I am the poet of the Body and I am the poet of the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the latter I translate into new tongue.
- Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Do you feel the earth beneath your feet? Roll, gentle, roll-around and touch the contours of place – what does here feel like? Bumps and grooves and grassthings, the esse essaying essence over the easysoil. Feel the roots dig tender into the sense between bone and home.

Do you feel your feet above the earth? What does my flesh feel like? What body do I inhabit? Ghostly post-COVID simulacrum dance eloquent in the dreamscape that blurs the Atman. Take a step back and dim. Enter, here. Silence. I sway. Does an image? The thing-I-am Deis, imago-ing nothing but the One-in-Many, a Unique. Thirtyyears growing in every-place, the loom of time swaddles my spirit inside the I, welcoming experience. I travel, I am, a world-between-worlds. Past-present-future. Creating-begetting-proceeding. Love-loving-love. Who I was, who I am, who I will be. The persons share the same essence; they differ only by their relation. “The three are testifying— the Spirit, the water, and the blood—and the three are united in agreement.” (1 John 5.7-8 CEB)

Sometimes it hurts. Does God hurt? The only God worth worshipping does. Worship, being-worthy-of-reverence. Where does worth grow in the painless hollow? All else is secondary in faith to this: God became human. Humanus. Kind, refined, learned. Adamah. From-the-ground. The earth-soul is Adam-kind that flecks its soil-birth with spirit-worth. A human being is matter mattering. And sometimes it hurts. And sometimes it heals. Transitioning is re-membering, bringing-together the shattered parts of the Unique. In the original dwelling, the One was whole but lonely; in loneliness, it created something outside of itself – creation. This creation was loving-shattering, the potential for recognition folding out of the otherness of the two, the three, the many. The One heals itself by dis-membering and re-membering, by taking-apart the hurting nothing and putting-it-back-together as whole. At the beginning, the hurt One; at the end, the healed One. God becomes human as a wounded healer. She weeps and turns her tears into wine.

Jung’s mistake is the same as Plato’s; to think the transcendent is other than the immanent. The archetypes are enfleshed in echoing; the form is formed in forming. It’s a mistake to think there is anything other than persons. The Trinity isn’t such a mystery once we people everything. Why I am not seen as a person? Sit with me a second and listen. To the thump of my heart, to the whistle of my breath, to the groan of my ribcage. What part of me does not speak? You cocoon the world in your head and forget that you were the caterpillar. All there is around you is the same that you decided, and in this forgotten womb you cannot see me. The pilgrims forget their cocoon and mistake the glint of money for divinity, as if the pneuma moves in metal rather than spirit. The TERFs forget their cocoon and mistake the security of identity for liberation, as if womanhood moves in genes and genitals rather than sisterhood and solidarity. I woman afraid of the woman you are, but I woman more freely than you ever will.

At the beginning of a journey, I pray. To the One who is closer to me than my own breath. To the Many that carry me closer to myself.

ash. she.

You are intellect, I am life! – Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson

Image: Dandelions by Isaac Levitain (1889)