, who lived history, and whose experiences very much reflect the broader landscape of what it means to be a woman.  Sacrifice, pain, suffering, yet also resilience, beauty, joy, triumph.

I am working with a witch to protect me while I am out, and at my most vulnerable.  She is clearing demons and other nefarious forces from my energy field, and will seal and protect me when I cannot.

Upstairs, asleep at the early hour when I pen these words, is a woman who has come to my home to talk to me about what it means to her to be a woman.  She is one of a series of women who have agreed to educate me, to come to me and to teach me.  She has brought a book that speaks to her about what it means to be a woman.  She will read to me from it, and I will listen.  I will listen to the words in the book, and then I will listen to the words in heart, hearing what she has to say about what it means to be her. She is one my conscious “big sisters”. I have many, and indeed, any woman who has reached adulthood knows so much more than me about being a woman, but only a few are holding me this way.

The four caregivers, four women who are closer to me than any others, are coming in turns to care for me both during and after my surgery.  They are all doing the same as the woman upstairs, and I look forward to being vulnerable with them, to receiving their wisdom, their love, their care, and protection.  It is changing my relationship with all of them.  They are all taking on the mantle of sisters, of being my big sisters, mothers, aunts.

I am also laying with a sex witch.  She is the High Priestess.  I know her well, having explored her tender touch and felt her energy, delicate, beautiful, alive.  She fascinates me in a groupie to a rock goddess kind of way.  I do believe that the people who come into our lives do so for a reason.  I couldn’t possibly reduce my reaching out to her to random chance.  I spent a year looking at various full-service-sex-workers, but there is only one I ever wrote to, only one I have ever been with.  Yes, there are others I would consider seeing–of course, who doesn’t like to feel like the child in the candy shop?  But there is just this one who I actually felt was the right fit enough to write to her.

And now, she has taken on the sacred task of embodying the role of the High Priestess, and given her enthusiastic consent.