Lately, I’ve been meditating on what it means to embody both joy and defiance. Not one at the expense of the other, but simultaneously, like a double flame flickering against the wind of oppression.
Reading Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline, I felt something stir in me—a memory, not just historical, but karmic.
Could it be that souls like Marsha’s are drawn back again and again to stand in the eye of the storm, carrying with them a fierce love that refuses to be extinguished?
Marsha P. Johnson, saint of Stonewall, was more than an activist or an icon. She was a mystic in drag, a being who turned the streets of New York into sacred ground through sheer presence. She lived out a gospel of wild grace, testifying in sequins and stardust to a deeper truth: that love, undefended and unashamed, can overturn empires.
Reading her story isn’t just reading about the past. For me, it’s a call from a spiritual sister, someone who remembered what so many of us forget—that identity is fluid, but truth is eternal. She didn’t need to read the Upanishads to know that “Thou art That.” She lived it, screamed it, danced it, even when society tried to kill it.
Paramahansa Yogananda wrote: “Man’s path to Self-realization is through repeated efforts in many lives.” I believe Marsha’s life was one of those profound efforts—a chosen incarnation to bring a disruptive beauty into this world, not to escape karma but to transmute it.
In Advaita Vedanta, we are taught that the Self is untouched by circumstance. Yet in the lila—the divine play—the Self appears as form, as personality, as struggle. And in that play, certain souls return not to “learn” more, but to serve. To shake things up. To illuminate dark corners.
Marsha, to me, is one of those. A lightbearer cloaked in glitter, a Bodhisattva who refused to sit down.
Sri Aurobindo wrote that human evolution isn’t merely physical—it’s the evolution of consciousness itself. Marsha’s very existence was revolutionary because it was a refusal to de-evolve. Even in poverty, even in pain, she chose love over bitterness, performance over hiding, presence over disappearance.
From the scientific angle, I can’t help but think of consciousness as something non-local, something that wears form like water wears a wave. Gender, race, trauma—all these are patterns in the field. But the field itself, as Roger Penrose might say, is rooted in a deeper order—perhaps even in the Platonic realm of mathematical truth.
What if Marsha’s soul chose precisely those patterns to show the rest of us how to break them?
Nisargadatta Maharaj said, “Wisdom is knowing I am nothing, love is knowing I am everything, and between the two my life moves.” That quote lives in Marsha’s life. She moved in that in-between space, balancing transcendence and embodiment. And she did it with flowers in her hair.
There is something in me that resonates with Marsha’s defiant joy because it mirrors a path I’m still on—what I’ve come to call spiritual tough love. It’s the love that confronts. The love that doesn’t flinch in the face of suffering. The love that says, “You’re divine, now act like it.”
Marsha did not let her suffering define her, but she didn’t deny it either. She turned it into art, into protest, into myth. That’s tantra in its truest form: the sacred and the profane, dancing together.
We don’t need to be activists in the same way Marsha was. But we are called, each of us, to some form of radical visibility. To live in alignment with our truest nature, no matter how much the world resists it.
Marsha reminds me that the path of the mystic isn’t always solitary or silent. Sometimes it’s loud. Sometimes it’s a parade. Sometimes it’s a scream that says, “I’m still here, and I love you.”
So I light a candle for her tonight—not out of grief, but gratitude. I sense she’s not done yet. Souls like hers rarely are. Perhaps she’s already back among us, wearing another face, standing on another front line, telling the world once again:
“No pride for some of us without liberation for all of us.”
May we meet her there.
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