Fire, Walk With Me and While You're Here Could You Get Me Some Ice-Cream?

I just got off the phone with one of my fellow spirit-travelers, Kat Nas, who was preparing her fire-walking workshop in Long Island. She’s going to take a gang of New York men and women and show them how to break arrows in half by jamming them point-wise into their own necks. She’s very brave, that one. Kat and I used to do the S/m circuit in Manhattan; it’s what many of us stumbled into on our search for expansion into freedom and bliss. Now she workshops fire, and I stick myself with hormones. I jest, sort of; my freedom and bliss, my dive into sublime Consciousness continues organically, and my body is like a crystal in a kaleidoscope, rearranging into newer, sometimes just different, glorious calls of love to my creator.

I know, don’t gag. I really feel like that though, like I’m fractally imploding into Love…I’m typing this and I looked up at this Klee print I have and it started expanding and moving with my third eye. That’s just how it is for me. Shut the fuck up. Get your own print if you don’t believe me.

Two weeks ago, I was deeply concerned about the shape of my body. Dysmorphia plagued me. I was a dolphin trapped in a tuna net. These breasts, these thighs, this overall inclination to a certain, dare I say, Zaftig physiognomy? Oh this female fat threatened to smuffocate me, headlock me with larded thighs; I was half-nelsoned with swinging underarm ladyfat, choking on a mouthful of Secret, bitch-slapped by two mammoth teats. Could this really be my body? How could I possibly go on, much less leave my room, if this was the form I took?

This was a whole ‘nother level in self-loathing. Of course, dysmorphia is an American illness. How am I different from someone who has come to believe they cannot have love with their current nose, cannot find a job without a more substantive bosom, cannot go on one more day with this wretched body, this betrayer, this Thing – what did I ever do to deserve this Thing?!

Yes, arguably the transgendered host their own insidious breed of discomfort, and perhaps it is righteous even. But I’m old, and I want peace.

The fire-walker learns to transcend, not pain, but space/time. The universe will accommodate this, is what I’m told. The fire-walker, the one who rends arrows on her neck, is the one who has transmuted her terror into joy, who has shifted energetically into a state of willingness to meet some goal. This is my goal: to walk twenty feet on burning coals. This is my brain: how the fuck am I going to walk on fucking coals without scorching my fucking feets!? How am I going to be a Sam-man if I’m blanketed with delicious womanly lady-lumpage? How the fuckity fuck!???

Transmute the terror into joy.

Well that’s easy for you to say, Tranny, is what I believe you’ll be muttering. Let me tell you what happened, allow me to guide you on my coal-walk…

Chapter One: Whereupon our lad reaches for his whaling knife, to scrape the blubber from the mammal’s skin.

I had a thought. It looked like this: if I could control my food, if I could diet, if I could drop twenty pounds, I’d have NO TITS. Because it’s true; I wouldn’t. I’ve been skinny, and I can tell you empirically “I have no tits.” I would have no mams, and no hips. Easy peasey. When you’re on crystal meth!

Chapter Two: Our hapless hero is daunted by this Sisyphean task, and so regroups for a more...economical solution.

I realized, no matter what I did, how I “controlled” any bit of my body, there would always be something. I was never going to have peace with this Thing. That’s a stunning piece of information, that’s very useful. It means I need to make some peace, find a place of ease in this…me…this corporeal construct.

JL said to me “You’re on a journey. I used to think ‘when I lose this 10 pounds, when I get this job, when I have this money’ in some future I would be happy. But you’re where you’re at right now, and in this moment you can’t change that. Be happy for Sam! He’s changing, every day! Be sweet with this person!”

I didn’t throw up in my mouth. You can hear certain things from certain people. JL is one of them.

I’m standing on the coals but I don’t feel them now. I can’t make the world “see me for who I am” – when do we ever see one another for who we are, except by intimacy or by accident? I have to love this little Sam who is on this scary, wondrous journey, who likes the wind and the tumult yet wishes it weren’t so tempting to hide beneath the bed.

This body, it’s a body. It does wonderful things – it makes all kinds of pleasure, and noises which I like, and movements, although last week it threw up out of its butt. I love this body. If it loses weight, cool, that’s awesome. Two less things to worry about. Perhaps. If it doesn’t, I’m still me, still making toast of the soles of my dogs, watching and laughing aloud because there’s no meat sizzle, no blistering, and you’re still holding my hand, which means we’re both standing in the middle of a motherfucking fire, yo, and look, look what’s happening right now. We just alchemically transmuted pain into joy.