Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Altared States: A Body Electric Sunday Workshop

Since the arrival of Covid, the New Body Electric School has offered online presentations by community members on Sunday evenings. I'm delighted to be leading one this week, on May 31.

Now, maybe more than ever, we need visible personal reminders of what sustains our lives—people we love, experiences that have shaped us, values we hold dear, images of the Divine that speak to our souls. Identifying our own sacred objects and arranging them together in a sacred space can bring comfort, insight, and deep satisfaction. 

This is a good time to put some creative energy and imagination into building a personal altar.  Think of this session as a Ritual Tupperware Party.  We’ll talk with each other about our sacred objects.  We’ll share ideas (and previous experiences) for creating an altar that expresses your Truth in visible form and helps you listen more deeply to your Life. We’ll model embodied practices that can help us hold body and spirit together.

Please bring to the session an object that you consider sacred, or which carries important personal meaning for you. We'll share these with each other in breakout groups. And please have a bell with you and a candle to light.

You can register for the Zoom session, which begins at 8 p.m. EDT, here.




Wednesday, May 20, 2020

Dreaming the Beloved Community


In this strange time when Zoom is the best we've got and almost all community is virtual, at least we can dream. Maybe one of the best things we can do while the routine forms of daily life are out of the question is to put some added energy into imagining the world we might want to live in instead.

What do you think of when you hear the word "utopia"? For some, it suggests sheer, unrealistic self-indulgence. But imagining a world into being that you've never seen can be the starting point of Gandhi's famous injunction: "You must be the change in the world that you want to see."

Utopian imagination can be what queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz calls a "forward-dawning, not-yet-conscious" awareness that we don't have to accept the world as it is. Other realities aren't necessarily unrealistic. They're just unrealized. Yet.

What world do you dream of living in? What would it look like? How would its citizens interact? How might queer men live together in loving, erotically accepting community? What could we build together? How could we go about the healing of our souls and the repair of the world? How might lives lived richly in acceptance, gratitude, and abundance awaken the wisdom and compassion that we're all capable of manifesting?

Give yourself time to dream. Write a story about this world of yours. Or draw a map. Describe its history and customs and rituals. Build a model of the temple or the assembly hall where the community gathers. Do all of those, and create a journal full of those dreams--as Tolkien did, year after year, with Middle Earth. Make it playful. Make it sexy. Fill it with passion and longing and conviction. Fill it with courage to resist injustice and oppression. Draw on the memory of what we created in the years leading up to Stonewall, in the years after Stonewall, in the years of fighting for queer lives in the middle of the AIDS pandemic, in the more recent years when we're still a despised minority in much of the world--and often in danger much closer to home. Honour the half-fulfilled potentials of those times. Cultivate those memories like precious seedlings that can grow into what is yet to be.

The future is queer. If we make it so.