Ritual Resources: Lingam Puja

The social advances in acceptance of sexual diversity over the last ten years  have been staggering. But they don 't cancel out the virulent homophobia of many parts of the world: think of Russia, think of Uganda. Think about the brutally violent acts that continue to claim the lives of queer people even in  places where legal protections are in place. (If you haven't seen the film Clapham Junction, look for it--it's a brilliant and wrenching story of the intolerance and repression still endemic in "enlightened" places like middle-class London.) Think about the spiritual abuse inflicted on queer people by erotophobic religious communities. Think about the wedge driven between eros and spirit through the souls of many men by sexual abuse at the hands of religious authority figures.

Homphobia is alive and well. Sexual shame is alive and well. Erotic injustice is alive and well. We're kidding ourselves if we think our work is over--the work of civil rights, the work of social acceptance, the work of self-acceptance, the work of intergrating our spiritual with our sexual lives, the work of expanding our own compassion. We need ritual that affirms our queer male bodies, with all their erotic capacities, as sacred participants in the universal Mystery. And we need to see our own spiritual healing not as an endpoint, but as preparation to offer ourselves in service to the healing of the world.

We need ritual that declares at the same time the holiness of the feminine and its presence in our lives. We need ritual that doesn't exclude or marginalize trans people.

One resource for the creation of ritual that helps us bring all this into our lives is Hinduism's veneration of the yoni lingam--of Lord Shiva's erect cock (lingam) enclosed by the vulva (yoni) of his consort, the Divine Mother. The stylized image of the yoni lingam is a primary feature of every Shiva temple. If you're not clued into its significance, you might never figure it out from its abstract, stylized shape in most temples.

Hinduism does better than many religious traditions in explicitly acknowledging both male and female sexuality as sacred forces. Sadly, this doesn't necessarily translate into the empowerment of women or the acceptance of gay men or lesbians in South Asian cultures. But we can work the magic of queer culture on the resources it offers, like spiritual drag that we appropriate from our mothers' closets to our own ends. We take what we need. Sometimes we outrage those from whom we borrow it. At our best, we take it anyway, but in the spirit of the Trickster, not in rancor or bitterness or a spirit of appropriation.

In the paragraphs below, I describe a puja (a ritual act of devotion) for a group of queer men. You can perform it with as few as two or as many as a hundred. It's designed to be a shared practice to start the day in community, but you can adapt it to different times of the day and different social circumstances. It works best as a group continues to gather repeatedly, so that the various elements start to feel more familiar, and participants begin to take community ownership. With repetition, many participants will find that the significance of the ritual "opens out" for them into new associations with the issues they're confronting within themselves.

*****

To create the ritual space, you need to delineate a circle on the earth (or indoors, or on a rooftop), large enough for your whole group to walk comfortably in a clockwise direction around the center.  You establish a fixed entrance path to the circle. You can do this with stones, or colored powder, or fabric, or cord, or other suitable materials. This circle and its entryway together form a yoni  honoring the holiness of female sexuality. We stand in this circle acknowledging gratefully the source from which we've come, and upon which the ongoing generation of the world depends.There is space here to honor as well the receptive erotic capacity of our butts, and the manginas of trans men.

You might consider placing a representation of an animal guardian figure at the entrance, whose purpose is to banish from the circle all that obstructs the spiritual development of queer men: forces like homphobia, misogyny, transphobia, racialized and class-based exclusion, sexual and spiritual abuse.

At the centre of this circle stands the lingam  honoring the holiness of male sexuality. Since a  central purpose of this ritual is to reclaim the connection between the sexual and the spiritual in our own bodies, it's preferable (in contrast to Hindu ritual usage) to use a realistic sculpture of cock and balls. Ideally it will be big enough to "read" clearly as a ritual object, rather than as a really ambitious dildo. It might be virtually as tall as an adult man; a smaller sculpture can be placed on a support narrow enough to allow for direct contact and embrace.

Place an altar before the lingam with a bowl to receive offerings of flowers to the Goddess, an incense burner, and a receptacle for open flame. Cut lengths of string in a color that seems appropriate, long enough to wrap two or three times around your wrist and tie in a knot.

Someone needs to assume the role of an officiant who will hold ritual space, improvising the necessary formulas of introduction and explanation to guide the assembly through the details of the ritual.

There are several stages to the ritual. The details are less important than is making the shape of the ritual your own: experiment with variations of content and language until it feels right.

You begin with a Greeting and Entrance into the sacred space of the yoni. The officiant prepares the space ahead of time by lighting a flame, burning incense, and centering himself in his own devotion. He greets every man as he enters the circle, marking his forehead with a tilak (the smudge of colored powder that signifies a god's devotee). He could, for instance, say, "Welcome, my brother. I mark you with the sign of One who abides in this place." He invites each man to offer his flower and to ring a bell announcing his presence, as congregants continue to gather.

You then proceed with an Invocation of the Goddess and the God.  The officiant  or another member of the gathering might read out the names of Goddess and God from a previously constructed list, or might invite all present to call out the names of God as they're moved. Including divine names from many traditions opens the ritual to affirm more powerfully the connection between sex and spirit in our lives. The officiant can improvise ritual language around this litany of the divine names.

The officiant invites each man to declare aloud his Intention in the ritual: his aspirations for the hours and days ahead. Men in the circle declare intentions one at a time in turn. A thread is tied around each man's  wrist after he has spoken, to visibly bind his intention to him. The officiant performs this service for the first man to speak. Then each man in the circle, after he has spoken, performs this service for the man who speaks next. The circle is completed when the officiant speaks his intention last of all.

A clockwise Circumambulation of the lingam is the central act of the puja. The officiant invites the men present to walk in meditation and prayer around the lingam, silently or speaking aloud as they're moved.  This continues for as long as it feels right. Congregants walk at any pace that's comfortable, at whatever distance from the lingam they wish. They may feel moved to come forward to embrace the lingam, kneel before it, lay a hand on it. If the lingam is draped in a ritual garment like a stole or a set of prayer beads, a devotee may wear these during his devotion and then replace them as he returns to the walking circle.

The Circumambulation of the lingam ends at the discretion of the officiant, who rings a bell three times and invites congregants to gather around the lingam in physical contact with it and with one another and to tone together until the chant subsides.

A Dismissal follows that may include the recitation of a short verse, a blessing, and an invitation to exchange an embrace of peace before departing the circle.

 

Photographs courtesy of Gerry Fortuna: http://gerry-fortuna.artistwebsites.com

Danger of Violent Thunderstorms

A big chunk of the Northeast has been under a static dome of high pressure for over a week.  The humidity's through the roof. The sun beats down like a schoolyard bully. Our cat stalks lethargically from her water dish in the living room to the relative coolness of the shade under a bush, and then back again half an hour later, sounding as cranky as I feel.

For the last two days, the forecasts in the New York Times have promised relief sometime today. A powerful cold front is lumbering toward us from the northwest, pushing more hot air in front of it, but promising rain behind that. I keep looking at the sky for the first harbingers of all this, wondering if each toss of a branch is the beginning of the weather system, grateful for the prospect of relief, and apprehensive of what the "thunderstorms, sometimes violent" of the Times report portend for my train trip up the Hudson Valley this afternoon to assist at a weeklong retreat. Two years ago, I was headed for Easton Mountain on the same route when a deluge brought down trees across the tracks and delayed us for eight hours.

Checking the web for alternative, perhaps more up-to-the-hour reports of what to expect is an exercise in self-perpetuating anxiety. The weather websites stoke their hit counters on hype, and so instead of "thunderstorms, sometimes violent," weather.com offers "danger of violent thunderstorms," with additional links, in case you're not yet anxious enough, to features on how best to prepare for the contingency. The weather is a threat, and the response to our lack of control is to pretend that we have some.

Part of the powerful mythology of my mother's family was my maternal grandmother's deep connection to nature and the earth. She planted trees at the house she moved into as a young wife and mother, the house where she would live nearly the rest of her life, the way most young couples place furniture. She raised foundling birds the way she invited stray human children as well to her already overextended kitchen table in the midst of the Depression. My mother habitually rehearsed a description of the rest of the family cowering in the house, in the midst of Indiana summer storms, while my grandmother stood at the back door, looking up into the wind and lightning and laughing in delight. I never saw my grandmother do this. Though I was blessed to know her for a few precious years, she was elderly, disabled, and sliding steadily into dementia from the early years of my childhood. But I'm grateful to my mother for passing this memory on, vividly enough that it's become my own.

I don't imagine my grandmother being foolhardy about the danger. I think she just didn't really give a shit about it--that she'd  decided  the possibility of getting hit by a falling limb, or electrocuted, was the acceptable price of seeing a wonder she wouldn't miss for the world.

This wild abandon seems to me all the more miraculous when I think about how she started her life. The abused stepdaughter of a woman who broke my grandmother's hip when she was nine, she fled the house four years later and dropped out of school to work in a greenhouse and live with the family who owned it. I think she was about twenty when she became pregnant by my grandfather, and they married, to the disapproval of his lace-curtain German immigrant family. That first child died in infancy. I imagine going through all that in your first twenty-one years might make you hold on to safety even more tightly. But my grandmother went the other way. She would never have used such language, but I imagine her thinking, fuck it, death by lightning strike would be a glorious romp next to what I've already been through.

I bless the memory of this woman. I breathe in gratitude that her blood runs in my veins, and I pray that I may have inherited some small portion of her spirit. I pray I'll be ready to look up into high winds exploding with ineffable sound and light the next time I have the chance, instead of cowering against a perceived threat.

 I think of the two dozen amazingly adventurous and spirited souls with whom I'm about to spend a week  at the Body Electric School's Erotic Temple retreat. I think of the journeys that have brought us all to this improbable rendezvous. I think of the courage it takes to bring our wounded histories, our longing to heal the rift between the sexual and the spiritual in our lives as queer men, our anxieties about being fully seen, our fears about what we can't quite yet face down in ourselves. I think of how easy it would be to scan the horizon for thunderstorms, sometimes violent, and seize up in an effort to brace against their danger.

And I pray that my grandmother will send her spirit upon us all.

 

Ritual Resources: Making Friends with a Stone

"Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves," said Rilke.

If you're anywhere near as much of a task-oriented head-tripper as I am, that's a nice thought, but one you're likely to file away as fast as you can in the Drawer of Worthy Sentiments.

The career decision that's looming; or the one that just gets endlessly postponed. The relationship that may or may not have a viable future. The leap it would take to move to a place where you might make a fresh start, or at least open a new chapter of your life. The decision you can't make, can't make yet, about how or where to let go of a dead partner's ashes. The request you know you have to voice for what you need, but your tongue cleaves to the roof of your mouth, every time you try. The gift you know you could make to someone else of what they've asked of you, but you can't yet bring yourself to answer that appeal with either a yes or a no. The elective surgery that might improve your life, but carries risks. The generosity you can imagine showing, but you can't muster the courage to let go of what you have to give.

Be patient? Love the questions? When instead I could flail around in a vortex of self-obsession and rising confusion as I grab at answers that are out of reach?

Here's a suggestion: put the questions out there, in a form you can see, touch, feel, hold.

Choose a stone. Not a small pebble, but a good chunk of rock, too large to hold with one hand, too large even to get your two hands around, heavy enough that it feels like an effort to lift it. Maybe its surface is smooth and even. Maybe it's rough and jagged. You'll know which feels right, which matches the state of your soul.

Set it on your altar. Lay your hands on it. Bear witness that to this stone you commit all that is unanswered in your heart. Mark it, if you feel called to mark it, with chalk or with charcoal. Tie cord around it, if you feel called to tie cord around it.

Sit with this stone in your hands, day by day. Meditate on its weight. Meditate on its impenetrability. Consider that if you hold it with tension, you'll strain yourself. Consider that if you pay attention to the effect it has on the muscles of your hands and arms, you can sit with it comfortably. Consider that you could break your head open with it, but instead press its firm coolness to your forehead. Carry it to the forest. Carry it to the beach. Kiss it in reverence. Jack off onto it in the light of the full moon. Raise it as you sit to the level of your heart. Take it again, daily, to your altar, and leave it there.

You'll know how long you need this stone. Maybe you'll need it for years. Maybe for a few weeks or months. Someday you'll let it go. You'll bury it, or throw it into the sea, or lay it back again where you found it. So far, you don't know that. Today, you don't need to know that. Today you need only make friends with the stone.  


“Try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live with them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now.”

(Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet)

Starting with Irises

Last weekend I celebrated a beloved teacher's big birthday with about forty others at Easton Mountain. To be in community for a few days with that many queer men, some old friends and acquaintances, and many more new, in a place that brings out the best in all of us, carries for me the sheer joy of homecoming. The loose scheduling of the weekend was just what I needed: events I wanted to be part of, but long stretches of discretionary time when I could lose and find myself.

Outside the main lodge stood a bed of blue irises in full riot, begging to be drawn; the art supply cabinet held a fabulous cache of watercolor pencils. For the next two days, I couldn't keep myself away from the flowers, or my hands off my sketchbook. I fell into the out-of-myself absorption I've experienced so little of for months: the kind of state that reminds me I'm not so much an artist as somebody who needs to make art in order to stay alive.

The longer you look at, and into, a bearded iris, the more seductively complex you realize it is. Unruly petals define convoluted inner spaces. Light plays across diaphanous surfaces. The scent is one of the underappreciated wonders of the floral world. The flower will utterly defeat you as you try to translate all this into lines on the page and variations of colour to suggest depth. And the defeat is the best part of the experience, the "hook" that will bring you back again and again in happy obsession to try to get it the next time. 

I spent more time drawing than I have the last six months--and still had time for the sauna, for the erotic massage exchange that was the centrepiece activity one afternoon, for reading Tarot two or three times with friends. I came away with four drawings that pleased me more or less, and with a resolve that I'd take my obsession into the studio course I'd booked for afternoons the following week.

Being a student in the studio is always a challenge for me. I don't like producing drek in front of even the most supportive of instructors. I want success and praise on the first brushstroke. Given an exercise, I'm headstrong and want to strike out with it in my own direction. I'm too invested in what I produce and in how others see it. Showing a teacher what I've thrown myself into, only to have him take it as the starting point from which he'll encourage me to depart, is a tall order. So opening my sketchbook on Monday afternoon to say, here's where I'm at, was probably the toughest moment of the whole week.

I didn't go further into the irises as I'd planned. Instead, I spent the week pulling back from them, thinking hard about the backgrounds behind them, learning how to scumble color into the negative contours along their edge, coming back to the challenge of mixing the color I saw, then letting it go in favor of the color that pleased me on the palate; practicing the dance of knowing when to press forward with a line or patch of color that wasn't working, knowing when to leave a shape as it was, knowing when simply to move on. Trips back to the flower were starting points, not the place of repose I'd imagined they'd be. The flower into which I dove turned out to be the flower within.

Mummy, Daddy--There's a Naked Bishop in the Hot Tub

Australian gay activist, theologian, and independent Catholic bishop Michael Bernard Kelly discusses the sexual ethics of gay marriage and gay promiscuity. Eloquence, wisdom, and grounded spiritual awareness--all from the currently non-functional hot tub at Easton Mountain.

http://eastonmountain.org/tub-talk-episode-1-michael-bernard-kelly/

Around a corner,

the intoxicating scent:

lilacs, still unseen.

 

 

 

 

Wading Into the Stream

(Photgraph of James Broughton and Joel Singer by Robert Giard.)

One day--or maybe one month, or over a single season--it starts actually to sink in that you're past the watershed of middle age. A creaky joint, long a background annoyance, a souvenir of the vigorous exercise you've so prided yourself in, starts actually to control and circumscribe what you can (or choose) to do. A friend gets cancer. A whole string of friends get cancer. A parent dies. A sibling dies. You get cancer. You realize on a visit, after a few years of separation, that people long close to you, whom you've always thought of as peers, have crossed over into the realm of the elderly. You wonder how anyone, ever, could possibly read the print on that drug label. You finally accept the fact that those leather chaps, in which you looked so unbelievably hot ten years ago (as a string of men told you) are probably no longer a good idea. (Or possibly you say, fuck it, a daddy can wear anything he likes.)

It's a universal passage, but your experience of it is utterly your own. There's virtually no communal recognition of it in our culture, little space for sharing the sense of loss, and not much more for discerning, honoring, and even celebrating what you've gained. Something profoundly human, something that unites us all, seems instead like a crisis that you're going through in bummed-out isolation, a painful realization of personal diminishment that you don't want to admit to yourself, let alone to anyone else.

But then, perhaps you begin to ask why, in our fear and anxiety over the omnipresent fact of change, we segregate the world in the first place into people on the right side of the stream that separates birth from death and people on the wrong side of it--only to wake up one day to the realization that we've crossed over ourselves. Maybe instead of imagining that we stand on one bank or the other, it dawns on you that we're all in the stream, whether we move with the current, or swim against it. We can struggle and exhaust ourselves, or we can float. And the body you inhabit as you float in that stream (or as you struggle against its current) is your particular body at this moment: not the body you want to have; not the body you imagine you could transform yourself into, if you only ate the right food, performed the right exercises; not the body you remember from ten years ago and want to hold onto with moisturizers or botox.

Your guess is as good as mine how best to make the transition from the unimpeded middle of our lives to an acceptance that our bodies change. But this I'm convinced of: we need to meet this passage in community, not tough it out in isolation. We need to share with others the fears and disappointments that come with our full embodiment as well as our celebrations of it, allowing others to bear witness and to stand in solidarity, bearing witness and standing in solidarity with them in turn.

This is true for everyone who's blessed to reach an age where they face these challenges. But in my gut, I do feel there's something particular to queer men's experience  of the aging body. Many of us as we came out fought long and heroically to inhabit our bodies, with their desires, pleasures, and capacities for connecting with others, in the first place. That sometimes leaves us all the less capable of accepting that the bodies we've struggled to claim are not immutable possessions, but changeable and always in process. And perhaps above all, we find it hard to accept the mutability of our erotic life. We get stuck in the notion that only youth is beautiful or sexy. We get mired in the nostalgic fantasy that it was better when three times in a night was an option, or when erections were more or less as common and as instantaneous as flipping a light switch.

And so here is my "to do" list, and I invite you to consider whether some of what's on it might helpfully go on yours. Get massage and other caring touch. Find a circle of men with whom you can bear witness to what's going on for you in your body. Learn to express your experience of embodied pleasure in the presence of others. Learn to ask for what feels good. Find safe places to spend time naked in the body you have. Befriend men old enough to be your father. Befriend men young enough to be your son. Breathe. Say Thank You.  

 

Provenance unknown. If you are the owner of the above photograph I will gladly remove it at your request.

Wasted

he’s such a pain out there on the asphalt puking
we’re so buff sunscreened sleek ready for Gay Pride
junked-up scarecrow tinder box of a geezer dumpster crazy
sort of guy who doesn’t take his meds piss-stained and mumbling
humping the roughcast a creature of brownsites
blackouts out of style out of touch out of mind
nothing he knows counts nothing he’s done’s remembered
no one he’s fucked survived to tell the tale
bones all poking out angular chest scars heart brain scars
dick a dried up stem of last year’s jack-o’-lantern

he blinks and wheezes stares and spits
scratches his balls belches a crazy laugh

I’m outta here

like a landmine he ruptures the smooth deathscape
of August afternoon one fiery ejaculation shot across the ecliptic
stallions aflame an Apollo with the balls to be so old
so gaunt distended crazy so totally uncool

we reach out for blessing jerk back
jerk off thick gobs of blood and cinders
like somebody deepthroated a red-hot chisel
ecstasy jismed out of sight out of it totally
leaving us standard deviation gays
stranded in the dark of too much light

Elijah’s come and gone

--Robert F. Gross (reposted by Robert's kind permission from www.boyslutpublications.com, April 25, 2013)

The Nude Photography of Andrew Graham

By Andrew's kind permission, here are seven of his most recent images.

 

 

 

 

Pink Sheep of the Family

In the ten years since my mother died, my trips back to my home town, an eight hour drive from Toronto, have tapered off dramatically. I still have a beloved aunt living in the area. Since last year, her advancing deafness and an undramatic but steadily creeping edge of confusion have put paid to keeping in touch by phone. Yesterday she turned 100, as good an occasion as I'll ever have for making the journey, and so here I am in east central Indiana. There were seventy-five of us at lunch yesterday: a handful of nieces and nephews, but nearly everyone else direct descendants or spouses, down even unto the fifth generation of great-great-grandchildren forming a moving obstacle course of toy cars and plastic dinosaurs in the corners of the Methodist church hall.

I'm flooded almost at once with the joy and the pain of being among these good people--the first time I've seen so many of them at once in I'm guessing thirty years. I gravitate toward a corner of the room with two of the nieces, my cousins. As much as I've adored my aunt my whole life, feeling at home among most of her own children and their families has always been a challenge. We live in different worlds, and theirs is as toxic to me as fresh water to a salt-water fish. I imagine mine is as unintelligible to at least some of them as coral reefs to river-dwellers. The ones I'm most comfortable with are the ones who like me have moved away.

Many of them are still local farming people, deeply rooted in a landscape they've known all their lives; many are evangelical Christians of a conservative stripe. When my aunt's grandson Tommy fell ill with AIDS in the early 90's, a few years too early for the Cocktail, many of them stiffened into uncomfortable silence, glad enough that he was cared for by an ex-lover at a safe distance in New Jersey; when his uncle, my aunt's only son, followed suit less than two years later, after twenty years of marriage, the family circled the wagons by pointing to brain cancer on the death certificate--a technically accurate cause of death that masked the unrespectable fullness of the truth.

I insisted on starting an AIDS Quilt panel for Tommy, a project I was astonished and grateful to find was taken up with unhesitating energy and dedication by others in the family. When it had made the rounds of all of us who contributed to its design and assembly, I finally delivered it into the hands of his ex-lover, who held onto it for some months before sending it to the Names Project. For his uncle, my aunt's son, it was clear a similar project wouldn't have been welcomed.

We're soon joined in our corner by another of my cousins once removed, Tommy's older sister, a soft-spoken woman about my own age, who wades into the shallows of happy childhood memories, then into deeper water, until she's confiding that among the hardest things she's ever gone through was the the loss of him; and the number of our relatives who turned their backs. And then my hand is on her arm, my voice cracking as I tell her how much I loved her brother, who'd come out to me years after our shared love of keyboard music had brought us together through adolescence and early adulthood.

From there we move on to the deep, sustained joy she's experienced in her partnership of over twenty years with a woman who's also present but whom I've yet to meet; to the feeling she tells me she always had of being off to the side, of not quite fitting in with the rest of the tribe. I share with her some of my life with Jonathan. And she refers to yet another of the extended family whose name I don't catch, whom I probably last saw as a toddler, or maybe only in photographs, and who she proposes is likely one of us outliers as well. I've already converged with him at the door of the church, a dark, trim young man accompanied by a male African- American friend. He works, my cousin tells me, in a high-end restaurant an hour and a half away in Louisville--that in itself serving as Exhibit A in our speculations. As I see him and his friend a few tables away, they seem to function as a couple, moving easily among the others, included together in the group shot of the great-grandchildren gathered around my aunt's wheelchair at the front of the hall, clearly accepted--but accepted, I have no doubt, by virtue of what's left unsaid.

I want badly to make contact with them, but I have no idea how to start a conversation without being invasive and abrupt. "Hi. I'm sure we share DNA. But I've lost all track of who you are" seems a singularly inept ice-breaker. The rest of the afternoon passes. By the time I'm preparing to leave, they're no longer in sight. I meet my cousin's long-time partner, and in the last twenty minutes before I put on my coat, we sit together, getting to know one another, feeling an immediate rapport, a big part of which is simple elation that we can bring all of ourselves to this corner table.

And I find myself asking, what would I need to feel fully seen and recognized among my people? Does the boy from Louisville even know that he's not alone in this sizeable pond of aggressively reproductive heterosexuality? Does he know about his queer great uncle, his queer cousins? What would it take for us to break out of the cones of silence that isolate us from each other? Is there some ritual, some acknowledgement that we spring from the same source, less final, God willing, than an AIDS quilt, around which we could gather without having to leave this room?

Relics Under the Altar

My albatross is a crucifix.

When I was twenty-one, chancel queen with one foot out of the closet that I was, I pored over the catalogue of an ecclesiastical supply house and told my mother that what I really wanted as a coming-of-age gift was a 24-inch walnut cross, on which hung a gaunt, mournful, and (it goes without saying, but I enjoy saying it) nearly naked Jesus carved of German linden wood. It made feminist friends shudder from the outset. But I was more or less oblivious to their discomfort over its relentlessly male representation of the Holy; almost as oblivious as I was to just how blatant my erotic investment must have been to them, and to nearly everybody else, in that pale, willowy body.  Devotion and empathy could channel any amount of desire and yet remain just barely veiled, at the edge of social acceptability in a still pervasively homophobic  culture.

(There's no more powerful expression of that than Michel Marc Bouchard's amazing play, Lilies, and the superb film made of it by queer Toronto director John Greyson.)

When I bailed out of Christianity altogether for nearly fifteen years--and it was one of the healthiest decisions I've ever made--Jesus went into the closet while I came aggressively out of it. When I finally took another plunge into that rich and deeply flawed tradition, the relation between the erotic and the spiritual in my life had shifted. The objects of my desire were alive and breathing around me; I didn't need another in one-quarter scale nailed to a cross on the wall.

I tried giving the crucifix away, but this Jesus was way too dead, too white, and/or too male for the taste of anybody to whom I offered it. So back into the closet went this relic of my past yet again, until I came to see it in a new light--not as an image that spoke to me in the present, but as an object that deserved ongoing reverence for its place in my spiritual history. Finally, my spiritual director came up with the solution: to place it inside the antique Korean rice chest I use as my altar. It became (like the relics in a stricter sense contained in the altar of a Roman Catholic church) the unseen presence supporting the objects that rest upon it in full view.

When a few weeks back I prepared to move house, removing the crucifix and wrapping it for transport helped me experience the full import of pulling up stakes and letting go of fifteen years in the house I was leaving. It helped me stay connected to the personal history I carry with me and inside me, even as my life changes in ways that sometimes, these days, leave me barely recognizing myself.

And I can't begin to describe the comfort and exhilaration I felt yesterday afternoon, setting the altar in its new space, opening the doors of the chest, and consecrating it anew by laying this ungainly fragment of my past in the sanctifying darkness of its interior. One by one, the objects laid above it became again a map of my hopes, of my longings and aspirations; a pattern for my prayers for those I love, for my memories of those I've lost.

 

Snow Day

The first big snowstorm of winter, and here we are. My friendly, hunky, very straight neighbour greets me as he plows down the narrow passage between our houses. For the six months since he and his wife moved in, I've been meaning to ask them over for drinks, but life has just kept filling up. We meet this morning in a vortex of swirling diamonds where I'm shovelling our shared walkway.

 From two doors down, the woman I've known since she and her husband arrived twelve years ago calls out a good morning and offers to look after my sidewalk as well as her own. It occurs to me that she thinks of me as slightly disabled since I had my hip replaced, and that rankles a bit, getting in the way of my accepting her kindness more graciously. I've watched her daughter, once a shy, perhaps even slightly fragile child, turn into a self-assured young woman I barely recognized after a year away when she said hello last fall.

I introduce them, one of my last legacies to the microculture of this stretch of Yarmouth Road, before my partner and I move on Tuesday.

I clear a single shovel's width in front of the house beyond Ted's, feeling an odd low-level welter of benevolence and resentment. I've never met the people here, don't even know if either of the two units is occupied by the newish owner. I just know that they never clear their snow, and that if I don't do this, I'm sure they won't.  The first time I chipped through their icy snowpack, after three days of struggling over and around it, I dumped what I removed onto the walkway leading to their front door in a fit of passive-aggressive pique, then regretted passing on the bad karma. Now, I do it mostly not for them, but for the rest of us, hoping that eventually, they'll notice that someone's looking after it, and they'll be inspired to do something community-minded themselves. Maybe they'll even come out of their house to say hello, if not to me, then to someone.

When the snow started yesterday afternoon, it was the usual nuisance. Now it's an extrarodinary event. Strangers on the street smile at each other in mutual recognition that a five-minute walk has become a fifteen-minute adventure that we share. In a low-level and homely way, we acknowledge together our powerlessness to resist a force of nature. Together, for a few minutes, we're smiling and mortal.

Just Noticing

I don't talk much here about my day job, but I make my living in the oddest way. I teach graduate students to read medieval languages, especially medieval Latin.

The habits of mind you need to master a dead language are complex and painfully slow to acquire. My students are generally extremely bright and accomplished. Most of them are perfectionists who don't take well to not getting it right on the first go. There's always a danger that their frustration at what they haven't yet learned will demoralize them. Think about what it's like for an adult with fully formed, sophisticated musical tastes, just starting piano lessons for the first time. You want to play Bach fugues, but you're stuck with fingering exercises that you still haven't mastered.

Yesterday afternoon, I experienced one of those flashes that teachers pray to have more often: an insight into what specifically was going on for one of my students who just wasn't getting it as we worked through some material. It was clear to me in the moment that she was overshooting the simplest and most obvious solutions because she was looking for more complex options, then getting tangled in trying to make sense of what didn't need to be so difficult in the first place. Faced with translation of a common word, she'd combed the dictionary for its less obvious meanings, then mistranslated the rest of the sentence in order to make it conform to her choice.

After the class was over, I decided to share with her what I'd noticed, but I hesitated, because I wasn't sure the observation would necessarily do her much good. It's one thing to be aware of a habit of mind, and quite another to translate that knowledge into a new way of proceeding: if that weren't so, most of the therapists on the planet, and at least half the teachers, would be out of a job. As soon as I remarked on what I'd noticed, she not only confirmed that she'd been aware of it herself, but that the experience of overshooting the mark--of looking for an answer more complicated than it needs to be--was an issue as well in other aspects of her studies. I heard the note of frustration in the admission, and I feared that in pointing out to her what I'd seen, maybe I'd simply given her grounds for an extra layer of self-castigation.

And then, weirdly, in the middle of a narrowly academic conversation, I found myself talking about mindfulness practice: encouraging my student just to notice when she finds herself  devising a more complicated answer than the problem requires; not to take it as a a reason to blame herself for getting it wrong again, but instead to see it as a "win" when she becomes aware of it, because with that recognition comes also  the possibility of choosing to do otherwise. As we continued the conversation, I grew painfully aware of how easy it is, in my own life, to treat self-awareness not as grounds for compassion towards myself, but as fuel for yet another cycle of self-recrimination--for what Pema Chödrön calls the "subtle aggression" we indulge in against ourselves, in our often relentless drive for improvement.

I thought as well of how little such self-recrimination actually helps us to improve, most of the time: energy we could put into gently guiding ourselves toward something different in the future goes instead into the dubious pleasure of rehearsing what we've gotten wrong, how we've screwed up. Instead of moving on, we just dig ourselves, as Julian of Norwich would put it, deeper into the ditch. (In a few weeks, a good slice of the piety of Lent will offer its yearly opportunity to wallow in a penitence that doesn't actually change much of anything--except to raise the world's general misery quotient.)

The more I thought about it afterwards, the more the exchange with my student seemed like a small, vivid example of a choice we're continuously confronted with: whether to stand outside ourselves as taskmasters fixated on our every flaw, or to make friends with ourselves, and with our mistakes, and to look forward, not back; to balance the wisdom of self-awareness with the compassion of self-acceptance.

Bless This House

I'm in a countdown to let go of the place I've called home for fifteen years. In less than six weeks, I'll lock the door behind me and walk away from the empty shell of nearly a quarter of my life.
I know there are people who can leave a home without much more apparent anxiety than they change clothes. I'm not one of them. For me, as for many, moving is one of the biggest and most stressful of passages, on a par with ending a relationship or a career.

Commodity culture doesn't encourage us to make much of such transitions. We're urged to believe that we can pack up and negotiate the shift successfully, provided  only we spend enough to replace cheerfully whatever we may have left behind. Real estate agents glibly talk about "product" available on the market. Stagers give advice on how to strip your personality out of your home when you're preparing to put it up for sale.

But it's not more stuff that we need. It's a community that bears witness with us to the life we've lived in a place that's stood at the heart of the world we've made for ourselves. Taking leave of a home, we need to celebrate among friends what we've become there, what we've created, what we've cherished. We need to go from room to room, giving thanks for how each has sheltered and enabled us. We need to leave space for grief and the acknowledgement of loss. We need to invest our household gods in objects that can stand for all this, and then pass those objects on to those who will come after us; or bury them; or carry them with us to the place where we'll build the next stage of our lives.

Longing for the Tribe

 

Photo from the Website of Red Pepper Spectacle Arts

 

For twenty-three years, no matter the weather, a proudly and joyfully rough-edged parade has snaked through Kensington Market in downtown Toronto on the night of the Winter Solstice.  Giant ravens  glide along the street. Iroquois shadow puppets tell the story of a miraculous birth. A contingent of Italian kitchen witches shrieks renditions of "Return to Sorrento" and "That's Amore." One year, a contingent in raccoon suits frolicked on the roof of a parking garage overturning garbage cans. 

Such apparently chaotic magic takes planning: it doesn't happen on its own. For the last ten years,  Red Pepper Spectacle Arts, a not-for-profit, artist-run collective has coordinated the parade our of their storefront community studio in the heart of the Market: http://www.redpepperspectaclearts.org/.  The Festival has always thrived on a model of leadership that blurs the line between spectators and participants. Handmade lanterns, many created in the open workshop Red Pepper hosts the week before the parade, float above the random crowd as we fall in behind the firebreathers, the stilt-walkers, the ten-foot street puppets, the drummers.

The Kensington Market Festival of Lights embodies much of what's most precious about this extraordinary city that mothers us all. There's room in the parade for every cultural tradition people choose to bring to it--and room for the ongoing creation of the new, shared tradition of the parade itself. Some of us bring Christmas, some of us bring Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa, or Diwali, or Yule.

I invest this parade, every year I go--and I've gone every year since I discovered it by accident in 1997--with my longing for a community created from the roots up by those who come together out of richly diverse experience, all the while affirming the distinct identities they bring as a gift to enrich the possibilities available to us all. And I'm intensely aware that such community can't be forced, can't be manufactured as a product, but instead has to be nurtured as a living thing: a seed planted in the cold furrow of a winter's night, lovingly tended in the light and warmth of the unconquered and reborn sun.

From year to year you can see subtle shifts in the demographic. There are always parents with small kids, hoisted on shoulders around the final fire circle for a better look at the burning of the Old Year. There's a growing contingent of beautiful, energetic twenty-somethings with piercings cooler than any body fashion statement I'll ever make. The last few festivals have seen a strong and foregrounded First Nations presence.  Always on the lookout for clusters of gay men in the crowd, this year I was happy to be part of such a clan myself, at least momentarily, a gaggle of nine or ten of us. The paper lanterns we'd decorated together a couple of weeks  ago helped us keep track of each other as we flowed with the larger crowd down the narrow streets of the Market and  into the park where we finally torched the Old Year.

I long to be part of a tribe with such men, however intermittently. I long for this to be the first of many years in which we come together as part of this fiercely uncommercialized, rough-hewn celebration of holy darkness and holy light. But such an aspiration calls for a light and flexible grasp, for hope rather than determination. Thinking back on the wonder of Solstice just a few days ago, the shifting constellation of our lanterns floating down the street seems like a parable for what 's required in holding to such an intention:  a few of us out ahead, a few scattered to one side, a few behind: all of us aware of the others, sometimes allowing for distance, sometimes slowing down to regroup or hastening to catch up.

The Mess of This Year's Book

I'm right at that cusp between looking back through the bewildering, worn-edged clutter of my day planner for 2012, and looking forward to the clean, sleek, empty Moleskine for 2013 into which I've only just begun to enter the first advance notes.

I still use a day planner, with paper pages that you turn with your fingers and write on in ball-point pen. I can't imagine forgoing this tangible, material record of my day-to-day life, any more than I can make the transition to reading the newspaper online. And every December, I imagine the coming year's book won't end up looking like the chaotic mess I've made over the last eleven months. I still try hard, at this point, to write in a controlled, neat script, carefully budgeting the space of each day's allotted inch-and-a-quarter to allow for some logic as the schedule fills in.

The natural sloppiness of my hand will take over in earnest about a week into the New Year. By then, what I'd in theory like my life to look like will collide with the reality of the choices I make from week to week, with what's demanded of me, with what I agree to, with what I want in the moment. There will be the notes transferred from one week's page to the next, a record of my sometimes epic procrastinations. There will be anxious reminders wedged in between consecutive meetings. I can trace the record of mounting anxiety about being overbooked by scanning this year's planner for the pages where I've even made notes to myself about when I intend to fit in exercise, when I intend to call a friend with whom I want to catch up.

This year, my resolution is not to fantasize about that clean, ordered book that I once again won't keep, but to look back with affection and wonder at the fullness of what's been, and to welcome the messiness of life as it lives itself.

Wanting the Polaroids

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to have hope, largely because a friend has so little of it right now in his life. The future doesn’t look good at all. A lot of the time, when we talk about his prospects, I’m at a loss for what to say that might offer comfort or help. What’s happening now is fine. It’s what may come to him—or may not come—down the road that’s sucking the blood out of life here and now, like some motherfucker demon that gets more and more powerful, the more fear it sees it can generate in us. At times like this, seeing what my friend is suffering, I can only say, it’s the future that kills us. It's longing for reassurance that everything will work out, and dread that it won't, that often pull our attention away from the blessings present in our lives today.

If he and I were on non-theistic paths, and God or the gods were irrelevant to us—if, for instance, we were Buddhists—it might be easier just to say that hope is beside the point; or even that hope is a toxic distraction, an enticing indulgence like absinthe that makes everything burn a little brighter for a while, and then slams you with the worst hangover of your life.

But my friend and I are both committed to the use of "God language," however tentative we may sometimes be about it. We're both given over to a faith in a You to whom we respond, by whom we're held in loving embrace, in whom we're comprehended. Sometimes that faith is little more than wanting to believe. At other times, it breaks into our lives by direct experience, like something we could never have expected, never could have asked or imagined, never could have bargained on. At times like those, we're confirmed in a trust that all will be well--and reminded that we have no idea in advance what that wellness will turn out to look like.

In the Christian Gospels, people have an odd way of not recognizing the resurrected Lord. They think he's the gardener, or a stranger on the road to Emmaus, or some random walker on the beach. They only twig when they can let go of their expectations, and of their dread.

In the face of uncertainty, we long for certainty. We want an infallible description in advance of what's in store for us. We want polaroids of the final destination, and GoogleMaps directions on how to get there. Instead of trust in a Person, we want knowledge of a thing. It's not hope that deceives us, but our habit of confusing hope with self-confidence.

We're in blessed luck: we don't get what we bargained on. We hang onto hope. The ongoing struggle--always in process, always a challenge, always an invitation--is to let go of our desire for the polaroids.

Why I Love Shortbus

I can count off 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.

I had a chance this weekend to take part in a conversation about the movie with twenty other gay men--some of us newcomers to the film, some fanatic fans for the six years since it came out. At the end of the evening, one man who came observed that if the leader had 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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wJ6y1eBDUYc

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 a Buddhist teacher like 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 are 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."

The Thinning Veil Between Worlds

I've had the oddest sense lately, making love to my partner, of the two of us being in a roomful of men.

When I say odd, I mean it's not exactly the fantasy of sharing him with a group, and sharing a group with him, that's coming forward for me. Nothing odd about that: let's be clear right at the start, the prospect turns my crank, and if it suited him as well--which it doesn't--we'd explore it.

Partly, it's the enduring presence of his former partner in his life, and by extension in mine. Bob died a little over ten years ago. His books line the shelves that cover whole walls of the house where we live summers, many of them inscribed to him by their authors, some of them annotated in his hand. His photographs hang throughout the house. A few summers back, we finally poured Bob's ashes into the bay, floating in a kayak together with Bob's first high school lover and lifelong friend, reading Whitman to each other in a light drizzle and watching a white heron flying low over the water toward an island at the mouth of the creek. I've come to say, only half jokingly, that I'm in a threeway relationship: sometimes one of us being dead makes it less challenging; sometimes more so.

Partly it's the long, slow repair of my friendship with my own former partner, now coupled up again himself, and the approaching prospect early next year of finally leaving the house I bought with him fifteen years ago, and the garden we created together before we separated. No question, I'm still in love with him too. It took me six years to admit that to myself.

Partly, it's the wider awareness of all the other men I've let into my heart, and into my pants, over the years--some of whom I dated; some who became soulmates on the short, intense coller-coaster rides of workshops; some whose names I only learned while we were having sex, or never learned at all, and never saw again. Thery're very much present in the room. Objects that represent them sit on my altar in the corner: the icon G. gave me on my fiftieth birthday; the crystal pendant cross S. brought me on a visit eight years ago; the natural phallus of stone, ground smooth by the tide, that A. found walking on the beach and saved for me; W.'s tuning fork.

Partly, it's the awareness that my partner's erotic history has been even richer and more varied than my own--and that now and then my nose is pressed to the glass with envy about that.

And in the shadow of all these, it's something else, something more. It's the sense that when we're making love, though we're two isolated individuals, we're also part of something larger, something more general. Something that embraces the other men who dwell within us: those who've slipped away, carried elsewhere on the diverging currents of our lives; even those who've passed beyond the veil of death--the"waves of dying friends" that the late poet Michael Lynch so movingly commemorated in the early years of the AIDS crisis.

I can't describe more precisely what I'm sensing so strongly of late within/behind/ beneath/beyond the experience of being with this particular man I love deeply, with whom I most intimately share my life. But whatever it is, it flies in the face of the romantic cult of the couple as a self-sufficient unit. It's radically opposed to the notion that we find one person who somehow completes us, so that anything else becomes an admission of emotional failure and defeat. I can't help but feel that our current obsession with marriage rights (as necessary politically as that may be) threatens to flatten and suppress the richness of this broader web of emotional, erotic, and spiritual connection.

Strangely, I'm reminded of what Plato said about (gay) love in the Symposium: that we start by loving an individual, progress by loving many individuals, and end (ideally) by loving what we find embodied in them all. That's one of the few things I can take away from Plato at this point in my life without vehement disagreement.

And perhaps even more strangely--weirdly, in fact--I connect what I'm feeling to this moment in the year--Hallowe'en, All Souls, the Day of the Dead, Samhain--when the curtain between what's present and what's vanished from our daylight lives is pulled aside, and we're in communion with the dead--and by extension, with the otherwise departed, and with the alternative worlds of our unrealized longings. If Bob's ever in bed with us, surely it's now. I'm glad for the thought he's there. Along with all those others, alive and dead, across town or across the continent, at the far-flung corners of my life and my beloved's, the men of our queer tribe, who nestle and nuzzle around us.

Living Soulfully

Last Sunday afternoon, I spent two hours in a church basement with thirteen other men, most of whom I was meeting for the first time. Maybe the fact that we'd come together wasn't exactly miraculous. But as we went around the circle introducing ourselves and sharing what had led us to gather, the hope I heard most of us voice seemed rare and precious.

Many though not all of us had in common that we'd spent time at Easton Mountain; or else at least we shared curiosity about Easton's mission of building more vibrant, more spiritually engaged, more inclusive community among gay men. But more immediately, what had brought us together was the desire to find such connection closer to home than the seven-hour drive from Toronto to Easton itself.

Easton's own programs, and the programs it hosts, are extraordinary and precious resources for personal growth and transformation, for the formation of new friendships, for the weaving of wider communal bonds. But as with so much of our experience of spiritual community as gay and otherwise queer men, these brief, finite opportunities to build our own culture are here one day and over the next, as we move back again from such gatherings into a world that we haven't made for ourselves, where we stand at the margins, where we're not quite fully at home.

There's a wistfulness that's an almost inevitable hangover from the peak experiences of "workshop culture. " It's a longing to walk more easily, and more often, into the space of deep connection. It's a dissatisfaction that the texture of everyday life allows so little space to integrate deep friendship, queer eros, faith, playful abandon, and resolve to change the world.

A place like Easton Mountain,to offer sustained hope for the transformation of queer men's spiritual realities, has to find ways of becoming more than itself--more than a few acres of land in upstate New York, however beautiful and peaceful they are; more than a week or two at a time of celebration and release from the constraints of life in a heteronormative world; more even than the few men who live on its land and hold space, ready to welcome those who come. It has to spread itself out as a widening network of complex, interwoven, multiple connections, like rhizomes just under the surface of the soil.

That's my prayer for what the fourteen of us in Toronto, together with those who find their way to us in coming weeks and months, might become: a web of roots strong enough to hold together, vibrant enough to send up fabulous green shoots into the gay sunshine, extensive enough to link us to men who share our vision at the foot of a mountain in upstate New York; in Boston; in Philadelphia; in New York City; in Florida; in New Jersey.

Chapters of Living Soulfully, an organization of men whose lives have been touched by the promise of Easton Mountain, offer fellowship and opportunities for local community in a growing number of cities and regions: see www.livingsoulfully.org and the Facebook pages of local groups.

Stanley Kunitz: The Snakes of September

Faced with the mortality of one of my dearest friends--made more vivid by the bad news from the last CT scan--I have only these lines of Stanley Kunitz, who was still hauling compost along the paths of his Provincetown garden at the age of 100, until his death in 2006.

All summer I heard them
rustling in the shrubbery,
outracing me from tier
to tier in my garden,
a whisper among the viburnums,
a signal flashed from the hedgerow,
a shadow pulsing
in the barberry thicket.
Now that the nights are chill
and the annuals spent,
I should have thought them gone,
in a torpor of blood
slipped to the nether world
before the sickle frost.
Not so. In the deceptive balm
of noon, as if defiant of the curse
that spoiled another garden,
these two appear on show
through a narrow slit
in the dense green brocade
of a north-country spruce,
dangling head-down, entwined
in a brazen love-knot.
I put out my hand and stroke
the fine, dry grit of their skins.
After all,
we are partners in this land,
co-signers of a covenant.
At my touch the wild
braid of creation
trembles.

Under the Surface

In these days just after the Autumn Equinox, I step out my back door into the last mortal exuberance of the garden. The late clematis is at the end of its three-week riot: thousands of small, scented white blossoms billowing over the fence, over my neighbour's garage, into the grape arbor of the yard next door. The corroded bronze Buddha sits on his small shelf just to the left of the garden gate, nearly obscured by the forsythia. What's left of the dicentra and ferns lie sprawled across the paving bricks in the corner nearest the steps from the deck. And day by day, the pond moves slowly but steadily toward dormancy.

The sunlight that sliced through its surface two months ago now barely grazes the far end. The floating plants--water lettuce, parrot feather--get leggier as they reach for light and slow down their relentless spread that from late June to early August needed thinning nearly every week. The goldfish, gluttons that they are, continue to guzzle anything I drop into the water for them with as much enthusiasm as ever, even though their metabolisms are slowing as the water temperature drops imperceptibly from morning to morning.

Down below, God knows what's going on. Fiteen years ago, I released half a dozen Japanese trap-door snails. An enterprising raccoon occasionally manages to fish one out and leaves the fragments of shell on the edging stones--sometimes along with a chaotic tangle of vegetation--as proof they're still going about their invertebrate business in the thickening layer of muck at the bottom and in the hoary film of algae that clings to the sides. I have no idea whether the current population of goldfish still includes any of the half-dozen ten-cent feeders that my ex and I turned loose in 1997. Some additions over the years have clearly contributed their genes to the mix.

I marvel at how little effort I have to invest in this more-or-less self-contained ecosystem the size of three or four bathtubs. I plug in a floating electric heater for the winter to keep enough of the surface free of ice that the fish--hibernating near the bottom except when the odd warm spell brings them churning sleepily up to the surface--don't suffocate by spring. In early May, an algae bloom turns the water an opaque emerald. A week or two later, the pond weeds begin to suck up enough free nitrogen for the algae to calm down and the water to clear again. By early summer, the seasonal floating plants and the water lily shade enough of the surface to regulate the water temperature. The marginal plants grow happily on a diet of fish shit, their roots functioning as a natural filtration system. I know what little I need to do to sustain these cycles. But I also know that my job is mostly just to get out of the way, and to give thanks.

It's all so long, so slow, and so resolutely under the surface. I'm directly aware only of the barest fraction of its life. And therein lies the lesson I continue to learn from it, more deeply with each year that it settles gradually into stasis and then wakes again the following spring into new life: that what happens fast and with obvious drama often just barely skims the surface, while something far more richly interconnected moves out of sight to its own rhythms.

5773: Some Thoughts for the Anniversary of the World

The poignancy of Rosh HaShanah (literally, the "head of the year") is that it invites those who observe it--Jews, those partnered with Jews, and other fellow travellers--to remember the world at the moment of its mythical creation. And in remembering its newness, at once to celebrate its promise, and to mourn how far short of that promise it has fallen; to assert as an act of faith that the world might still be perfected, or at least repaired; to imagine that we could be, in some small way, the instrument of its perfection.

At the funky, quirky, fiercely inclusive alternative shul that I attend, goy toy of my partner that I am, I was offered this morning the following:

"Each time I stand for the Amidah [the great, silently recited prayer at the heart of the first part of the service] I sift through the tangle of legend and learning that is our inheritance, searching for my own blessings, my own prayer. I stand with one foot planted in empiricism and the other entwined in the messiness of my own humanity. No body part touches the God of my ancestors. My heart wishes to be open, my mind to be fully present. And so each time I stand for the Amidah I invent my own religion." -- Claudia Bernard

"The peak of religious ethical perfection to which Judaism aspires is the human being as creator. When God created the world, God provided an opportunity for the work of His hands--humanity--to participate in creation. The Creator, as it were, impaired reality in order that mortal humans could repair its flaws and perfect it. God gave us the Book of Creation…not simply for the sake of theoretical study but in order that we might continue the act of creations."--Joseph Soloveitchik

In these two quotes, I find a place for myself as a queer participant in a tradition that doesn't belong to me. I find space to invent my own religion. I find the chutzpah to believe that by inventing it, I am participating in the completion of the world. I find the ethical leverage I need to insist that part of my calling is to correct the great world faith traditions when they fail to see queer identities and queer love as part of the richness of Spirit's unfolding.

Stuff

My partner and I have just returned to the house we left fifteen months ago. It's been surprisingly easy to settle in. The couple who were living here were extremely conscientious about giving it back to us more or less as we left it.

But what's surprised me over the last ten days is how little I'm in a rush to unpack the stuff we stored in a corner of the basement the spring before last, or to reclaim the five or six boxes we shlepped to a friend's attic. It's not just that I've lived without this stuff for over a year and probably don't need it back right away. It's that I wonder why I need it back at all. And why I'd want to weight myself down with it.

I don't want to romanticize this impusle to chuck some ballast. It's one thing to live a thoroughly middle-class life (as I do) and think, wouldn't it be great not to be so thoroughly owned by my possessions? It's quite another to be living on the street, trying to piece together the price of a room for the night. But it does seem like a good opportunity to remember that life isn't all getting and spending.

And now for the wisdom of George Carlin: