Beltane on the Boulevard

The plane trees
pruned so brutally six weeks ago
wake up late, these first days of May,
laugh, and shout,
"I win!"

Slow Learner

It's only taken me
the better part of twenty years
to learn I have to let watercolour dry
before I add an overglaze.

Sangha

Plum Village is a Buddhist meditation community in the Dordogne, an hour's train ride and then a short drive east of Bordeaux. It was founded thirty years ago by Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen monk, teacher, poet, and peace activist who led the Buddhist delegation during the Paris Peace Talks during what Americans, when they don't just try to forget about it, call the Viet Nam War, and the Vietnamese call the American War. (As far as I can see, it's the Vietnamese who have the right to name it: it was their country, after all, that the United States wantonly ravaged and then left unreconstructed, as though we bear no ongoing responsibility for the enduring damage we did to bodies, minds, souls, and communities.) The Americans, the North Vietnamese delegation, and the Viet Cong all held him in suspicion. He was a close friend of Thomas Merton and of Daniel Berrigan.

The monks and nuns live in a cluster of discrete hamlets mostly within easy walking distance of one another, along roads that thread between rolling hills and vinyards. They welcome the steady stream of guests who come on retreat, mostly for a week or two, occasionally for longer. Thay ("Teacher") lives in a hermitage, cared for by rotating teams of monks as he recovers from a stroke last November. His spirit is everywhere in the community, with its gentle, open approach to Buddhist practice and meditation reinterpreted for the modern world, for the West, and for dialogue with other faith traditions. One of Thay's most beautiful books is Living Buddha, Living Christ, a collection of dharma talks he gave during the Christmas season--a major annual celebration at Plum Village.

I was fortunate and blessed to spend  last week there. Early this last Friday afternoon, seven of us stepped off a local train into the bustle of the Bordeaux train station , then crossed the square to a cafe where another contingent of our new Dharma friends had already found a table for lunch. We all smiled like idiots at total strangers--which in my limited experience is even further outside the norm in France than in New York. Our newly acquired habit of bowing to each other with palms pressed together put us right off the chart.

There's good money on many of us never seeing each other again. That doesn't stop me already fantasizing about a visit to London or Dublin, Paris or Amsterdam to see one or several of the people I fell so completely in love with over seven days of sitting together in the meditation hall before dawn, getting to know each other on walks together, in sharing circles, or chatting during periods of the day when, truth to tell, we should have been more conscientiously practicing Noble Silence. The longing to hold onto the connections is maybe itself a slippage from the equanimity that meditation practice is supposed to instill--the Right Thinking that knows everything is impermanent, nothing lasts forever--and that we are all part of one another now, even if we don't meet again.

We were all already in the heady first stage of reentry--the hours and days when we find ourselves back in a world where you don't get constant encouragement to breathe and smile, to walk slowly, to eat silently; where instead you decide what you want for dinner and go after it, rather than accepting whatever you find in front of you--providing most of the food isn't already gone when you get to the head of the line; where a glass of wine, a cup of coffee, or meat on your pizza is again thinkable--each in flagrant violation of the Five Mindfulness Trainings; where you look at your watch and hustle to get to the market for tonight's fish before it shuts down. Walking home along busy Friday night streets in Aix en Provence at the end of my long train trip back across France, I could have been strolling through The Matrix. Today I feel a slight undertow of anxiety that the joy I experienced so much of last week may slip away and leave me wondering, "What was that?

Part of that anxiety involves my own ambivalence. On the one hand, I remember the joy of waking up to the flavor of every noodle in my half-full bowl , after I got to the front of the lunch line to find the serving dishes all but cleaned out.  I remember the bliss of being greeted by a cat on a path early in the morning, and deciding the most important thing in the world was to sit down on the spot and invite her to settle into my lap for a nap: it was the cat who calmed my Monkey Mind enough that I could simply sit, as she was sitting. Not least, I remember  the deep, unproblematic affection I shared with the straight men with whom I developed friendships.

But on the other, I'm aware of my resistance. The bustle of busy streets  Friday night felt like a beautiful expression of human energy to be treasured, not like a departure from the path. I've come to accept over the years that my tendency to flow from one object of attention to another isn't necessarily something for me to constrain; sometimes it's a way of embracing the freedom to play and recreate in the presence of the Sacred, an impulse close to my core nature, not a departure from my true self. (Hence my experience that having a cat in my lap for fifteen minutes is more likely to lead me toward Beginner's Mind than simply sitting facing the wall. I remain a devotee of Distraction by Shiny Objects Meditation.)

And then there's sex. In the Five Mindfulness Trainings transmitted at Plum Village, and in the Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings that are a more advanced expansion of the precepts, I find it striking that the Training titled "True Love" expresses a deep suspicion of  erotic engagement, a sense that sex is a mostly negative force that drives us farther from enlightenment. The best that can be said about it is that in a committed long-term relationship between laypersons, it's allowed, but hardly a source of positive value or spiritual growth. Rather, its destructive potential is simply mitigated when it's kept carefully channelled. I find it especially striking that the last of the Fourteen Trainings devotes so much space to sex, carefully and extensively hedging around its pitfalls. I'm reminded of Christian approaches that so often begin with a canard about sexuality as sacred gift, and then move straight into reshearsals of ethical danger.

(I'm reminded by contrast of Mark Epstein's wonderful book Open to Desire: The Truth About What the Buddha Taught, where Epstein thoughfully and accessibly explores what Buddhism has called "the left-handed path" of erotic engagement as an awareness practice, a means of learning to immerse oneself fully in life without clinging.)

Then again: maybe my misgivings are themselves the product of Too Much Thinking, as I imagine Thay would be quick to say. The Dharma isn't a doctrine, it's a practice. After a week of sitting to face the wall every morning before dawn; of eating mindfully, focusing on the food, on all that went into its production, and on the companions at my side; of walking slowly and feeling the earth come up to support my next footstep, I've changed, just a little. My partner Jonathan and I yesterday morning had the best sex we've had in months: playful, uncomplicated, passionate, immersed in the moment, unhindered by fantasies of What I'd Really Like to Do.

Yesterday afternoon, we walked to the top of Mt Ste-Victoire, outside of Aix. I'm irrationally fearful of heights. The peripheral awareness of space dropping away around me freaks me right out, even when the path is wide enough that I could fall flat without going over the edge. As we got to the last stage and the switchbacks began, my anxiety rose.

And then I started talking to Monkey Mind, addressing him as an old friend, telling him to stop jumping around and settle down for a little while. I thought, maybe I can be the Buddha just for a minute or so. And something clicked.  I began simply to breathe, and smile, and put one foot in front of the other, and the last five minutes of the trek to the top opened out into pleasure and adventure.

At the top of the mountain, there's a little priory built in the seventeenth century for a handful of monks, now used both as a pilgrimage chapel and a cultural center. The courtyard was full of people. A hiking club started singing together after their lunch. Somebody had hauled a viola da gamba up the mountain and gave a short recital in the chapel. A group of Japanese tourists posed for pictures with an 84-year-old woman in traditional Provençal dress and hiking boots. They were all having the time of their lives. A lovely woman in her sixties started chatting with me, with exquisite patience for my terrible French. From the parapet, I could look down about a thousand feet toward the massif to which we'd walked the week before from the other side of the mountain. It felt like the whole world was singing Vivaldi's Gloria.

On the way back down, my old friend anxiety sat quietly while I breathed into my next footstep and said to myself, as the monks encouraged us to do all last week, "I've arrived. I'm home. In the Here and Now."

Breathe. Love. Pray.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Metropolis

Saturday afternoon, in the middle of a downtown shopping errand, I turned at the greeting of a friend and her daughter. A few minutes later, as our unexpected encounter ended, my day felt transformed.

Blanche is my long-time colleague at work. She also lives just a few blocks down the street.  An immigrant from France whose family made their way in the course of two generations from North Africa to Provence to Paris to Montreal, she's gloriously, charmingly, elegantly Gallic. Her adopted daughter Julie was born in Viet Nam. She's an eight-year-old vortex of compact energy, Khmer by her looks, as French by nurture as her mother, trilingual in French, English, and the Dutch of her adoptive father Gerrit, and now learning some Vietnamese into the bargain from the woman who looks after her late afternoons. Sometimes I look out my second-floor window to see them heading home on a bicycle fitted out with a tandem extension for Julie.

Our conversation was hardly remarkable--a brief exchange of the day's events, my suggestion of a DVD together that evening (not possible for them), her countersuggestion to join them for their Sunday morning ritual of breakfast at a locavore hangout at the end of the street (possible for all of us). My intense pleasure in the meeting lay in the surprise of it: it came as pure gift and nothing any of us had bargained on, sparking our shared desire to make spur-of-moment plans. I walked away with a renewed sense that I belong in the world, and in this city. Not because of what I choose for myself in isolation, but because of who I'm invited to become in the presence of others.

It happens not only in chance encounters with friends. A week ago, I cycled up the steep hill north of my house to one of the most vibrant farmers' markets in the city, held in a set of repurposed barns that originally housed streetcars during repairs. The two guys in their late fifties who run the stall with the best-priced late winter vegetables were as usual putting as much time into shmoozing as waiting efficiently on customers in line.  The Adrian Brody  look-alike in the beret who plays French-style accordion at the end of the main aisle didn't show. Sometimes I run into people I know; sometimes not.

This is the gift of life in a city, or at least of life in cities worthy of the name: for all the alienation of modern capitalism, human beings, given the chance, find each other and are capable of taking pleasure in the simple facts of shared existence. But letting it happen requires that we prize randomness as a value, instead of organizing our lives to get just what we want and only what we want. We need to be surprised in order to be delighted, and need to be delighted in order to dedicate ourselves to strengthening the web of connections in which we're held. Vibrant cities are set up in ways that throw us together rather than keeping us in our own isolated grooves. Jane Jacobs taught us this fifty years ago, infuriating the city-planning moguls who cared only for efficiency, and for bigger and better expressways driven like stakes through the heart of neighbourhoods.

It's a cliche of urban regeneration over the last forty years or so that it was gay men who moved into decayed neighbourhoods, restored the houses, opened the local shops. There's a danger in romanticizing and idealizing that process. Others with more cash followed, turning less sweat into more equity as real estate values took off. The process of gentrification that often began with those gay urban pioneeers in the 1970's has had its dark side, rendering areas unaffordable to low-income populations that had called them home.

But the transformative potential of what they did lay in this: that they often espoused a model of urban life that valued public affinity and interconnectedness over private values of ownership and blood relations. Gay men don't and never have had a monopoly on the communal values of urban life. Arguably, gay life in the age of the internet has retreated from these values: Grindr has become as effective at keeping us from being surprised as a suburban shopping mall; the ubiquitous focus on marriage rights has nudged us out of the streets and back onto the couch in front of the TV. But in living memory, our circumstances have often put us in the position of living lives enriched most deeply by connections that haven't come automatically through the ties of biological family or a single-minded drive to couple up. That's a heritage of queer urban experience that's worth embracing consciously as a path through life, affirming that the cities which nurture us are indeed the metropolis--the mother of us all.

Heart Circle

Two days ago, I made my way home from the Breitenbush Winter Faerie Gathering. I'm grateful that the long trek from the West Coast back to still-frozen Toronto gave me a whole day to decompress. I needed eleven hours and a bus, a tram, two flights, and a cab to transition back into a world where queer men don't sit together for two and a half hours every morning to speak their truth to one another without fear of judgment. 

I'm mostly content with sweet, rich memories of what I experienced in the company of 150 loving, miraculously openhearted fae spirits three hours southeast of Portland: the languorous hot-spring soaks under stars I haven't seen blaze so brightly in years; the river's endless rush below the camp; a steady stream of affectionate touch in passing from men most of whom I'd only just met, in the dining hall, on paths, in crowded hallways; delicious surges of infatuation, half a dozen times a day; the mindbending fabulosity of the Saturday night talent show; dozens of brothers gathered around a bonfire breaking spontaneously into a chant invoking the Goddess. 

But as for the Heart Circle, memory doesn't feel like enough this morning. I find myself longing to sit daily among companions who weave a safe, sacred container for one another, to go on living among those unafraid to access the soft, tender vulnerability that is the working of an enlightened heart, as Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön reminds us. I want this as an ongoing practice in my life. 

When you sit to listen deeply--without cross-talk, without comment--to the grief, the longings, the pain, and the aspirations your companions share, your own heart opens in response. You find yourself awakened from your superficial projections when the man you've spent two days fantasizing about across a crowded room voices the loss he's suffered; you rejoice to witness the passion for justice that animates the next man who speaks. You speak in turn in safety. Your soul begins to mend. In some small but infinitely precious way, the world begins to mend. And you become part of its mending. 

Just a few hours after I landed back in a world where such things don't happen every morning, I went yesterday noon to an Ash Wednesday Eucharist. There was much talk of turning again toward the Source of our being, of reconnecting with the goodness of who we were created to be. But Lent, for me, remains the most toxic and problematic season of the Christian liturgical year. I still hear too much self-loathing in the ancient formulas of penitence, too much individualistic obsession with getting it right and with how we've gotten it wrong. Some years I say, only half as a joke, that I plan to give up church for Lent. What I want instead as a Lenten practice this year is forty days of heart circles.

Seen and Unseen

On the same granola hipster corner in Portland as last night,
the thin bearded boy seated on the sidewalk next to his dog,
diffident, not quite meeting your gaze.

His sign speaks for him:
"Namaste. Remember that you are loved and beautiful."

His surprise at being addressed;
his startled pressing of palm to palm as he bows from the waist.

His longing to reach out.

His fear of reaching out.

The story of his life that you don't know,
because instead of asking if you could sit with him,
you gave him a dollar and walked on.

His vulnerability.

His holiness.

Not a Clue

It's beyond me to comprehend fully what was happening while I lay on a futon for two blissed-out hours Sunday afternoon. If you're lucky enough--actually, make that blessed enough--to know a really gifted masseur, you'll have some idea of what I'm going to try to express.

I could try to tell you about the unholy mass of tension in my neck and back that I brought with me to the session, or to describe how it gradually melted away during the generous hour I spent face down, before George invited me to roll over.  I could try to assemble some kind of connected narrative description out of the raw material of my experience. But  the words would just disappear into the gulf between language and the body's deep wisdom.

Have you ever received touch that itself awakens you to how deeply you needed it? Has gratitude ever welled up directly out of the knot in your shoulder, bypassing your head more or less entirely? Have you ever lost track of how the arm that's being gently extended is connected to the hip that is also somehow, in the same moment, being  encouraged into repose by firm contact with another body?

Have you ever found yourself wondering, how can he possibly be doing this, and that, at the same time? Is he kneeling at my head right now? Or at my left side? Or standing over me with his legs astride my hips? Is that his hand on my sacrum, or his foot? His thumb applying pressure, or his elbow? And have you finally said, to hell with trying to figure it out: it just is?

Breathing deeply, eyes closed, the body isn't so much a unified whole as it is a field of possibilities. The body of your masseur isn't so much an object of attention as a mystery that inspires wonder and thankfulness. Especially if you both turn off the flow of words more or less completely.

How much is that briefly non-verbal state like a return to what we knew as infants--or for most all of us, more accurately, to an idealized version of what we wish it had been like for us as infants?  Those hours on the table or the mat are still informed by all that we didn't get in those first months of life, as by all that we've become in the long years since we first looked in a mirror as young children and misrecognized our unified, all-in-one-piece reflections as ourselves. What we experience isn't so much a return, then, as a reparation.

At the end of two hours, I found a hand laid to my chest , an arm slid gently, easily, surely around my shoulders--no state-accredited, licensed and certified experience, this--and a voice repeating softly in my ear, "I've got you. I've got you."

What if we took such experiences as a parable in the quest to understand our encounters with God--not as the object of our thought, but as the One whose touch mysteriously loosens what's blocked within us and in the world, unpredictably delights what hungers for loving attention, and unwaveringly cradles what thirsts for reassurance?

Angels Ascending and Descending

I didn't make it to Midnight Mass this Christmas Eve, nor to a service on Christmas morning. The weather, my energy level, the crush of social obligations all factored in.

But the day after Christmas, I accompanied a friend to the chapel at the long-term care facility where she lives. She's a remarkable woman--a member of a well-known and very wealthy English family who as a young woman immigrated to Canada to work as a nurse,  founded a non-profit organization in support of children living with HIV/AIDS and their families, and came out as a lesbian in her late fifties after the collapse of her marriage. Two and a half years ago, a brain bleed left her incapable of walking or stringing together more than a sentence or two, on a good day.

At the service, I was the only congregant out of fifteen who didn't arrive in a wheelchair. It wasn't the Christmas Mass I might have bargained on. But it was a remarkable lesson in what it really means to believe that we find God in our flesh. The celebrant kept an eye on people who were drifting off, gently encouraging them to focus on the service, helping them to find their place in the hymn book.

In Genesis 28, when Jacob has his vision of God's angels on a ladder, they ascend and descend, not the other way around. They go from earth up to heaven before they descend from heaven to earth.

It's the ground-level, utterly physical conditions of our lives that enable and nurture our spiritual awareness. Angels don't start by coming down the ladder from heaven to meet us. They begin by ascending the ladder from earth to heaven.  We meet the Divine in and through our bodies. Our bodies aren't a distraction from the search for God, or God's search for us. They're the ladder without which angels go nowhere.

We experience the Sacred in the only bodies we have. We often need a reminder, like the one I received last Friday, that this is true amidst weakness, infirmity, sickness. But I'm not so sure we don't need to hear that message amidst strength, vigor, and health, as well. Legs that run, arms that lift, eyes with clear vision, rib cages that expand and contract with our breath, hearts that pump reliably: it's easy not to notice them, easy not to practice mindfulness. It's gratitude that reveals them as ongoing miracles.

If that's true of limbs and lungs and hearts, it's true as well of the possibilities of pleasure: as men, experiencing our life in and through male bodies--the only bodies we have--our erotic desire is a powerful bridge between flesh and spirit, a uniquely intense locus of our embodiment, the place where we experience that, as Tony Kushner put it in Angels in America, "the body is the garden of the soul."

It's gratitude that turns eros into prayer, a gateway through which we pass to become the angels of Jacob's vision, ascending the ladder from earth to heaven,  if only we allow pleasure to open our hearts rather than close them off. This is true when you're alone, falling into the miracle of the pleasure you're capable of giving yourself. It's true when you're with a partner or partners, becoming for another the angel who in your ascent extends a hand to draw him up from below, becoming the one who takes a hand offered from above , for the healing of yours souls. And then descending more deeply into the world of all flesh, which longs for and stands in desperate need of repair.

Homage at Midnight

 

Provenance unknown; shared by Hoppergrass.

The Wisdom of Darkness

You might not expect to find deep wisdom for these sacred nights on the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times. But here it is:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/20/opinion/why-we-need-the-winter-solstice.html

In his column there this morning, Clark Strand wrote:

"In times past people took to their beds at nightfall, but not merely to sleep. They touched one another, told stories and, with so much night to work with, woke in the middle of it to a darkness so luxurious it teased visions from the mind and divine visitations that helped to guide their course through life....

"We need a rest from ourselves that only a night like the winter solstice can give us. And the earth, too, needs that rest. The only thing I can hope for is that, if we won’t come to our senses and search for the darkness, on nights like these, the darkness will come looking for us."

 

As Solstice Approaches

...look for the light. Look for the magic.

 

 

 

(Photo by Drew)

 

 

 

 

 

Rooted

What happens when you embrace a tree?

If "tree hugger" is too much a phrase of mockery for you ever to have done it, you should give it a try. Ideally, find one that's been alive longer than you have; one that wasn't planted by human hands.

You have to meet the tree. You have to get out of your head. You have to understand that the tree has its own life beyond your experience of it.

You have to visualize what lies beneath your feet. You have to remind yourself that the trunk your chest and cheek are pressed against are not its base, but its midsection. That the roots visible at your feet only hint at its hidden life, which reaches down and spreads out as far into the earth as the branches over your head. That half its being is an unseen tangle you can only vaguely begin to imagine, another world you cannot visit.

Balancing Act

I work in a building on one of the busiest commercial corners in mid-town Toronto. Starting in my block and heading east, luxury retailers have stacked up the last few years thick as cockroaches: Louis Vuitton next to Tiffany next to Coach, and so on down the block; Cartier is across the street. To the west there's a different mix: a sequence of public institutions and university buildings south of the street, on the north side toney new condos and a posh hotel, punctuated by relatively downmarket eateries left over from thirty years ago. Between the museum and the Royal Conservatory of Music lies a surviving ribbon of a greener Victorian Toronto: Philosopher's Walk, following the dale of a creek that now flows invisibly through a subterranean culvert. An Edwardian stone and wrought iron gate bows away from the sidewalk, creating a little eddy out of the main pedestrian flow, an invitation into the tranquillity of the the footpath leading south, away from the traffic and bling.

One afternoon about two weeks ago, a man knelt beside the gate, a random selection of stones at his side. Before him, more stones rose as he'd left them balanced, in columns of three or four. A field of focused energy radiated around him. At its centre lay only his union with the work of creating  equipoise and stillness.

There was no question of our pulling him out of his task. Instead, he drew us in. I misread him at first, emptying the spare change from my pocket into the satchel he'd set to one side, before it sank in that his practice had nothing to do with solliciting money, on a street where half a dozen people a day ask me for a handout. Or perhaps: that if it did, the heart of his enterprise lay securely beyond any expectation of the donations he might take in. It existed for itself. It was pure gift. As I dropped my few coins into his bag, he said while making eye contact only a moment, "I love you," and went back to the work of finding the still point hidden in the heart of the jagged, angular rock he was holding almost motionless over the one beneath it.

Later that day, he'd gone; the stones remained.

Total Immersion

 

(Provenance unknown; shared by Hoppergrass)

 

On an Autumn Afternoon

Right of Return

Saturday afternoon: as the sun prepares to set on this Day of Atonement in the Jewish year 5775, those of us who attend the final service of Ne'ilah will meditate one last time on the New Year call to t'shuvah--"repentence," but more literally, "return": return to our original natures in their divinely ordained goodness. The repentance of the High Holidays doesn't grovel in self-loathing. Instead, it points toward the ways human nature is meant to do better and is capable of doing better. Which is why I go back, year after year, gentile in a Jewish congregation that I am. I find there an invitation (one I never answer fully) to be the best of myself. For me, that call often gets lost in my own Christian tradition, especially in the pieties of Lent, tinged with self-loathing as they still all too frequently remain.

The sober self-assessment this day invites us to exercise is grounded in the fundamental goodness of who we are at our core, of who we were made to be. That core includes the discovery, the rediscovery, and the living out of our authentic sexuality and gender identification. Our core embraces the force for good, in ourselves and in the world, that acting on the truth of our sexual being can be.

T'shuvah calls you to repair the self, not to deny the self or to turn it into some other self. T'shuvah calls you to show kindness and respect; to embrace your own capacity for desire and pleasure as miracles to which the proper response is gratitude and celebration, within yourself and in erotic communion with others. It calls you not to shame others; not to belittle them; not to evaluate and use them as objects.

It calls us to affirm the best of who we are and to resist everything, both inside and outside ourselves, that denies our right to return to the truth of our queer souls.

That scrutiny of who we are at our core surely also includes a close look at the complex, often painful heritage of our early religious upbringings. The impulse to walk away from traditions that served us badly is strong. Sometimes walking away from a spiritually abusive heritage is the healthiest thing queer men can possibly do.

But I know from my own experience that the alienated rage I felt for so long towards the Lutheran tradition of my childhood and youth screened a deep pain--the pain I felt at losing the riches it held along with the abuse it doled out. For me, t'shuvah--return--has meant finding a way back to embrace again what  fed my soul as a child and as a young man. My own queer t'shuvah eventually meant claiming my right to return to religious language and symbols that from my early childhood on were woven into the truth of my soul.

My path of return is all the more queer because it wanders on its course through rich traditions not my own--and guided, this day and this evening, by the sound of the shofar in the wilderness.

 

(Photo by the late Oscar Wolfman.)

This Time for Durga



When Mahishasura, the demon water buffalo, threatened to destroy the world, the gods combined their individuals powers in order to effect the creation of a Goddess who could defeat him, as they could not.

Thus was Durga born. She rides a lion. In her ten hands she holds the weapons contributed to her power, her Shakti, by the gods who brought her into being. She is the restorer of cosmic order. Supremely beautiful, she is also powerful in battle beyond all withstanding, destroying the forces that threaten to overwhelm Creation.

Now, if ever, the Earth needs her.

The ice caps melt. Lake Erie chokes on toxic algae nourished by the runoff of chemical fertilizers from factory farms. Countless millions of animals live lives of uninterrupted misery to maximize the profits of corporations and to satsify our desire for cheap meat, eggs, and dairy. The rain forests of the Amazon are clearcut. The boreal forests of northern Alberta are destroyed and the groundwater contaminated to produce the dirtiest oil in the world. Cancer rates rise as our bodies absorb more and more poisons. We choke on the fumes of the cars we insist on driving, the planes we keep on boarding.

These are the forces of chaos over which no one of us can triumph. In dwelling on our sense of individual powerlessness lies despair.

On Sunday, September 21, thousands will gather in New York City, at the beginning of  a climate summit at the UN, to stand for the Earth against the forces of shortsightedness, greed, and indifference, and to demand action in the face of the mounting effects of global warming. Demonstrators will gather along Central Park West and the march will begin at 11.30 from Columbus Circle.

Patriarchy, in its delusional attempt to subdue and control Nature, has fucked over the Earth. The desire to dominate the planet, the desire to dominate women, the desire to eradicate queer desire among men--these are the poisonous fruits of a lust for domination, of the denial that men, in our mortal bodies, are the sons of Nature, not Her masters.

It is time for Durga to appear. It is time for us to contribute our powers to her manifestation. It is time for us to become the lion on which she rides into battle. It is time for us to become the weapons of cosmic righteousness that she holds in her hands.

www.peoplesclimate.org

Holy and Perishable

For over six years, my altar's been falling apart.

It was a ruin when I first adopted it--a 60's-style backyard brick hearth, long disused, cracks already opening in the mortar. I swept it clean and filled it with votive candles and incense the night of Summer Solstice. My neighbours have year after year remained quietly tolerant that every morning I ring a bell and kneel in front of an eyesore fifteen feet from their kitchen window.

Every summer, I've removed objects and added others, as I do to the indoor altar that becomes the focus of my practice September through May. This year, I've included no Christian symbolism, though every day I begin by crossing myself and reciting the formulas traditional to the monastic morning prayer of Lauds. Red, white, yellow, and black stones for the four directions surround a small Shiva Lingam. Behind that sits a small, corroded bronze Indonesian Buddha, missing an arm and part of its chest--a reminder of the transience of all things, including our understanding of the Friend who makes our lives possible and gives them meaning.

Tibetan Buddhist monks proclaim this lesson of transience by spending weeks constructing mandalas of coloured sand--which they then sweep back into chaos and pour into moving water.

The collapse of my repurposed shrine continues. Yesterday morning as I knelt,  a cluster of bricks had skewed loose from the wall, wobbling under my touch. They're going nowhere for the moment, but the frosts and thaws of the coming winter will take their toll. The floor of the main chamber is already one course shorter than when I first consecrated it. The lower chamber, once the firepit, holds a compost of undisturbed garden detritus dedicated to the Goddess's endless cycle of generation, decay, and rebirth. Eventually, everything above that I've prayed over and venerated will collapse into it.

When it does, I will take it as an invitation to give thanks for the lesson and to look for the Sacred in another corner of the garden.

Jonathan's Circle

“When David had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was bound to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul.  Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul.  Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that he was wearing, and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt.”   — I Samuel 18: 1, 3-4  NRSV

The story of David and Jonathan is one of the slim list of relationships in the Bible that give queer people a chance to see themselves reflected in the sacred scriptures of the West.  (Nehirim, the lgbtq Jewish spirituality group, has printed "Jonathan+David" and "Ruth+Naomi" bumper stickers!) But you don't have to go as far as reading erotic love into the story of David and Jonathan's iconic bond to register the undefended tenderness that passes between them. Amidst the militaristic retinue of Jonathan's father King Saul, who's already shown the first signs of paranoid tyranny, Jonathan takes the risk of handing over to David, the beautiful young shepherd who has won the king's favor, not only the garment that marks him as the king's heir but even his means of defense: he takes off his armor and hands it over.

The moment when Jonathan strips off his protection, and meets another man face to face and heart to heart, is the inspiration for a new initiative to bring men together at the place where their sexuality and their spirituality converge--a place where most of us feel, or have felt, apprehension, shame, misunderstanding, danger, and confusion, in a dominant culture that puts a Berlin Wall between sex and spirit, without genuinely respecting or honoring either. Frank Dunn, an Episcopal priest and counsellor in Washington, DC, has announced the formation of an innovative take on men's consciousness-raising groups like those that blossomed a generation ago out of a Men's Movement that never completely fulfilled its potential.

 Dunn's proposal is for something more focused and more fundamental than many of those groups of the 1980's and early 90's ever achieved. He's encouraging an open, undefended sharing of the links between participants' individual sexual practices and their spiritual journeys.

Imagine digging deeper into your pride and your insecurities about life in your amazing and not-so-perfect male body. Imagine digging deeper into what moves and excites you sexually in order to understand how those longings and pleasures are connected to your relationship to the Sacred. Imagine feeling safe to do that out loud, in a circle of men whose experiences might be similar to yours--but also may well turn out to be radically different .  Imagine being surprised by what you hear. Imagine being open to expanded perspectives. Imagine looking at your own view of the world from outside of yourself, as it's reflected back to you by other participants, with wisdom and compassion. Imagine doing all this not just in heady conversation, but dropping down into your body, by group consensus through yoga, meditation, movement, massage, structured erotic exchange, breathwork, chant, co-created ritual, any or all of the above.

That's a brief sketch of what Jonthan's Circle offers. You can learn more by visiting the group's new website: www.jonathanscircle.org.

On Behalf of Our Fathers

I know that some queer men have never experienced anything less than love and unconditional acceptance from their fathers. I rejoice for them. And at the same time, I'm somewhere between incredulous, wistful, and envious as hell.

We each have our story. Our fathers abandoned us for a life elsewhere. Or were explosive, abusive drunks. Or were quiet, emotionally crippled drunks. Or told us to stop acting like goddam pansies. Or were themselves so shamed by their own bodies and desires they couldn't reassure us about our own.  Or furtively imposed their own same-sex attractions on us. Or told us we were going straight to hell if we went on experimenting with the boy next door. Or...

My own story isn't representative of anyone but me. My father was an obsessive-compulsive binge drinker, a hollowed-out emotional wreck who destroyed himself before he'd made it to 64. It's been fifty years since he died (on Mother's Day, for God's sake) when I was 8. I've spent my whole adult life piecing together a fragmentary, indirect, conflicted relationship with him.

So it was a huge grace when the week before last I experienced a flood of compassion for him unlike anything that's ever come alive in me before.  During a journalling exercise at a weeklong intensive program, I revisited the usual litany of ways he failed me. And then: thanks to a constellation of circumstances I won't rehearse here, I suddenly thought, my poor father, and spent the next fifteen minutes quietly sobbing. And knew what I had to do. I needed to say Kaddish. Non-Jew that I am.

If you're not Jewish or familiar with Jewish practice, Kaddish is the prayer you say in memory of one you mourn, and especially in memory of parents.  The most observant say it every day for a year, and then annually on the Yahrzeit--the anniversary of the death. The odd thing is, the Mourner's Kaddish never mentions the deceased. It glorifies God, prays for the speedy arrival of God's kingdom, and voices hope that peace from above will descend on us and on all. This peculiar disconnect between the content of the prayer and the emotionally charged intention with which it's spoken is a source of discomfort to many who fulfill their responsibility to recite it: they feel denied the chance to remember one they loved in all his or her individuality.

But oddly, in keeping the deceased out of it, the prayer can become a container big enough for the conflicted feelings you may have toward the dead. You don't have to wax warm and fuzzy toward the person you're mourning. You're not obliged to feel any one thing as opposed to something else. Instead, you speak this on behalf of the dead in the presence of the Holy. The deceased is representative of humanity. You're saying it for him. You're saying it for yourself. You're saying it for all humankind. If what's really going through your head as you pray is that the deceased was an empty emotional shell, or an abusive creep who made your life hell when your were five, there's room for that, and you don't have to fake the saccharine greeting-card sentiments that characterize (for instance, in my own experience) so many Midwestern Protestant funerals.

That unexpected space to feel whatever you're feeling can become fertile ground for the post-mortem healing of relationships. If you say Kaddish repeatedly, you'll experience it differently every time you do so. Your feelings will change over time, from one day to the next, from one month to the next, from one year to the next.

All this to unpack my intuitive flash, in the moment that I softened towards a man I can most of the time feel very little towards at all, who died just over half a century ago. This last week, I've continued to chew on why  a nice Lutheran boy from the Midwest would with unhesitating instinct borrow a Jewish prayer to mourn his father. Saying it linked me to my partner in his Judaism, as well as to the leader of the workshop--a man who over the last several years has given me more of what one would hope to get from a father than probably anyone else in my life.

And then there's the very fact that in borrowing somebody else's tradition, we can set aside toxic associations that our own spiritual heritage has often accrued for us as queer men. We take what we need, in ways that might not always win the approval of the keepers of the tradition(s) we pilfer. But it's not that I can imagine my appropriation of the prayer offending some simply because I don't have a right to it by heritage.

It's that I recited it  in front of a five-foot Phallus in a flowering meadow. Standing before this sign of linkage between my spiritual and erotic life as a gay man, laying hands and forehead on it at the end of the prayer, I contemplated my father's woundedness as a share in the wounds all men sustain. In the midst of a circle that represented the infinitely fertile womb of the Mother Goddess, I meditated on the sexuality that links my father to me in a continuum with the embodied, desirous experience of all men--a message I desperately needed to absorb from him as a boy but never could. And then found myself giving thanks for the miracle of his orgasm that made my life possible.

I expect to go on doing the work of repairing my relationship to my father for the rest of my life. Praying a very queer Kaddish for my father,  and on behalf of my father, changes nothing of that, and changes everything.

 

GLORIFIED AND SANCTIFIED BE THE HOLY ONE'S GREAT NAME, THROUGHOUT THE WORLD CREATED ACCORDING TO  THE DIVINE WILL. ESTABLISHED BE GOD'S KINGDOM IN YOUR LIFETIME AND DURING YOUR DAYS, AND WITHIN THE LIFE OF ALL HUMANKIND, SPEEDILY AND SOON, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY GOD'S GREAT NAME BE BLESSED FOREVER AND TO ALL ETERNITY.

BLESSED AND PRAISED, GLORIFIED AND EXALTED, EXTOLLED AND HONORED, ADORED AND LAUDED BE THE NAME OF THE HOLY ONE, BLESSED BE THAT ONE BEYOND ALL BLESSINGS AND HYMNS, PRAISES AND CONSOLATIONS THAT ARE EVER SPOKEN IN THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

MAY THERE BE ABUNDANT PEACE FROM HEAVEN AND LIFE FOR US AND FOR ALL MEN, AND LET US SAY AMEN.

MAY GOD WHO CREATES PEACE IN THE CELESTIAL HEIGHTS CREATE PEACE FOR US AND FOR ALL THE WORLD, AND LET US SAY, AMEN.

Shared Sexual Energy in Mid-Life and Elderhood: A Guest Post by Ken Stofft

Why is the shared experience of erotic, sexual energy an important resource for queer men in their passages through mid-life and into elderhood?

Because unless we tap into that reservoir, we miss out on some of life's vast riches.  If we don't experience our full sexual energy, which is more than the sex act, we become limited in our relationship to ourselves and to others and don't enter as fully as we can into the profound mystery of life itself.  

Entering my 40's,  I was in my mid-life crisis. I felt isolated and driven by fear. I read William Bridge's Transitions, which I found greatly helpful.  That book started me off onto the right path of self-awareness. Although I was still drinking like a fish,  a major self-assessment told me that something had to change. The start was full of tears, anxiety, confusion, anger, disorientation. It took me another decade to take my first step, which was to get sober.  Then the 'work'  had just begun.  I entered unchartered territory and needed empathetic ears to hear my story, and to receive witnessing from someone outside of myself as I stumbled and worked my way up from what seemed like a bottomless pit.  I felt revitalized and on my way to new beginnings.   

In my early 60s, I entered into elderhood.  I went through another major transition and am still working my way through this time, which I consider the apex of my life.  I am clearly facing my mortality and have entered into this new dialogue with curiosity and a sense of playfulness. 

Both periods of time demanded my attention, and I knew then, as I know now, that self-awareness comes gradually and is a never-ending adventure.  So, I live today with a great deal of curiosity about myself and others, and with that overwhelming mystery we call life.   

Since those early days of mid-life, I've discovered the importance of my sexual energy--my life force. It is what flows or is inhibited in me, my source of creativity and vitality. It includes sex but is far more than simply enjoying sex. It is almost impossible for me to define what it is, but I know it is what I share with all others who are nurtured and sustained by the earth. It is the way of nature.  Birth, death, re-birth, death, the endless cycle.  It is the way of nature.  Birth, death, re-birth, death, the endless cycle.  My sexual energy is the source of my creativity and my power to simply be me. 

 

I've also discovered that I need other kindred embodied spirits to join me, and me to join them, in this journey of deeper, clearer self-awareness.  I discovered my need for a 'community', people that I want to surround myself with and  want to bond with.  It is this energy that feeds and nourishes its members when such a community exists.  And when there is a sense of safety, a freedom from judgment, shame, and guilt, I can let down my guard and reveal who I am.  It has taken me decades to feel comfortable and safe in my body, and it is due  not only to my own courage to be me, sexually alive, but to the people I've met on the way, and who surround me today. 

Since mid-life, and now as an elder, I have found certain elements  need to be nurtured.  I breathe into my belly.  I sit in meditation.  I reach out to others and listen to them when I am in need.  I touch and am touched physically by myself and with/by others.  I dance, and I have playful sex. I have found that breathing into my feelings is far, far more helpful than suppressing them; living in my body with excitement and joy is paramount.  The importance of shared sexual energy in these major transitions in life is primarily about “letting go” of the armor I have accrued over a life time, giving  myself permission to be seen, heard, touched, and to witness the same with others, becoming ever more deeply self-aware, and having the courage not only to own who I am, but to revel in who I am. More often than not, it is not a matter of having a one explosion of insight, but transitions are mini-events that accumulate, sometimes subtly, sometimes surprisingly, but always opportunities to be re-born.

I've learned that sharing my sexual energy, not only in sex, but in the way I live my life with passion and as much authenticity as I can muster, sharing my emotions, sharing my touch, sharing my beliefs, sharing my emotional vulnerabiltiy, is the only way for me to live.   

I have delved deeply into my sexual energy to create my own form of yin/yang, male/female, my own masculine identity that I believe is the most authentic for me.  I lived my life in fantasy and vicariously through books. Now I live it in my body passionately.   

I believe it's my sexual energy that also afforded me the ability to create my own spirituality rather than living in a traditional religious context, which I had found suffocating and unhealthy in its denial of  bodily pleasures its negativity about sex.  When I became sober and began to open to the fact that I was indeed a sexual creature, I faced a multitude of options that could have taken me in a different direction.  If I had allowed fear to rule my life, I never would have learned more about who I am and what I need in my life to simply be me.  I'm very grateful for having discovered a liberating, self-loving path for myself. 

What do I recommend?  Each man's path is his own.  What I have found most helpful I have listed above: breathing into the belly, sitting in self-assessment, moving/dancing, bonding physically and emotionally with others, finding others who are empathic, and always bringing curiosity as a gift of wonderment.

In what ways do you express your sexual energy? What do your sexual fantasies tell you about yourself?  When you are aroused, is ejaculation important and necessary?  How are you a passionate and sexually alive man when you're not having sex?   Is there a spirituality that nourishes and feeds your sexuality? If so, what is it?  What does your sexual energy say about the kind of man you are, and want to become, as you move through mid-life and into the status of elder?

 

Ken Stofft coaches men in exploring issues related to their sexuality: www.transitionpower.com