WHY, OH WHY, CAN’T I?
In June 2015, I flew to New York to attend our first required intensive. It turned out to be one of the most extraordinary weeks of my life. This was the first time I met my heart tribe face to face. Here were 75 people who instantly felt like my soulmates. For the first time since beginning my daily practice of joy, I didn’t have to remember to practice joy. I just lived it! In the presence of this group of cracked-open hearts, I understood something for the first time: We can only truly experience love when we feel completely safe.
On the last day of our intensive, Reverend Joyce, the associate director of our seminary, stood up to speak to our class. She was a diminutive, white-haired woman who looked like a nonsectarian nun. She had spoken little during the four days, but when she did, it was with a twinkle in her eye and the authority of a Biblical scholar.
She told the story of taking a workshop in New York City during the 1970s, at the end of which the moderator invited all the gays and lesbians to come to the front of the room. Reverend Joyce had been frightened because gays and lesbians could be arrested in those days. But up to the front she went. Then the moderator did something that she never forgot.
“She asked the audience to applaud,” Reverend Joyce remembered, “saying that ‘acknowledgement was a profound form of loving. Perhaps the greatest form of loving.’ There was great applause and cheerful yelling and clapping. It was a profound moment in my life. I was and continue to be so very grateful to her for doing this.”
When Reverend Joyce finished sharing this story, she looked at all of us and then invited everyone who identified anywhere on the rainbow spectrum to stand up in front of the rest of the class. She named everything she could think of from that spectrum—letters I hadn’t even considered. One of the names she spoke was “two spirit.”
I first heard about the Native American concept of two spirit in graduate school in the mid-1980s while reading a book about how a Zuni berdache—a man who had lived as a woman—had been deeply revered for his spiritual power and leadership abilities and had even met the president of the United States as a representative of his tribe. Although the book was fascinating, nothing about the idea of being two spirit called to me personally at that time. But when I heard the term thirty years later in a completely new context, it resonated in my heart.
So much had changed in the world since I was in my twenties. New generations of brave young people were finding the courage to speak their truths and to create new ideas of love and partnership, gender and sexuality, commitment and connection, which were so much more fluid than any previous generation had believed possible.
As I got to know some of these young people, I realized their coming out was not really about sexuality as much as it was about redefining gender and the freedom to love—both for themselves and for others. Getting to know trans teenagers, who understood that they had been put in the wrong body and who were fighting to be seen for who they knew themselves to be inside, had a particularly profound impact on me. Their incredible courage to name themselves when the adult world refused to believe them blew my mind. Their understanding that if they were not true to themselves, then there was no way they could be true to the world, became a huge part of my own healing journey. It took witnessing this courage of a younger generation to begin to allow myself the permission to begin to define myself.
When Reverend Joyce spoke the words “two spirit,” something clicked. In that moment, I recognized that I was two spirit, though I didn’t yet know what exactly that meant.
With about fifteen other people, both students and deans, I stood up as Reverend Joyce had done forty years earlier and went to the front of the room. Then she asked the rest of the class to applaud, affirm, and acknowledge us. Everyone else in the room stood up and cheered and applauded and loved us all up big time. Standing up there, I cried like a baby.
I had been publicly “out” as a lesbian for decades, yet I had never felt like a lesbian. When I heard the words “two spirit,” I stood up for the first time as my true self. I had come home to my own heart.
In the months after the intensive, I began to understand that my true self identifies as spiritual rather than sexual. I am drawn to others through a soul connection that may or may not include physical attraction—but even when I am attracted to someone, sex is the least important thing to me. Because I had never understood that about myself, I had never been able to express that to anyone else. That was why so many of my relationships failed. I had never shown up as my true self. It wasn’t until I acknowledged my spiritual calling and felt embraced by my spiritual heart tribe that all the pieces in this puzzle of me finally began to fit.
For as long as I can remember, I have felt twinned inside myself as both male and female. Not male and female in terms of physical or biological identity. I identify as two spirit because I feel that my true self manifests beyond our physical or sexual ideas of male or female—even beyond gender identity.
I believe that as spiritual beings, we ultimately encompass and express all supposedly gender-based qualities. It is only society and the material world that seeks to identify us physically or sexually, to label us and put us in boxes. We all express the divine masculine and feminine. I had felt this even—maybe especially—as a little girl. But never having seen it articulated by anyone else, I felt crazy. So I hid that essential me not just from the outside world, but even from myself.
For now, two spirit is the closest term I have for my true self. Having many Native American friends, I recognize that my understanding of two spirit is precisely that—my understanding. All we can know about any idea amounts to our understanding of it.
For me, identifying as two spirit meant that after years of trying to be someone I’m not—for my parents, for churches and religion, for my family legacy, for the gay community, for myself—for the first time I felt able to show up in the world true. To do that, however, I not only had to be willing to lose everyone else’s false ideas about me. I also had to get rid of a few of my own. I had to forgive myself for all the ways I felt that I had failed others—especially in love. I realized that, although I had genuinely tried my best in every relationship, I had never shown up as who I was. I had put so much effort into trying to be someone I never was, instead of showing up in truth. I had been unable to show up as my best self, because I never let myself acknowledge who she really was. In order to learn how to love as my true two-spirit self, I had to keep discovering who I really am.
I learned this in the most beautiful of ways on a Sunday afternoon while bird-watching with a friend. After sighting a few mature Indigo Buntings, as well as a number of smaller, equally bright blue birds, I put voice to something I had been wondering: “I know the bigger blue birds are the Indigo Buntings, but when I look in the books for the smaller bright blue ones, I can’t find them.” As I said it, I felt that old junior high feeling that there was something I “should” know but didn’t. So I felt junior high school relief when my friend said she didn’t know either. We speculated together as to whether they were immature birds, new nestlings just learning to fly and sing. We ended up being very comfortable in our not knowing.
It was then that she said: “I once read that if the bird you see doesn’t match the picture or the description of the bird in the books, the bird is always right.”
I looked at her and a huge grin broke out on my face, mirrored back by an equally big one on hers. Of course! How sweet and how true! What a perfect metaphor for, well, everything . . .
The bird is always right!
My whole life, I’ve felt as though I have been asked to check some box that was supposed to represent me. But none of the boxes ever seem to match how I see myself. None of the boxes, none of the labels, none of the initials or titles have ever felt like me.
We’ve all been asked to tick some box that is supposed to describe us. We’ve all been taught that we are different but the same, separate but united. Yet under every skin color; every uniform; every political affiliation; every sexual orientation or gender identification; every nationality, religion, or ethnicity; every body size; every ability or seeming disability, I believe there is an individual at least part of whom has never felt as though there were a box to check, an initial to choose, a profession to pick, a lifestyle to live that fully fit who they felt themselves to be. In one way or another, all of us have wondered at one time or another in our lives why the descriptions in the book didn’t match the plumage that we feel.
Even when I was a kid, my mother never quite knew what to make of me. Sometimes I would come down to breakfast wearing an outfit she thought so misguided—oh, let’s say, a Japanese kimono with a cowboy hat and leg warmers over my pastel-colored school uniform—and her whole face would blanch. “What kind of a statement are you trying to make with that?” she would ask, horrified.
I always felt as if I had to give her an answer—but my answers really never made any sense because what I wanted to say was simply, “This is the me I felt like being today.”
At some point, when she had heard enough, she always trotted out her old adage: “Well, unless you’re going to have a T-shirt printed explaining all of that—and what you just said is going to take up the whole front and back—no one is going to know what you mean. You don’t want to go through life having to explain yourself to everyone, do you?”
Well, no. I didn’t. I didn’t see why I had to, really. So what if I was a kimono-cowboy-hat-leg-warmer-wearing tall white girl who didn’t really want to be white at all? What did that matter? Apparently it did to my mother—and a lot of people like her. I have spent far too much of my life trying to fit into the box I never felt but that I nonetheless checked on a census form whose import was lost on me, choosing a major that covered only a minor amount of my interests, attempting to get comfortable being an initial that never matched my heart, identifying as sexual when what I felt was spiritual, and reducing the weird array of me to a clever T-shirt slogan that everyone could “get.”
It hasn’t worked.
The longer I am alive, the more I think every single person on the planet occupies their own uniquely unlabelable-whole-alphabet-I-had-to-pick-something-but-this-box-doesn’t-even-come-close reality. Eventually, we all will discover that this is the only address accepting mail on the Way of Being Lost.
That Sunday morning, as I wondered why I couldn’t find the little blue birds I saw in the field in any of my books, feeling confused, even wrong, suddenly it seemed so obvious—actually so wonderfully funny—to think that any of us humans could presume to know, to even want to label, the beauty of those little blue birds. Who cared what they were called? All I wanted to do was to enjoy them—to listen to their sweet trilling songs, watch them flit across the fields, see the sun glint off their blue feathers. I wanted to be with them and love them—be they buntings or bluebirds or something else altogether.
If it’s hard for us to do with birds—to resist the taxonomies that we use to wrangle the wild into submission—no wonder we can’t do it with ourselves. Let alone with one another. Only when we are willing to lose our compulsion to categorize can we revel in the wonderful wilderness of unknowing that is the Way of Being Lost.
The solution to our fears is not to squeeze ourselves inside the box, any more than the “best” way to travel is the most direct route. The answer to our dilemma is not to pick a letter of the alphabet and try to live it with as little misery as possible. The healing of the world is never going to be creating more labels that reduce everything to more meaningless iterations of us and them. We must try to resist the need to comfort ourselves with labels, and instead choose Love. When we choose Love, we live Love. When we choose Love, us and them just dissolves into One.
On the Way of Being Lost, I have had to learn to find my bearings neither where I hoped to be nor as who I thought I was. That means learning to love myself right where I am. I used to wish that I was “like everyone else.” Now I recognize that nonconformity—in school, religion, celebrity, sexuality, creativity, home, and relationships—has been one of the greatest gifts of my life. It is the disturbed soil in which I have learned to wildflower myself whole.
My whole life I had wondered why, oh why, can’t I live and love like other people seem to be able to do.
By losing all the labels, I finally was able to choose Love and find my heart tribes.
When we choose Love, we can fly over the rainbow.
When we choose Love, the bird is always right.