Wise Adolescence.

A bit high on caffeine this morning.  Listening to epic songs from Muse.  Wondering whether I should revise my curriculum vitae, again.
What do ''they'' want?

I'm realizing how much of a teenager I have been.  Not wanting to integrate society, feeling confused and angry at the ways things are done; ; calling it superficiality, hypocrisy... unsustainability.
But those feelings are gently shifting today.  There's been a revolution happening in me since I learned about shadow projection.
Besides,
Collective consciousness is a historicyclical phenomenon.  Those who are able try their best, the others are not responsible for their failures. (Here we get to the problem of evil again, but I'll choose innocence over fear again today.) I've been observing it in myself for a few years now: superficiality, hypocrisy, there's a drop of everything in every single one of us.  Makes me feel compassion (com-passion = feeling with)  It's all rooted in fear and not-knowing.
But what about unsustainability?!  Doesn't that make for right and wrong?  I sometimes think so.  And in true anthropocentric fashion I will say that it'd certainly be a sad-sad thing to see the self-conscious species gone.  But I Love the Creation regardless.  We'll either kill ourselves or we won't.  All of this to say, that the challenge of sustainability is perhaps more like a dance between life and death.  Hopefully humans can hear the song.

Am I buying into oblivion, buying my peace of mind, giving up the struggle?  Who knows?
I feel like growing up a bit, it's true.  I think it's time I stand behind my vision.

Adolescence (to come back to my point), after all, is an in-between time.  It's true I've pretty much always felt in-between.  I couldn't always name it, but that's what it is.  I'm not quite schizophrenic but I'm quite queer indeed.  I even created that condition outside of myself by falling in love with San Francisco: in the end, I could neither be here nor there.
And that's why I chose to move back to Montréal at this time.  I needed to try out this route to my feeling of integrity.  On the great wheel of Life I wanted to move towards more grounding and manifestation.  My heart is full, I want the world to drink from it.  I want to nourish my peers, I want to follow my exegesis of Nietzsche in ''becoming the meaning of the earth".  I think it is time to share some of my wisdom.  I say this in all humility.  By wisdom I mean: a knowing that ''it's all good.''
I've learned that much through thirty thousand dollars of graduate school.

How do I write that in my résumé?

I've been visualizing myself teaching philosophy to teenagers.  It'd be a good way to integrate that familiarity for adolescence all the while stepping into my new found sense of self-authority.
Or I could still work my way towards another credential, in Drama Therapy.
I'll always write, I'll always think.  I want to help things move.  Doesn't matter the title the job has.  Give me a chance to organize a great project on civic participation, or invite me to join your co-op grocery store.  I'm not that picky.

Each thing in their own time.  Other times will mean and necessitate other places.  Things they come and things they go..

For now, I clearly see this propensity of mine, that natural state of mind: in-between.
Like a psychopomp of sorts.  Working the transition.

Wish I could only get a bit of financial validation.  To pay the bills, keep warm, keep the energy flowing.  I'm giving of me and I trust.

Thank you for reading.  Don't be shy, please comment and engage.  What do you think?  What do you feel?  How is your experience similar or different?  This ain't supposed to be a soliloquy.

Centimeters..

Snow has been falling down alllll day.  I had tentative plans on my agenda for the day: 1) call this dude Vahid and go visit an apartment, 2) go introduce myself at the local office of employment.  But with this gentle white blizzard waving at me from the other side of the window, I decided to stay in instead.  (Plus, Vahid postponed our meeting.)
I browsed through a few more job offers, reworked a few résumé to fit the profiles, worked on those cover letters that are supposed to make them impatient to meet me.
People ask me: '' What kind of job are you looking for ?''  I tell them I am open, as long as it is inspiring.  You see, I'm not interested in working at Tim Hortons'.  I'm not going to spend my days like an automaton, just to make ends meet.  I want to care.  I want to grow.  I want to feel connected.
So these jobs I am applying generally have requirements that are a bit above what my experience is.  But I KNOW, they are not above my competency.
Here I am, in that infamous qualification ''ditch'', trying to show that I can climb and fulfill whatever functions these people need fulfilled, trying not to slip to the bottom and lose faith.
It's been less than I week since I moved here, I suppose.  I am trying to be patient.  The old wise woman inside knows it's only a matter of time until I get to shine my little light and take part in some super duper progressive creative community endeavor.  But for now, it's lonely as hell.
I haven't gone dancing in over what... two months?  My foot won't allow me.  The tendon connecting to my heel has a little tear (happened exactly a week before I left home in San Francisco.  Talk about body-mind!) and it wants me to stay in place and be with my emotions instead of going out and dancing them off.  It's hard.  I want to move, get my heart rate up, sweat and shake and feel free... but I can't.



I'm back on OkCupid.  I figured it'd be a good way to meet other queer people.
I miss home.  I miss the sunshine.  I miss creating with Harvey.
But this is not meant to sound down in the dumps or anything.  It's just that it's been snowing all day.  And I long to share my energy with others.

I have some ''meetings'' lined up for the next few weeks.  I found a group of people who are wanting to start a sustainable-living-community-land-ecovillage-project-thing somewhere.  I'm planning on joining the first meeting next week.  I'm also meeting a professor from the Drama Therapy program next week, just to learn about what the scene is around here.  Tomorrow, I'm going to some introductory meeting for a ''young entrepreneur in social economy'' formation.  And saturday, there's an open house at a dance studio.  Don't know if I can dance quite yet, but please foot, let me try out that physical theater class!  Oh, and hopefully, I'll get some calls for interviews soon...

It's cool not to be working, actually.  It means lots of free time.  Besides, I got a bit of a cushion still.  I can handle it.  It gives me time to explore the city.  (I went to a lecture on Mohawk history yesterday, at the McClure museum near McGill university.)  It's just that it ain't that much fun when thermometers show minus twenty (celsius) outside, and you got a sore heel with all the fear (of a chronic injury) it brings..

TransToulouse

Narrow streets of "La ville Rose"

More Toulousian musings on the themes of gender and identity.  Though it wasn't so much musing as it was just simply… experiencing in a closer, more personal way, yet another angle of the gigantic and wonderful diversity of Life.

I knew J. from San Francisco, having witnessed his part in a Theater for Change performance at CIIS, where he studied Expressive Arts Therapy.  His story (told partly in French)  had touched me deeply that day: a story of awakening to and accepting of her/his difference.  There on stage s/he had revealed part of the personal and political struggle s/he'd gone through in this hetero-normative and dualistic gender world.  Neither woman, not quite a man.  Gay, not quite lesbian.  J. has had to define himself outside of the reference frame provided by modern society.  

When I first contacted J., via email, I asked if he preferred the use of a particular pronoun.  He said he generally goes by he, "but like[s] the feminine plural."

J. has decided to begin taking testosterone.  His voice, his smell, his pilosity is changing.  J. is really beautiful.

I contacted him because I thought he might have some good French contacts for HE: a genderstranged clown duo.  I mentioned that we had met briefly once or twice, even though he might not remember.   I said I had the impression we'd get along pretty well, since I am into clowning - I had seen him stilts-walking during the Pride parade!- and drama therapy, and anarchist theory, as well as queer and gender studies - though I'm not half as versed as the real academics are on the subject (Foucault, Butler, etc.). 

He told me he had just moved to Toulouse and didn't know many people yet.  It might be hard to get us a show, but we or I could come visit anyway.

Harvey and I somehow kept our performances of ShameNoShame! in Berlin, but I thought I'd come visit J. in Toulouse.  I asked and s/he said s/he'd be delighted to meet.  And s/he could probably ask his squat-mates if I could stay there for a few days.

Funny how two beings with so many commonalities can live in the same city (SF), without ever meeting.  

Lovely how it can happen so naturally, two years later, on the other side of the Atlantic.  Given: there was the French connection.

"You can call me when you arrive and I'll come meet you", he'd said.

I was a bit nervous.  Was I cool enough to hang with J.?  Was I cool enough to hang at the squat?

When I called he asked, "how are we going to find each other?"

"I've got a big red backpack," I answered.  "And I'll recognize you I'm sure."

"Okay.. well I'm wearing a hat and… pants… kinda like a clown.. hehe."

Place Wilson.  I'm sitting on the bench entertaining conversation with a local man, busy trying to gage whether I should - and how and where to - draw my own opinions and boundaries, as the man passes judgements on a group of homeless young adults hanging around peacefully.  He asks me where I'm staying in Toulouse.  "With a friend," I say.  "He's coming to meet me any minute."

I used the masculine pronoun repeatedly, even though something inside of me wondered how androgynous-ambiguous J. might show up to be, and what reaction this narrow-minded fellow might  have.  I was eager to find out. 

J. and I found each other immediately.  He came to greet me. Kisses on each cheeks.  He shook my interlocutor's hand; I smiled.  I didn't remember seeing J. with facial hair before.

On the way to his house he told me he was in the process of changing his legal name:  "It's very complicated here in France.  I need a note from my doctor, which states that my decision to take testosterone makes my transition irreversible."

This is what I mean when I say that I got to experience the whole thing to a more personal level.  I know a few transgender folks, yet there is something about J. that I just feel so close to.  It's an essence.  It's the woman and the man in him.  It's the complete ease with which I see him as he is, forgetting and remembering the difference according to the moment.  It's the strangeness of my own voice when I refer to myself in the feminine.

Why am I identifying as a woman?

I don't actually feel the dire need to answer the question.  Maybe that's why.

"I came to a point where I realized that the only way I would be able to grow old was if I became a man" explained J.

Can you imagine?

Perhaps many of us cannot.  And I guess that's valid.  Yet, it is so real, and so freakin' beautiful to me.. integrity in complexity… evolutionary… beyond duality… You gotta respect.

But I left my new friend now that I'm on the bus towards Sevilla, Spain.  Last leg of this three month adventure.  

Yes, I am confident saying that I made a new friend.  It was a short time, but J. and I met straight from the heart.  The connection is undoubtedly timeless.  
Once again I met someone who's in a similar place: out of San Francisco and hoping to create a good life in a new place, hoping to share wisdom and care with the world, painfully seeing the many imperfections of this neoliberal system and trying to create something else, something better, more sustainable and ethical, at the periphery. 

But we didn't only talk.  We also danced.  First, he invited me to join his contact improvisation class, on wednesday evening.  And then again on Friday, him and his partner asked if I'd be interested in "helping out" and come to the studio to rehearse a session of "movement exploration." 

Because you see, J.'s girl has a passion ... for Butoh!  
Together they are crafting a workshop she will be offering at a festival in London.

Help out?  ah! ah! ah! Amen!

I met them at the studio, and then J. and I got a private Butoh class…

Connecting in movement, in breathing, in presence and exploration, in vulnerability and in freedom.


Butoh is a dance of in-between.  It's a dance of being with becoming... of being with transition.
How perfect.  How powerful.


---

"Parlas occitan?"
"Una soleta lenga sufis pas jamai!"

I also meant to write about Occitan, or Langue d'Oc, which is a latine language spoken  in eight regions of Southern France, as well as twelve alpine valleys in Italy, and in parts of Spain.  (It is quite close to Catalan.)
It was the language of the troubadours and poets, and it was widely spoken until the 14th century.  But then came the systematic imposition of the French language over the territory; first, when the king of France began to "unify" (read: conquer) the nation, and again with the French Revolution, because diversity of languages came to be seen as a threat to the Republic.
I'm just so fascinated with how languages morph and mix and become extinct...

Naivete & Nativeness

How often do we think about Native peoples around the globe?  How often do we ponder the concept and history of their realities?

How often do we feel guilty about the deeds of our ancestors?

I want to see (help lead?) group drama therapy being used in a form of "Healing the Wounds of History" fashion. I also dream of seeing drama therapy being used at the U.N.

This is where I know that I am an eternal dreamer.

Strength and Fear

Love and Fear

Fear

and shame, and guilt.

Acceptance

Patience.  How much?

Resilience.

Check out the work of Armand Volkas:

http://www.livingartscenter.org//Healing-Wounds-of-History/Page/About-Healing-The-Wounds-of-History_14.htm