[foxyshaman]

The more I look inside, the more deeply I fall into and out of who I am.

I can no more separate my spiritual calling from my physical appearance then...well I don't really know what to compare it to because I don't remember not having a calling. Ever.

I am very female on the outside, but it took me years to find my feminine. I had always been in relationships where I took the more masculine role, I am actively aware and use the animus parts of my personality easily. The anima is an integral part of my exterior healer. My interior shaman is male, so very very male; not just animus.

As a Northerner, first generation Canadian, I draw heavily on my ancestral practice of seidhr. Seidhr has been historically considered to be "evil magic" because it could be used to alter men's minds and thoughts - I have often read the term "turn the world upside down". This might be a reference to an earthquake (which would be pretty serious magic) or to changing someone's perceptions so drastically via this mind-altering magic that their world might as well be turned upside down. The phrase strikes me so strongly because that's exactly what third gender people do. By our very nature, we turn the world upside down. We are living, walking catalysts, and this is the first mystery of our existence. We turn everything that people think they know about gender - that supposedly safe ground beneath their feet - upside down. We change worlds.

There are "out in the world" third gender persons. There are also, in the other worlds, third gender persons. I will continue to draw attention to the latter for as long as I draw breath. Sexual identity is fluid, gender identity is not simply an outward appearance. Shamanism is a deep and complicated practice. Complicated further by being a feminie dyke with a male shaman interior.

Related yet unrelated, many people I know are very afraid, or leery of doing head stands. Makes sense to me, how many of us like to turn our world upside down... and then stay in that position without falling right side up.