A Long Path to a Place of Peace

It is that time of the year when musical activities come to a close. We will start again in September. Like university and college programs, we are active in the least beautiful months, weather-wise here in Canada. I suppose too many of the participants are busy doing other things to sustain a band or an orchestra through the summer.

At any rate, we have had concerts these past three weekends and it is time for a break. Yesterday was a wrap-up party for a group I joined just two weeks after my surgery. A woman I have got to know very well, whose husband I knew years before (so they were in on my transition), told me how much they admired how I simply got on with being me.

To my credit, I was not dismissive or overly humble, but simply thanked her for the compliment. Her comments made me think about the path that had brought me to a place where I could just get on with being me. 

The casual reader may not want to read through over four hundred posts to attempt to glean what made me able to live comfortably in such new skin. Sadly, there is no recipe for success in ditching a façade and finding one's long-misplaced self.

My story and path is here, all around, in hints, words, and feelings expressed, none better than those from Socrates and Richard Bach - words that speak of love; of friends closer than family, and soul searching. 

If you are a seeker - a fellow traveller on this journey, my advice is to go thou and do likewise. My hopes are travelling with you.

Beginning a Journey

One sometimes doesn't even know they are beginning a long journey. When you are at the end, or as I am, at a vantage point along the way after travelling a long way upon a road, it is fun to think about the beginning.

As an aside, this analogy of a journey is quite apt, as Tom and I have been corresponding in comments on his blog Gwynt about the way the human mind tends to put things into terms of movement. There has been very little physical movement at all in my progress toward womanhood, and yet it is much easier to talk about change in terms of a journey. 

There were stages along the way of my growing womanhood where it seemed there were mountains in my way. I could never manage to get across those obstacles! And yet, here I am, a woman sitting in her family room with her computer in her lap writing about it all. Oh, I'm still a work in progress. So much to learn and do, but being me is just normal now and no big deal. 

Having accomplished a difficult task has left me with a changed attitude toward beginning some project that I know will take a long time. A case in point is the cross-stitch I started on earlier this week. Here is where it is so far: 

Yes, that is my foot in the top right ... I wanted to give some sense of scale. 

updated progress - Saturday, April 13

If you zoom in, you can see the gridding of the Aida cloth. This is 18 count which means there are eighteen squares per inch (apologies to the metric world ... cross stitching is old school). The part that is completed is about 1 1/2 inches by 3 at this point. The finished product will be about 20 inches by 18 inches. It isn't a complete coverage - what you see is the beginning of the border which will frame a poem. You shall have to wait until it is completed to read the poem. 

The total length of the border around is about 68 inches, so if I'm at the three-inch mark in a week, that means the border should take about twenty-three weeks... then there is the poem to stitch. 

After about fifteen months doing cross-stitch, I have quite a collection of completed works, and that helps keep me from becoming discouraged; I know it gets done if you persist. 

It's all about the journey - completed late last year

Now that my new project is here on the blog, that means I shall have to keep at it! But there was no danger of me putting it away and forgetting about it. 

I am a trans-woman. 

A big project doesn't deter me. 

Waste Not

I grew up in a home with grandparents who had lived through the Great Depression in Canada. It was a time when very few had luxuries. People learned to appreciate the little they had and how to extend the use of things that seemed to be used up, or worn out.

A Darning Egg like the one we had - Available online

One of the things learned as a child was how to darn socks. I would put the darning egg inside and use wool to weave a patch to close up the hole in the toe or heel of my McGregor "Happy Foot" socks. It meant the toe or heel had a slightly thick spot, but it let me use the socks for much longer. Socks weren't cheap. We didn't throw things out until they couldn't be fixed. K tells me that part of her Brownie training was to learn to darn socks. That was in the 1960s!

In Canada, World War II rationing ended not long after the war did. Nobody talked about that sort of thing as I was growing up, but I know people who live in Britain and they remember it all very well. 

The one on the right isn't really smaller

I still have a glass jar of Vick's rub somewhere, but now it comes in plastic. Those jars were great for getting at the very last bit of contents, and the glass was perfectly recyclable or better still, reusable as a container for other things. 

Many hand and body creams can come in plastic tubes that make it impossible (or at least inconvenient) to get at all the contents. 

still a lot in there! 

My esthetician showed me a way to get at it all. By cutting across the middle of the seemingly used up tube, you can get at the rest. If you cut a small slit down two sides of the plastic, you can then put the 'top' back on to protect the cream from drying out. 

Slip it over like a lid

This isn't about longing for the old days. In my humble opinion (ok, I'm not really humble), we should all be concerned about getting rid of single-use plastics. I really like these creams. My hands and feet both get so dry that the skin cracks without attention, but how much longer can I ignore the planet and support this dangerous misuse of plastic?