Joy in the Forest

 

Photo by Gerry Fortuna

God Bless Charles Rennie Macintosh

With thanks to the lovely and talented Mountaine Jonas for snapping the photos and sending them along... 

Yom Kippur 5782

Walk, don't run....

The bush doesn't suddenly catch fire,

it's been burning the whole time.

Moses is simply moving

slowly enough to see it. And when

he does,

he takes off his sandals.

        --Bob Rell

Being Seen

In the introductory statement to his book of male nude photographs, Being Seen, my generous and brilliantly gifted friend Andrew Graham writes, 

"What about our deeper selves--our naked selves--that which makes us weep with abandon, laugh out loud, or that which gives us reason to rise each morning? What are our passions? What is it that makes us vulnerable? Can we share these parts of us? 

"Obviously for most to be literally naked before the lens is to be very vulnerable. I believe there is a truth inherent and unavoidable when we shed our clothes. It is my goal to capture and share that truth."

Andrew's lens lovingly captures the beauty of the men he photographs, both those who would turn heads on Fire Island, and those who probably wouldn't. Not "seeing past" the physical, but seeing into the physical, seeing "the soul beneath the skin" (to borrow the title of David Nimmons' book about gay men forging more loving, connected communities).

Whenever I visit Andrew, it's a joy to look at his recent work. When I saw him this last week, I didn't expect him to ask me to model for him--a request he made with his characteristic concern for the comfort and agency of those he's with. 

My body shame operates oddly. I enjoy walking around a locker room nude--until I look in the mirror and go, "Oh, fuck." In the depths of Covid's first waves, I took to joking that I was down to one angle I was happy seeing myself naked, and that my goal was to make it back to two by the end of a summer of daily visits to the Y.

I asked Andrew to forgo sharing the work with me during the shoot, as he prefers to do with his models. I knew that self-consciousness would take over as soon as I saw the images. When we finished, nearly 300 exposures later, my predicted distress set in. I talk the talk of all of us having the right to take joy in our bodies, to love them as they are, to inhabit them as subjects rather than evaluate them as objects of scrutiny. And then that all goes out the window when I see that three months of fixed weights have done nothing, nothing at all, to reverse the sag in my 66-year-old chest or the extra pounds around my middle. 

I found myself cringing as much at the hypocrisy of my discomfort as at the soft contours of my belly. And yet could go on feeling good about the experience of the shoot, because of Andrew--because of the respect and affection of his gaze, because of the alchemy that comes from being witnessed rather than just looked at. My vulnerability held within the safe container of his regard. Encouraged by him to see myself through soft eyes. My being, seen.

Later that day, he showed me what had become of a few of the images he'd begun to edit. And I was astonished. Being seen, being truly seen, can be more than a safe experience. It can be a healing. 

Images from Andrew Graham Photography

The Trouble with Archetypes

Magician. Warrior. King. Lover. 

Enneagram 6. Myers Briggs INFJ. Virgo with the Moon in Drag Queen.

Sometimes we'd really, really love to find the Captain Midnight Decoding Ring. 

When we're casting around trying to make sense of our lives, trying to find a center that will hold, it's comforting to think that in some universal archetype, finally, lies the deep truth of who I am. The deep truth of who I've always been, of a destiny that's mine to fulfill. The truth of who other people are as well. Cut through the vagaries of my history, the random stuff that's happened to me, and underneath I'll strike the archetypal bedrock that makes sense of it all. 

Except it doesn't.

We want there to be something solid down at the bottom. We're drawn to the possiibility of some universal truth. But we won't find the truth of our lives in some eternal verity that's waiting to be uncovered. The truth of our lives is in the random history of how we came to be who we are. Peel away a layer of the onion, and you'll find the onion inside. Except that there's another layer to peel away after that. And another layer after that. 

It's not always easy to look with clear eyes at our own histories, with their joys, their traumas, their wounds, their experiences of grace, and their sheer accidents. Sometimes it's hard work to see ourselves as the entirely particular beings that we are. So we start projecting our experience onto some transcendent realm, instead of facing the specific, precious randomness of who we've become and are still becoming. We start making outrageously overgeneralized statements about the universal nature of men's experience, or gay experience. We imagine we're including everyone, when what we're doing is marginalizing those whose experience doesn't conform to our own formulation.

Men don't, as men, have some core essential nature that makes us protectors or warriors, kings or magicians or lovers. Gay men aren't, by some innate gift of being gay, nurturers or tricksters or shamans. We may have some or all of these qualities, but none of them sets us apart as men, or as queer men. None of them is a secret handshake that admits us to the Boys' Club or the Queer Boys' Club. None of them makes us esssentially different from women or straight people or gender-fluid folks or anybody else. And all the other components of our identity--our religion, our class, our race, our cultural background, and on and on, just as importantly make us different from one another.

What we have is the particularity of our experience. We need to dive deeper into it, not impose on it the template of some imagined realm of essential identity. Use whatever images, whatever boxes, whatever labels, you need to make sense of your story. But they're only tools to use for as long as they're useful.

Random Objects

The Sacred isn’t just something we discover out there, or within. It’s also something we invent with our bodies. And something that invents us.

That’s my summary, in twenty-four words, of Brent Plate’s A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). It’s that rarest of all phenomena, a book by an academic who can write clearly and accessibly for an intelligent non-specialist, without sacrificing subtlety or suggestiveness. It’s the kind of book that will unsettle anyone who thinks his own spiritual path offers an exclusive or unique access to the Divine. And it’s an antidote to mystified shamanic woo-woo.

Plate starts by making a fundamental point about our experience in human bodies--we’re not complete. We feel partial, because we are partial. We’re not each a whole, but a half. We long for completion, and we try to find it by a whole slew of means: drugs, companionship, sex, the perfect relationship, our i-Phone, the touch of a dog.

We also look for it by reaching out further, when these stopgap measures fail to satisfy, toward the Mystery. We create religion. But we get sidetracked into believing that religion is about disembodied teaching, or that the spirit is separate from our flesh, even antithetical to our flesh. Religion, Plate insists, is about tying body together with the longings we experience for relation to what is beyond us. (The word "religion" itself derives from a Latin verb that means "to tie back together.") And we do that through the means of the senses.

Plate’s five objects are stones, incense, drums, crosses, and bread. In each case, it’s the physical practice of what we do with these objects that comes first, not an abstract understanding of the meaning of our action. We act, then we think about the meaning of our action. First comes practice, then comes belief. 

We set stones on top of one another to mark a place out as noteworthy, or even sacred. Later, we create an explanation for what made us do it. 

We make a memorial quilt panel for someone we’ve loved. Only later do  we experience what our grief might mean in the larger world, when we see our handiwork incorporated into a project that honors tens of thousands of those lost to HIV-AIDS. 

We lay a bouquet of flowers in a public space to honor someone who’s died. But the meaning of what we’ve done depends on the offerings that others have already made there, and on the offerings that will follow. 

We witness our love for someone by buying a cheap lock and shackling it to the grate on the Pont des Arts in Paris. All this is not only about discovering or expressing what’s within us. It’s just as much about inventing it, making it real through the senses and through the body. 

All this turns our understanding of the relationship between ritual and the soul inside out. We want the rituals we participate in to be immediately and easily meaningful. Many of us want their purpose and significance spelled out for us ahead of time, and we’re uncomfortable with doing something before we understand why we’re doing it. 

It’s not a bad idea to resist this impulse for clarity. “Listen to your art,” says Marina Abramovic. “It knows more than you do.” The same can be said, sometimes, of ritual. Long ago, Pascal said, “Kneel down, move your lips, and you will believe.” Walk into the river and submerge yourself. Afterwards, you may understand that you longed to be cleansed. 

Ring a bell at the door of a temple, and afterwards you may get it that you needed to announce your entrance into the Presence of what’s honored there. Bow to someone who smudges you with sage, and later you may understand that the smoke has prepared you to take what happens afterwards more seriously. Hold your wrist out and let someone tie a red thread around it, and days later it may go on bearing witness that the ritual it was part of is still working its way through your consciousness. Your urge to sit quietly at the back of a church with your eyes closed for five minutes every afternoon doesn’t require your belief in a creed.

First we do. Then we understand.

But the reverse of this trust in the integrity of the ritual before you completely understand it is also true. Plate’s approach also invites us to build ritual from the roots of our experience up, when we need to, instead of waiting helplessly for some expert to hand it down to us ready-made. Your favorite park bench may work better for you than the back pew of a cathedral. 

A ritual doesn’t depend for its authenticity on an esoteric meaning fully possessed only by some master of the tradition. Being recited in a language no one in the room knows except for the officiant doesn’t make a chant more effective. Exotic materials aren’t necessarily preferable to what’s around us from day to day. Something as ordinary as water or wine or bread or a candle becomes extraordinary because of how it’s used, and the care with which it’s treated, and because of how its use encourages us to sink further down into its deep multiple meanings for our life. 

“...one point of a history of religion is that all these sacred rituals were, over time and space, made up. All traditions adapt and change, fitting new environments,” as Plate puts it (p. 133).

We build a spiritual practice for ourselves out of the materials we have on hand. There’s nothing to wait for, no expertise you need that you don’t already have, no clear understanding that has to come first. Pick up the tools. They’ll teach you what you need to know.

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Sex is a Finger Pointing at the Moon

The deeper you dive into the Left-Handed Path of desire, the more you run up against this inevitable truth: your monkey mind thinks it's about fulfilment, but it's not.

A well-known koan runs, Zen is the finger pointing at the moon. And the non-answer to the riddle is, "Don't look at the finger. Look at the Moon, stupid."

Don't get hung up on Zen teaching. Don't get hung up on perfecting your meditation practice. Don't get hung up even on the quest for enlightenment.

If we take desire a teacher, the stakes are high. We're pretty nearly hard-wired to imagine that the perfect fulfilment of the fantasy, the perfect connection with the perfect partner, the perfect orgasm, is what will bring us completion.

In other words, we're almost inevitably inclined to "chase the dragon," hoping for the perfect high.

If only the masseur's touch were a little firmer. Or a little lighter. If only the guy I just started dating were five years younger. Or older.  If only he were more my type.

If only my abs were a little tighter. If only I could still keep it up like I did when I was twenty-five. 

If only I'd come out six years earlier. Or twenty years earlier. Or fifty years earlier. 

If only the surgery hadn't put an end to my ability to ejaculate. Or to my partner's sex drive.

If only I weren't actually living my life as it is, here and now, in this present moment.

When we keep staring at the finger, we miss the Moon. We miss the lightning flash of unexpected experience. We miss the magic of what we never bargained on, of what's more than we could have asked or imagined.

Your fantasies, your memories, your expectations, they're all a finger. You need them to point the way. But look at the Moon.

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

If you keep an altar and are willing to share it here, send me a photo and I'll post it.

Icarus: A Reverie

We sit on the slope above the field where we go on warm, windy spring afternoons. We watch one bright purple kite fly higher than the rest. As it dives, the practiced hand of the young man holding the string lets it play out till it catches the updraft again and shoots higher. His son shouts in delight. 

I turn to my daddy and we lock eyes. "You really want it, don't you?" he smiles. I just nod slowly, and we head back home.

Thirty minutes later, I'm leaning against the diamond-shaped plywood frame with its thin mattress. He's putting the restraints on my ankles, stretching one of my arms out to the side to tie it down, then the other. He unfastens the base  of the diamond from the shackle that secures it to floor and hauls up on the pulley. I'm swinging in the air now. He puts one hand on my chest, gazes into my eyes, and rocks me for a few seconds from side to side.

The soft cord goes in a slipknot around my cock and balls. He wraps the other end around his forearm. His fingertips graze the underside of my erection, and I shudder. He flicks the tip of his tongue over my frenulum, and I moan.

This will go on for hours. By the time he lets me down again, I wil barely remember my own name. I'll have only a few words left, but they'll be all I need.

"Please, daddy."

"Thank you."

"Higher, daddy. Make me go higher."

"I need this so bad."

"Please let me be your fucktoy."

He tugs gently on the cord around my junk, and I sway tilted, suspended three feet off the floor.

He oils his hand and strokes the length of me, twisting so his palm rotates, gloriously and excruciatingly, over my glans. The middle finger of his other hand presses against my perineum and begins to burrow gentlly towards my pulsing hole.

He, too, will only need a few words.

"Take another deep breath for me."

"Take it in. I know you're close, but you can hold on."

"We're going to go a little higher now."

"That's my sweet boy."

"I know how full you are, but it's not time yet."

If I begin to hyperventilate: "It's OK, I've got you."

Everything will disappear but the feel of his hands and mouth. His eyes. His voice. The sight of his own erection, unreachable though just inches from my hand. The pleasure spreading from my bound, oiled cock through my whole body. Before it's over, I will forget that I am anything other than my daddy's fucktoy. I will not want to be anything, ever again, but my Daddy's fucktoy. 

At last, when I've pleaded for an eternity, he will make me cum. He will bend down to taste it and then share it with me in a kiss. He will adjust the pulleys so that I'm floating horizontal, slather the rest of my semen onto his own perfect phallus, and ejaculate into my grateful open mouth.

Until then, I will look down from the sky to see Daddy expertly playing the connection between us, tethering me safely to earth as I strain towards heaven.

Encounter With Eros: A Guest Post by Michael Gvamos

 Deep gratitude to Michael Gvamos for sharing this beautiful reflection on the connection of his erotic energy with the Source of All Things. Michael's previous guest post, on his extended hermitage last year, appeared here last August 7. Michael observes that he felt he was transcribing it more than writing it himself, at 3 a.m. shortly after completing the Body Electric School's weeklong intensive, The Dear Love of Comrades.

I woke up at 3 AM, my hand stroking my raging cock. It was as hard and full as I can ever remember it being. It was like a power unto itself – asserting itself; demanding attention, insisting on being dealt with and reconciled with – my Life Force declaring itself in its full power and manifestation. It was a beautiful, awesome and thunderous spirit to behold. 

I do not own it; it inhabits me. I am but the earthly vessel – a limited, rickety and beautiful container. My Life Force is beyond male and female; yet is both at the same time. I acknowledge and honor it by stroking – moving the energy/power; transferring it into my body. I stroked it for quite a while – riding the energy, celebrating its spirit and power – being thrilled and humbled by it. Participating with it but not owning or possessing it. Stroking it; feeling the ecstasy and the danger at the same time. For the first time, feeling a freedom, a pride, a communion with it without shame, hesitancy or recoil. “Pride” does not capture it – it is “happiness with the fact that I am the custodian of this awesome and thunderous power.” Having a fascination and infatuation with it – knowing it is unusual, unique and special – humbled and reverent towards it power and responsibility. Thrilled at getting to play with it – to be able to ride the waves of ecstasy – both physical and spiritual. At the same time knowing that such power exacts a terrible price; there can be no ecstasy without suffering. Knowing that this force is what is best in me – that which drives me and compels me to love myself, to love others, to love this world; to feel, imbibe and soak up this world, as beautiful and broken as it is. 

As it is, my Life Force is very small and insignificant in the big picture of the world. But at the same time, it is vital and crucial to me and those in my spiritual/emotional circle. Irreplaceable but miniscule. I have never felt so unified, whole and healed. I am humbled and reverent to the Power that has guided me to this moment. I know that I consciously choose to participate with that Power, even as I am possessed by it. My body seems a fragile and inadequate vehicle; but one that has learned to welcome, celebrate, dance and surrender to our symbiotic relationship. As I stroke my fully alive Phallus, I both seize and surrender to the Power of my Life Force. 

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Through a Glass, Darkly

 "Remember, the only language available to religion is metaphor.  God is always like something else we have experienced visibly and directly."

--from Fr. Richard Rohr's daily meditation for May 30 (Trinity Sunday)

Center for Action and Contemplation

L'dor v'Dor

It's the Jewish liturgical phrase for the endless sequence of connection, from generation to generation. 

And wired into it is the privilege given to biological reproduction as the means by which we inherit a sense of belonging in the world.

This side of the Holocaust--with whole lineages wiped out, and others that survived by the most tenuous thread--that phrase is also full of trauma, grief, longing, the desire for reparation. 

And for queer children of survivors, I know--sometimes a nearly intolerable burden, as it was for my beloved, gifted friend, the late Oscar Wolfman. 

Oscar Wolfman, "Five Sons"

I don't have to be Jewish myself to get the nostalgia, the longing for connection to a family of origin who couldn't teach me what I needed to know about making my way in the world as a man who loves men. Growing up German Lutheran in the Midwest, at the tail end of a dysfunctional generation who loved to think they were the Waltons, I got a full helping of the desire to be seen and mentored, and precious little of its fulfillment. 

Of course, it's where my daddy fantasies got their start. 

I've decided I'm done with pathologizing those fantasies. I'm ready to move on and accept them as my personal expression of a broad and easily recognizable human need. More radically: I'm ready to say that the erotic connections we form across generations (within the parameters of the law, which is to say 18+) are a precious form of mentoring. Rooted deep in our individual psyches, yes.  And at the same time, a means of weaving the queer social fabric we need to thrive and find our place in the world. A means of creating acceptance and belonging for one another. 

I'm a man of a certain age, and getting more certain by the month. At some point, you look in the mirror and can no longer deny you're now the older and wiser man you always wanted to meet. I may still be a son longing for his father figure, but it's time to step into being the father figure ready to respond to the younger man who needs me. Giving what I've always needed is the best way I have to experience it myself. 

Not to pretend I can recover lost youth, but to send the young into a country I'll only see from the top of a nearby mountain.

"Your children are not your children," wrote Kahlil Gibran. "They are the sons and the daughters of Life's longing for Itself."

Why I Love Shortbus

I can count on one hand the movies that I don’t just love but credit with changing the way I look at my life: 

Word Is Out, the 1977 documentary that assured me there were any number of ways to be gay in the world, most of them interesting, many of them desirable; 

Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which helped me find the courage to walk away from spiritual abuse at the hands of a dogmatic, life-denying religious hierarchy; 

Babette’s Feast, which goes on reminding me that the only way to find the deepest joy is to give joy lavishly away;

And Shortbus : John Cameron Mitchell’s sexy, sad, funny, compassionate vision of a queer utopia, set in and around a Brooklyn salon/sex club hosted by the outrageous and divine Mx. Justin Vivian Bond (then still pre-Mx. and pre-Vivian). 

When the movie came out in 2006, I was raw from a long, obsessive breakup with plenty of confusion, grief, anger, and blame to go around. Mitchell’s film showed me people trying hard, fucking up, struggling against shame, longing to connect, fleeing from connection, hurting those they loved, forgiving themselves and each other. I found myself in more or less every scene. 

Years later, talking about the movie with a group of other gay men--some of us newcomers to the film, some fanatic ongoing fans. At the end of the evening, one man observed that if we'd screened the end of the film as one of the clips to prompt discussion, he would likely have cried through it, as he had before. I expect I would have too.

In candlelight during a blackout, Mx. Bond sings "In the End," more or less summing up the vision of the film. Songwriter Scott Matthew's lyrics are anything but upbeat: "We all bear the scars," they begin. "We all feign a life." But it's the tenderness and affection that Bond brings to the song, and that Mitchell and his cinematographer bring to the shooting and editing of the scene, that convey what matters here: that the participants in this "salon for the gifted and challenged" have touched what Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön would call "the genuine sadness at the heart of things": bodhichitta. 

This is the realization that our lives are infinitely precious because they're infinitely vulnerable. The end of the song erupts, with the incursion of a marching band--I'm not making this up--into a riot of musical and erotic carousal. In the end, the characters celebrate their humanity not despite, but in and through their flaws. They find community, but only because they accept the aloneness that we can't overcome.

Some less than appreciative responses to the film, including Bruce Diones' snyde notice for The New Yorker, objected to the utopianism of the final scene. But the inbreaking of what isn't expected and can't be foreseen, until we let go of our attachment to the illusion of perfection, is the whole point. "I never saw that one coming," Bond observes through a bullhorn in the last line of the film. "You never know what's gonna happen in this neighborhood."

Sakura

In the midst of a lockdown, a promenade of Japanese cherry trees lines a walkway on the south side of the university library. Friday they were at what is traditionally considered the most beautiful and poignant moment of their cycle--in full bloom, but the petals just beginning to fall:  the glory of the perfect, present moment bound intrinsically to the impermanence of all things. 

It was my third pilgrimage in a week. They'd lasted longer for the cool, mostly dry weather, and they escaped damage a few nights earlier when the temperature dipped significantly below freezing and we woke to three inches of snow.

And beneath them, several dozen people wandering through the miracle, looking up in delight, taking photographs--of the trees, of one other standing beneath them. Almost all of them masked, all careful to stay distanced, strangers immersed together in a communal moment of deep joy, despite the anxieties of present circumstance. Themselves part of this transient and inexhaustible beauty, themselves subject to the precarity of all things, and all the more precious for it. 

The Goal

The goal of an erotic spiritual practice isn't satisfaction.

The goal is to embrace desire as Life's unbounded and endless longing for Itself.

To take it as a teacher.

To see that what you have, you cannot possess.

To see that what you lack, you already have.

 DEATH 

IS 

ABANDONED

The Night of the Arrest

 “A certain young man was following him, wearing nothing but a linen cloth. They caught hold of him, but he left the linen cloth and ran off naked.”

            --Mark 14:51

You’ve seen him here late at night all week. He’s come up the rambles between the trees to this knoll at the top of the garden. You thought he was looking for sex when he first showed up on Sunday night, but he didn’t prowl like most of the men who linger until they’re sure it’s safe and then offer to buy you for the night, or for an hour, or for just a quick fuck behind the biggest, oldest olive tree. Or else keep on looking for another man as hungry for sex as they are. 

He just leaned against what’s left of the stone hut that belonged to the gardener in the old days. Aware of what was going on around him. Not horny and panicked at his own desire and the danger of the place, like most newcomers. At peace, saying yes to it all, but wanting none of it for himself. 

You wear just a linen sheet when you’re up here working the hill.

Tonight he’s back with two friends, who for hours started at the sound of every pebble that shifted underfoot as men cruised the paths. His own face showed more sadness than fright, until he finally went off alone to the side of the garden, kneeling as he wept. You waved a john away, wondering if you should go to him. Now his friends have drifted off to sleep.

Another john comes up, and you’ve got to make enough to eat tomorrow. But then the man turns, and your eyes lock. The john glares, shrugs, and walks off.

Without thinking, you get up and walk over to him. He’s still weeping as he reaches out to you, but by the time his arms are around you, you realize the comfort he’s offering is beyond anything you can give back. For the next five minutes, you exchange no words, only sobs, until the two of you fall into a slow, steady rhythm, rocking back and forth, your breath matched to one another. His hand burrows under your dreadlocks to stroke the back of your neck.

Down the hill you hear the scuffle of men scattering as they do when the police barrel through. You pull back in alarm. He smiles and says, “It’s O.K. Go, get out of here.”

As you pitch down the hill, a cop grabs for you, but you leave the sheet behind, clutched in his hand, as you run on to safety.