Blood, Moon
of tidal transition and cyclical becoming
Today, I am writing to you while looking out at the open, cold, November Atlantic. An unseasonably warm sun shines on vast, wind-stirred water, unhindered by land as a thick, glimmering band of sunlight stretches from horizon to shore; here at the edge of the Dawn. In the tidal shifts of the waxing moon, I feel I am a point held between currents of water - the low-thunder roll of soft waves, the surging pull of the moon in their near-peak eclipse, and the first day of my bleeding; waves of pain and process pushing and pulling within, their edge un-dulled by the pain-aid I forgot to take before hiking here. My consciousness lays at a stillpoint, finding dynamic balance in this confluence of currents.
As I walked the two-ish sunny miles to this outlook point, I could feel the pain in my body building. I leaned into a feeling of gratitude for the momentary time when the pain, the release, the cyclical transformation of this eclipse season could be simplified into the somatic. Held between my two hands at the low bowl of my belly, loved and tended through the warmth of touch. Two weeks ago, as the moon tipped into the first sliver of new light, I would have been ovulating. I am at the culmination now of that prayer - a coin tossed into a wishing well at the edge of the river, a tender hope I carry.
I am writing about this experience, using terms that are traditionally gendered in the feminine, as a Trans person - as a body of multitudinous gender. On the eve of an election, I am writing about a relationship in my body that is, for so many bodies - bleeding bodies, feminine or female-socialized bodies, Trans bodies, at all times both personal and political. As a Trans person in the current climate of our country, I write knowing that my words, my own relationship with my personal process of becoming, could be pulled from this vulnerable place of revealment and held up, out of context, as a banner to harm my younger kin whose bodies are being used as political tools before they can even discover their own names. I write these stories here because they are my stories. They move in me. I cannot write that which does not authentically flow. And what flows today is crimson red, a mirror of the moon.
My body is one that has cyclical relationship with the alchemy of transition. Over the years that hormones have been a tool, a shapeshifting, resonance-honing language for me, I have met them in many ways. After our initial knowing, I spent many years without them completely before finding the smaller, personally liberatory pendulations of low-dose transition. Transformation, however we find it, is a good teacher. I am in love with the possibility and the miracle of our bodies and all of the ways, from within these same forms, we can become.
When I first started Testosterone, twenty years ago, I was 18 years old. At that time in the dominant medical model, “full dose” was the standard starting point, injected intramuscularly with a 1.5” bit of transformational steel. A modern magic wand, pointed directly into the muscle of my thigh. (Nowadays we have gotten far more more nuanced, far more personal, in the range of expressions a body can have - low dose Testosterone has been a subtle revolution in my life, and the innovation of subcutaneous injections invited me let go of a little of the internalized transphobia that, to be who I am, it has to hurt.) I was taught how to do my injections by a military-nurse-turned-Family-Nurse-Practitioner who, with her square shoulders, salt and pepper military issue haircut, and name that referenced a flower, was more Butch than I have ever been in any iteration of myself.
“You just do it - like this” she said. And with that, I looked down to see a plastic tube filled with my future, sticking out of my thigh. That was the only lesson or hand-holding I would get that day. It felt like some form of initiatory masculinity from a Queer elder; a masc-to-masc, “good luck, kid” pat on the back. I was sent out of the office with what I needed, back into my life as a teenager on the brink of adulthood, living in a summer college dorm in Portland, Maine and working a day job at a photo shop. (Back when that was two words.) We never know when - the intergenerational interactions of Queerness, the smell of film developer - the moments we’re living will some day feel like history.
6 days after my initiatory injection I found myself alone in my dorm, fully responsible for the chemical care and feeding of my budding re-pubescent self. I planned my injection for 15 minutes before I had to leave for work, so that I wouldn’t have time to stall. The endocrine sledge-hammer of full dose T moves quickly. My shape shifted faster than my integration. Within a few months I was walking into door jambs with the new edges of my shoulders and, when I tried to put my hands on my hips, I missed - my hands sweeping clean backwards through empty air.
When I stopped Testosterone for the first time, 3 years later, the pain of the first blood was as welcome as the pain of the first injection. Both are miracles - my body responding, changing, expressing. Neither of them make me more male or female - or more masculine or feminine - both of them make me myself. A body in emergent cosmic agreement. A body that loves the confluence of currents. At my injection sites, a tiny pinprick of blood would well up to meet me at the surface of my skin. Stopping the weekly curves of hormones delivered by my own hand, the tides turned back to a lunar clock, the blood coming all at once. The pinprick of Yang traded for oceanic Yin; both the same fluid essence.
That first cycle, I spent the small hours of the night walking around my best friend’s dorm at the edge of the Boston Commons, trying unfruitfully to comfort my bleeding body, breathing through the labor pains of delivering this new version of myself. My uterine muscles, not used in 3 years, surged and turned and twisted in their awakened remembering. I’ve never given birth to another human being - not yet - but I know the hormonal and physical cycles of gestating and releasing each new understanding of myself.
Today, the Taurean moon waxes full and I am saturated in the sensations of my body. Over the course of this eclipse season I have emptied out to a hollow bowl - gotten quiet in the emptiness, let myself dare to fill with new dreams, new light - I sit here at the peak of it, body thrumming.
This body is one that is taking joy in the long road of emergence; each stop along the way, a home. This body that now speaks in full tongue, that can feel Yes, No, deep desire, the waves of this supermoon tide surging in longing for the fulfillment of prayers made with a coin toss into a new moon pool.
My body, our bodies, microcosms of the tides; their extremes of highs and lows pulled wider apart by pairs of eclipsing spheres. In this time, the tide of my emotions comes further up the beach of my psyche than I am used to, placing areas not usually touched by water under soft, transforming currents. As the water retreats a more dramatic distance, deeper parts of me are revealed under the examining light of day. All the way dark, all the way light, the dark where light should be - dances of duality that change all of us. The moon, nightly shapeshifter, always whole.
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Want to dive deeper into embodied invitations of element and spirit? I offer monthly sliding scale live Yoga Nidra workshops via Zoom on the first Friday of every month, and have a digital download library of past full Nidra practices to work with any time.