Becoming One: Within and Without

This past summer after an extremely moving experience I shared with one of my sisters in small town New Jersey, one Sunday, I discovered a community of intention and have been meeting with them on an ongoing basis. I have made some new friendships that are nurturing and sustaining.

      

                                                                                                                                                                   

Today we met and sought insights as to how we can, as an intentional community, reach out to more people in many more ways. We looked at our strengths and we discussed our challenges to create and realize such a vision.

Over the past several weeks, I have been coming to terms with something from long ago that was never resolved that frustrates me and leaves me confused wondering why it can occupy space in my mental and emotional life sometimes. Not every day and not necessarily all day either, but enough that it bears examination.

One of the things my community does is takes me out of that space and restores my sense of well being, physically, emotionally and spiritually. It does this by allowing me to feel connected to other people who as I get to know, I grow to care about.

These people accept me and want me to be with them, listen to what I say, allow me to listen to them and show that I care too. It has created a space where I don't need to think about gender. I can just be.

Many people speak of feeling less than, or "otherized" as I like to call it; not having a sense of belonging, or of less than equal worth. There is none of that in my community. It is a place I can be me. Simply just be me.

Some of us find ourselves along the way and experience that serenity, some of us don't. I'd argue that this is really what it is about, not a gender identity, male or female or whatever number of genders you may opine to exist. That is not what matters, really. What matters is that one can be who one is, be accepted as one is, without thought or pretense about where you fall on a binary or continuum.

Within ourselves we have to cultivate the level of self acceptance that when someone meets us or when we are a member of a community, we don't worry ourselves to death about the level of acceptance we are experiencing and how we are identified by others or how we identify ourselves.

Instead, in my community, we are focusing on how to strengthen each other as we reach out to be of service and comfort to those who find themselves disenfranchised and seek a hand up. We want that open hand to be there for each other and for those who have need.

These are the more and more frequent things I am experiencing in my life. They are nurturing me and giving me more opportunities to live in service to others, as I have always striven to do my whole life.

My wish for those of you who share a similar life journey, whether it be my walk in two worlds, or one, or even multiples of worlds, is that you too will find more and more experiences in life that allow you to just be in the moment, without thought about who you are or how you think others think about who you are.