Hey, reader. How’s tricks? Where are you comfortable and feel like yourself? I’ve been thinking about city vs rural vs wild.
Backing up, I could ask: Are you ever comfortable and feel like yourself?
I’ve said before that I’m only comfortable when I’m alone. But that’s not true. With Ming and a few other people, I can breathe and rest, feeling like my whole self. I’m so glad I’ve learned how to relax around a few people.
hold me, land
Being in a rural or wild area helps me feel like myself. The land is holding me. The truth is, Parent Earth is always holding me. But in rural and wild places, I can feel it. God’s love is humming in the land and water and sky.
Trees are talking to me in a whispery way. The creek is in motion at all times. I’m in a relationship with the wind. Love is undeniable.
fear
Yet what about hicks? Rural areas, I have to stop at the gas station or pause at the park. I can feel scared of conservative people who don’t like queers or who want to violence women, or do violence in general.
There can be conservative people anywhere, including in the city. But the conservative rural people seem more empowered.
Also, there’s racism. I travel with Ming, and at times it’s made sense to worry about Ming’s safety. Like when we were homeless and passed through that one super racist, Christian part of Idaho. I will never go there again. I get the chills still, thinking about it.
There’s racism from cops, from the courts, from doctors and all of medicine, schools, workplaces, government agencies. Racism in families. Environmental racism where POC have to breathe such bad air, drink polluted water, live with mountain top removal and pollution mining, nuclear testing, and have all the trees cut down.
There’s racism that’s soaked into the culture and comes out as a default prioritizing of white ways of being, talking, thinking, relating. Poverty, of course! But the racism of individual white Christian people in Idaho is a very sad, scary kind of racism. We got out of there as fast as we could. Homelessness was a hard time in general, and those creeps made it way harder.
Christian white people who are decent, maybe you should go take care of that. Someone needs to help those Idahoes learn how to love one another. Probably the only folks they’re going to listen to are other Christian white people.
mix
Whoa, that was an intense plea all of a sudden. Thank you for holding my hand through that racism part, reader. I love you for all sorts of reasons, and no reason at all.
It’s wonderful when people are a mix of cultures. They can have some hick culture like rural fashion and forestry skills, while being about liberation and loving queer trans people like me and Ming. Yes, I get thrilled by the nuance-combination. Do you like that? When the cultures rub against each other and there’s a vibration, kinda like petting a cat to get a purr.
Trans fairies wearing camouflage jackets and impressive stompy boots, compassionate queer hippies in the woods who wear a beard and a skirt and use chainsaws… That’s my favorite. If you bake sourdough, build sheds out of pallets, make amazing stew, and have been nurturing crazy people through radical mental health for 30 years. If you’re a zinester who goes fly fishing, and you’ve helped thousands of people through harm reduction drug counseling support and handing out narcan. Yes, I love you. You are my people.
Ooo, that was a better paragraph. I’m happy to explain that. Thank you for holding my hand through the good parts too, reader.
city
As for the city, we can find many books there. We can eat vegan Sri Lankan food, I must admit. I can visit the ashram and worship Durga with other people who know who Durga is. The city is amazing for getting ingredients, and for feeling dirty. It’s a different kind of dirty.
I get exhausted in the city from loud trucks and busses, traffic jams, and being looked at or not looked at by thousands of strangers who I will never see again. It’s depressing all the people who I glimpse and will never see again. They are filled with God, and I wish I could sit down with them by a fire and listen to where they come from and who they are. Instead they are here and gone in a flash. It feels disrespectful.
The city drains me, and then I need to go rural. But after a while, rural and wild places drain me too because I hamster wheel with my own thoughts too much. I need to move back and forth among city vs rural vs wild. I move back and forth between the different kinds of over-stimulation and under-stimulation.
city vs rural vs wild
- Is it depressing for you to glimpse tons of people you will never know?
- Where do you prefer, city vs rural vs wild?
- Are you thrilled by mixings of culture?
- How does racism affect you?
- Where’s the worst place you were ever homeless?
- Who do you relax around?
- What do you like in the city?
- How do you relate to wind?
The wind is my lover. I’m always still learning how to love.
