Wow first blog post! Hello everyone 🙂
The internet is such a strange place to get to know someone, but I thought it would be nice to share with you a piece of writing that is very dear to my heart. It comes from a zine I made a few years ago for my Introduction to Worship class in seminary. Throughout its many pages I make an argument for the importance of ritual in gender transition. I’ve learned a lot since then, but this little ole zine still makes my heart feel tender. I hope you enjoy! -kam
I’m reaching. I burrow, I float. Water filtering through the gaps in my skin.
Living as I learn to die. Dying as I learn to live.
Please, come with me.
~ ~ ~
There are many places where we could begin our journey. child under the porch snow falling freezing and quiet quiet quiet adolescent back to the ground face to the leaves orange and brown no coat and mother yelling yelling yelling college locked in my room scared heart pounding sleepless and my banjo picking strumming singing last year across the table beer and rain on my chest ached and I listened, I listened.
But let’s start with this one. I’m sitting on a cushioned stool in my seminary bedroom, and “Cry Me a River” is playing in the background. Before I open the syringe packet I walk over to my computer and turn up the volume. As I meticulously prepare my first at-home testosterone shot, squinting with my glasses on, I occasionally squeak out an intrepid attempt to sing. It takes me an astounding six minutes and forty-three seconds from start to finish. Though the wall behind me is covered in photos of friends, in my bedroom on that night I am alone.Â
I know all of this because I recorded a video. Documentation of this particular beginning seemed, to me, important.
The video itself, however, is completely mundane. It is long and it is boring. Most of the “action” is obscured by my hands, though I still wince at the moment in the video I turn the prepped needle towards my pinched up stomach. I only shared the recording with a handful of trans friends on a secret instagram account called kamhasfeelz.
I wanted that moment to feel noteworthy: a marker, a memory, a milestone. But it didn’t. There was and continues to be, at so many transitional moments in my life, a significant disconnect between the intensity of what an event feels like to pass through, and how that event is (un)recognized or (ill)received by my communities.
At times, it breaks my heart.
At other times, it numbs my heart.
This is serious.
I don’t want to feel broken or numb.
I want to feel generatively fragmented and sensually awake.
Do you?
To be clear, no one has done anything wrong. It’s just that my communities don’t intentionally do rituals. We don’t live ritually.
We read Chani Nicolas’s astrology blog and consume memes and eat vegetables. We ride bikes and go to protests and listen to Democracy Now!. We have complicated relationships with our family and we abhor the tyranny of organized religion. We try to “do self care” but we’ve experienced a lot of trauma and so often we fail.
We try and
often we fail.
We don’t nourish our spiritual lives. We don’t nurture our spiritual health. We don’t ask for help. We don’t engage our ancestral lineages. And we don’t (we can’t) imagine our futures, for ecological crisis will surely change everything.
I’m painting with a broad brush.
This is serious.
The absence of ritual is another form of ritual.
For most of my life I rejected “spirituality” because I didn’t think I was good. I felt bad and I felt I was bad. I was under the impression that spiritual people were all chaste, quiet, selfless, temperate, and serene. That it meant wearing Earth-toned linens and not drinking alcohol and never sending messy emails to ex-lovers.
child under glittering gold dome kneeling knees in pain and giant jesus’s odd fingers damning my mismatched socks adolescent skipping school skipping prom skipping fire safety skipping town adult on yoga mat chanting all around me enlightened beads of sweat all over me and deep deep deep hatred of my own fallacious speech this year apathetic and ashamed
Of course, this is exactly the image of white-washed and watered-down spirituality that American society sells to us: a spirituality that privileges individual well-being at the expense of resourcing resistant and resilient communities.
So now, here, I claim my good-enough-ness.
Here and now I claim that I live in relationship to the divine.
My body is porous and god seeps in.
Which is not to say that performing intentional rituals alone will manifest the world we want to live in. We need community organizing, we need just economies, we need farmers and builders and rebels, and we need art. We need song.
We know that capitalism, white supremacy, heteronormativity, cis-sexism, ableism, nationalism, and misogyny kill. But where there is a lack of intentional and communally guided initiation, the oppressive conditioning that constructs and upholds dominant society swoops in and shapes us, too.
So how do we teach our bodies new ways of living and dying? How do we affirm pleasure while we unlearn harm? How do we reorient?
I think, humbly and earnestly and without certitude, that ritual can help.
I know I need it.
In ritual god draws my attention to what is and would could be and what must be. Ritual attunement sharpens focus, heightens sensations, increases sensitivities, illuminates desires.
If god is process, then god is trans. If god is in relation, then god is in transition. I suppose you could call me an optimist, after all.