Sunday Lesson

Last Friday my surgeon, Dr Haertsch, performed a minor adjustment we'd discussed after my sex reassignment surgery a little over a year ago. The skin over my mons pubis area had not joined together as well as it should and it had remained a little tender. Also I felt that my labiae majora were a bit more widely separated than I would have liked. My surgeon wanted to wait the 12 months before he did any adjustments. I was a bit too stressed out when the time to attend to it came round but last Friday we finally did it...under local anaesthetic.

The procedure went well and I am very pleased with the result - prrrr! nice pusso! However, once the local wore off I was a sore and sorry girl. Shades of my previous experience after the operation itself - shuffling carefully, oh! so carefully around the flat like an old neanderthal woman; only too painfully aware how many things in my little world needed bending down to get them!

Alex was wonderful - he drove me there and back and attended to me with great tenderness. But thank god(dess), too, for electric blankets and Mersyndol! Oh! And the Romans! Where would we be without the Romans...and plumbing (read long, hot showers)?

Anyway, I took it fairly easy this weekend, altho' I did get Alex to drive me out to the Feminist Bookshop in Lilyfield yesterday to pick up a copy I'd ordered of Sandra Haldeman Martz' "I am Becoming The Woman I've Wanted" (No! it's not about being transsexual woman per se, tho' the sentiments are very apt and the stories, photos and poems extraordinarily touching and inspiring - it's about the journey, our various journeys, of being and becoming woman).

Big mistake, Paula! I felt every tiny bump in the road thru' our 40 year-old vee-dub's non-suspension. Ouch! Ouch!

This morning, feeling better but still a bit fragile, I sat in the sun under the mandarin tree by the old laundry wall and dipped into Sarah Ban Breathnach's "Simple Abundance: a daybook of Comfort and Joy". Her inspirational thoughts for early August were right on the mark for me.

You see, I have just managed to secure a new appointment at work as an "Operations Specialist", reporting to the business unit manager and supporting her in matters of problem and risk analysis, process and workplace training. That's right up my alley being, in effect, a formal recognition of the work I've done for the last few years. However, I'd be lying if I didn't admit to the little voices of self-criticism and doubt clamouring to pull me down. I sort of feel like now I'm in the spotlight and will be found out as the fraud I am and fail...embarrasingly.

Yeah! I know! We all feel like that!

Anyway, "Simple Abundance" addressed exactly those issues...that's synchronicity for you! I particularly liked two of the chapter headings: "Honouring Our Gifts" and "Calling Forth Our Gifts" as I do know that I have a gift for communication, articulation and teaching...as much as some horrible little person inside me keeps screeching, "yer no good, yer no bloody good, everybody hates you, nobody loves you"! The other thing I really liked was a sentence in the chapter, "Second Thoughts":

"Actually, feeling inadequate to the task we're asked to do seems to be a spiritual prerequisite."

After a while, soaking up late winter's sun I became drowsy. I was roused by a big currawong* shaking the bush lemon tree. She made me see the abundance of fruit which had gone unnoticed even tho' it was right in front of me. "Black bird singin' in a lemon tree". I looked all around me at the glorious mess of our neglected garden...a perfect ruin. It was perfect, all of it. Fallen fruit and rampant creeper, cracked concrete and...and me, broken old me. I had one of those moments - haiku moments - when I knew that I was held in the palm of Goddess, in the matrix 0f Gaia and that everything was as it should be.

Gardens...and currawongs..are great teachers!

Click here to hear a currawong calling. Link to bird sounds on Australian National Botanic Gardens site kindly provided by the lovely Ravensong
Thanks Marit!