You have to allow yourself to be an artist … you have to allow yourself to open to experience reality. We spend so much time resisting reality that, if we’re going to create art, we have to gently open the door to ourselves,in the spirit of appreciation and acceptance.It’s astonishing what can come from just loving, listening, and allowing.~David Price

This is an in-between time. A marriage of culture (i.e., the capricious time we choose to end the calendar year) and cosmos (the darkness has had its say; now time for the light to grow). Perhaps the year’s end is not random or impetuous. Maybe, in the closing of accounts, collecting of tax documents, and glancing over our shoulder at the year that was, we’re trying to tell ourselves that darkness holds no sway.

Would We Also Say Light Holds No Sway?

When I was younger, I brooded about the darkness, starving for spring to shed a beam of light, a scent of warmth. I feared and shunned darkness like I reacted to my brother Blayne’s adoration of the Doors. All that doom and gloom of the Lizard King … but the music and lyrics were SO. FUCKING. GOOD!

Now that I’m older, I crave the darker, colder, wrapped-in-secrets tilt of the planet away from the sun. Just like I can’t help but love everything and anything the Doors did. When I was a child, it felt like a humiliation, a giving-into what I thought were my brother’s perverse musical proclivities. Now, it feels like “Look what I was missing! I’m damn glad I gave in at seven years of age, baby!”

I Haven’t “Given Into” Darkness

Rather, I’ve adjusted my eyes and heart. Unlike the light, needing—nay, demanding—to show everything, darkness helps me unwrap little parcels randomly dropped in nooks of my heart.

When the light shines, it’s time to make hay, people! And I once did my own share of that in spades. I still do lots of hay-making. But in my own time. And I find that the tiniest parcels in my dark, cozy heart-rooms blossom into acres of grain waving in the night breeze under the moon.

In bleak mid-winter’s frost-bitten stubble lie seeds.Spring will come in its own time, and offer emergence from burrows of dark and seep, light and aroma, moths and snowflakes.

This Year’s Darkness

This year, in the Solstice time of encroaching darkness, I furiously feared in my heart for our world. I seriously looked into ex-patting it to some other place that wasn’t wooing fascism. I adore England and Wales. Yet, they have the same problems/different names. Where to run but deeper into who I am? I’m trans. That’s one part of who I am. I’m a writer. Another part. A baker, a patient access representative, a wife, a parent, a grandparent. Oh, and a hatchet thrower.

I let those fears gallop over my December, without tamping them down or numbing them. Fear opens doors in my heart and parcels I never guessed were there. Every night can be Yule.

The fear has galloped away. I am who I am right here in Colorado. I don’t need mountains to climb on another shore. Dang, the ones here are beyond majestic. Beyond fear. Beyond delight. Everyday, they stand there and woo me. Thus, my ex-pat aspirations found purchase in planning for the trip to Wales my son will take me on this spring. (Good son, that man!) There, in May, I’ll have the chance to bring a few parcels into the light, to see what the Welsh sun does to ‘em.

At the close of this work week, I took Persephone-path first steps away from fear. (Mind you, all first steps are in darkness.) I’d asked my supervisor if I could observe one of our providers in surgery. I talk everyday with patients. I’m not qualified to give clinical answers to their questions. But their fears and uncertainties? I can bring a human voice to share with them. Uncertainties are lived in flesh and bone. It was time I took a literal journey into the darkness of blood vessels, fascia, and muscle, to see what parcels O.R. lighting might reveal, that I could take back with me.

And it revealed a delightfully unexpected parcel of peace.

It’s All About the Art

I stood four hours, by our surgeon, watching the dance of surgical lights, forceps, gloved fingers, and vocal exchange between nurses, NPs, doctors, and beeping, trilling machines. It was mesmerizing and fascinating, eliciting “Wow!” after “WOW!”

I said to the surgeon, a person for whom I schedule clinic appointments by the hundreds, “Doctor, you’re an artist!”

The surgical NP quipped, while grasping a retractor in one hand and adjusting a shunt with the other, “Now, now, we don’t need to inflate his ego.”

My surgeon said, “Ah, it’s all art on the inside, that never gets seen,” as if apologizing for what he does.

I smiled under my surgical-grade facemask, “All art is on the inside, doctor. Words, paint, dance-steps, and more are the telepathy for communicating it.”

“Hmm,” my doctor said (probably wondering how this stupid bitch got into his operating room!) and continued with his artistry.

The next time I see him though, I’ll tell him this:

“You have a telepathy, too, doctor. It’s called ‘health,’ and, though it’s hidden in the dark places where your expertise and instruments take you on a daily basis,you reveal it in the doing.We all reveal it in the doing.”

Happy Solstice and New Year, one and all.

Love,

Bethany

There are no manuals for the construction of the individual you would like to become. You are the only one who can decide this and take up the lifetime of work that it demands. This is a wonderful privilege and such an exciting adventure.To grow into the person that your deepest longing desires is a great blessing. If you can find a creative harmony between your soul and your life, you will have found something infinitely precious. You may not be able to do much about the great problems of the world or to change the situation you are in, but if you can awaken the eternal beauty and light of your soul, you will bring light wherever you go.The gift of life is given to us for ourselvesand also to bring peace, courage, and compassion to others.~John O’Donohue. Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong.

I’ve talked at length in my writings about who I presented as before transitioning, about what I was like, about how far I’ve come, and even about the mercy I’ve learned to grant to my previous years. What I haven’t talked about is transition itself. What it was (and is) like.

Part of that is because while I was transitioning, I had to, um, transition. Analyzing it would have halted it, while I analyzed the fuck out of it instead of getting on with it. The rose doesn’t pause its blossoming to note how far it’s come from the bud. And the yeast in a sourdough starter don’t measure their progress from once floating on air to landing in a jar of water and flour, to eating, fucking, and spawning thousands of new generations. They just do it.

While I was transitioning, I had to, um, transition. Analyzing it would have halted it, while I analyzed the fuck out of it instead of getting on with it.

A Fool’s Errand

Nonetheless, I can fool myself into believing that I can, at the same time, grow and analyze that growth. Ah! A fool’s errand if there ever was one. I can’t go back to my transition period. Hell, I can’t go back to a moment ago. I live my moments now. What I go back to is a memory of it. And memory can be deceptive, much in the same way a photograph can deceive. Oh, yes, because a photo captures things at a precise moment, granting a seemingly “realistic” image of the subject. Yet, it’s still an image and not the thing, the moment, itself. Far from being an objective glimpse, frozen in time, a photo records the subjective, as in “subject” to everything that was happening in that precise moment—the way the light hit, the flow of air, the interaction of shadows with shades, tones, and hues and the aperture of the photographic device, not to mention the medium of record, whether digitization or chemicals on film. The subject of a photo doesn’t even capture the subjectivity of the photographer. Rather, it’s an image of that person’s subjectivity, much like writing, music, dance, painting, sculpture—and any art, really.

Where it goes beyond subjectivity, where subject and object cease to be an illusive binary, is where the viewer/reader receive the image. This isn’t an exchange in which the artist hands over their work for consumption. It’s an event that shows we’re all shared events.

Perhaps that’s why, in the West, we’re so wound up about sexuality. Obsessed with binaries like “before and after,” “subject and object,” and “matter and spirit,” we have trouble analyzing the event in which two seeming opposites are one—ourselves and all that we fear as “other.” Uniting sexually with other human beings is something that can’t be had by analyzing it. For that breaches the event horizon. The uniting is the being done, the event. Analyze it later if you want, but don’t stop happening with each kiss and caress.

That’s what transition is.

This isn’t an exchange in which the artist hands over their work for consumption. It’s an event that shows we’re all shared events.

We Are Uncatchable Moments

Yes, the photo makes its mark because it’s so similar to what was there when it was taken. But that thing, that moment, isn’t there anymore. It’s different. Infinitesimally different from what the photographed thing is now and what it will be the next moment.

Just like me and you.

Being subjective isn’t bad or worthless for all that. It’s us living in the narrative of time. So, in transition, my memory in every moment played a glimpsing role in what I was becoming even as it plays a role now as I look back on my transition. Reflecting on it helps shape what my reflections on it in a moment’s or a year’s time will be.

None of us is given an instruction manual because nothing like you and me has ever before been previously built. We aren’t even “built.” We’re us, happening. Unique. And we’re not us, as in we’re not what we were a second before, and in the next second won’t be what we are right now. But we constantly happen.

So, we can painstakingly try to mark how we go about that. But that is a taking and a pain. Yes, we can think about what we want to be, but when we get there, we won’t necessarily be what we expected or intended.

And that’s quite fine. An adventure, even.

None of us is given an instruction manual because nothing like you and me has ever before been previously built.

I Know What I Like

The focus should be on what we like, love, and feel most at home with right now.

We don’t do that in a vacuum. Yeast don’t grow in outer space. They need air, food, and moisture. They’re algorithmically programmed to gravitate to what they like. Indeed, they’re like those things because yeast are an ever-happening relationship with them. Yeast float on air and consume water and food to make more of themselves by making air, water, and flour more themselves. We and all things in the cosmos transition by transformation—transforming the needful things that in turn transform ourselves.

We and all things in the cosmos transition by transformation—transforming the needful things that in turn transform ourselves.

I’m learning, recipe by recipe, that such is my ever-happening life.

Damn, I’m grateful for it!

Love,

Bethany

No recipe for this week’s newsletter. It’s not because I’m out of them. In fact, this weekend, I made bread pudding, focaccia, and a hideously sunken banana walnut bread (still goes good down the hatch). This blog really isn’t a way to make money, though that would be welcomed. I write about what I witch, and I don’t always get the choice to witch what I choose.

The mood hits me, and I’m painting, baking, writing, or throwing hatchets (that last one will be material for an upcoming post). Lately, I’ve been writing where I didn’t think I would—on a book I want to market to a publisher instead of self-publishing. I thought I’d finished the bugger, but it keeps growing, changing, needing refinement that I didn’t expect. Every book I write is a means of self-discovery. Yes, of course, I write because I enjoy and want other people to love it like I adore my favorite stories and writers. Outside of that, though, I can’t think of a practical reason to write stories, memoir, or philosophy, all of which I do like it’s the one and only vocation I live for.

And it is.

So what if I write something that lots of people read? What was the point? To communicate something? Why shouldn’t I just go out with friends or chat up the patients I check in at my medical receptionist day job? I communicate with them, don’t I?

So, there’s something special about communicating through a book, something I have to do, or I wouldn’t be me. Yet, even if I do that to the tune of international fame, what’s the point? Yeah, I’ll have communicated something. To what end, though?

I honestly don’t know. Nor do I have to know. It’s a spell I do, like baking and painting, or cracking a joke. It doesn’t accomplish anything. My meals, stories, rhetoric, and art make a connection with bellies, hearts, and minds, but why the effort? I apparently just need to do it, and that’s very selfish on the face of it, not to mention narcissistic. The utterance of the spell implies the hubristic assumption that I have something to give. The hard-and-fast utilitarian can easily say that I do it to be heard, even by a tiny audience of appreciators. Still, I don’t know why I do it anymore than I know why I’m here in the first place.

Presumably, the universe would still be here if I didn’t go to the trouble. Yet, I’m here anyway. And that says something. Something about the fact I’m here when I might as well not be says that I’m here for something more than vanity or coincidence. And, as I’ve been fond of saying frequently since I transitioned, “There are no coincidences.”

So, I’m going to tell you a story about my day job that made me blush every color in the spectrum. This really happened, though it’s both mundane and odd enough that I find it needful to tell.

On Halloween day, a patient who’d been particularly chatty at check-in called out to me from his exam room and in his boxers, while taking off his socks to reveal his swollen, purple feet (which he was there to see our surgeon about), serenaded me (his son also in the exam room, harmonizing) with the “Aura Lea” version of “Love Me Tender” that they said their ancestor wrote back in 1861. THEN, they sang “Love Me Tender” as the head surgeon of our clinic was entering the room. I whispered to the doctor, “THEY called me in. I’ve nuthin’ to do with this, I swear!”

I then told the father-and-son duet act, “That was lovely, gentlemen—those songs perfectly express how I feel about my wife,” and got the hell outta Dodge.

So, yeah, CREEPY, but not in the usual Halloween way.

The doctor later smiled at me about the incident, so no harm done, I suppose. Still, I was flush with 17 different kinds of embarrassment, discomfort, and … gratitude(?)

Yes, I was grateful. They didn’t have to sing it, but they did, making my morning at the clinic something I’ll never forget. Other than me, the doctor, and three MAs in the clinic, those two men had no other audience.

Yet they sang like it was what they were called to do.

I wonder how many of us do that?

Then I remembered that I write.

Pam says I get a tone. And she’s right. It’s when I get preachy.

A long time ago, in a lifetime far away, I used to preach for a living. There were a million things I could have done with my life, and I set my sights on becoming a Methodist minister.

I don’t regret any of the thousand choices I’ve made, at least in the sense of damning myself for them. Knowing what I know now, being who I am now, I realize I wouldn’t have made those choices. I don’t get a rewind button. I have right-now life.

I can look at life like I’m holding a remote, a passive viewer clicking through streaming services to decide on which of a million entertainments I can watch. Yet, taking life as an observer may have been the reason I decided out of a million things that I needed to be a pastor in a Christian denomination.

We don’t decide Netflix’ menu. They decide it for us. It’s like the radio playlists of the ‘80s: yeah, we had the freedom to flip the dial to another station, but the industry was deciding what got heaviest rotation on any station. So, the industry of living in the capitalist West decided which circles I’d live in.

Maybe it’s just a process of growing older and hopefully wiser that I write this. I’m not damning myself for rotating myself into a frenzy and making life decisions that I clung to with a death grip even long after they revealed themselves as not the best in a million (or even dozen) things I could do. Maybe I’m doing it again. I don’t think so, though.

You see, we don’t decide. We live. And how we live, what we open ourselves to, where we put our flower pots so they can catch rain and sun, does the deciding.

So when I see legislatures deciding that of a million things they can do, they should harass trans people; when I see Hamas slaughter people like it’s what they have to do out of a million things they could’ve done; when a preacher decides that of all the things they could preach this Sunday it should be about who’s going to hell because of what they do with their genitals with another consenting adult—well, I no longer judge the preachers.

I don’t agree with them. I grieve the decisions made and wonder about the human choice-maker that’s inside me every bit as it’s inside them. And I feel in my heart that I’m frail and that this life is precious. And that I have f*cked up, am probably right now f*cking up, and will f*ck up. Some of that decision making process is out of my control because I’m shaped by culture and inner fears and desires I haven’t admitted to myself.

I start again. With myself. With this magik called life. I give it another go. The dead are right now burying their own dead. I might help them and do more than preach or worry or bemoan our existence. I might even decide that, out of a million things I could do, it’s right now time to stop writing a post and instead not decide to do anything. But to instead be still and see. Feel. Listen.

And love.

Myself. And all us decision-makers. The million things I could do are all really one thing. Before I do anything else, I’m gonna let life happen to me.

To see what happens when I don’t feel called to do anything but be me to the next soul I meet.

There’s a soul-sickening here that steals dreams.

We live amid wonders. And hideous peril that makes us wonder what we’ve done. Future ages will call this a wartime, like we called the Civil War. World Wars I and II.

Now We Dangle

In those wars and others, we knew all hung in the balance.

Now we dangle, for we don’t even know we’re at war. We feel it but haven’t the words. We’ve stolen meaning—and worse, we handed over, without a qualm, our magik.

Magik never leaves us. It stands with us. In us. Is us.

Disinformation. Flirtation and outright adultery with fascism and nihilism.

“Why not?” we say, fey with the sheer acceleration of it. Every moment feels a cliffhanger, no chance to rest, heal, pause, and present ourselves … to ourselves.

Though we don’t reckon the partner who walks with us, she’s still here, calling us, as Lincoln said in a more seemingly perilous moment, to the better angels of our nature. What we miss is not just our razor’s-edge peril, but who we are.

What do we desire? What do we see as the ultimate prize? Look at the clothing we wear. The cars we drive. The persons we keep relation with. The places we live.

Breaking with the Broken

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” has long been a tagline of homo sapiens.

What do we do when it is broken? When we are broken and just don’t see it but instead go on like we’re getting better?

At some point, we’ll see that we’ve been settling for something—anything—other than that which really answers our thirst. Dressed in chrome, brushed nickel, and ever smaller microchips, our costume is as superstitious and fatuous as paintings on cave walls.

“Yes, but look at our technology, ever outstripping itself and us!” we might say.

What then? We bank on ever-improving, ever-evering … to what goal? What’s the endgame?

A Never-Ending Cornucopia

Aristotle, then the Renaissance, set on course the technological revolution that was all along our choice and not destiny, not evolution.

We at first went with what we knew, to build civilization. Stepping beyond that, we crafted an alternate reality where we might live free of weather, catastrophe, disease, poverty, hunger, war, and one day, even death. From being subjects of a harsh universe, we turned the cosmos into our subject.

Still, We Hunger for Something.

For the last 600 years, we’ve bewitched ourselves with scientific method. We continually poke the bear we call the unknown. In the meantime, we consume, consume, consume. Techne is our religion. Its priests assure us that the bear won’t maul us and that we’ll continue to enjoy an endless supply of bear meat and fur.

Magik was an option for our ancestors, and to call that mere superstition misses that they were behaving no differently than we are now: going with what’s working for us.

Until it doesn’t.

Chanting what we know.

Until we’re not sure we know anything.

Unknowing the Question

The scientific/technological revolution, by its nature, can proceed in no other direction than to eventually undo itself.

Witches feel our world’s right now undone. The pandemic was a tipping point that made it apparent to a critical mass of humanity. For the last 250 years, only witches, artists, poets, and prophets had felt and proclaimed that something’s bubbling under the surface, against which technological prowess won’t avail.

We’ve so bifurcated our perception that we think we face a precipitous choice:

* Should we use our world as a means to something, whatever that is …OR …

* Should we hallow it?

We haven’t tried unknowing. We might then see that the two questions are pointless. We’ve needlessly dissected the one thing in front of us—the thing that is us—till we fail to recognize ourselves.

We are the answer that never needed a question. We are the reality that was never a choice.

We are magik.

Sinead and Me

The death of Sinead O’Connor hit me powerfully. Of course I loved her magik voice. But she challenged me. She was a pop singer, for crying out loud.

Until she wasn’t.

She tore up a photo of the Pope on national TV. Hear what she said:

“We have confidence in the victory of good over evil. Fight the real enemy!”

Patriarchal “princes” like Frank Sinatra and Joe Pesce took turns bragging about the violence they’d’ve done to her had they been there.

But they weren’t. Like so many of us right now aren’t here for ourselves. I was 29. Pam and I awaited the birth of our third child two months later. I was a practicing Catholic who even then asked questions about the church’s soul-sickening monster of abuse. I didn’t know what to make of O’Connor’s lone voice in the wilderness crying out against the depravity that garbed itself in white robes.

For that’s where we were living and still are—in a wilderness of our own making.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We never left the garden, only built around ourselves a desert so that we could then righteously take water from those not powerful enough to keep us from doing it.

Water Under the Bridge of Sighs

Think of everything that’s happened since that October night. We no longer have “national TV.” The twin towers melted into the ground. The planet is taking arms against the virus called us who have sickened its soul. We’ve waged wars like a theater-goer missing the picture for trip after trip to the popcorn stand. Our democracy and liberal progress have been stolen by a contagion of misinformation in the grip of our appetites—the same misinformation machine that raped and vilified Sinead the rest of her life. We congratulated ourselves at our righteousness at having burned the witch.

Ah, But She Was Right

And she was a pop singer who heroically burned down her career to wake us up.

“There was no doubt about who this bitch is,” she said to us.

“There was no more mistaking this woman for a pop star … People say, ‘Oh you fucked up your career,’ but they’re talking about the career they had in mind for me. I fucked up the house in Antigua that the record company dudes wanted to buy. I fucked up their career, not mine. It meant that I had to make my living playing live, and I am born for live performance.”

We All Make Our Living Playing Live

So why, in the wake of her death, are we all still playing a lie?

Her words didn’t shake me then like they should have. I went on playing my life as righteous father, faithful head of household, slaving to build for Papa Culture the beach house he convinced me I could have, if I just worked hard enough, kept faith enough. When I woke up to myself, I found that the sand all around me was my own private Sahara, no sound of waves in earshot.

But her voice rang across the dunes and echoed in my heart. I kept listening to her music, finding prophetic the art she made after “the incident.” Clear. Ringing. True. Best of all—beautiful. Like this, her song:

Thank you for hearing me …Thank you for loving me …Thank you for seeing me …And for not leaving me.… Thank you for staying with meThanks for not hurting me …You are gentle with me …Thanks for silence with me ……Thank you for holding meAnd saying I could beThank you for saying "Baby"Thank you for holding me …

Thank you for breaking my heartThank you for tearing me apartNow I'm a strong, strong heartThank you for breaking my heart

Thank you, Sinead. By the cosmos, thank you.

You haven’t died. For I live. Beautifully torn by you.

I was 25 years old. Married to a beautiful lifemate whom I couldn’t have dreamt up, yet who was a living dream. Paul, our first-born, only two months old. A grad degree. A job (a shitty one, albeit, but it was a start) that paid the bills. Going for my PhD.

I was living my life, though, like it was wartime.

Life in Wartime

It had been that way since I was 10 years old, when my parents divorced. School had been a hellhole of bullying and pointless regimentation to make me a properly functioning citizen. At age 25, I told myself I was properly functioning, but I didn’t believe it. What I didn’t know till decades later was that I suffered from anxiety, depression, and latent gender dysphoria.

Always looking over my shoulder for the next assault was the norm for me. I hated the world I lived in but played its game to prove something to myself (though I hardly knew what that was). I was a house of cards poised to crash at a nudge.

Then It Happened

My shitty employer canned me for pointless, dysfunctional reasons. That was actually a blessing, but I felt like it was the end of life for me. I was paralyzed. I had a child. A wife. An overactive intellect and frustrated artistic ambition.

And now, I couldn’t even do that. I had no income to pay the bills. No prospects. Turning to myself was the last place I could go because I had turned on myself each and every moment, trying to be a warrior but unable to reach deep into myself for something—anything—that could rise to the occasion.

I sat on the front stoop of our little apartment and cried helplessly, Pam at a loss as to why this temporary setback had so unhinged me. A month later, I’d get another shitty job that, within less than a year, led to a much better job with benefits, a solid salary, and the chance to grow our family.

Yet, I Couldn’t Move

Why budge an inch, anyway? My spiritual and emotional landscape was cratered, with incoming shells, shocking me into further frozen panic.

We all get that way. And we live in a culture that denigrates paralysis. The prize that was myself was gone, sucked away by banshee ghosts of the slavish ambitions Papa Culture told me I had to pursue. If only I could …

… what?

Love Myself?

That was never in the equation. I hated myself and the blessings that had been showered on me. I didn’t deserve them, for I had smoke-and-mirrored the game, and now the jig was up.

What did it take to love myself? Jump the next hurdle in my path? Sustain another grenade blast that deafened me to what my heart really yearned for?

There was no magik in any of it. But at age 25, I had no inkling that I was already magik. Nothing about me had hinted enchantment since my earliest years. This was no way to live. Yet, I leapt from one foxhole to another, trying to find someone who could tell me the war was over.

Where’s the Magik in Telling You This?

I need you to know that everything I needed was already with me—that, paralyzed, I was free. That you are, too, when everything comes crashing down.

That’s the magik I’m here now to tell. I had to go through countless other bouts of paralysis till I dared embrace who I really am. Till I saw through the cocoon of loathing I felt for myself, the world, everything. In telling you this, I’m not claiming I’ve won through, that the war is over. That life isn’t hard. That I’m now pain-free.

Avoiding Pain Isn’t the Point

The point is that I exist, when I have no “right” or “destiny” to even be alive.

I’m a completely gratuitous instance of the cosmos reflecting on herself. She doesn’t need me to be here to do that. But she does it anyway.

So, I figure, why not take a chance on that?

I’m here. Why hardly matters. I am. Why not celebrate that I’m here?

Reckoning my burden or calculating the odds against my survival(let alone the odds against my ever being here in the first place)has never once helped me.

What has helped is daffy-hearted giddiness at the prospect of me. Of you. Of any of this.

Who am I to change the world? Do I need specs, a game plan, practice?

Or do I just do it, and it happens, this thing called life?

The Next Words

I can’t tell you the next words I’m about to write, but words still come. So do paintings, bakes, and ridiculous gestures that make up a life.

All are a promise of gratitude.

I’m grateful for you. For Pam. For my children. For the current silly job I have and for the absurd thrill in the tummy I get at the prospect of baking something new.

No archaeologist of future millennia will find my bakes and wield them like a talisman to solve whatever paralysis their world faces. I’m not here to save the present or the future. I’m not even here to save myself.

I’m Enough. So Are You.

Even being in the crater, while bombs explode, shows me I’m here.

It sounds trite to say that life is a gift. But it is.

And so am I. So are you.

I’m stepping out of the crater now. I have a present to open, right here, right now.

It’s magik.

We all are.

The other day, I scanned Amazon and selected an immersive blender that fit my needs and budget … and I was touched. (I realize that sounds kinda pornographic, but I’m NOT immersion-blender kinky, people.)

I was so touched that I wrote the folks at Gavasto an email as to why/how they touched me, seeing as how immersion blenders may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think about making a connection in this haggard world.

But it happened … and my note to Gavasto tells the story:

Folks @ Gavasto,

I've witch-cycled 779 moons in this space-time continuum. I thought the ultimate in packaging and product presentation was to be had with Apple products. I realize how Bougie that sounds, but verily, Bougie has met its match.

I opened my Gavasto JHB-328 Immersion Blender with the usual aplomb I reserve for Amazon boxes. Release the beast, recycle what I can, trash the detritus, toss away all the lawyer-inspired warnings about using electrical devices safely, skim the User Manual, yada yada.

"What ho?" I glimpsed a little Thank-You envelope.

I've gotten little thank-you notes in other products that were fun to read, but this note was written by someone at Gavasto who took the time and presence to make it mean something. I felt spoken to.

Yes, you don't know me personally, Friends at Gavasto, but you're proud of your product, your design, and your art, all the way down to telling me how important it is to you that I experience it well, as a tool to whip up some joy in my kitchen. I've used the JHB-328 (sounds like an early George Lucas dystopian sci-fi flick, THX-1138; extra points to those on the Gavasto Support Team who've seen it!), and am happy with it, as I expected to be.

What I didn't expect was your reaching out, across the disaffective distance, logistics trails, and endless throb of the capitalism that's put us in the mess we're currently in. And … well, you made a difference.

Please, please, please keep on doing this! (I mean, yeah, make sure your products continue to deliver all sorts of goodness, too.) Keep on reaching out.

I'm an odd-duck witch, but I make a point of letting folks know when they've enchanted me. YOU have!

I'll think of this every time I grab my Gavasto Immersion Blender!

Sincerely,

Bethany Beeler

[Welcome to the first of what I hope to be a regular installment: Witch Haps, in which I tell you about my moment-by-moment happenings as the witch I be.]

Last night, our dear friend, Trey-Trey, was over for our once-a-month or so movie night. That’s where he, Pam, and I watch a movie of one of our triumvirate’s choosing, accompanied by a munchable picnic-spread, or, in this case, a dinner of homemade linguine with chicken and fresh pesto, and a yummy dessert of baked-right-then Bomboloni (both dishes to one day be featured in my B*tch Bakes recipe posts!).

This time, the film was Pam’s choice: Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, with a stellar, almost too true to Julia Child performance by Meryl Streep. This and the meal, prompted Trey-Trey to ask, “So, what’s the impetus behind all this baking, Babs?”

[For the uninitiated, “Babs” is what Pam and my closest friends call me. My initials are B.A.B.—Bethany A. Beeler—so Pam calls me Babsie, and it’s caught on.]

Jags

Interesting question. I get on jags and have done so all my life. When I had a beard down to my chest, I got into beard-grooming and oils. When I got into craft beer, I became a homebrewer with a DIY all-grain rig, with mash tun, lauter, camp burner, wort chiller, and fermenting fridge in my Texas garage.

The jag traits didn’t leave me when I transitioned (MtF) and toyed with the idea that I was a witch to boot. They stopped being jags at all. I saw that, all along, what I’d called “jags” had been spells that, in 50 years of masquerading as a dude, I didn’t know were magik.

My magik.

I suppose that’s why, almost immediately upon transition, I returned to painting, something I hadn’t pursued since I was 17. Though I’ve been a writer all my life, my pursuit of that magikal art had been in the service of academia, a corporate job as a tech writer, and penning sermons as a United Methodist minister. [Yeah. I’ve lived a life: get the deets in one of my memoirs.]

But my heart-lived writing took a back-of-the-minivan seat to raising a family of three amazing kids (and enslaving myself to ratf*cked ideologies; again, deets in the memoirs^^). Transition unleashed the writing beast. In the last five years, I’ve penned and published eight novels (with seven more in progress), six memoirs, a collection of short stories, 100+ blog posts, a poetry chapbook, and a children’s book, all while working a full-time job.

I’m not bragging; just underlining that I’d pent up a lot of magik that’s exploded with transition.

The Uncharted Country

Baking isn’t like that.

In fact, I avoided baking post-transition as much as I did before.

Oh, I’ve always cooked, but in a limited way. Since college, I’ve made intense spaghetti sauce and Italian food from family recipes. I dabbled in grilling when I had a backyard with a deck.

But baking? That was the mysterious realm of everybody else’s grandma. Pam knew how to bake (uh, not from her grandma, but from a teen summer where she worked at a lodge in the Utah mountains). Baking contraptions looked weird and even mad scientist-y. You had to measure stuff exactly and follow recipes that baking devotees collected like furbies collect … um, well, fur.

Terra incognita, peeps!

Then, last fall, Pam and I double-binged all the Great British Bake-Offs. Those shows are healing, I tells ya! Watching polite British people, with Empire-era courtesy and offbeat humour (uh, “offbeat,” that is, by American standards), politely tell people when their bakes are off (“Just 5-10 minutes more in the oven, and it would’ve been perfect. It’s a shame”). All that was a delightful balm for my soul.

Artful

And as I watched, I saw the magikal art of it.

I wanted to try it.

To do something I wasn’t already experienced at.

To stumble and make mistakes, with no claim or mission to perfect anything but just be me.

Hell, yes! Writing and painting are my glory from day one of my life in this time-space continuum.

But baking is a bloody WONDER, people.

Rearrangement Derangement

I rearranged the kitchen. I bought some items (after, of course, hours of intrawebs research) that I determined I couldn’t jury-rig at home. I dared dough—and not just any dough, but full-on, four-turn puff pastry. Go big or go home!

And I found it’s fun! I mean, it’s playtime fun!

Fun that I haven’t had since I was wee-sized and played in the dirt pile or in the den I made in my childhood basement. It’s my own world of wonders where I dip a toe in volcanoes, veer past black holes, poke rabid bears, and dance with rattlesnakes—all from the comfort of my tiny apartment kitchen and rampant imagination.

Nay, Witchful!

The weird thing that happened, the thing I didn’t think would happen because it was just me playing … was that other people like what I bake.

Um, that was incidental, people! I was just having fun.

But it’s even more fun when the spell I weave in enchanted play enchants others in the best ways … through their taste buds and tummies.

Baking cemented for me something that I’d previously only toyed with:that I am a witch.

Baking made me own it, celebrate it, proclaim it.

And, uh, here’s a tiny recipe to celebrate with you!

B*tch Pesto!

Prep Time: 10 min Cook Time: n/a Total Time: 10 min Difficulty: Easy Servings: Covers 4-6 servings of pasta depending on how thick you put it on, baby!

Pesto warms the soul on a rainy autumn night and kicks awake the palate in a summer dish. Don't buy the pesto paste at the supermarket—make this quick and easy condiment, and you'll be in Umbria, with the locals, laughing, eating, and sipping Sambuca into the wee hours. La Vita Bella!

EQUIPMENT

Food Processor/Blender

Silicon Spatula

Small Airtight Storage Container

INGREDIENTS

1 large bunch (2C heaping) fresh basil leaves, destemmed, washed, & patted dry

3 cloves garlic

⅓C pine nuts

1T Pinot Grigio or other wine, cooking Sherry, Grappa, or for a licorice kick, Sambuca!

⅔C olive oil, plus more for storing

⅛t smoked paprika

salt and pepper, to taste (optional)

⅓C freshly grated Romano cheese (NOT the sprinkle stuff, people, but an honest-to-goddess wedge of imported stuff, if you can find & afford it)

Instructions

1. In food processor/blender, puree basil leaves, garlic, pine nuts, alcohol, and smoked paprika.

2. While blending, drizzle in olive oil.

3. Add cheese and blend to desired texture.

4. Taste test and correct seasoning with salt and pepper, if needed. (Remember: the Romano will bring its own delightful saltiness and tang).

5. Serve fresh or spatula scrape every molecule of goodness into an airtight container and top with olive oil for refrigerator storage. (I witchily urge you to cure the pesto in the fridge for at least 8 hrs, to let the spices and cheese assimilate for maximum WOW factor from your diners.)

“a deadly system doesn’t have to seem like it’s targeting you directly to kill you consistently.”—Alexis Pauline Grumbs

The roots of the word, “witch,” also mean “to be strong, lively.” Which is why the ruling order tries to consistently strip us away. Witches are living bridges to desire so in keeping with the surrounding landscape that Papa Culture doesn’t notice he treads our backs to cross chasms he’d otherwise fall into. When he spots us, he strips the tree-bridge and burns us—but only after he’s safely crossed. Strip away enough leaves, and he’ll kill the plant.

Yet, ultimately, he can’t finish the job without destroying himself.

He also can’t sum us in any equation, philosophy, definition, dogma, or description. We’re consciousness pausing to say, “It is good.”

Leaves Can Also Be Stone

“Death and seeing clearly are fraternal twins. They are also the two, mysteriously curved, faces of the ancestral knapped stone leaf blade that is myth.”—Caroline Ross

Myth is not some collection of tales sequestered in the basement of a college library. Myth is how witches speak of ourselves to be aware of ourselves. Papa Culture tries to pulverize the stone and leaves that form the bridge under his feet.

He is not aware.

Myth is us being aware of ourselves … without having to know it to death.

Because it’s playful. We’re having too much fun to worry about the bridges we tread, the leaves we brush. And that is good.

As Caroline Ross sagely notes, the tendrils issuing from every living thing do not bind, but reunite. “They are the ‘be’ of be-longing, be-loved, be-side, be-lief, be-reft, be-come.”

The Stone Leaf Bridge

UNknowing is the stone leaf bridge. Unknowing doesn’t mean making ourselves insensate. Rather, in play, in journey, in contact with the living consciousness in every stone, leaf, and root, we cease the slavery of insisting on our own identity. I mean, if I am, as Papa Culture incessantly goads us into reminding ourselves Every, Single, Moment, why do I have to think to know that I am? Methinks my Papa-warped psyche doth protest much.

In being, in am-ing, I’m already unknowing. I don’t have to constantly think of my arms or my liver for them to be there. They are. I am. I don’t call myself into being. We never have. We are called into being by the leaves, stones, and roots that are our partners in consciousness.

To be is to be called into being~in~connexion. If you do not attend to this connection then one must rely on insisting on one’s identity with a forceful mind. If I allow myself to be called into being, contingent on the caller, different every moment, then no effort is needed to be my so-called self. Like the lilies of the field, relying on the loam, responding to the sun.—Caroline Ross

It’s Not A Battle

We don’t have to battle Papa Culture. Orcas playfully and strategically smashing only the rudders of billionaires’ yachts sink them without making a statement. We see and sum that statement into lifegiving myth.

White Gladis the Orca isn’t starting the revolution. She’s an orca witch, bridging us to unknow our place in “the Big Scheme.”

It’s not about billionaires or paupers or the so-called “average” lot of us. In brushing the leaf, we become the leaf and feel that we are always the leaf. In treading the stone, our feet are the stone.

The Spell of Play

Papa Culture burns witches because those he singles out for the stake are living bridges to all of us being who we are. I call us witches. You can alternatively call us humankind.

The myth is the living of who we are. A magikal story that says root-deep and moon-high profundities about the universe.

With every step we take, every leaf we brush, we teach ourselves the spell.

Thank you for reading Magik - Enchanting the World One Word at a Time. This post is public—I’d love for you to share by re-stacking and posting on social media. Let’s get the word out!

Humankind’s attention is a Humpty-Dumpty pile of eggshells. Though we can talk to our sisters in the cosmos, we haven’t really tried, all the time muttering that anything but our lot has to be better.

We’re confused about the correlation of ourselves and the world. Distinguishing between those two helps us devise nature-dominating technology. That activity also distances us from desire.

How, if we are part of this world, can we behave as if we’re not—to the point of endangering Earth herself?

Other Brains, Other Thumbs

Other primates have opposable thumbs but haven’t evolved a cerebral cortex to decimate the planet. Octopuses, elephants, dolphins, and whales have highly developed brains but not the physical equipment (or, perhaps, the anima) to dominate nature. Ants, bees, and mushroom networks sport neither oversized brains nor opposable digits. Yet, they form sophisticated societies that make our “social networking” and “AI” pale in comparison, all without driving themselves to extinction.

Belonging

We’re enamored with, and baffled by, our separateness from our world, all the time feeling that we nonetheless come from it. What we don’t know is …

… whether we belong.

Our moral codes define who’s in and who’s out. The moral majority reinforces group identity by scapegoating minorities. Morality is the agent of our separation from the world, supposedly putting us above the natural realm. Gifted with consciousness to think about how we’re not of this world, we craft ways to belong to something more than dirt. And those who don’t play by the rules of belonging threaten that plan.

That’s what I mean by the term, “witch.”

To Be A Witch, To Be A Leaf

It comes from the proto-Indo-European, through Germanic and old Gaelic, meaning “to peel off, strip, or break off.”

“Leaf” is also a linguistic root for “witch.” Leaves are bridges between light and earth—living spells that transform sunshine into root, bark, flower, and seed. A tree without leaves is dormant or dead, a Demeter without her Persephone.

“Witch,” also means “to be strong, lively.” Trees touch by means of strong and lively leaves and roots. Some witches work underground. The ones who wield their magik in the waking world are the leaves that bridge the gaps between trees. Get enough leaves, and you make a dark and scary forest.

No wonder fairy tales always put the witch’s house deep in the woods. In every human being is the leafy potential to bloom into a forest, the heart of which is magik. That’s why, for the last 3,000 years, Papa Culture has specialized in deforestation … of the planet and the human soul. From that little hearth in that little cottage in that unnavigated forest comes his undoing.

You see, we’re all witches.

Why we scare Papa into witch hunts is the leafy bridge to my next post.