Noble Silence

(Friday, July 18)

At the San Francisco Zen Center's Green Gulch Farm these few days I'm here, I eat breakfast amidst a community sitting in silence. I haven't received such a gift in a long time, immersed in the sweetness of the experience.

The silence isn't an absence. It's the womb of possibility. I'm invited to protect it for the sake of everyone else in the room. They protect it for one other, and for me, whom they've never met and likely won't see again. We all protect it for the sake of the silence itself.

As I sit here with a dear friend, I look out the window to the trunk of a coastal redwood, its bark a deeply scored record of decades and centuries. Its life unhampered by the prison of identity. Its roots buried deeply and invisibly in the earth, reaching out to communicate wordlessly with the roots of other living beings.

Contemplating its trunk, I remember my grandmother living on the edge of poverty in the 1920's and 30's with a family of seven children, yet somehow scraping together donations for conservation of the redwoods that she never saw.

This tree's roots somehow reach out to embrace my grandmother, to migrate and transmute her life into its life. She's become the tree, rooted here just outside the room where I'm starting my day, 2500 miles from where she's buried. Visible only because of the silence. 

When communal silence is reframed--when it no longer seems an arbitrary discipline but instead something we all tend lovingly and reverently together--a space of unpredictable magic opens up.

Finding the Language

I want to live in the faith that we're on the verge of something new among men creating erotic ritual community togoether.

It's been building for decades: among Radical Faeries, at queer retreat centres, in groups like the Billies and Gay Spirit Visions. On the rare website like Bateworld that feels like genuine online community. On blogs like this. Sometimes we draw on the resources of existing traditions; sometimes we create new forms and structures more or less from scratch. The emerging variety is wondrous. 

At some point, experimentation starts coalescing into continuity. Repetition creates familiar patterns and confirms expectations. We move toward consensus about what brings us together, what we value, what we reverence. Every time we gather, actions become more familiar. Every time we gather, what they mean to us changes. What they mean to you may be different from what they mean to me. The ritual is the container in which all this can flourish spontaneously--essential, but not an end it itself. 

None of it requires complete agreement. Our sense of belonging is based on things we do together, not necessarily on all of us understanding what we do in the same way.

Ritual is like a language. The objects we use in ritual are like its vocabulary: fire, water, earth; food and drink; bells, candles, incense, ritual garments; images, altars, mandalas. How we use them, what we do with them, follows a grammar that we perfect with practice. Formulas of greeting and beginning, formulas of completion and departure. Rituals of initiation; of membership in community; of gratitude; of mourning; of renunciation; of remembrance.

Before any such language is there to be learned, it has to be made up and then consolidated in the first place. This has always been true, in the case of every spriitual tradition, no matter how ancient, no matter how established. Now, it's emerging among men who feel called to reverence the sacred, transformative power of our erotic pleasure and of our desire for one another. We've been inventing the language for a long time now. We're more than ready to speak it to one another.

The internet has helped us find one another more easily, but the internet is not the magic. The magic is what we do--and did long before the electronic age. The magic is what we do in and with our bodies--together, weaving the webs of connection that transcend the isolation of the false self.

Yes, Over the Top. And I Love It

The trenchant satire of Aleksander Constantinoropolous, aka Virgin Monk Boy on Substack:

Modern wellness culture has achieved the impossible: it has fused quantum mechanics with kale.

What once began as a sincere desire to feel less like a walking cortisol ad has now metastasized into a full-blown industrial complex with the aesthetic of a Whole Foods altar and the pricing of a small liberal arts college.

As a celibate monk who once accidentally biohacked his pineal gland by eating expired tofu, I feel qualified—nay, spiritually compelled—to address this.

Dear seeker, it’s time we talked about Rainbow Diets and Chakra Cleanses.

Or as I like to call it:
“Late-stage capitalism dressed in hemp pants.”