Storms Roll Over the Mountains (1998)

Caitríona Reed

Storms roll over the mountains filling the winter sky. When they have gone, the days are bright and cold,and the sky is astonishingly blue. In the morning, mists rise up out of the meadows. A raven calls. It’s hard to imagine the stillness of summer, the uncompromising midday heat in August. The transparent seasons slide into one another, leaving no trace. Only our speaking of them seems to give them any solidity at all. Our memories have no more weight than the tiny rodents nesting in the rafters, or the distant shadow of a coyote disappearing into the chaparral.

Smoke from the wood stoves rises into chill air. The winter is only just beginning, but I am writing this now to proclaim that my spring has arrived. This year I came out of the closet as transsexual. All my life I wanted to express myself as a woman, live as a woman, speak, move, celebrate life, as a woman; but I was born a boy-child, and the shame and fear of it held me in a kind of perpetual hibernation.

If I made any choice last April, it was to let go of fear. My Buddhist practice was always an attempt to discover what is simple, real, and nourishing. My insistence, as a teacher, has always been that we be authentic, that we simply be ourselves. My own advice seems to have caught up with me! And my practice, to my amazement, has found its fulfillment.

For years I thought that if I spent more time meditating, if I was sincere, dedicated, and truly selfless, this ‘problem’ would go away. I was also sure that if I were to express myself openly as a transgendered person, I would lose my credibility, my friends, everything. As a Dharma teacher I was pretty certain I would also be out of a job. Strangely, this doesn’t seem to have happened.

I now live as a woman.My driver’s license says Caitríona, F. To my surprise, people do not shun me. Though I am a “big-boned gal” strangers now call me ma’am. If I have come out as transsexual, I have also come out as someone capable of being whole, free, and open. I am reclaiming my body, and my life. May we all find the means to do the same!

The support of friends in the Ordinary Dharma community, of the broader community of the Order of Interbeing, of my peers and fellow teachers, and even of my teacher, Thich Nhat Hanh, has been unexpected, generous, and deeply touching. “Thank you. Now I feel free to be just as I am,” was one response. My friend and teacher Joanna Macy, speaking on the telephone, with tears in her voice, exclaimed, “Now we all have to come out!” Thây simply asked, “Shall we call you Caitríona now?”

I am happy in ways I never knew before, not because my desires have been fulfilled, but because, mysteriously, I seem better able to embrace both my own suffering and yours without making too much of a rigid distinction between the two. What I mean is, the drama that oppresses us has become a little less solid and the beauty that nourishes us, a little more palpable.

After the winter rain, the spring promises to be abundant with wildflowers. Larkspur and wild lupines are almost as vivid in my imagination as if they were already here. The towering yucca; the clamor of bird songs in the morning; then in the evening, those same songs, slightly different, echoing in the canyon. The songs make me feel safe, so much a part of the world, so much a part of this landscape. Dried leaves from last autumn are disappearing under green grasses. Without them there could be no new growth.

Caitríona Reed. December 1997
(an edited version of this essay appeared in The Mindfulness Bell. Spring 1998.)