Invitation

My friend Rachel is teaching an online class called “Yoga 4 Musicians” (http://www.yogasong.net/). She leads us in exercises to improve our breathing and stretching, and to find the healing nature of our music. This week our assignment was to investigate our own special gifts, what we bring to our craft that is uniquely ours. I’m not virtuosic on any musical instrument, I play many instruments as my friend Mike Deaton (Mike Deaton Arts and Music) says, “like a drum”. My poetry comes from my heart as do most things in my life.

The word that came to mind immediately was “invitation”. My music, art and poetry come less from a place of craft and more from a place of bringing what’s hidden into the open. I’ve become friends with my unconscious and look forward to its gifts. My creativity is something I entice out of me and encourage to flow freely, come what may. I encourage this in myself and encourage it in others. The relationship of you and I and what’s inside us both is essential to my creative work.

My life is my art and my art is an invitation. I invite myself and others to become ourselves, and then to thrive openly and truthfully in the world. In the late eighties I worked at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. In the work spaces once there was an exhibit of the art made by employees of the NGA. There was so much beautiful work, there’s so much talent living unnoticed around us wherever we are. My heart and my roots artistically are in the conceptual arts, I consider my brain a “New Idea Workshop” as I recently dreamed.

For the exhibit, with a nod to John Cage, I wrote on a slip of paper:

“At a time determined by chance, become yourself”

For me that was an example of my craft at its best. That was my oil painting and my etching, my first symphony. It was an invitation to accept the unknown and uncontrollable, and to embrace that in you which is completely knowable and in which you can abide with the ultimate resilience of being your true self. When the moment presents itself, make the most of it.

It was an invitation that I would not myself begin to fully realize for another 28 years.

After last week’s class I wrote this poem

Invitation (September 2020)

“invitation” September 24, 2020

My Gift is an invitation
to open our life
to our senses and sensations
our emotions and our movements
all of our connections
elations through confusions

My Gift is an invitation
to see in different ways
to hear with new ears
the processes of life

My Gift is an invitation
to explore without borders
without inhibitions and restrictions
the Universe of gender
all of our emotions
all our sexuality
opening every part of us
vulnerability and power

My Gift is an invitation
to open all our Gifts
in safe places to play
expanding into one another
wrapping ourselves
around one another
standing alone
taking up space

My Gift is an invitation
to think new thoughts
to try on new clothes
to expand and expand some more
past what you thought
were possibilities
into borderless positive space

My Gift is an invitation
to negate with creativity
directions of sinking
directions of withdrawal
directions of brutality
directions of closing off
separating and harming

My Gift is an invitation
to hold on to this moment
and carry it into the next
releasing all the energy
we hold inside
that we used to keep held inside
for fear of letting go

Let go
Make noise and listen
my invitation

Find your Truth. Open to your true self. The theme was the same as it was thirty years before. An invitation to become yourself, and an effort to try and create a safe place for us to do that, whether in an art gallery, a website or our own mind.

Recently I’ve been taking pics of the poetry in my last few years of journals, with the intention of presenting them in a book or blog. I want to share my life experience. I’ve kept a journal regularly since the late nineties. Before that I started many journals and destroyed them because of what I found written and drawn there. Then at some point I invited myself to accept the thoughts and desires that went through my mind, as disturbing as I might find them. I wanted to get past the first step, which I seemed to be repeating over and over, of simply seeing myself as I am. Feeling hidden aspects within myself desperately trying to communicate, I longed to become myself. The time had not yet come.

Looking through the last few years of my poetry I found another poem I called “Invitation” written almost exactly two years ago

Invitation (September 2018)

“Invitation” September 23, 2018

I invite me
To drop all resistance to me
I invite me
To come out from the Deep Inside
I invite me
To disregard external barriers
When safe to do so
I invite me
To disregard the voices of
“No you can’t”
I invite me
To play
with my appearance
with my friends
with my music
I invite me
To build my own community
One friend at a time
a community
of mutual love respect and growth
I invite me
To LOVE
The people that I choose
The way that I choose
I invite me
To study Love
To understand Love
To refine Love
I invite me
To open my heart
open my arms
open my LIFE

The space between September of 2018 and September of 2020 is a lifetime. A life hidden within me came to exist here on the outside. The life I had created on the outside cracked, shook and was wholly changed. I found myself alone, the time to become myself was now, and I didn’t know what I was becoming or how to control or stop it from happening. Six months into sobriety in September of 2018, I had accepted that I had felt alone for many years, tried to transform my long time relationship (ending in a traumatic separation), hoped to save a loving relationship with my children, began a magical new relationship and many beautiful friendships and stepped into my life.

October 2019

I found a woman and girl inside me uncontrollably being born and demanding her space in my life, while going through spirals of change as my “old life” was rapidly transforming. I came out as transgender first to myself and then in public, tried to feel what that feels like and figure out what it means. I found space for myself in my life, found a loving partnership without obsession or loss of self, found space for myself in the LGBTQ+ community. I live alone for the first time in my life. I found fun, fashion and so much music inside of me that I can’t wait to create and release. I found a strong, bold and magical sexuality ready to blossom without shame. I took pictures of myself changing and becoming. I found the true beauty of caregiving and activism that strengthens rather than depletes your resources. I found self love and self care. I found myself appreciated and loved. I found out how much I love Godzilla movies. Even my handwriting changed. I became an artist.

Central to all my changes and transformations, and the key to my becoming, was the realization, acceptance and understanding of my gender expansiveness.  I had a woman literally locked inside of me who I had hidden when she was a child. Hidden for safety, hidden for survival. Undeveloped, unknown to my conscious mind and not going away. I began coming to terms with the side of me that hid her, having built a life where I could be me without being entirely me. Being me with what I knew to be me. Being utterly unaware of why I felt incomplete, alien and unlovable as my true self, without knowing what was behind all that alienation. Not knowing what was hidden, but feeling the effects of her every day. I compare it to observing the effects of a hidden planet or star on all the bodies around her, but not seeing or knowing her. I had to let go of something to know what it was, and without knowing what it was I had to let go of everything. And when I did she took my hand.  Not only she but others, my new love, my therapist, members of the trans community who so very strangely seemed to echo many of my most personal experiences.

Gender, or more specifically my gender fluidity, was the missing piece. Its discovery, exploration and acceptance was the missing ingredient to every aspect of my life. My relationships, my art, my sexuality, my overcoming shame for my desires and guilt for my behavior. The reason I became addicted to substances. Gender fluidity isn’t all I’m about, but it is a part of everything that I’m about. I knew there was something different about me, but I didn’t have the language to see and understand and identify it until I became more familiar with the transgender community and transgender experience through my work supporting trans youth. Then the woman inside of me began to ask “How about me? It’s my time now.”

October 2020

Dropping all resistance to me was the necessary step to opening my life. I changed my life. I accepted my own invitation to go down the waterslide to becoming myself, open now and freely flowing. Parts of my life were damaged, healing is a long and unpredictable process. I’m whole now, at the beginning of the next stage of my life as I near my sixtieth birthday. I want to share my life art with the world. This blog is a safe space I’ve created for myself to do that, and to encourage and invite others to become themselves truly and without shame in your own life.

The invitation is more than just encouragement. It’s a gift of permission, a welcoming into, a safe space to explore and experience something new that you may not have felt was allowed before. It’s an opening of a place for you to be you, unashamed and uninhibited, a space to love and appreciate yourself. For the first time yesterday I said to myself “I am my own best friend”. To be able to say that after all I’ve been through means that even though I’m still a mystery to me in many ways, I know in my heart that I’m good as just me. I don’t have to be anyone else. I accepted the invitation. My name is Marty Drake, my pronouns are They/Them. I invite you into my life, and into your own.

2 Comments

  1. Linden says:

    This is wonderful. Thank you so much!

  2. Linden says:

    Hi Marty,
    What better way to begin my weekend, but by reading your blog! I love the title of “Invitation”. Your description of how you’ve interpreted experience is like giant billboard as we travel the roads of our existence. In my heart, you are brave, bold and brilliant!

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