#otherness

I might be late in responding to this thread, but despite being part of the LGBTQ community I more or less felt that it didn't really factor into my spirituality. If anything, there's the genericness of the pagan community being far more accepting than some of the other world religions out there. Other than that I felt like from my personal experiences I didn't really have anything to add to this conversation. 

But then tonight it just clicked with me that in Reformed Druidry, my "spiritual home," it lacks the black and white polarity of some religions like Wicca or Zoroastrianism or draconian sects of Abrahamic faiths. Instead it embraces the gray areas of our life experiences. It asks us to be observant and aware of things where polarity and perfect opposites just don't really exist. And heck yeah, even queerness is in that category of a (rather colorful) gray area. Gray areas are liminal, being somewhat between two or more distinct things. 

For his graduation collection The Tangent Flows in 1993, designer Husein Chalayan buried his garments with iron filings in a friend’s garden, leaving them to decompose over several months. The resulting pieces were degraded and enshrouded with iron oxide, appearing as though they had been unearthed after centuries of decay.

"Otherness"

By Justyna Stoszek

I.

I hover at the thresholds, deciding who shivers and who comes in The cruelty fits my hand far too well

Past acquaintances gather in their old choreography Offering up what’s spilling from them into something wrapped like a gift

Glossed daughters, rules like chandeliers

And the mind It keeps wanting to split To hybridize To become something truer than what safety allows

A tank of bright swimming things A house with paper walls If I angle the world just right Another panel opens If I angle again Another

I keep looking for the door that leads to wanting without humiliation Power without injury

II.

What belongs to my childhood gets rezoned for adulthood Even inside myself I’m told to knock first

Sometimes I picture myself holding a doorknob with someone trembling on the porch Sometimes I don’t open it Sometimes I savor the delay

Identity ripples First one species, then another Until the herd stares Deciding what counts as pure

To find the hinge To flip each layer of this pop-up world Fish moving in colored currents