Life After Leaven w/ Tamice Spencer-Helms
As a follow up to her debut book, Faith Unleavened: The Wilderness Between Trayvon Martin & George Floyd, Tamice Spencer-Helms is joined by folx from all walks of life and society to talk about picking up the shattered fragments of a faith we used to know. Life After Leaven is a podcast for those seeking to heal from the damage caused by toxic Christianity and rebuild something new and life giving in its place.
Life After Leaven w/ Tamice Spencer-Helms
Poly Wanna What? w/ E. Corry Kole
Have you ever questioned the role of communication and clarity in shaping our identity and relationships? This intriguing exploration with E Corey Cole, a dear friend of mine, brings to light the intricacies of non-binary identity and polyamory, particularly how these aspects of personal identity have been influenced by western Christianity. We unravel the spiritual world of mysticism, psychedelics, and crystals, as invaluable tools in gaining insight into non-binary identity, and discuss the power of cultural humility, the necessity of de-colonizing our minds, and the journey to connect more deeply with fellow humans, varied cultures, and the land.
Navigating non-binary identity and polyamory is not without challenges; the social cost can be great. So, how does one maneuver this journey? E Corey Cole shares personal experiences, shedding light on their path to self-discovery, the role of rituals in marking their transformation, and the balancing act of individualism and collectivism. We delve into the potential impact of gentle parenting on children and how non-conventional parenting styles can shape a child's worldview.
Our conversation also uncovers the power of rituals, like poetry and autobiographical books, in initiating healing and personal transformation. E Corey Cole offers profound insights into these processes, illuminating the beauty of participating in each other's stories. So, join us on this journey, as we peel back the layers of non-binary identity and polyamory, challenging preconceived ideas, and stepping into a world of self-exploration, acceptance, and understanding.
Life After Leaven is sponsored by Sub:Culture Incorporated, a 501c3 committed to eradicating cultural, social, spiritual, financial, and academic barriers for Black College Students. If you are interested in giving a tax deductible donation toward our work with black college students, you can do that here. Thank you for helping us ensure temporary roadblocks don't become permanent dead ends for students with marginalized identities. You can follow us on Instagram: @subc_incorporated, Facebook: facebook.com/subcultureinco, and Twitter: @subcultureinco1.
Our episodes are written and produced by Tamice Namae Speaks LLC.
Don’t miss out on what Tamice has planned next! Follow her on Instagram and Twitter, or subscribe to her Patreon page.
On the other side of toxic Christianity. I found myself faced with one question, now, what this podcast is about that question? We have conversations with folks who are asking themselves the same things. We're picking up the pieces of a fractured and fragmented faith. We're finding treasure in what the church called trash, beauty and solidarity in people and places we were told to fear, reject and dismiss. I'm Tamise Spencer-Helms, and this is Life After Leaven. What's up everybody? Welcome back to this episode of Life After Leaven. I'm your host, tamise Spencer-Helms, and I'm joined by my homie. You probably already heard them speak on the first season, so we're not going to do all the things we typically do in an episode, but E is here. I'm going to have you introduce yourself, tell us who you are, what you do, and then we're going to jump in and just talk like friends. Okay, because we are.
Speaker 2:We're so, we're so happy. We're soul friends. I go by E Corey Cole.
Speaker 2:I live in Rhode Island, a originally unwelcome guest on the unseated lands of the Narragansett and the Wampanoag people. I love these lands and I'm very grateful to be on them, building a relationship with them. I am a birth and death doula. I am also working in higher ed right now, but doing diversity, equity and inclusion work, as many of us do when we're recycling our trauma from evangelicalism Indeed indeed and trying to make a way in the world. I feel very complicated about DEI. Maybe we can get into that, even on the pod. But I'm also grateful to, mostly for the people that I advocate, for the students, the staff, the faculty I work with, and for LGBTQ folks in a Catholic context right now. So I'm a parent. I have two beautiful tiny humans that I co-parent with my ex and I live with my platonic life partner in this funky little house where we raise our kids together. So I have a beautiful life and I'm making my way. I'm making my way after years of white evangelicalism.
Speaker 2:So, I'm glad to be with you.
Speaker 1:You are. I think you're one of my favorite people to talk to because we've known each other through so many moons of life, and so there's a couple of things that I wouldn't want to have anyone else speak about besides you. But I want to talk about some issues. This season, obviously, is about queerness. The title is we're here and we're Queer, so we've covered a ton of stuff this season, but what I want to talk about is something that we haven't touched on, which is polyamory right, and this journey towards becoming non-binary or coming out as non-binary, which I have experienced with as well. So I want to just talk about it. Tell us a little bit about how you got there. You and I, a few years back, had conversations about poly, so talk to me a little bit about what you went from, who you were sort of mourning the first time we had you on the podcast and who you are now. Give us that story, that trajectory, okay.
Speaker 2:What an invitation. Thank you, you're welcome. Well, I think that if there's one through line through all of these changes, it has been understanding white Western Christianity's role in colonization and peeling back that layer. And when you peel back the layer that the church as I knew, it was like a nested doll inside of a much bigger system and a much bigger project. It really does impact every area of life, including who we love and how we love, and so I was just broaching this conversation in a very funny intergenerational moment with my mom and my aunt and just sharing that. I think that our generation in particular is chasing some very old ways of being and resurrecting ways that humans have always sensed or known could be possible. So when we think about polyamory, I don't think about polyamory as a more evolved state of humanity. I think a lot of poly people can be a little obnoxious.
Speaker 2:However, I do think it takes some consciousness to get there and simply put, simply placed, polyamory is about loving multiple people at the same time.
Speaker 2:And for me, that doesn't mean explicitly sexual connections. Some people may look on and see polyamory as a way to have all the cake and eat it too. What I'm learning in very I want to be clear. I'm new here. I'm new here on so many fronts, but what I'm learning is that these are ways of being that are very old, that also require an incredible amount of communication clarity clarity of knowing what you want and clarity of letting other folks know and constantly checking in. So I am and in my polycule, which is the network of loving relationships in my life. Some of them are romantic and platonic queer relationships.
Speaker 2:Some of them have sexual dynamics to the partnership, some of them are comets like I'll see you when I see you, and some of them are daily relationships. So what it does, I think it blows open which it queers, the lines around commitment and fidelity and community. And I would say, like most things in my life, I learned or became attracted to poly by first critiquing it and being really pissed about it.
Speaker 1:Wow, wait. I'm so interested to hear this because I think one of the ways that we talked about it was it just made sense. So you're saying that you're new here, but I'm wondering, as I think about you being queer or being non-binary, am I really new here?
Speaker 2:or am.
Speaker 1:I just out in the world.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:And how does that feel for you? Was it something that when you heard this sort of I've talked about it before, but like when something isn't on the menu you can't order it right. So was it something to where you hear about polyamory and it's like that makes sense of me? Is that kind of how you experienced it?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think when I first started listening to and engaging with content from people who are polyamorous online, it felt like a bit like a homecoming, of like oh, I understand what you're saying and I understand the capacity you're talking about. I think I've always been and we've talked about this I've always been someone with the capacity to have many loves and really like a very deep, intimate relationships with people. And because of being in white evangelicalism, romantic or sexual dynamics to those relationships probably hovered under the surface and were not named and certainly not embodied. And so when I say I was pissed about and like annoyed with this concept, I remember someone in one of my church communities who was very passionate as a single person of challenging the norms of what intimacy looked like for single people, and what I would say now is they were getting into some queer shit. But it was so offensive to my spirit in two ways One, because of the cognitive dissonance of being told that that was inappropriate and sinful, and then the second was because I wanted that. That's what I wanted. I wanted us to be able to challenge heteronormativity and the worship of marriage and the ways we center.
Speaker 2:Romantic connection is the only or the most important, and I think a lot of us are coming to the consciousness that if you put all your eggs in the romantic basket, you will surely be disappointed. That is not the, it's not the only ingredient to a fruitful life. So there are many, many ways to connect with people and relationships can ebb and flow. So I think, if I'm thinking about it, that if we're going always back to the characteristics of white supremacy around control and power and being able to track and property comes in here but maybe we'll get that eventually and the passing on of property, private property being a core tenant of this whole system, I get why you're socialized to fear the blurring or the combining or the crossing of boundaries of different relationships.
Speaker 2:And the way I found myself in polyamorous circles was by listening to my body, and that's another thing we're dissuaded from and really getting critical about what makes me come alive and makes me hopeful and makes me feel expansive and I find for myself, a Polyamorous relationship structure helps me prioritize the agency of everyone, including myself, mm-hmm, that I am primarily in a relationship with myself and with others. Wow, and Monogamy has not led me to that path and I think that's that's part of that is trauma and I'm very open to that being healed and I might find myself in another Monogamous relationship in my life.
Speaker 1:Wow, wow. That polyamory is first about you being in a relationship with yourself is mind-blowing to me. And it makes sense because I remember when we talked about it and you said something to the effect of I just have, I've always had a capacity for love, a deep, large, big capacity for love, and I was like, yes, this makes so much sense, like, and it just was such an interesting shift in my mind because it made sense for, for someone that I know, like you, who has so much Wisdom and depth and ability to relate to folks, I'm kind of like, yeah, this is something that I Wasn't even thinking of, polly, like that. But now that I actually know someone, it's like, yeah, it's not what it's being caricature, caricature to be. So it's like, with that, now I know, but maybe the audience doesn't know, was it that first, or was it the gender journey first? What, what, what precipitated what?
Speaker 2:Great question. They were both happening at the same time, but I was not ready for the social costs of polyamory.
Speaker 2:So, I do think there's a really bizarre.
Speaker 2:It's an.
Speaker 2:It's a bizarre experience in a white body that benefits from a lot of these systems to Keep coming out as more and more pathologized identities, to come out as queer initially I'm like classic, I'm like bisexual to lesbian, to non-binary, trans, non-binary pipeline and I I think, with with each coming out, is a Exposure to more vulnerability, right, exposure to more resource vulnerability. And you and I are both Business owners, your nonprofit I'm a business owner like trying to figure out how do we do this in a world that Really despises us, right, despises your blackness and despises my queerness. And so holding and for you, your queerness and your blackness, like holding all these intersections together. I Think I really appreciate your observation that these are not like are we new here? Because I think for me, and something my spiritual director and I have named, is like it's not that there's a seed inside of me that now gets room, there's an oak inside of me that now is like being revealed. So that can be a very Shocking experience for people who have known me when I was hiding Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Indeed, I feel like that's probably the hardest part about the non-binary like leaning more and more into my masculinity and being so excited and so at home in my skin and having people's reactions be like well, like, wait a minute, like we don't, we don't know you like this but people love me or like, yeah, you've always been this person.
Speaker 2:I'm glad you're here, I Hope it's okay to say I remember seeing pictures of your, your first wedding, and feeling that dissonance and and feeling like I was watching you perform something you felt you were supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1:Absolutely did 100%. Now, like I know that that we both actually have we have exes, we have kids from our exit navigating. Well, you're navigating co-parenting. I'm navigating something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Lord.
Speaker 1:So so what if you don't mind talking about that, the beauty in the story with you and your ex? I Would love for you to share anything you'd love to share about that, because I think it's so. Here's why I want to talk about that, and again, we're having a conversation, so there's not really a topic. But what I love about it is like when people like you're saying my life is so full, it is so Rich and it's beautiful, my relationships are deep and Life-giving and at the same time, there are these elements that are just thorny all around my life.
Speaker 1:But I've been thinking about how people, when they really come into who they are and when they really love a person, it's almost like you're very excited to see that person thrive and come into who they are and finally have their own freedom and stuff like that. And so that's what I've watched with you and your ex like just in that whole journey, and I would love for you to share it, just because I think people need hope. I think you know some folks are kind of considering, like, do we stay together? He's like in his 50s, is a trans woman, so he's still using he him.
Speaker 1:Yeah they're going, they're having these conversations yeah, he's that, he's a she, yeah, and his wife and him have been married for like 38 years, right, and so they're navigating this and and his conversation was we love each other so much that we can't imagine getting in the way Of each other's freedom. And so they're like do we, are we roommates? Like how do? Yeah, yeah, each other right. So yeah, talk to me about that.
Speaker 2:Okay, which I will. I just want to say, like, if we can, if we can be open with poking monogamy and seeing what's there a situation like that, there are infinite possibilities for connection. And I think, if I think of toxic monogamy, what it does, and again, all this through a white, western, colonizing perspective, again around private property and the tracking of it and it going from generation to generation, like those are the primary ways that marriage as we know it was constructed in a political way, it's wild.
Speaker 2:It's wild, right, right. So if you, just if you start to poke that, what is? There's so many possibilities, like there is a multiverse where I wouldn't even have had to get divorced if that felt attainable and it did not for us, and that's okay and that's what ended up happening. But there are worlds that people are co-creating right now where kids live in a household with their parents and their parents have their partners in their lives and there is no divorce process. And it does blow open our creativity to co-create the world we want to.
Speaker 2:And I wanna add, I'm quite a bit of a relationship anarchist because, as I've pulled on this thread, I define poly as the ability to love multiple people at the same time. That's what we all do, that's what you do. You are in a monogamous romantic relationship, but you, literally you also have a huge capacity of love we all do. And where it gets very taboo is around sexual partners and romantic loves and because of the ways that that activates our attachment systems, where we don't know that we will be secure.
Speaker 2:So I do wanna point the listeners to there isn't I wanna make sure that I tag them correctly there's an amazing creator on Instagram and on on TikTok, decolonizing Love and yeah, millie and Nick and they educate on polyamory and how European colonization changed how we love and their content is great. They're interracial, neuro, spicy people doing poly and teaching us so much so just wanna highlight that resource. But many of the ways that I have learned to relate to people through a polyamorous framework I apply to my relationship with my ex-husband and his partner, which is to say that more is possible and that we need to be direct in our communication around our boundaries, and so what we have navigated is teamwork. We are all a team. My kids, they proudly say they have three homes Mommy's house, daddy's house and Mimi and Papa's my parents' home.
Speaker 2:And my ex-husband is still very close with my parents. They are a core resource in our survival and in parenting the kids and helping us that we are so fortunate not everyone has that kind of assistant and my ex and I are very different people and part of one of the things that he said to me that I hold on to at the end of our marriage I caused a lot of harm at the end, did not act in integrity, and so there was quite a repair process ahead of us and he told me it wasn't the harm that you caused that taint our marriage. It was when you told me you couldn't be your full self in this marriage. And that's love, frankly. Like that is the love I love.
Speaker 2:Belle Hook's definition she just puts it into words like love is my investment in your spiritual wellbeing, in your wholeness. Like and that doesn't mean a religious, you know sense of wellbeing. It's about your integration and your flourishing and I take that into every partnership in my life and that means that I hold people with an open hand and that kind of detachment is not an avoid. I'm sure it can feed avoidant practices right. You could fear that way and be like I'm just. You can come in and out whenever, I don't care. You know like no, I care.
Speaker 2:I care I'm invested, but ultimately I have to hold all of my relationships with an open hand to know that my love is an investment in who you are and who you are becoming, and if that means that we will no longer share proximity, that we will escalate and de-escalate our relationship as needed infinite possibilities. But what I will say, what is necessary is a healthy amount of ego death and ego dissolution.
Speaker 1:Ooh gosh, the ego death machine.
Speaker 2:Yes so, and part of that ego death. So case in point with my ex-husband and his partner is is, for me, being secure in my role as a parent in my child's life and knowing that no other relationship has to threaten that that relationships add value. So having another loving adult in my kid's life is a beautiful and a good thing and I think the way that we set it up at the time both my ex-husband and I we both had girlfriends, which was really sweet for a period of time, and we both met each other's partners privately.
Speaker 2:So I was not there when Chris met my then-girlfriend and was not there when I met his girlfriend and his partner and we established relationship and build relationship and have honored direct communication and boundaries have been crossed and you don't know when your boundaries are gonna be, crossed, so when they are, we commit to communicating them.
Speaker 2:That changes. How often are we gathering? Where are we gathering? When are we gathering? I'm playing the long game here for intimacy and connection and for the kids. So I do think, like the polyamory has given me the gift of really examining my own attachment system and understanding when I'm tripped up and what's going on, and being really open to expansive creativity, that there are many different kinds of connections that are possible in relationships. Whew.
Speaker 1:I just wanna hold that for a sec Because it's just it's. I really do believe that, like where we're going in society, the imagination for where we're going is just starting to bud and to me, if I find it really exciting like Ellison and I talk a lot about like where things could possibly go they kind of think like it's a returning to the earth and I agree, I'm like I think Harlem's generation is gonna create ways to, I don't know, have oxygen somehow manifesting out of a hologram. It's like it's something I just feel like the creativity and the technology and the anti-racism and the decolonization, like I think all of that stuff could come together to create something beautiful and, at the end of the day, like this is all a lesson in imagination, like all of it is about and it's so funny because this morning I still I'm wearing this light jacket, but like this morning I woke up in it and what popped in my mind was that passage that talks about how there are many more things I need to tell you, but you can't bear them right now, which is a weird thing to think about, because what their teacher was telling them was like your imagination cannot stretch to the things that I could tell you are true and reality and you can't bear them. So there's two things happening.
Speaker 1:There's way more than we got in scripture, and so also Jesus sets it up that there's stuff I'm gonna say beyond this right, and so to me that feels so exciting because I haven't had a hard time navigating new spiritual experiences, navigating new language, navigating new containers and grounding those in my past and grounding those in my history and grounding those and even almost like my container comes with me. Like you know, I can have a view of all of these things and they make a complete sense to me, even given, like the past worldview I held in a lot of ways, or at least the non-white one. So I think that this is helpful and you're saying what I hear you saying is like the decolonization journey is actually important. Before you ever enter into this sort of sexuality and gender journey, would you agree with?
Speaker 2:that? Yes, I would. I wanna read you a poem, If that's okay, just hitting on what you just said, and then we can jump. I would love to jump back more into that, and this is from a German poet, no less, reiner Maria Erilke, and this is a poem that I have rewritten many times and painted, and it's right on my mirror, so I look at it every day, and this has been the thesis that has carried me the last two to five years of deconstruction and rebirth Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them, and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Speaker 1:And that'll do it in civilized way.
Speaker 2:Give the earth Literally, and I love your tie to Jesus' words because Jesus was a mystic. I think the spiritual journey I've been on is about mysticism and poets are mystics. I am a poet, I am a writer and an artist, and I love the weird ones. I love the ones who prophesy. Sometimes I wonder if John was on psychedelics when he wrote Revelation. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know the word that's used there for what John is on and also Peter, when Peter has Peter's vision, the ecstasy is like where we get the phrase ecstasy. Like they were, there was something else going on there and I mean people don't talk about it, but mandrakes and all that kind of stuff, like that stuff was like psychedelics, like they really it wasn't. People just don't look into that stuff. That's why I'm like you know what? It makes sense to me, because even this is a side note, but thinking about like spiritual practice and stuff, like I've started to get into crystals and all those types of things and like, yep, I got my ring. Oh, my goodness, you're Rose Quartz, I got Rose Quartz soon.
Speaker 2:Cute pictures and Jesus loves us.
Speaker 1:Indeed, and it's so funny because, like when you read Revelation 4, right, and I had to memorize it when I lived in Kansas City, you know, I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day and I heard a trumpet and he goes up and he looks and he's like and behold, I saw one. I saw a throne and on the one on the throne was one seated and he looked like or the one that was seated doesn't even genderize, the one that was sitting there looked like Jasper and Sardias and Carnillion.
Speaker 1:And then there's an emerald rainbow. I'm like he is talking about crystals.
Speaker 2:It's all connected, baby. It is all connected.
Speaker 1:I'm like y'all keep trying to say that this is like what you've kind of deduced down to why Jesus, but like he's describing crystals, which to me like going on that journey of understanding crystals and how they work and what they represent, is so interesting to me because now even that passage has way more meaning, because now that I know what Jasper and Sardias and Carnillion and emerald means, like the way that they function as crystals, I'm like yo, john is trying to tell you so much more about the Godhead than like there's going to be this violent uprising at the end of days, Like this formation here that he's seeing. That is like all you have are what Lightning's thunderings, voices. You've got vibration, vibration, baby. You've got lights and you've got crystals Right in Revelation 4. I'm saying like it's really funny to think about how so much of I had to take off my shoes, I had to touch the ground.
Speaker 1:I'm just saying like there's so many things that that we have happened upon in saying you know, I'll speak for myself happened upon in the name of leaving white Jesus. It brought so much life. Yes, and it's like, oh my God, like I don't I still haven't had to throw away Jesus, like you know, like not that Jesus is throwing, but you know what I mean. It's like, whoa, you're here too, you're buying this door and that door and this door. And it's like, oh my God, like we were in a very small system. Yes, yes.
Speaker 2:It was very earlier this year I worked up the courage to do my first tarot card reading experience and yeah, I grew up in a castle, you know. You know the level of barrier to exploring any of that kind of spirituality and on my first pull, one of it was like an Oracle deck with a different mostly, I believe, hindu gods and goddesses, and it talked about Shekinah. And I was cracking up because I'm like Shekinah in this card was about the divine feminine, a very, very powerful spirit, and I'm all thinking about a Shekinah glory and I'm like yo, we've really like, we've really stole this shit, yes, and repackaged it, but it's, there's something. I mean Richard Rohr, you know this white Catholic mystic, he's talked about it too. He's like the more you fold into love and suffering, the more universal this gets.
Speaker 2:And it's not in like a white middle class unitarian flattening way. I don't. It's not a coexist bumper sticker. I'm not about that. It is about distinctiveness and flavor and texture and mosaic. But I think the cultural humility that I'm experiencing, as I encounter parts of the divine that were baptized in one form of language and I see them apparent in another culture, like that connects me to other humans and other cultures into the land, and, yeah, I. So I think that that journey and the decolonizing, so sucking out the poison, life after 11.
Speaker 2:To your point, like I guess, as a white person and descendant of colonizers, I always have my I'm always looking over my shoulder to be vigilant. If there's something I want to be hyper vigilant about, I want to be hyper vigilant about recreating whiteness wherever I go. So I think when it comes to polyamory and my gender journey, I always say like I've been coming out as trans, non binary for about a year, but I always say that my socialization as a white woman will always with me. I don't get to evolve out of the political role that white women have to play and upholding oppression and anti blackness. So that feels very important as a white queer person that my whiteness is the heaviest thing about me.
Speaker 1:And that's just reality.
Speaker 2:It's like being in an AA meeting, you know. It's like it's just being really sober about what I carry in my body and what I'm complicit in. So the gender expansiveness I think I fear that it can sometimes be a way that white folks are trying to distance ourselves from our own complicity in oppressive shit.
Speaker 1:Oh man but and but and it is.
Speaker 2:Also. It is good to get really clear about who you are and where you begin and where you end, and I feel pretty gender expansive and inclusive. I think there will be a day where all pronouns feel fine for me. She, her pronouns have felt pretty like quite dysphoric for a little bit, and so I've just been asking my community to use they pronouns and I present it in a pretty fluid way and this is the best way to address me for now, because I am. I am nothing if not committed to revision for the sake of authenticity and people know.
Speaker 1:you know that though.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like I feel like that's, that's what I've been on for and it's like you know, just thinking about, my new epistemology in life is honesty, oh beautiful, Just radical honesty and just be honest, tell the truth, like you know as much as I know to be true, as as as I know the truth today, and like I feel like that's been so helpful because thinking about, obviously you know my partner's transmask and when we met they were using a different name, they were using a different, even presenting differently in a way, and so it was like it's so beautiful to watch someone like you're saying the oak inside of someone finally have the space to stand and to be.
Speaker 1:It's just been like it's just been a very beautiful thing to watch because it's like, oh, this is you, like this is you, and you're getting to see like someone become themselves, like become who they, who they've always been, because they have the safety and the permission to do that. That's right. It's been a really, really beautiful journey. I just feel like there's there is a ton of stuff that you can talk about.
Speaker 1:I love the idea of us. You said something about the more you lean into love and suffering, the more universal this becomes, and something about that, when you were talking about holding your whiteness and being cognizant about that, and it almost feels like, okay, so there is the solidarity right, Because black people are constantly reminded of how they live and move in a space and so for a person to say, I understand my whiteness is currency, the New Evangelicals book club yesterday like came up with that phrase.
Speaker 1:They were like because it. I was like you know, I was trying to figure out what phrase do we use? Do we use like technology? Do we use property? We weren't sure, but they were like we should use currency because it encompasses all of that, encompasses class. So, thinking through all of those things and going, the more you strip that, the more things fold into themselves and you get to this idea of God is, all in all and all, correct, correct, correct. I mean where else are you going to go from? I mean you. I mean like you know, yeah, I know.
Speaker 2:I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between the individual and the collective and I think what I've really had the privilege of learning from collectivist cultures, from indigenous folks and leaders about our collective role and the ways that collectivism can obscure the individual in ways that are harmful and the ways that individualism can obscure the collective in ways that are harmful. And I guess for me on the gender journey it has really been about just understanding where I begin and where I end, that I'm a, I'm a limited, um, human being, um, I. There have always been ways that woman, this has chafed against something in my spirit as not quite right. Um, and you, you, you interrogate that right. You're like, oh, is this like my internalized misogyny? Is this this, is it that? And I think just coming, I mean a local feminine is like one of the most beautiful prophets in this area. Everything that they have to say about gender makes me weep, especially because they are rooted in such an abolitionist love ethic that I don't care very often. Like that, they talk about the gendered world as violent and the ways that it does violent to cis people and it does violence to all of us to not be able to just play Like I shaved all my hair off on the spring equinox this year in total ritual and ceremony.
Speaker 2:It was witchy and Jesusy as all get out, and I had my beloveds in the room with me. Months prior I had just um ended a relationship with one of the loves of my life, who I still love deeply first queer relationship and I knew that I needed an external marker of the internal shifts and that it would be like a sacrament for me as a mystic to sacrifice the feminine. Like I had some good. I had, you know, some good white girl hair, the swoopy swoopies, and I felt very sexy with that hair and it was a shield and it was a socialized thing. It was a way to fawn towards powerful people. Like it in my own little white way. Like shaving all my hair off has confronted me with a lot of isms, a lot of privilege and a lot of ways that, especially in my workplace, I'm like physically embodying the thing that they despise.
Speaker 2:Like I am becoming more close to a thing that is despised and that is so fucking powerful to experience in your body and to say, like I, I am on a journey to the root and I need somatic, ritual and tangible ways to measure that and experience that. And maybe this is like a little masochistic, but I was just like I need to not be able to hide, and it does feel very exposing and very horrible to play with your gender expression and to do so publicly and my kids carry grief over it. I think all kids do Like.
Speaker 2:I've heard stories of kids whose dads shaved their beard off and kids are weeping. They're like Daddy, no, you know. Like kids feel safety and security and a consistent sense of their parent. And my kids are like, when is your hair going to grow back? We miss this version of you and I have to believe that I am modeling for them something, something courageous, that it is okay. It is okay to take these things on in your body and it's okay to play and to figure out who you are and, yeah, they in that. And I think it's important to talk about the kids in this journey and I this is only one perspective on like, as they get older they'll tell their own stories, but they in their little lives have had to make room in their worldview for a lot of different possibilities.
Speaker 2:You know and they hop to in a way that's very interesting. My four year old was like it's really cool that we call you mom E, because it has your name in it E mom. E you know, like they just find creative ways to connect with me in the way that I am sharing myself with them, and I was. They had gotten me a Mother's Day book with from Bluey that is about Bluey's mom and you know she her pronouns through the whole book and Parker was like correcting the pronouns as we went.
Speaker 2:He's like, well, for you, it would be that they get on the floor and play with me. I like never do, but you know I was like, oh, that's amazing. So just these little flexible people that teach me a lot no-transcript. I think my kids in this time in my life are teaching me a lot period. The way that they move through their emotions and then snap back. They're just like, yeah, that was a feeling that was brutal.
Speaker 1:I'm good now, like yeah, yeah, we're doing that with Harlem the attachment style parenting and gentle parenting, and it's. It's really incredible to watch someone feel they live in a house where there is no shame allowed, you know, and to see the level of confidence and like just life that she lives with when she goes out of our house. I mean, harlem is a life force Like there's no other way to describe her she it's like raising a bonfire, you know, like she is fire and and I love it and she's. She's thoughtful and deep and courageous and emotional and loud and she just all of these things to just watch like and you kind of, as a parent, you're like you're witnessing something very holy, in my opinion. I'm witnessing a person become themself on a number of levels in our house and thinking about how she corrects everybody.
Speaker 1:My nobi is not a she, it's they, and it's just like duh, like, and it's been so interesting to watch her respond to all of this stuff and be like it's not that big of a deal for her Hop to hop to, it's just like no, they're they. And like the things that she's been exposed to at her age and like all of Ellison's like chosen family, is deaf or hard of hearing, or or went to Gallaudet and then on top of that, they're all. Most of them are all queer. So all Harlem is around is conversations about access, conversations about queerness, conversations about different ways of doing spirituality and life, and it's just been such a beautiful thing to just watch. It's magical. It is magical.
Speaker 2:You know, and look at like frankly, look at you in the middle of that ecosystem, like, and your countenance, I think the things that have been shed like literally, like when I think of you, I think of this to this, which I don't know if the listeners are not gonna see that, but I'm just like contorting, kind of like a cat. Cat contorting my body inward and then exhaling outward, and that, I think, was the point I was making a little bit back is, when you start decolonizing, you understand that my role as an individual in the collective is to have a clear sense of who I am and to fully embody that, that that is loving to my community. And then I communicate my boundaries and my needs and mute and we then are tied in a web of mutual care and connection with each other and everyone deserves that. Everyone deserves that self determination and that agency. And it's not and I think where whiteness got it so wrong was like we're just going to prioritize these people being able to live and move and have their being at the expense and exploitation of everyone else, and that's wrong, it's so wrong.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, just the I. So I think the secure, the secure self in a white body is to say I do take up space, but I take up a very particular amount of space. Like I don't self flagellate right False humility and try to contort myself to somehow atone. I do repair and make reparation and I do take up the space that I take up and it's exactly this much so that you can also have exactly this much, you know and everyone can embody what we're meant to be. There's this kind of read another poem Sorry, I'm full. Of course. This is from Audrey Lord. Oh, yeah, and it is when she was pregnant with her daughter. I'm sorry if it takes me a moment to pull it. Yeah, it's called now that I am forever with child and Audrey Lord what a saint right.
Speaker 2:Saint like. I yeah, when I it's. It can be hard as a white person to find good ancestors and I don't. I don't get to claim Audrey as my ancestor, but as someone who mentors me, absolutely who I get to look at and learn from.
Speaker 2:So this is, this is her poem, now that I am forever with child. How the days went while you were blooming within me. I remember, each upon each, the swelling, changed planes of my body and how you first fluttered, then jumped and I thought it was my heart. How the days wound down and the turning of winter. I recall, with you growing heavy against the wind, I thought. Now her hands are formed and her hair has started to curl. Now her teeth are done, now she sneezes. Then the seed opened and I bore you one morning, just before spring, my head rang like a fiery piston. My legs were towers between which a new world was passing. Since then, I can only distinguish one thread within running hours you flowing through selves toward you.
Speaker 1:Hmm, Well say la my God, my God Wow.
Speaker 2:There's a beautiful biographical book that I'm reading about people who are parents, mostly cis women who are mothers, but it includes essays on Audrey Lord and Alice Walker and how most of them were poly navigating their creativity, their parenting, their sex lives and romantic lives, and their wholeness in the freaking 40s and 50s, like, yes, you know, like in that backdrop and that poem you running, like through selves, to you feels like such good medicine for the, for these evolutions. You know and what we're talking about.
Speaker 2:And for me, that's the gender journey, that's exploring polyamory, it's queerness, it's vocation, you know, and it's finding my place in the family of things. It's finding that I have a role in the collective, and it's not always about me. I get to participate in other people's stories and it's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing.
Speaker 1:And you are a beautiful person. I love talking to you and there are like so many things we could talk about. Like it's, you'll be back, you'll probably be regular, so I love it. Thank you for this vestige of wisdom. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:It's so good to be with you. Love you, friend. I love you.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening. To paint your money in your heart is donate to Subquatcher Inc and clear the path for black students today.