Seeds Planted, Sproud

What are you growing?

I love the metaphor of a planted seed, and use it all the time. I love thinking of these tiny little things settled in the cold, wet dirt, sprouting and growing and reaching for the light, eventually breaking through the surface for all of us to see. I love noticing even the most mundane little plant, doing its job of simply existing, transforming our exhales into inhales, rooting down in the remains of the waste, the bodies of our human ancestors, and all the other creatures that once roamed the earth. I love a blade of grass with a little drop of dew on it. GOD! I love a patch of moss, imagining the indestructible microscopic water bears within, building and maintaining the foundation of life itself. I’d like to lie down in a bed of moss to die, when the time comes; nothing between me and the earth. I can’t think of a better way to go out. I’ll probably settle for a body farm–it’s apparently illegal to even decompose. Sometimes I think we should stop to ask ourselves What hath we wrought?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the seeds planted, which got us to the traumatizing state of the world we are living through right now. Nixon’s desire to have total control over the media (interesting, because it was journalists who took Tricky Dicky down), Reagan’s post-hippie conservative swing, with his murderous homophobia and unfiltered antichrist energy, Daddy Bush and his eflish evil and obsession with oil, Clinton and the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing downhome sex pest sex appeal, his legalized-slavery inspired drug laws, and then the Baby Bush of it all, the demonstration of overreach that never really ever dialed back after it escalated, the fear, the islamaphobia, a post 9-11, post “we can declare war on an idea” world. Barack Obama’s intelligence and charm, his beacon of progress, his war crimes, the marginal moves forward, the refusal to move forward enough, and his Blackness, which White Supremacist America is still reeling from. Think about the Occupy movement and the foreplay to the fascism we are all living with today– the ridiculous Tea Party. That was when the line between reality and satire really started to blur. All the murders of Black people by police and neighborhood watch members and anyone paranoid and power hungry and racist and dead-inside enough to take another human life; the mass shootings, the movements, the protests, the ever-growing lists of names we commit to remembering–it’s the least we can do–and the learning and unlearning, too. Realizing the power of organizing, of sharing stories, of providing justice when we couldn’t get it anywhere else– #metoo and Black Lives Matter and Queer Liberation; learning how to look at the world with a critical eye; how to challenge white-supremacist-capitalist-cisheteropatriarchal hegemony within us and without. It really felt like we were getting somewhere! But Bernie didn’t get the nom and now never will, and the maintainers of the status quo did just that and continue to do so, looking down at us with more of the same, which the left and right can agree (and when do we ever do that?) none of us wanted, like gentle parent influencers, saying, condescendingly “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” We didn’t even get that far!! We got as far as the inner work and knowing things needed to change, starting to realize how to do it, and starting to see movement in the direction of hope, at least. It was slow, and we were angry, but at least we were seeing representation and pronoun conversations and trans people getting to move through the world a little bit more safely. At least the people clinging to their ignorance kind of knew they could get in trouble for overtly displaying their bigotry. But that’s part of what got us here.

Never underestimate the destructive power of white “victimhood.” Anyone raised by a narcissistic white woman knows how deeply that little martyr complex can cut. These people took one look at the possibility of an unfortunately superficial-at-best consequence and went full Third Reich. “Went” is the wrong word choice. “Went” implies they weren’t always there. It is one of my conspiracy theories that all generationally wealthy white conservative-leaning families have a secret room with Nazi memorabilia in their house. I am a little bit psychic, and I’m telling you, it’s just in the vibes. Plus, there have been a number of news stories and media depictions of this phenomenon that have come out over the years that do corroborate this theory– it is way too pervasive not to be a thing. It’s like how you feel when you watch Eyes Wide Shut and you’re like “Yes, I believe rich people really do this shit” and it turns out, (Diddy, Epstien) They Do! I used to write celebrity gossip, and the stories out there about celebrity orgies are WILD. Lemme be clear, I’m not anti-orgy or freaky sex at all (which I’m sure most of you know at this point lol), but creepy rich and powerful men and young women (and young men and sometimes children) and the expectations of transactional sex with power imbalances, coersion or force, and having these massive systems in place, all this cooperation and secrecy and protection to keep things hidden and happening in perpetuity... It’s just a little on the nose, is all I’m saying. I don’t think anyone watches Eyes Wide Shut and is like “This is prePOSterous!!!” Anyway, my point is, Fox News has become The White Tears Network, and the conspiracy-subreddit-Rogan-fan-MAGA subset is in their special snowflake era, and we are all living with the consequences.

I remember in my early days of learning about feminism, I read an essay about how women are often considered too emotional but a man will murder someone for rejecting him, punch a hole in a wall because he loses a video game, do a coup because his daddy never told him he was proud of him and they still get to be considered models of emotional regulation. This level of escalation feels new, but the impulse, the idea, was a seed planted a long, long time ago. This is what conservative America has always wanted (whether they admit it or not). This is what policing the bodies, the gender, the race, the status based on arbitrary borders, and the financial stability of people leads to. This is what unchecked accumulation of wealth leads to. This is what environmental collapse leads to. This is what no access to resources leads to. This is what late capitalism leads to. This is the culmination of the choices that have been made in this country from day one. Actions, meet consequences. This is where we’ve always been heading. It’s like an abusive relationship– while you’re under the spell, you can find an excuse for every controlling behavior; it all feels so romantic, so passionate, so exciting, but once you’re out of it?? You can’t even find the beauty in the person anymore. All you can see is the immaturity, the insecurity, the volatility, the desperate grasp for control. Sometimes things have to get really bad before people surrender to change. Think of every bit of stubbornness in you, in your loved ones; think of all the times you resisted til your body ached, til every muscle was in knots, til you thought your heart would explode. Think about the rubble, the ash, the disaster that lay at your feet when the inevitable fall finally fell. How bad did it have to get? How loud did the wake-up call have to be? Think about all the grief, the resentment, the frustration, the responsibility, the anger, the pain that went unfelt for so long. Those moments, for me, became compost; a dead thing to create life from. Maybe we’re still in the death phase. It feels like the old world is dying, but still, frustratingly, destructively, terrifyingly trying not to.

My Queenie (that’s what I called my grandmother) died what feels like recently, but it could have been months or over a year ago. Linear time has never been my strong suit (hence, my tagline “They exist beyond the confines of gender and time.” I thought about adding “genre” in there too, because that’s true, but I wanted it to be snappy.). My aunt, who has become the backbone of the family and who, I am so grateful to say, really took the reigns on getting me back in touch with them, made me feel safe enough to try; I always describe her as “a bitch on wheels,” which I say with truly all the love and admiration in the world, told me how much Queenie resisted at the end. She told me how she once read that narcissists often have the hardest time dying–they resist it so hard, and they get so angry about it, because it’s the one thing they can’t control. I am so grateful to have surrendered my control a long time ago. Practicing all my little deaths: my orgasms, my sneezes, my changes of mind and transformations, my proven wrongs and meditations. Ego deaths. I used to look at Queenie when she’d rage at me–throwing a tantrum– she always reminded me of a toddler when she was like that, or a teenager (the kind of teenager I never was, incidentally, I never earned her rages.) and I’d think How have you not worked on this yet? You can resist forever if you want. It’s possible! But it doesn’t lead to a very happy or free life.

A seed has been planted in the good direction, too. I can’t tell you how different I am, how much more honest and loving my perception of the world is now. The overlapping Venn Diagrams of oppression, for me, come up in every single conversation I have with anyone. There are more people out there motivated to change than there ever have been before. While some people have the strength of will or depths of fear or whatever personality flaw it is to be able to close Pandora’s Box once they open it, for most people, realizations cannot be unrealized. To RECLAIM the EXREMELY TRANS 1999 film The Matrix, once you take that red pill, you cannot go back to sleep again. Even if you could, you could never really forget. Some of the seeds that were planted in me that have grown into a Holistic Liberation way of living were planted before I was ever born, by people I will never meet, but who’s thoughts and work and minds are as dear to me as anyone I love in the here and now and with my own two hands. It’s already happened. The Tower already fell. I know the disorienting experience of Tripping Balls and being around people who are stone sober, marveling at how we could be looking at the same thing and having completely different experiences, wishing they could see what I do, because it’s unbelievably beautiful. It’s like how you might look at someone you love and think You are a miracle of creation, you are sex on a stick, your brilliance and capacity for love take my breath away and they can feel, at that exact moment, like they don’t even like themselves or have anything to offer. GOD! What I wouldn’t give to be able to play our loving perceptions of each other like movies for one another to experience, to understand how much we mean to each other. Words fail to do the profundity of love justice, to my constant annoyance. Or maybe I’m just not that good of a writer. Idk.

This whole thing reminds me of something very silly, so let me cook. The Rapture. I said, LET ME COOK!! Many Christians are kind of like Teresa Guidice from the Real Housewives of New Jersey, in the sense that they do not understand metaphor, and that often leads to table-flipping conflicts. They are also very goth, which I would think was fabulous and sexy, if they didn’t want me to hate myself so much. The Rapture is a metaphor for awakening. The people who “ascend” will essentially return to the (sang in the style of Mayem Gaga, Amen) Garden Of Eden!! Life will be beautiful for them, abundant, they will have everything they need; there will be no more suffering, very “imagine all the people…” and then there will be those still-asleep souls who get Kirk Cameron Left Behind™, forced to live in the hell of a world they created. Poetic. Fierce. I kind of stan. Look at the world!! There are those of us in stark reality; struggling, forced into a system we don’t agree with, held hostage by work, all while witnessing one of the most heinous genocides the world has ever seen, losing rights left and right, falling into fascism, feeling shame at how judgmental we were of the people of the past, sitting on our high horse wondering how could they have let this happen and here we are, not “letting” it happen necessarily, but seemingly powerless to stop it. I get so triggered by this particular feeling of stuck, like being held down by my mom’s boyfriend, my 10 years on earth not even flashing before my eyes, most of them too dark to remember, instead all I could think was I’m going to die. I wasn’t even scared, exactly. I was just stating it like a fact. I can’t breathe. What weight those words carry now, in this present moment, given all the lives ended with a boot, a knee on a neck, one body pinning another to the ground, and the memory of his over mine with a toy chair pressing into my windpipe. I tear up as I type them, I can’t breathe.

Denial is a hell of a drug. The thing about being a truth-teller is that you know the simple truth that It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. You sense the goodness in yourself, in others, in all the potentialities of the future. You understand that we are only as stuck in these patterns as we allow ourselves to be. You know how to unpack a thing in your mind when it doesn’t resonate any longer. You have allowed yourself to undergo the ego death of letting yourself be wrong, being able to change your mind when presented with new information. You may tango with absurdity, but you never let yourself fall into nihilism. There is hope in wanting things to be different; in believing they could be better. There is so much love in that desire. You are courageous in the face of feeling your feelings, you haven’t smothered the empathy impulse within you because it hurts too much to feel. It does hurt. But you know the importance of that discomfort. You want to connect, to care for, to communicate with, to build community with others. You know how to show up vulnerable, to be authentic, you know your boundaries and you lay them; you know the power of speaking up. To me, that is the Garden of Eden; that is awakening. Maybe the way we are forced to live doesn’t match the liberation within, but when I was homeless and squatting in an empty house, or sleeping on a friend’s couch, I used to write in my journal I have a safe place to live over and over, allowing myself to tap into the energy of what that would feel like– I can’t tell you I knew it would happen, but I can tell you it did. It’s hardest to see where you’re heading when you’re in the thick of it, and we are in the THICK of it, honey! But the world becoming more uncomfortable, those in charge making choices that hurt the majority of us and help only a chosen few (the most sociopathic and exploitative among us, at that) is a sign of those sprouting seeds. Look at the way people respond to rude celebrities! We are losing our patience and willingness to be distracted by the illusion. The Red Pills (please remember I’m reclaiming this, ugh, the association of cringe at Matrix references because of a bunch of fucking nerds who missed the point entirely is SO not fair to the Wachowzki sisters) have awakened. Our seeds aren’t just sprouting, they’re taking root.

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