Carry the Banner of Love and Acceptance

I watched a powerful and touching documentary the other night--For the Bible Tells Me So.

I wept.

Earlier in the day, after class, I saw Devon and he continued his intense work on my shoulder, then I saw an excellent MD who gave his affirming opinion that I probably don't have a rotator cuff tear but rather tendinitis with some calcification in my upper right shoulder along with some impingement. Prescription: evaluation and physical therapy 3x a week for 8 weeks! (and a cortisone injection if I want one). No painkillers and no anti-inflammatory prescriptions! I like this doctor! I was so excited about his referral to a clinic that specializes in shoulders only to learn they do not accept my primary insurance carrier and therefore my secondary insurance carrier won't cover me at all. Just another Catch 22 in the American system of escalating medical costs and dramatic decreases in insurance payments, hence the epidemic dropping of many insurance carriers, especially Medicare.

So what now? Find a clinic that accepts my insurance, if there is one, get another referral to a different clinic, or work out a payment plan and pay out of pocket. This system is really broken. It's just shocking how many doctors and clinics no longer accept Medicare. What in the world do retired people do if they can't afford to pay out of pocket? (We should all know the answer to that if we simply watch the evening news or know retired people who paid into Social Security and MUST accept Medicare as their primary carrier).

How does this tie in with the documentary? Maybe it doesn't, but clearly the ignorant and uneducated leaders of the influential christian right propagate the totally false notion that the Bible, being the word of god, condemns homosexuality. It is hatred in action, which is rooted in fear, that's been used for centuries to condemn women, Jews, blacks; to justify slavery, to justify concentration camps, to justify condemnation of fellow humans. It's the opposite of love and acceptance. It's selective perception, literalism of a few select passages from the bible yet ignoring all the other passages that are equally absurd when interpreted out of the context of the time, the culture, and the language in which they were written.

"It's okay to have a 5th grade understanding of the bible so long as you are in 5th grade" stated one Biblical scholar. As a result of this preaching of hatred against gays, families are torn apart when they learn of a gay family member. Parents reject their children based on what their church leaders have been telling them--it really is brainwashing at its worse. Gay teens are 5 to 7 times more likely to commit suicide than their peers, and 20 times more likely to attempt suicide. It gets me all riled up, and brings to memory the homophobia I've had to deal with in the past. The homophobia that begins with oneself. The shock and total rejection that this could be happening to me. The painful loneliness and isolation. The excruciating fear, followed by the months of conversion therapy I underwent, thank goodness not with a fundamentalist, but with a misguided Freudian shrink, a Rhodes Scholar, who thought he was doing what was best for a frightened 16 year old who could barely utter a word. To be honest it wasn't so much conversion therapy as it was a means to get me back into high school, back into my home, stop the "incipient delusional formation"and get back into some semblance of normalcy in a typical small town high school filled with people I felt totally alienated from.

Years later, out of the closet and in a long term relationship, I learned how homophobia can be rampant in the workplace, and how it finally, in it's relentless berating and humiliation can bring you about as far down as you'd ever want to go. In a most dramatic exit, like a scene from high drama, I left my workplace on a stretcher, surrounded by medics wheeling me down the long corridors of learning, with throngs of curious onlookers, many of them sympathetic fellow co-workers, watching the scene unfold. Yet another crowd awaited outside, as the ambulance, with sirens screaming, headed for Breckenridge Hospital. I just didn't have the energy to wave at all my fans. :-). Act II, the hospitalizations, the therapy, the consultations with shrinks, social workers, psychologists, tests and more tests, and lawyers. Act III--he's totally nuts, he's so fragile, he brought this on himself, we were rather mean to him, he didn't have a clue how to take care of himself, it's all his parents fault, let's donate 12 months of paid sick leave from the pool! It's Religion! It's the worse of institutional bureaucracy gone awry! What do you expect from a deviant? Let's say he's mentally ill!

If only we can be taught to learn to love and accept ourselves and others as we are, as they are. It sounds so simple, it seems so easy, and in fact it is. But people are taught otherwise by people in positions of authority and the cycle of hatred begins falling like a long row of dominos, gaining momentem, spiraling out of control, and is easily justified because our great leaders told us so.

(As one of Hitler's henchmen said, "If you tell a lie long enough, people will begin to believe it." )

I like to think the same theory applies to telling the truth, and that ultimately it yields far more power. I hope so.

http://www.forthebibletellsmeso.org/

Touching Souls

I'm sitting in a waiting lounge, in north Austin, at a car dealership, surrounded by 3 flat screen TV's, each one turned on. I can hear an unpleasant cacophony of sounds --cell phones, an intercom system broadcasting dialog, a crying baby, the voices of office workers in cubicles, the ssshhhwww of the cappuccino machine. In a mild, non-panicky sort of way, I can't wait to get the hell out of here. The lounge has bright red chairs and love seats atop a dull gray wall to wall carpet, brown grass paper contrasted with stark white walls, a sea of glass, a coffee bar with an assortment of goodies--caff, decaff, chocolates, ice cold beverages, cinnamon rolls. If there was grass nearby, I'd go sit on it. I'm waiting for this coaster looking device to start blinking red and vibrating and in general going totally berserk to signal that the car is serviced. I've been fantasizing about yoga retreats for this spring or early summer, set in the mountains, with secluded hiking trails, or on a beach, with the sound of rolling waves lulling me into total relaxation, guided meditations, a deep tissue massage, which reminds me of something I read last year regarding touch:



Unfortunately, we are a touch-starved culture. The deep wounds we suffer from the harsh, often brutal touch of caregivers--the wound of unlove--spirals outward and pervades the whole of our society, creating an epidemic--the fear of touch. However, true touch, when it comes from the heart, possesses profoundly healing qualities, and when we are able to both give and receive heart-felt physical affection from another, deep understanding and healing begins. Caplan writes:

"though we cannot heal the soul-wound by an affectionate pat on the back, for those who have felt unloved all of their lives, a small act of kindness can shake their whole perspective about who they are in the world. Touch, when done with heart, is always healing--period. Whether given by a trained professional or a nervous friend, IT HEALS."

Many of us suffer from not having true, intimate, connective bonds with others; all too often touch is merely a prelude to sex, so fear sets in and we frown upon touch. "TrueTouch"--that which comes from the heart, helps to counteract the effects of *damaging touch*....I like the book "Untouched, the Need for Genuine Affection in an Impersonal World" by Mariana Caplan.

Early one morning in a hospital setting I awakened to the sound of relentless pounding. Why would workers be busy at work long before dawn when everyone was fast asleep? In these kinds of settings, you are drawn to certain people for inexplicable reasons, a kind of fast friendship that gets you through your stay. At least that's my personal experience. Turns out it was my new friend and she was pounding her head against the wall, and the proof wasn't
pretty. She couldn't stop one of her selves from doing this. Such a condition used to be called multiple personality disorder and was/is very difficult for professionals to diagnose. Remember the book scripted into a movie called Cybil? The condition is now mostly called dissociative identity disorder. When the child has suffered severe abuse, and usually such abuse is inclusive of unspeakable acts of cruelty--mentally, physically, and sexually--the need to escape into a newly formed personality(s) who cannot feel the pain is created, and this is totally understandable. If you ever meet such people you may get your heart ripped out. You may want to love and save them. If you get very involved with them they may unknowingly screw with your mind and your heart until you just KNOW the only choice before you is to walk away. Usually, after you've tried your best to lead them toward some source of healing, you come to realize your own weaknesses and flaws. There seems to be a universal law that says when you begin playing the role of savior, you are playing a game of self righteousness doomed to come to naught. Such dissociative personalities, in my experience, are often highly narcissistic, from a pathological point of view. You love them, you feel for them, you show them compassion; however, the lies, the deceit, the manipulations, the very craziness of the dissociative personalities has the potential to wreak havoc on he who chooses to play caregiver. There's an inability of the narcissist to escape from his own prison of self-centeredness, and in the end, you count for nothing. Such has been my experience and I know there are exceptions. No two people are alike, no two syndromes or illness are totally alike. I find it fascinating. It's yet another facet of the bejeweled and beguiling human condition.

I like to recall how important and healing it can be to be touched by others, and also to touch others, in an appropriate and healthy manner. Mostly I'm talking about hugs. For some people, this can be extremely frightening when they might have a history of being touched from a place of "unlove." It may feel really yucky to them. It's important to learn to read people's body language, to try to hone in on what they may or may not be saying to you, to always honor and respect boundaries. But for goodness sakes, if someone makes a gesture of openness that's an invitation to a hug, and you just know it's a good thing, go for it. It can be healing. It's a complex proposition to fully understand the language of the body, both our own and that of others, but sometimes a basic understanding can be of tremendous value.

I can't seem to make this link work, so just google "you tube video hugs" or "free hugs campaign" and watch this very popular video on hugs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

The coaster just went berserk. Time to get the hell out of here.

"Old, Broken, and Ugly, But We Still Get Hot, Cold, and Hungry"

On the way to practice Thursday afternoon with the loving (and fun-loving!) Anusara yoga group, at the Love Yoga Coop, I saw a woman at an intersection with a handmade sign in her hand that read:

Old, Broken, and Ugly, but We Still Get Hot, Cold, and Hungry.

I swear she looked like a saint, like a nurturing mother earth goddess with a scarf that framed the sweetest and warmest features of womankind, a Mexican mama with hordes of children at her feet as she moves with stoic deliberation through her primitive kitchen preparing all sorts of hot spicy dishes to feed the members of her large, extended clan. Or maybe one of those gifted doctors or nurses who really know how to make you feel comfortable and safe before the big old needle gets jammed into your vein, or before the catheter finally gets pulled out. I can even see the face of a pious nun caring for the masses of spiritual seekers who have made a pilgrimage to some holy site that has drawn her to assist them on their journey, maybe offering a drink of refreshing water or a garland of freshly strewn flowers. I can envision her lighting candles and offering them up as prayers to her god to please bring some much needed peace to so many parts of our troubled and suffering world. I can see her wandering the rows of a little garden, pulling weeds, watering, hoeing and tending to leaves and shoots as the sun makes his daily ascent lighting the sky. I couldn't seem to see the reality of a woman at an intersection begging for money so she could have her next meal and maybe find some respite from the cold winter winds blowing in from the north. She glowed with an earthy yet ethereal radiance. Clearly I was projecting, or was I? I wanted to know her story, her history. What brought her here to this busy intersection on far south Lamar soliciting money from people sitting behind the closed windows of their warm automobiles? I once read that it's important for us to try to get to know the names of the people who are often invisible--the janitors, the garbage collectors, the house cleaning crews, the people who perform the jobs at the bottom of the pay scale and who often play a significant role in the abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables and many other goods that are available to us. Say hello to them, ask them how they are doing. Connect with them. Often these souls are the very essence of what is most humane in our world. Some people believe these underprivileged bodies are the temples of advanced souls, more evolved than most, hence they have chosen a life that is difficult and hard, knowing an easy time doesn't afford much opportunity for spiritual growth. A testament to spiritual stagnation--best expressed as an inner poverty--can often be seen in the empty lifestyles of the priviledged and powerful where there is no such thing as enough, and more is perceived as better but is in fact often ruinous to themselves and to so many others.

Earth mother, I hope you had a good meal last night and found warm and safe shelter. In my eyes you are not broken and you are not ugly. You deserve to age with grace and dignity, as we all do. I am sorry that hunger has become your companion. You touched me, you brought tears to my eyes, you triggered feelings of gratitude and the kind of humbleness I need regular injections of. It doesn't seem right and it certainly doesn't seem fair. The world is filled with injustices that often get mislabeled as mysteries. There is no mystery to being old, cold, or hungry with no place to sleep.

Andrew Harvey advocates "sacred activism." John Friend speaks of our interconnectedness and how we should honor that and suggests many ways that we can do just that. My friend Roger and his friend Maggie are a couple of examples of the good work many people do. Connect with someone you would normally not even notice. I'm going to try and do that. You can find Roger and others at:

http://www.discoverhopefund.org/

The Fruits of Compassion vs. the Blues of Aversion

This blog entry, or blog entry endeavor, is going to be a difficult one, but I feel I need to own it and confess it, so to speak. I say endeavor because that's all it may be, an attempt, without an end, without conclusion. But isn't that part of the human experience? It's beautiful to view events and experiences as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe it's just NOT the end we wanted, or the beginning, or middle, or the whole package, for that matter. I got so totally caught up in my own anger and frustration the other day that I couldn't find any passage out of it. I just stayed there, stuck, in that pretty awful place the whole day. Angry, frustrated, stuck, knowing what was going on, even being aware that it would eventually end, but feeling totally helpless, totally unable to snap my fingers, or chant a mantra, and say okay, that's enough, I'm out of this shit hole. It didn't happen that way. Perhaps my ego, or some inner injury that got triggered, decided that I was going to be stuck all day long, and be pretty miserable the whole time. I felt embarrassed, humiliated, and immature. I felt small, like a child having a temper tantrum. Something failed, something collapsed, something came falling down, and until the tears finally came, and until I sat down with it and began reading passages from an inspired text was I able to sail out of the maelstrom and into a sea of calm. I lost touch with myself for most of the day. Or did I? I just love it when Pema Chodran tells us to stay with our stuckness, feel it to it's fullest, try to find peace with feeling really uncomfortable with what's going on, try to learn to be able to use that experience to go deeper. For me, when I'm in it, there's little peace or learning going on that I'm aware of--it comes afterwards, IF I put in the work. Like right now. I'm feeling pretty okay about it all. I suppose we are going to have visitations from our emotional selves that we'd just as soon slam the door on and say please, not now, not today, not ever!! Then we beat ourselves up for thinking we have not succeeded in working our program, or we have failed to reach into that healing part of ourselves that we've worked so hard to cultivate. In The Guesthouse, Rumi not only tells us to invite all these things inside, but to welcome them openly and with love. Pema writes:

"When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently toward what scares us. The trick to doing this is to stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion, to let fear soften us rather than harden into resistance."

"Stay with emotional distress without tightening into aversion." For me I think that's a key. I can get all tangled up in struggling with distress to the point that I feel I like I'm tied into a thousand little knots.

One of my triggers centers around being told or asked to do something that I don't want to do. Really, it can be that simple. And I don't feel okay saying no. Or maybe more accurately, it's the whole concept of being told to do something when I don't know how to do it, and kind of want to. I think that happened to me over and over again as a child, in countless ways, and when I sense it happening again that very frightened little kid in me wants to shut down, wants to scream out please teach me how and I will do it, please show me how, please be with me and let's do it together, can we let it be a fun and loving learning experience? It's part of my history that I have to process and accept and learn from. Over and over I come back to the events of my childhood. Undealt with, these fearful experiences that are part of our history "take purchase of our souls" (James Hollis). As a child I was painfully shy, withdrawn, had very little supervision, no discipline, no structure, and an environment often shaking to its foundation with chaos, craziness, and at times a violence that can be difficult to revisit. When you watch someone you love getting beat up repeatedly and you can't do anything about it, and you really want to, it's quite a burden to carry, for anyone, especially a little child who thinks his mother will probably be killed. The scene plays out again and again. The child is called upon to be the adult, and of course he can't. He becomes hyper-vigilant, trying to become the protector, the keeper of peace, the one who soothes. He gets chastised and criticized for not knowing how to do something he's never been taught how to do. He wants to give up and simply be a kid. But there are times when that is not allowed.

So I conclude that the root of anger and frustration is fear. So what's the fear? For me, and for many others, the bottom line, the core, the center of the fear is fear of not being loved. Fear of not being worthy of love. It gets me every time, and it hurts like hell. You sort of hang your head in the most humble of ways and say I am afraid that no one loves me because I'm not worthy of love. Pema calls this buying into the old storyline, the old storyline that is not true, the old storyline that never was true. We were taught so many falsehoods, it can take a lifetime to unlearn them.

Noah Levine writes: "Aversion isn't the enemy; it is just the normal reaction of the mind and body to pain. Whatever the hurt we feel, our biological survival mechanism tries to get rid of it. The problem is that we don't actually have the ability to escape from all the painful experiences in life. It can't be done. Thus the revolutionary's practice is to learn to break the habitual reactive tendency of aversion and to replace it with a compassionate response. The good news is that although aversion or anger toward pain is common but unhelpful, compassion is a response that decreases suffering and brings about an internal and external experience of safety and well-being." "A compassionate response can, at times, be as simple as seeing clearly the pain we are meeting with anger or aversion, and just letting go of the attempt to push it away and relaxing into the experience itself with mercy and care."

Pema Chodran writes: "Befriending emotions or developing compassion for those embarrassing aspects of ourselves, the ones that we think of as sinful, or bad, becomes the raw material, the juicy stuff with which we can work to awaken ourselves."

A lot to think about, to ponder on, to work on, to process. It isn't easy and sometimes the going gets pretty rough, but if we can recall that if we stop and try to connect with the feeling of compassion that resides in our heart, and sometimes most especially self-compassion, it will help make riding the waves of anger, pain and aversion to those feelings a bit smoother.

Behind Bars or In Front of Bars?

I dreamt that I was trying to squeeze my body through a small space in an intricately patterned wrought iron panel on an open window. Of course my task was impossible and I turned to a companion and said "you know, I used to be able to do this." I don't I think I meant that earlier in my life I was a contortionist, but that I was able to get to the other side of the bars and quite often found myself in that space, on the other side. I can't help but view this dream as a celebration of sorts that I am no longer able to easily slip into and behind those old and well known mental/physical/emotional bars that kept me imprisoned in so many ways for so many years. Not that I've discovered total freedom from all restrictions in my advancing age, but I think I can acknowledge a measurable leap beyond the countless restrictions that held me back, way back, from truly feeling alive and happy and yes, quite literally, from functioning in this world. The dream was filled with the theme of freedom and liberation. Freedom from addictive behavior, destructive behavior, learning to say no to life and learning to say yes, listening to my intuition and trusting what I feel in my gut, healthy boundaries, becoming pro-active in my own mental and physical health, and so much more. Something as simple as learning how to exercise patience has been a lesson decades in the learning for me. Learning to stay in that place of calm instead of reacting. Recognizing when I'm reacting, when I create scenarios in my mind that have nothing to do with anything remotely real, especially negative predictions about anything having to do with the future. Learning that quite often my near obsessive infatuations were a desperate grasping at others who were totally unavailable to me emotionally because they represented the love I never got from my father, who was totally unavailable to me emotionally (a WW II PTSD sufferer). Those extremely important, basic childhood needs that are left unfulfilled can haunt us for a lifetime if we don't process them and come to an understanding and deep awareness of them. No blame involved, but we need to explore those elements that comprise our dark side.

James Hollis writes: "The long-term neglect of the self will manifest itself somewhere, perhaps in physical illness, or depression, or more commonly in that crankiness that is the leakage of repressed anger. The difficult task is to balance one's own need for personal freedom and personal growth with the needs of others. It is never easy to find such a balance, but the failure to try will ensure burnout, resentment, and depression, which is typically anger turned inward. However great one's sense of responsibility, no good fruit comes from such a contaminated tree."


Like many others, I am drawn both to the masterpieces and the tragic life of Vincent van Gogh. The above photos were taken at the asylum St. Paul de Mausolee in St. Remy, Provence (except the first one, which is a *studies after* painting). He painted several paintings through the bars of his window as well as the grounds, the courtyard, and surrounding countryside (he also was hospitalized in Arles where he lived and painted). I've read that in his worse moments of madness (whether from a rare form of epilepsy or a severe case of bipolar illness, or both, combined with the high content of lead undoubtedly in his system from eating his paints) he wasn't able to paint. It was during his more lucid moments when there was a degree of clarity going on that he painted prolifically, some 200 paintings in one year alone. From van Gogh's small room I gazed out, through the iron bars, onto the green landscape, and tried to imagine the darkness that imprisoned him (recall St. John of the Cross). The deep, dark pain of his life compared to the brilliant bright light of his Provence paintings illustrates the profundity of his short, tragic life.

Hollis writes: "Just as there is a progressive energy at work within us, so there is a very conservative power that seeks to limit growth by limiting vulnerability. As all growth requires facing what we fear, we naturally learn patterns that protect against the fear. If we cannot speak the truth, our truth, to ourselves, we will be unable to speak it to the world either. Speaking it to the world requires that one learn to speak it to oneself first, and then to realize that our truth is who we are. To deny the complex truth we embody is more than a personal wound--it is a wound to the world by our refusal to participate in it, a reluctance to add our unique aspect to the whole. Seen in that light, it may fuel each of us to risk greater disclosure of who we are, for we are brought here to add our small portion of the truth to the world, our uniquely colored chip in the larger mosaic of being."

Hours can turn to days when sitting in front of an easel, brushes in hand, paints spread out before you, trying to produce a rendition of a favorite painting and trying to capture the emotions expressed on canvas by the artist, trying to see the world through his eyes, trying to feel her deepest emotions, find his vision, see her view out onto the landscape of life, all the way down to the study of the brushstrokes. It can be intense (and great fun).

Hollis writes: "Feeling good is a poor measure of a life, but living meaningfully is a good one, for then we are living a developmental rather than a regressive agenda. We never get it all worked out anyway. Life is ragged, and truth is still more raggedy. The ego will do whatever it can to make itself more comfortable; but the soul is about wholeness, and this fact makes the ego even more uncomfortable. Wholeness is not about comfort, or good, or consensus--it means drinking this brief, unique, deeply rooted vintage to its dregs."

"Every day the world is full of clues as to the will of the soul, if we are willing or desperate enough to begin to pay attention. If and when we do begin to take this inner life seriously, our locus of sensibility, our psychic gravity, begins to change. From this internal change, profound changes of the outer world become possibilities."

"Even when surrounded by many others, your journey is solitary, for the life you are to choose is your life, not someone else's. Alone, we nonetheless move amid a community of other solitudes; alone, our world is peopled with many companions, both within and without. Thus, this paradox stands before each of us, and challenges: We "must be alone if (we) are to find out what it is that supports (us) when we can no longer support (ourselves). Only this experience can give (us) an indestructible foundation.* Finding what supports you from within will link you to transcendence, reframe the perspectives received from your history, and provide the agenda of growth, purpose, and meaning that we all are meant to carry into the world and to share with others. The soul asks each of us that we live a larger life. Each day this summons is renewed

and leaves you, unspeakably, to sort out

your life, with its fearsome immensities,

so that, now boundaried, now limitless,

it transforms itself as stone in you and star.**

*Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, para 32.

** Rilke, "Evening," II. 9-12, (author's translation).

The Consequences of Saying Yes, in Hindsight (Opening Doors, Crossing Bridges...)

I always look forward to the "Readers Write" section published in The Sun magazine. Submissions of personal, nonfiction writings are submitted by readers based on a given topic such as Yes, Anger, Narrow Escapes, to name only a few--with a wide girth to avoid subject matter restriction. In the January 2009 issue the topic is Saying Yes, and the writings are fascinating, thought provoking, and at times gut wrenching, which make me think of the times in my life when I said yes whereby the consequences had a significant effect on my life, which is pretty much what readers write about. When I was 22, I met a man in a bar who invited me to go home with him. I remember being very attracted to him and sensing something unique and wonderful beneath his somewhat nerdy/intellectual appearance--glasses, short stature, longish dark hair, big brown eyes, thick brows and long lashes, Mediterranean skin. Yummy!! It was 1974. It was agreed that I was to follow behind him in my car, so we left the bar in the wee hours that night after a fun evening of dancing and small talk, with me following in my car. My gas tank registered empty. Totally empty. At the time I was a student at UT living on a very tight budget. I grew nervous and apprehensive, fearing I would run out of gas. I decided that as soon as I found a gas station that was opened I would pull over, flash my lights, and hope he would figure out what I was doing. There were no open gas stations anywhere, and he just kept driving and driving, further and further away from familiar neighborhoods. I just knew I was going to run out of gas, my heart started pounding, my mind racing, it was very late, no other cars in sight, everything was closed. And, after all, this guy was a total stranger, and he seemed to live pretty darn far away in a relatively remote and scarcely populated area I was totally unfamiliar with. I pulled my car off to the side of the road and stopped, thinking that the only logical and reasonable thing to do would be to turn around, call it a night, and hopefully make it back to my apartment without running out of gas, but if I did it would be okay walking the remaining distance home. His tail lights grew dim as he kept driving, maybe not noticing I had stopped, or maybe deciding that he was going home with or without the company of this stranger in tow. I began to navigate a u-turn and head back towards familiar geography and my apartment. But something inside stopped me and said Yes, keep following him, take the risk, just do it. So I did and miraculously I didn't run out of gas. That was 34 years ago and I am so glad I said yes to his invitation, and yes to my intuition to keep on driving despite the odds.

In the ensuing months one of my best friends tried to talk me out of this blossoming relationship, but instead I listened to my heart that said Yes, this is a good relationship. I went home that summer to work for my step-father and my new love went abroad on a pre-planned vacation. He wrote me a much anticipated letter which my mother confiscated and read. I never saw the letter but knew he had sent it, and I began to suspect my mother had it, but she denied it for many years. Suddenly she seemed to turn against me, and made it clear I was no longer welcomed. What the hell was going on? In his letter to me, l learned later on, he declared his love for me and proposed that we move in together. My mother grew more hostile towards me, and finally asked me to leave the house, that there was no longer any place for me within my own family. I was totally devasted, as are many young people whose families reject them outright and toss them out (I was 22 and an adult, but I was still in college and they were providing much needed assistance just as they had promised they would). I had vacated my $45 a month apartment, given notice, but still had a few days left. I drove back to Austin and slept on a bare mattress and cried and wept for days.

In the end, my partner and I moved in together and are still happily together. A few years later after reading The Front Runner, my mother became a great friend to the gay community and one of my best friends, and remained that way until her death in 1996.

Sometimes in the split second of a situation where we are called upon to make an immediate decision, the only thing we can do is try to listen to the answer that we feel coming from our deepest gut and go with it. Usually, it's in our best interest, and can sometimes have an effect on our life in a most profound way. (Of course our gut can say No, in which case the outcome is usually, but not always, a mystery. And mysteries are part of the magic of life.)

Photos: Door, hilltop village, Provence; Bridge, painted many times (from below) by Cezanne, Provence; Dale and Ron long ago in Mexico

A Time for Drunken Horses

I watched a movie last night titled A Time for Drunken Horses. It was not easy to watch. It dealt with life at its harshest--life as a persecuted ethnic minority living in poverty, in a remote mountainous region of extreme cold, a daily struggle for survival. In the trip across the mountainous border between Iran and Iraq, liquor is poured into the water given to the mules right before the long treks ahead, the colder the weather, the more alcohol they get. The movie is not about the horses, but the heartfelt tenderness and caring that binds a family together as a unit, in the midst of terrific strife, which in a moment can be torn asunder, split into pieces, awash with tears and sorrow, again and again.

Right after crossing the High Atlas Mountains in Morocco, we arrived at a site that our guide deemed important for us to see. It was a beautiful day, the ruin sat atop the crest of a hill, with a nice long walk along a winding country road with beautiful scenery and fresh mountain air. We passed a man with his two young boys and their wooden cart, the little donkey tied nearby. The boys were too young to work so they sat in the cart, the father nearby harvesting fresh grass to feed his animals. What a bucolic scene! As we rounded a curve in the road ahead, leaving the family behind and heading closer to the ruin, I heard the man loudly cursing in anger and could hear popping sounds that were quite alarming. I retraced my steps, and as I rounded the corner I saw him whipping his donkey, mercilessly, for eating some grass in the back of the cart. Strike after strike, he put all his muscle into hurting this little donkey, who was tied down and could only dance about trying to bear the deep stinging of the wooden stick which came at him in one blow after another. It just made me sick, and without fully realizing what I was doing, I let out a scream that echoed through the whole valley, some may say a blood-curdling scream, and suddenly everyone just froze and stared at me. The little boys appeared frightened, the man totally perplexed, the donkey I would like to think look relieved. The abuse ended. For the time being. These animals are the life line to survival of these impoverished people. I understand their anger and frustration at a world that has dealt them so very little in terms of material goods, making life a daily trial of survival. But the ignorance at play was more than I could stand, and the donkey was suffering needlessly for eating grass in the back of a cart right in front of him. I'd like to think I conscientiously did a good deed, but I think in reality something very primitive inside me just took hold and came pouring out of me through my voice onto the landscape and the wrongful act I was witnessing. Our guide was so calm about it all as he walked with me, calming me, and telling me that unfortunately that kind of thing happened way too often, and was born of ignorance about how to take care of and nurture that which is the very source of your survival.

Many young impoverished Bedouins thoughout the Middle East begin earning money for their families at a very early age, and for most, attending school is not an option. When I revisited St. George's monastery near Jericho I went alone. The driver just dropped me off and agreed to pick me up at a later designated time. On the long, winding switchback trail leading to the monastery a young Bedouin man joined me hoping to persuade me to ride his donkey for $25. I declined but he stayed with me, even though I told him I wanted to be alone. So I accepted his company and we walked along, donkey in tow, and he begged me to ride his donkey, at least on the return trip when he thought I would be tired. I knew he was only earning his living and tourism can be nonexistent for long periods of time in a country so often ravaged by conflict and violence. He volunteered to wait for me, even though I reiterated that I preferred walking. Nevertheless, I did tell him I would give consideration to his proposal but could offer no guarantee. A few hours later, after my visit, there he was waiting for me. I told him I'd like to offer him $25 as a gift but I didn't want to ride. He refused, saying it was not about the money. Well, of course it is, but I had wounded his pride. No handouts for him. So I swallowed my pride and in spite of not wanting to burden these poor pack animals I accepted his offer, we agreed on a price, and up I went onto the back of Ahmen the little donkey. I must admit that I totally enjoyed my visit with this young man, and learned all about his family. Our tour guides had told us that it's a longstanding tradition amongst the Bedouins to invite strangers into their homes for 3 days, but after that you are no longer welcomed and of course they will want money. This young man invited me to his home and I actually think I would have accepted had I been free to do so, but I wasn't. Imagine staying in a tented Bedouin village in the middle of the desert and meeting his uncle and his uncle's wives and their 15 or so children and the rest of the clan. What an adventure! But alas my driver showed up in his fancy white Mercedes and as I turned to my new friend to give him a final heartfelt farewell, I could only see his back as he rode atop his donkey, having made enough money to begin his homeward journey to some unknown, remote site.