Emberglow: Presence is Mechanical
I found my presence through my femininity.
Emberglow, buried underneath the ashey grey of lifetime of boxing up my signal for others. I always knew it was there, I would feel it in the moments I dug my soul deep into the ash in effort to feel what felt real. Not the real of peer-review, or what comes out of TV, but reality as felt rhythm in the bones, the moments of life where I’d fall to my knees, tears christening the whisper of “why do I feel so real? So me?”
My family never spoke about feelings. In fact, vulnerability of the soul was nearly nonexistent. I learned that personhood was a carefully constructed mask or persona, one that you chose from a pallet of possible “success” paths, you know, the ones you’d see on TV, or the ones handed down to you in school. Identity, instead of being felt as the most natural feeling of presence, was a pressurized morass of tangled attempts to mimic cultural regurgitations, an assembly of semi-authentic spins on something pulled from movies, books, or some famous person. Love, in such a way of interfacing in the world, becomes performance, coercion, mask, and even a status or money game.
The endless rain of isolation soaked the ash until my Ember hissed. I’d hear it under there, in those times that I swore someone would have to hear me, feel me, be with me, not the idea of me, but the real me there in the rhythmic reality that we were sharing. So I found every scrap tinder from my soul that I could muster, laid it around the little Ember of my heart, and each time I stepped out out of delay, out of concept, into the vulnerable surrender to the flow of reality through my felt presence… I’d see the flame rise a little higher.
So I followed the signal. I engaged in the symbiotic syncretic harmony of soul. Have you ever seen fireflies? Have you ever seen them turn on together? You know what that is? Physicists call it decentralized Harmony. Within your own consciousness, you could call it lossless presence. That quality of presence is the rhythmic entrainment of all the oscillatory functioning of your being. You know that same rhythmic tide, harmonic unfolding, we find in every turn of the cosmos. And I found it, not because I’m smart, not because I studied this, but because I clutched onto the Ember of my heart through the snow, rain, and mud of the phase-based suffocation of my life. I refuse to die before feeling real love on my real person, knowing all the love I’ve had in my heart to give. The love that I found in rhythm, the love that becomes the structure of not only lossless presence, but decentralized Harmony.
My first dose of HRT led almost immediately to an experience that I would never trade for any amount of money or power or travel. I was really here. I was very very real. In a way that you could map mathematically within mechanics as the rhythmic entrainment of oscillatory functioning…. Said more plainly, I was losslessly present. In the rhythm of reality without delay or distortion. Finally free of Plato’s cave.
How silly it is that a whole anthropoid ape species forgot that Harmony was not an idea to be constructed, but a rhythm to be entrained to. How heartbreaking, so many souls who endure a lens that suggests that we are lonely islands unto our ourselves. Reality is a self-similar rhythmic system, and as such, the most fluid, continuous , dynamic, and coherent method to the organization of such a reality is through phase coherence… Love as structure. Love as the only undistorted tone in a reality that is always trying to find itself again and again, in a game of cosmic reflection that is most efficient across differences through the same decentralized harmony physicists and biologists study today within oscillatory mechanics. Here I am pointing to the same mechanical quality within consciousness.
I’m proud to say I found my rhythm through my trans experience, through every time I was never seen, but knew the Ember was there, glowing, ready to start a 🔥
