Blog-type-thingy (BTT) #1. Secret Rainbows and Deep Seashells.

For Blog-Type-Thingy Number One, a Real treat!  Y’all get to read my currently favorite poem.  Alright, Dig in, and then we’ll talk about it a bit.  (Lona clears her throat delicately in a sophisticated manner and strikes a pose as if she is reading rather serious stuff…)   no no no! just kidding, just relax with this poem, it is not High Falootin at all, it is just simply gorgeous and true!  Ok, here goes.

“The Excesses of God”
(by Robinson Jeffers)

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know
Our God? For to be equal a need
Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling
Rainbows over the rain
And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows
On the domes of deep sea-shells,
And make the necessary embrace of breeding
Beautiful also as fire,
Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom
Nor the birds without music:
There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,
The extravagant kindness, the fountain
Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise
If power and desire were perch-mates.

Now here is the great thing about this poem…   It is awesome.  God has done a lot of cool things, as great as second life is, not much of it has quite measured up to the gorgeous little playground God has made for us on terra firma.  There are a lot of things we could talk about in regards to God, but this poem shows how over the top, even showy, he is in how he envelops us. (Do you like how I use that word, “envelop,” feels like a crisp, but snuggly little hug, doesn’t it?)  Hmmm… what if we allowed, through our choices, for power and desire to be perch-mates? (Do I really understand that? – I think I do, I think that if our true desires for beauty and caring for one another were aligned with the powers that were granted to us, the beauties that God gave us would be amplified by our actions rather than smudged or royally messed up by them).  If what we really wanted in our most basic nature were aligned with our consistent actions, then we would be like God.  BUT we mess up, and sometimes we are just plain nasty, (seriously at a Beach dance party the other day, some bozo with an cutesy fake name like Corrupted Early and a basic first day avatar won the themed costume contest by eight votes!- he probably crashed the board with hidden alts and made off with about 300 L$, anyway it seemed fishy and the hostess said he had cheated, but what could ya do, just sit back and feel smug at your moral superiority that’s what! Sheesh!   I looked so awesome that I would have won if he had not cheated.  Now wasn’t that nasty of him?  And y’know that other thingy – war?  Now don’t EVEN get me started about how nasty war is!)

So, anyway, we come back to needing God in order to get our mojo and our gojo to be perch-mates.  But the whole thing about needing God might not even be greatest thing about this poem.  What I love is how Mr. Jeffers effusively gushes about how gorgeous God is.  The poet paints both the broad scope and the minute detail of God’s creation, and that God loves beauty sooo much He even weaves it into hidden corners and basic functions of survival.  You can’t uncover any little rock in this world without being surprised by something wonderful.  For me the fact that God puts “secret rainbows on the domes of deep seashells” is especially poignant.  I am a transgender woman, who will likely never transition my real life avatar from male to female because of the imperatives of my particular faith, the desire to keep my wonderful marriage intact, and the desire to be a fully present parent for my children.  Nevertheless, the three pound universe between my ears has been decidedly and secretly female really my whole life.  I had taken steps in the past to take hormone therapy and start the switch and it felt wonderful, and I have more than a little holy envy for those transgender people who have walked down that road, even though I know that road also has it’s own deep challenges.  I had spent a good bit of my life thinking I was a sick little weirdo or a sinner for having these thoughts, but I have since realized that even though I have important loves in my life which outweigh my desire to transition, I am just another fact of biology, and of God’s creation.  I believe I have heard  that male to female transgender occurs at a rate between one in ten-thousand to thirty-seven thousand, so we are not all that common, but we seem to exist in higher proportion in Second Life than in the non-pixelated spheres.  This does not surprise me, I am sure that there are many others who have had the same liberating experience of being able to be beautiful in Linden land when we would not be able to express who we really are in quite the same way “up there” in the so-called real world.  Here I have also found the first people who are like me at the Transgender Resource Center.  The community there has been open and kind and generous in acceptance of all types of transgender people.  For the first time I have been able to converse with people who have at least a slight inkling what I feel like.

The residents of Second Life have built a sweet little wonderland, and I am very grateful for it, but it is really just a small little corner of the earth.  It might even be considered a “dome of a deep seashell…”  But it is full of wonderful, kind, and generous secret rainbows.  So…   let me raise a glass of whatever it is that I am drinking these days (strictly in line with my little Mormon idiosyncracies – so no fermentation is involved) to the residents of Second Life who are building from their hearts.  Thank you!  Have fun, keep up the good work, and don’t fall too far off your perches!   Love, Lona.