Trans Migrations & Monday Meditations
Dear Becoming Ones:
The apple does not fall far from the tree, my teacher tells me. I talk with her on the daily, one person who occupies my time and attention, as I tend to another possible world. I love visiting my teacher.
To be a student, is to devote oneself to study. I have done that my entire life, trying to tease out the complexities that tether me to norms of hegemony.
I keep returning to the Source, which was the last thing she urged me to do. Not my teacher, but a Transwoman who betrayed me.
I’ve learned how to compost pain and tend to the grief of betrayal. I was reflecting the other day and realized that every white person I’ve known and had some kind of intimacy with has betrayed me. We betray each other, and I wonder if that is part of our ancestral wounds that need healing?
Discourse seems to be the thing that is impossible these days. We are losing the art of connection and we no longer know how to gather. And, how we gather matters.
I took my Monastic Vows recently and will spend this year as a Novice in service to the charism of reconciliation. The Order holds me and my various complexities and I am met by folks who have known me since my 20s.
I have been spending time with some of my most favorite people on the planet. Kate and Larry Kamphausen. I’ve known them since I was in seminary when I lived in Chicago, and in fact, Larry, an Evangelical Covenant Church Priest, asked me once to be the Prior of their intentional community.
I was in my 20s at the time called to community, but was in a long-term relationship that didn’t support communal living. That should have been my first clue about white women. I don’t always learn from the obvious.
I was not ready then, and am not ready now, and yet I think community is the way forward. My teacher encourages me to study intentional communities. I am doing that as I travel around eating with people and asking them how we turn toward one another.
I believe we need a cultural metanoia, a cultural turning to(ward) connection, to(ward) each other.
I tell people that connection is the antidote to fascism. I also tell people that this country has always been fascist; we are just now beginning to see it, because we cannot reckon with the fact that we also stole land.
My white ancestors come from Ireland and Scotland. I have been to these ancient lands and learned about their histories. I am learning about the genocide of these United States and learning how genocidal we have been socialized to be. I am learning poco a poco how anstrestral trauma shows up in patterns, and the kind of social healing that is needed is healing on an individual, communal, and social way for the patterns to be interrupted and repaired.
So, I have become quite closed to the world and am focussed on this cultural turning that I think we need. I think it has something to do with food, art, ritual, and so I travel to eat with people and remain chaste for liberation.
I have been spending quality time with my friend Larry, and Larry and I have been eating together and drinking coffee together for more than 25 years. It feels nice to have steady and stable people in one’s life that share the same values of radical interconnectedness that you came to learn all these years ago when you did your stint in Chicago, IL!
Place.
I arrived by train and left the same way. Quiet, unnoticed, and fugitive.
Fugitive. Finding cracks and sinking into them to see what is possible.
I did not announce my arrival nor did I announce my departure.
I was in Chicago for a few days and got to reclaim my anonymity for a brief moment at Kopi where I’ve been having their bottomless cup of coffee for over 25 years. I see them every time I’m in town. Kopi is a place to which I return.
I don’t know if I’ll ever get to return to my homeland of Mexico more than weeks at a time, and I don’t know how long I will feel exiled in the northern most past of Appalachia in rural New York, but for a brief moment in time, I am home.
It’s taken time for me to experience Chicago to be a home place. I lived in Chicago in my early 20s and cut my teeth on radical queer politics in the city of Chicago.
I gravitated to queer spaces in my 20s, avoiding gay male spaces, because as a gender queer masc presenting young person, I didn’t feel safe in gay male spaces. So, I hung out in feminist spaces and communities of color spaces. This land of Chicago was foreign to me, leaving land I knew for the promise of education.
The grief I carry from being far from the land that I know is hard, and yet I know I am cultivating another possible world from exile and as a fugitive.
But, back to Larry…
Larry and I talk about everything and because he is a historian, we are able to traverse many years together, since I was trained in the Humanities with a particular liberationist lens. I love talking with Larry. I love meaning making with someone that I’ve known for a long time; someone who calls forth virtues of the beloved community. I love coming into greater awareness of who my people are.
It reminds me to circle back to you, dear reader, whom I think about every day as I pen these thoughts in my mind before they make it onto paper and eventually into a note on my computer, then onto Substack.
Who are your people, dear reader? Who is your ride or die?
I live in a country where I could be murdered and I seek refuge every day in boltholes around the world. I have found refuge with Larry since we were together for our monastic retreat, and being with your people is one way we can experience the oneness of being. I’m so grateful for the folks in my life where I experience the radical interconnectedness of all things that reminds me of what is possible when we cultivate intentional relational gardens.
Who are your people? What kinds of relationships are you nurturing?
Since leaving the stage of public life and nurturing intentional relationships with churches and organizations, strangers and kin, alike, I have seen who have become my people.
We are socialized into transactional relating. If you look at your relationships, look at what the outcomes are. You grow what you feed! People enjoy being around me for who I know and what I think, and when I then leave public life to actually live what I think, people disappear. I see now the limits of the white liberal progressive.
For a year, I wrote on care and for a year, I began thinking about how to put care into everything I do.
It’s why I decided to do a relationship inventory after my dear friend, Meg, suggested it. This has been the best thing that I have ever done.
I am learning, slowly, like Baldwin, how important relationships are to the artist.
He wrote to people who were his heart people. I write to my heart people an analog note. This helps remind me to whom I am accountable.
While I am learning who wants to be in right relationship with me and who only wants proximity to the ideas, discernment and learning to be faithful in the small things has been what has carried me this last year.
I’ve been hoping that these migratory letters and meditations on community might spark an idea in you, dear reader, to begin nurturing an intentional relational landscape with the folks around you.
As I’ve been on the road this year doing auto ethnographic research on belonging and freedom, I have learned that we feel like a better body when we engage in the work of food, art, and ritual.
I’ll be finishing my research out in Mexico for the rest of the year and learning how to be in right relationship with the underside of history. As I leave, once more, I leave behind loved ones who are struggling to make sense of their life and others who are suffering in environments that are extractive and death-dealing. It’s always hard to leave, and it is always hard to bear witness to the suffering that I see on the daily, from the assault on the poor to the toxicity and supremacist mindset of the academy.
I hope to have a chance to write a bit more on some reflections from Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which I recently listened to with Larry on a long road trip. We need to recover the work of consciousness raising in a moment where nuance of discourse has evaporated.
Paz, —RCE+