I’ll get into my gender story in an essay following these TDOV teachings, but TLDR for now: my body cannot be rendered materially fluid enough to match the flow of my gender, which is, for me, inextricable from the flow of my spirit. This is a source of pain, trauma, fertility loss, and existential struggle. 

The best I’ve got are singular they/them pronouns (tattooed on my wrists the weeks following the Trump regime’s declaration of only two genders), and the insistence that my loved ones literally comprehend me as a person who is not, and has never been, a man.

This next TDOV teaching addresses the unnatural binarist rigidity in our culture and, within that, our parenting. The teacher of note? A single one of my guides: a deity of where the river meets the sea, commonly associated with LGBTQIA+ folks — especially with non-white LGBTQIA+ folks. 

I did not know this jovial, regal (and handsome!) guide existed as an historical deity of renown until he popped into my energy field one day, spelled out his name, and was welcomed by my other guides. Fascinatingly, he did so right after I’d taken a freshwater shower and stepped into a highly salinated sensory deprivation float in a facility located alongside the LA River. Dude literally showed up as I crossed from fresh into saltwater, as a river does when it meets the sea!

Post-float, I researched his name and confirmed his renowned history, completely unknown to me prior. Since then this beloved guide has provided many teachings, most of which are water-based or utilize water as a metaphor. I am in particularly deep, moving gratitude for this TDOV teaching of his. It settled something deep in my expansive spirit, and is shared here as an offering and as a reminder: gender must, like water, flow.

***

What follows is a transcript of a recorded teaching. Reminder: the reader will encounter two “speakers,” though all communication passes from spirit world through me/my voice. 

When the transcript identifies me as the speaker, I am usually conveying what does not arrive as spoken language: images, bodily sensations, smells, impressions, clairsentient-ly known information. I also speak my own questions and responses in dialogue with my guide much as I would with a living person. The transcript then separately identifies when a guide speaks to/through me using words alone. 

Awen: Okay — now a single one of my guides is coming forward. What might you teach us, here on Transgender Day of Visibility? 

Immediately I’m shown a place in Malibu I love to hike, a mountain beside a river that meets the sea right at the base of the mountain.

Guide: When water needs to find its way down a mountain to the ocean, it does not only seek preordained paths. The water goes where it flows, because that is what works, and so it must be with gender. 

There can be no sluice [a track for water, often found at old mills or in irrigation, forcing water to go where humans want it to]… For all that work of upholding and building and maintaining a human-made pathway, the water will still move too quickly. It will overflow. It will leak through. It will rot and degrade the container. 

Water is not meant to be contained. Gender, like water, must flow. 

And so parents may be egocentric engineers, dropping a child as water onto the mountaintop, expecting it to flow right where they did when first dropped onto the mountain in their own births as babies.

Awen: There is a wink here and a big smile regarding “water dropping” (read: a pregnant person’s water breaking). I find spirit world is always playing with language, often comedically! 

He gives me such a funny image of parents standing at the top of the mountain, nodding a little too knowingly, smugly, saying to each other with self-satisfaction: “I know where my kid's gonna go and how it's gonna be, they’re gonna flow right where I flowed.” This kind of thinking is just shy of “boys will be boys” essentialism. Lots of nodding and patting their selves on the back, over-exaggerated and performing control, like human life is so predictable.

Guide: Water is meandering. It flows unexpected. Thus so are children.

Awen: And now he shows me a scene from the movie Jurassic Park where Ian Malcolm, played by Jeff Goldblum, demonstrates chaos theory by taking Ellie Sattler’s hand and dropping a bead of water on it. I believe he says: you’d think the next bead placed at the same spot would go down the same path as the first, right? But it doesn’t — because that’s chaos theory. Randomness is innate to life — that’s the foundation of the famous quote from the film: “life finds a way.” 

In a sense, within this teaching, we’re learning “gender diversity finds a way.”

Being transgender — you can even lose that word if you need to… Having an experience of gender that is your own, having a sense of self that is not predictable in socially normative terms, is part of being alive on Earth. There are no strict binary stories in nature. No “all dogs are all this way, all cats are all that way.” There are just lots of different kinds of dogs and lots of different kinds of cats operating across a broad spectrum with some coalesced norms that do not apply to all. 

Why? Because nature is endlessly creative, refracting as through a prism and incarnating so many different types of beings to ensure the survival of the planet.

Part of human diversity is to serve the survival of the planet, not just our own species.

Guide: It is silly — the way you humans will try to control the flow. It is like trying to stop gravity. You can't do it! Water flowing down a mountain is going to find its own way. Some water flows all together, predictably, each season, into a larger established river — but not all water.

If you look at that larger river and you smugly think you are seeing all the water that exists… if you see the river as the place all water "should" flow only – then you misunderstand everything.

You misunderstand the very nature of water, of this planet, and, of gender.

There will always be water that finds its own way outside and away from the larger river. There will always be water that overflows and leaves the river to find its own way. This is sustainable. This is natural. In many cases, this straying overflow [near the source] upstream is what prevents massive floods downstream.

And so unique paths are carved, cut into the earth by these “straying” waters to allow future waters that stray to move freely and to expand — to leave the larger river entirely, or perhaps to find a way back to the river further down the mountain. Or to go in and out of that larger river. Or never to see it again. There are many, many ways, with water!

Awen: I’m now being shown that the “unique" water that flows on its own away from the larger river is children. Children trying to find their own way, the way that works for each of them. And then he shows me parents trying to dig the dirt out from under the wandering child-streams, trying to reroute them back to the main river.

All the while the child-stream is just trying to flow, then this digging, this forcing it to move against its flow, literally feels like the bottom dropping out. The child-stream was finding its way organically across the land — then the parent suddenly tries to control, forcing them to drop down into a sluice and be forced to flow like a canal. And we know canals almost always have violent, fraught histories. They are often so stagnant and without flow that boats had to be pulled on them by livestock. Canals are water colonized. 

For that free-flowing child-stream, this is felt as a betrayal. Not just of self, but of nature.

There’s a clear sense from these child-streams of “I was exploring the land as water is supposed to, and then I was taken away from my natural place. There are plants I was going to water that now don’t have water. There are gorgeous waterfalls I was going to be, that I am now not. Because someone meddled, forced, boxed me into a sluice that will only fail me over time. I will be lost in that large river, it will swallow me whole."

Guide: This is all felt as a relinquishing of self, a loss of a natural calling, and this is not the way.

Awen: Oof. There’s a lot of teaching coming in right now. Hang on. There’s a whole bunch of images… Okay he’s taking a moment to validate the mainstream folks in that larger river… Oh, haha, “main stream” folks… 

He affirms, there’s something absolutely beautiful about all of the water that flows together in the larger river — the expected pathway, the pathway shaped by generations of similar people, of cisgender people, of cisgender-passing people, doing the expected thing. A river is how we got the Grand Canyon, after all! So we’re not dismissing the river. We’re not dismissing the water that flows together in this way. It’s a beautiful thing. The well-hewn river is not the problem per se. 

But now he shows me a tarn. A tarn is a small body of water, usually high up, way up in the mountain, in alpine meadows. Not quite a lake, but a wonderful freshwater pool like a pond, fed by smaller rivers and creeks, that sustains a local ecosystem, provides hydration to animals, to humans who go far enough out into the backcountry as I do while backpacking.

This tarn is an example of the wayward water — the water that wouldn’t, couldn’t, flow into the larger river. That water serves the hardest-to-reach places, the places of liminality, of remoteness… Oof there’s a lot of emotion coming in with this communication – a griefy tenderness, a sadness mixed with joy at existing in such a unique way. 

The thing is, these far off places (literally and metaphorically) need watering too, and they can't be reached by the main river. This is why we must let all water flow, let all gender flow. There are places and people that need to be fed by the off-shoots, by those who flow away from the main stream. There are places unknown to the larger river that are key to the planet’s health, that need sustenance at the margins, and so the water flows there.

Guide: All of the water, all of the people, cannot just be in that main river. Or there wouldn’t be alpine meadows. There wouldn’t be secret, hidden places of beauty. There wouldn’t be little streams and creeks and rivulets, if all water had to be one river. Water would not be water, then, is my highest point in this teaching.

Water is not so rigid, not so without adaptation. Its cycle is too grand, too all-changing to operate within those high stakes. And so it is with gender.

Awen: Wow. Blessings be for this message, thank you. Bowing my head here to these watery teachings. I feel very seen and loved as a gender-fluid being. And as I say this, I'm smiling huge because I hear from him, as he also smiles so big...

Guide: Why do you think I found you, after all?

To be continued in Part 3... For full archive, visit Patreon.com/WilderWithin/Posts