For the past couple of months, to aid me in my even older new adventure of learning French, I have started experimenting with Suno, an AI music creation tool. I have a very musical mind, and my French-translated songs are really helping me absorb new words.
Here are some samples of songs:
Are You Going to the Caraquet Fair? (the old folk song)
Hyacinth – Flower of Spring
Jacqueline (about a distant ancestor in the 1600’s)
The One Who Stayed a song about the Ojibwe migration from my homeland in Canada, centuries ago. This is a rough draft.
It’s Your World (a french cover of a Gil Scott Heron song)
When the calendar drearily flipped from 2025 to 2026 after all of the very depressing events of the previous year, with no promise of change; I had been quietly praying for a little bit of guidance for some direction to take in the coming year. I had received my passport, having lost the battle to have my correct gender reflected on it. I had some vague plans to travel to Canada to go to some powwows, try to discover more about my ancestry, and impose myself somehow, on people who literally told me “Take a hint. We don’t want you around” at one point. I had absolutely ZERO idea that I would be enrolled in college a couple of weeks later!
Even with all of the rejection and discouragement, I decided to be patient and continue studying the Mi’kmaq language, reading voraciously, and just staying off the related social media groups. I also started coming across a lot of Ojibwe language lessons, and some of their teachings. It was all so familiar! I found that I was picking up Ojibwe really fast! I came across a lecture about The Seven Generations and the Seven Grandfather Teachings (2021, Vukelich, J.), hosted at Red Lake Nation College. I was really blown away by the teachings themselves, which were very much like what I learned from my own Grandfather. And I was also incredibly moved by the introductory words by Dan King, Ogimaa (Chief) of the Red Lake Band of Chippewa, and college President. I decided to take a chance. I applied and wrote an introductory email about myself to the admissions office. From that point, my life has been 100% completely out of my control. A week later I was registered for and beginning two classes! The next semester, I expect to be a full time, in-person student on their campus in Minnesota.
This is an incredibly positive and exciting experience for me. I seem to be doing well in my classes, which I had never really dreamed possible. But it is also one of the most terrifying things I have ever embarked upon. Maybe even more so than gender transitioning in a very hostile world. In my previous life, I was a high school dropout. I didn’t just drop out on a whim. I literally had not been able to function at all in school for several years. I found myself wondering how I had the absolutely absurd audacity to think I could survive in college. I literally almost panicked and bailed out 10 minutes before my first class. But I didn’t run! And like most other things in the past year that were really scary for me, they turned out ok. I just have to show up. The universe seems to take care of me.
The classes I am taking, are usually no big deal for most people. But I am finding that in every class, I am forced to remember and write about things that I have always been scared to think about and remember. My previous experiences in school mostly. Explaining myself. Who I am. What have I done in life. I am someone who for the past few years of sobriety, has constructed a world that I can live in, and surround myself with a GroovyVerse warp bubble of alternate reality. The day I got sober is day zero of year zero. Nothing happened before that. It is all moving forward! I do this everywhere, even at work. I am a transgender woman and deal with hundreds of people every day, half of which usually hate my guts, and I make most of them like me by the end of our short transaction. When they set foot into my 10 foot radius warp bubble, they are doomed. I create a little world where I can exist, love everyone, even if they don’t love me back. And I make it work.
This strange ability to warp reality, grew out of our virtual world, GroovyVerse. We are a community of artists that have created a whole world, roughly the size of Wyoming. It is filled with cities, railroads, pristine wilderness, sailboats that you can explore the vast waterways with for weeks, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, pre-contact Native America, 18th century Acadia, and countless other creations. Most importantly, we are like a small utopia where people are really kind and decent to each other. We are used to dreaming it, and making it reality. That has spilled out into the real world for me a bit. I carry this reality with me.
Hyacinth at Historic Caraquet in the GroovyVerse virtual world.
Unfortunately in school, I am not a goddess. I do not have my amazing Jedi powers that I exhibit at work. I have to face things I do not want to face, and write about things that I do not want to remember. I am catching up with decades of therapy that I refused to get. But… I still have a tiny bit of magic. I am showing up, every day. Doing my best and doing what I need to do. And so far, I am subverting my whole history and everyone’s expectations of the old me, and getting good grades. And I am even doing citations. Imagine that! 🙂
