Faith

For most of my adult life I have heard tell of a book written by my paternal grandfather's sister Hazel.  It was a book in which she describes her interactions with forces beyond our world.  By her definition and by wider repute she was known as a Christian mystic.  Even in my childhood I had heard whispered bits of stories about her experiences, incidences in which she would commune with ghosts or God.  Where she would in one day learn to play the piano with the proficiency that could only have been attainable after a lifetimes worth of arduous practice.  As I forged ahead with my exploration cousins of mine confirmed the book's existence and in some cases had told me that they had actually read parts of it.  My cousin Trudy who passed unexpectedly this past week was one who had read it when she was a teenager.  Speaking to Trudy about it only heightened its mythology within my mind and more recently the role that Faith had played in my great aunt Hazel's life. 

Merriam Webster defines Faith as an allegiance to, or fidelity with something.  A belief in a traditional religious doctrine ; a trust in or loyalty to something.  A sincerity in ones promises.  Putting aside the raison d'etre of Merriam Webster's mission, their definitions belies Faith's relationship with mysticism, that misty intersection of otherworldliness that can be neither seen nor touched with the solidity of the ground beneath our feet.  In a recent blog I seem to remember saying that I had received a copy of my great aunt Hazel's book. and in the intervening months I have read some of it.  It is fascinating in many ways and it has fed my need to explore it more deeply and by extension my relationship to Faith.

During my childhood religion played a fundamental role in our household.  To put it bluntly religion was the bedrock of our lives.  It wasn't until my wholesale rejection of and subsequent renewal with a protestant church of different and more accepting viewpoint that I began to understand why religion was so important to my parents, and in particular to my mom.  In a complicated way my mom believed that her religious tenets were the garments in which she could wrap herself in to find comfort, meaning, and protection.  In reality that was not the case.  My mom's childhood demons haunted her every day of her life, and by extension ours.  In a recent conversation with a paternal cousin I described my mom as being difficult.  In many ways that is a gross understatement.  My mom was a complicated, controlling, reactionary, frightened, and often frighteningly violent twelve year old child living in an adult body.  Her professed religious beliefs were not a comfort but a weapon that she would use to bludgeon those around her into submission.  I remember her always saying It's not what I say but what God says.  I came to understand during my renewal that my mom conflated her missing self esteem and self worth with that of the omnipotence of her God.  In the intervening years before recovery and early into my recovery I began to understand that in many ways I was also like my mom.  I was often complicated and controlling, at times reactionary sometimes to the point of excess.  I conflated my lack of self esteem and self worth not wrapped within religious tenets but within a sense of academic knowledge.  I began to understand why I was like my mom about three years into recovery when I started to  re-experience parts of my childhood trauma, memories that I had buried deep within me out of reach of my conscious mind.  To look into my past with a keen eye is to understand how I inhabit the present.  There's a saying in recovery that in essence says look back without staring.  Some people have interpreted that to mean live in the present with little regard to ones past.  I interpret it to mean that the more I understand how my past informs my present the more my body will transform from living in past to living in the present.  Equally important is to  understand that I am the sum total of my experiences to date on this earth.  That I can not erase my past, I can only continually build a new relationship to those things from my past that challenge me in the presence.  It is about acceptance.

How I came to be where I find myself today was more about the randomness of life than of me making thoughtful decisions based on prayer and guidance.  That has changed in the twenty one years I've been in recovery.  I am more thoughtful, less reactive, less controlling, and by extension, less complicated.  In everything I try to act from a place of intention seeking guidance through prayer.  I continue to work to deepen my acceptance of my past and the PTSD that comes with it.  I have found more clarity about my relationship to grief.  I can also say with a great deal of introspection that my spiritual practice has, over these last many years, expanded exponentially beyond my renewed protestant beliefs.  In hindsight I suppose that was inevitable.  That I find myself here, finding a different way to inhabit my spirituality by questioning the very foundations of it.  That is why reading my great aunt Hazel's book is so apropos.  She was not afraid to open up to all the possibilities, to embrace her mysticism.  She followed it where ever it led her.  Great aunt Hazel was not afraid to explore the world well beyond what the five senses had to offer.  It seems too that I am now being led through her prose and poetry toward more mystical experiences of my spirituality.  Maybe that is the role Faith is to play in my life.  For me to let go.  To follow where I am being led with a childlike sense of awe and wonder.  To allow myself to be led by Faith.  

Today

 "We can not erase our pasts however hard we try.  Instead we must carry them with us into the future.  We must carry them with us and look forward with hope.  We must look forward because to look back is to waste precious time.  Someone recently said to me we should live as we have never lived and we must, all of us, take heed and live as we have never lived for we are all mortal.  We are all fragile, and we all live under the shadow of death."

These are not my words but ones said by the vicar at the end of the first episode of Grantchester, a favorite British show of mine.  The reason they were said is not important.  What is important is that this paragraph is prophetic for me right now although I do take issue where the vicar says looking back is a waste of precious time.  I find it quite powerful to look back.  I believe to know ones past is to know oneself.  For most of my life before recovery and for a good number of years into it I blindly moved forth without the benefit of hindsight.  A bull in a china shop comes to mind albeit with some bits of grace and decorum mixed in.  I wasn't the bull because of outright malice, it was for the most part because I was unaware of my childhood trauma and the effects it had on my adult life.  To understand one's past is to know how that past informs ones present.  

I am not a very forward looking person right know although I have, for some time, been seeking guidance from my Higher Power about what my future is meant to be.  To say that my life has changed in the last three years is a gross understatement.  Three years ago my only concern was preparing for retirement.  I did not know that both Larry and Guido would pass from this earth as my father, mother, Crook, and Sylvia had before them.  I didn't know that I would be leaving work prematurely and that the first year of my retirement would be taken up by settling Guido's estate.  I thought my days would be filled with puttering in the garden, hanging out with Larry in his declining years, traveling back to Italy with Guido, and spending time with my chosen and blood family's who I dearly love.  I thought my days would be like that song sung by Marlene Dietrich entitled Lazy Afternoon.  I knew I wouldn't be spending those hazy lazy afternoons making love as she sings about.  I thought my life would be me relaxing into my post work life while the beetle bugs are zooming and the tulip trees are blooming, and the meadow cows are sleeping......  but I was wrong.  It has been about grieving the loss of the last of my animal companions and the loss of someone who also meant the world to me.  Guido and Larry loved me unconditionally as I loved them, just as I had all who I lost.  As Guido's estate finally moves towards its inevitable end my life has begun to take on more of that lazy hazy afternoon feeling but hanging over it all is one question; what is my life meant to be in my post work years?

I love San Francisco.  I love the fact of it.  The essence of it.  The power it has to warp ones consciousness.  It lures you in with its seductive raison d'etre even on its most challenging of days.  I love my apartment just as I have since I first set eyes on it.  I love how my apartment has evolved over time, how it has evolved since retiring.  I love my garden.  I love the play of light and shadow as the afternoon sun moves west.  I love how the leaves of the trees shimmer in the wind.  I love how the perennial border blooms throughout the spring, summer. and fall.  I love how the birds flit from one branch to another as they teach their young to fly.  My garden is everything I ever dreamed it could be and more.  I love that I have everything I need within a ten block radius of where I live.  That if I chose to I would never have to leave my neighborhood.  I have the quintessential urban life.  A cherished existence that most people only dream of.   I also understand just how tenuous this life is.  Heraclitus said "all is flux, nothing stays still.  Nothing endures but change."  The paradox for me right now is that I want to relax into this life I have so graciously been given while at the same time I seek to escape it.  It is as much about my fear of being vulnerable while at rest as it is about my fear of change.  To relax into my post work life here in San Francisco is patently unsettling to me.  To consider moving away is incomprehensible.  

I have always struggled with how I came to live in San Francisco.  It wasn't by my choice.  It always seemed to be because someone else said this where I should be, like I was riding someone else's coattails.  It may explain why I have never felt a soul connection to San Francisco, that inherent felt sense of homecoming when your foot touches the earth.  I have felt this in other places so it's not from a lack of understanding.  It has been present when walking the streets of New York City, London, Budapest, and Vienna.  In those cities I seem to be able to exhale in a way I could only do here when cuddling with Larry on the floor.  I'm happy to say that somewhat recently there has been a shift in this because of some guidance I received.  Basically it said, I didn't choose San Francisco, it chose me.  This has brought me some peace as guidance generally does, even if at times the answer is not within the realm of possibilities that I saw in front of me.  I was meant to come to San Francisco, to build a life here, but for how long?  Is there another place that is waiting upon my arrival just as San Francisco did for first twenty-one years of my life?  I have no idea.  What I do know is that, as always, the next right step for me is to continue to seek guidance from a power greater than myself until the answer is revealed.  In the mean time I raise my glass to the City by the Bay.  

Life on Life's Terms

I haven't been writing much lately and I miss that.  I miss it because the act of writing does for me what I can rarely do for myself.  It gets me out of my head and down into my body.  There is a quiet center in that down space, a spiritual place that is devoid of my anxiety and fears.   I feel that is why I am so strongly drawn to gardening, besides the genetics of it.  Gardening also gets me down into my body to that quiet center.  It has something to do with feeling the dirt between my fingers and aroma of the sweet loamy soil wafting up.  Cleaning the house while it is quiet does the same for me as does taking a passeggiata in my neighborhood in the late afternoon sun and people watching in the various parks near my home.  Taking a drive out in the country is also a favorite of mine.  My parents use take drives out into the country all the time when I was a kid.  They called it "taking a ride".  There was never a reason for it that I could tell.  It always just seemed like a spontaneous act where they would say, lets go, and we would all pile into the car.  They never had a destination in mind that I could tell.  They just headed away from the house in a blind act of faith.  In my adult years I started taking rides and like my parents, I would let the powers that be randomly lead me towards wherever I was meant to go.  Often times I would find myself driving some back country road somewhere as I enjoyed the unfolding scenery or climbing a steep winding two lane road only to find the expansive Pacific Ocean open out in front of me when I reached the crest.  The last time I went for a ride was about three years ago when Subie Deux was in the shop.   I had rented a canvas topped Fiat 500 for the duration; the little Italian I called it.  After picking the car up from a rental place around the corner I got the urge.  I thought, what better way to spend my day then to open the canvas top and head out for parts unknown.  Soon I found myself heading north across the Golden Gate Bridge, the great towers casting their momentary shadows across me as I drove.  Hours later I was on a back country road in West Sonoma County heading who knows where.  Somewhere along the way I found a perfect place to pull over for a nap.  After turning the engine off and reclining the seat I found myself being lolled into a peaceful place guided by the utter quiet around me, a quiet that was, from time to time, interrupted by some bird song or the occasional warm breeze that rustled the gnarled branches of an old oak tree above.    

Unfortunately I spend a lot of time in my head.  I can't fault the fact of it.  It's raison d'etre is designed to protect me.  It knows it as much as I do that being fully in touch with my physical body brings with it significant emotional challenges.  In the early years of my recovery my anxiety perpetually begot more anxiety feeding on itself like a virus until I thought I would go crazy.  It wasn't until some years later that I learned the value of cultivating quietude.  This is why I value writing and gardening so much among other things.  It transcends that anxiety breaking through to a quiet grounded center that is my safe place.  I learned during those intervening that most of my anxiety originated in the trauma stories of my childhood, tales that had lain unformed for many decades.  I seemed to had always known that something(s) were amiss but they lacked both definition and clarity.  To me they always seemed to be just a bunch of jostled consonants and vowels, ones that I kept nudging into.  It's like those buzzing mosquitos circling above you in a darkened bedroom on a hot summer night.  You know they're there but when you turn on the light.......  The majority of these stories began to coalesce in my late Forties bringing with them the aforementioned anxiety.  Thankfully, much of my recovery has coexisted side by side with my core group of close loving friends, confidants, and beloved animal companions.  Their support and love has been essential to me.  It was because of this that I was able to learn an important lesson, especially lately.  It is the concept of living life on life's terms.  I have to say this wasn't easy and lately it has gotten even more convoluted.  Lately I have come to define this current phase of my recovery as me being in a non sexual polyamorous relationship with various parts of myself and my history, all of which are filled with loads of unconditional love, great joy, even greater sadness, and unending grief just to name a few.  What did Churchill call the Russians?   "A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma."  That is what this time in my life feels like.  No wonder I have always had a strong affinity towards Russia, an affinity that has recently led me to buying my first icon, one I will soon be hanging in my hallway.  

Life on life's term.  This seemingly simple four word sentence is deceptively complex to me.  It means that I must sit in acceptance even though I often find myself railing against the very situation I know I can not change.  And afterwards when all is calm again I know I still have to face the inevitable fact of what I was trying to avoid in the first place; accepting the reality of my existence.  This is not to say that anger is a wasted emotion.  It is not.  It can be a powerful motivator if it is not twinned with the act of causing harm.  No emotion is wasted in my opinion.  To have a rich full emotional life is a gift from the gods.  They say in the rooms, feeling the full maturation of our emotions without being slaves to them.  There is so much more to this grouping of words too.  It is at once a powerful statement of awareness and acceptance and yet one of utter spiritual humility in the face of our emotional life.  

We humans are an interesting bunch, a fact that has been amply highlighted in the past five years. We have seen the worse of the worse, the best of the best, and everything in between; and yet we are still here, still breathing, still walking the loamy earth beneath our feet.  The Greeks had a good eye for the vastness of our emotion lives.  Their pantheon of gods were based lovingly, or not, on the richness of our human condition.  In Greek mythology the Greek god of fire was married to the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite.  Aphrodite was purported to have been born in the froth of the sea when Uranus' genitals were tossed in, genitals that had been cut off by his son, Cronos ; and yet equally it is said that Aphrodite was born from the coupling of Zeus, the Greek god of sky and thunder and his mate Dione, the female side of Zeus.  

Life on life's terms.  It been a tough road, these last four years.  Besides the normal challenges of my recovery I have been faced with a number of health issues, some of which have not yet been resolved and one of which will never be resolved.  I have also lost many that I held deep in my heart.  Beloved cousins and friends; my oldest friend Kathy who I met when I moved to Colorado in 1976; my friend Bebe who I had met in the early 1980's; the last of my animal companions, my beloved cat Larry in May of 2020; and six months ago, Guido, my closest and dearest confidant of forty-two years.  I also retired last September ending my some fifty plus year relationship with the working world.  What I face now is an unknown future, one without the intimate connection of those people who brought me joy, love, and stability.  This is not to say that I haven't a friend left in the world.  I have been deeply blessed over the course of my life and I still have many very close friends and family whom I love dearly and who are at the center of my life. 

Earlier this evening before I started writing this blog I was reminiscing about the time I spontaneously hitchhiked half way across the country during the fall of '76.  I was living in Colorado Springs at the time in a flat I had rented earlier that summer.  I had been partied hard the night before and had slept well into my alarm the next day.  When I finally woke up I realized I was quite late for work.  I remember being utterly frustrated about everything and that I dearly wanted nothing more than to take a break for it all.  I remember grabbing the phone to call Kathy not knowing why until I heard myself asking her if she would come pick up my golden retriever puppy Alexander Bryant and my car because I was going to hitchhike to San Francisco.  When she arrived at my place she tried talking me out of it but I refused to backdown.  After she left I packed my backpack, grabbed the only money I had, three dollars and change, and headed down the few blocks to the Interstate on ramp.  That first night I stayed with my cousin Crystal and her husband in Denver.  Throughout the evening and well into the night they both convinced me not to go west so I decided to go east instead.  For the next week I had the best time.  I never knew who was going to pick me up, or where they would take me.  I never knew when my next meal would come.  I got rides from a father and his teenage son who put me up for the night in Wyoming.  I stayed with a geologist who had picked me up east of Cheyenne.  I got a ride with a trucker, stayed with my friend Chuck in Omaha for three days spending most of my time with an elderly woman I had met on the streets, a woman who had just gotten out of the hospital and was hell bent on having a three day bender.  I got rides from a gang of musicians who had just been released from jail, a randy monk, a gregarious guy in a pickup truck across Iowa, and an insurance salesman who took me into south eastern Wisconsin.  For the entire week I was in no communication with anyone other those who I was spending my time with.  Not once during that week did I feel in danger.  Not once did I question my decision to leave.  It was all about just living from moment to moment without knowing what my future held for me.    

Life on life's terms.  It's not a bad thing.  It's rather liberating to tell the truth because as I walk my current path I know that it is the same act of faith that I had tapped into while hitchhiking.  I know I will be taken care of by a power greater than myself just like I was then.  And I know that I will be shown what the next right step is for me and that all will be revealed when it is meant to be revealed.  And I know I will arrive at my next destination when I am suppose to arrive.  In the meantime all I need to do is take one step at a time, then another, then another.

.....as ghosts are said to do.

Today was one of those days in the City.  The air was thick and warm to the touch, the sun brilliantly shining, the sky that particular soft blue foretelling spring's imminent arrival.  It was one of those days in which I would have rather languished laying about on the great expanse of lawn that covers the western side of Lafayette Park.  I use to spend a great deal of time up there in my youth; well in my twenties and thirties.  It was a meeting place for all kinds of people, some of which I knew from my neighborhood, others were friends of mine.  Sometimes we would plan an afternoon up there or on other days we would run into each other then spend the afternoon propped up on one arm talking about the nonsensical things young people talk about.  I so enjoyed those halcyon days relaxing into conversation for hours on end.  I also enjoyed those spontaneous moments of just running into someone on the off chance in the neighborhood.  I use to say to Tyler, "I'm running up to the corner store.  Be back in a few minutes" only to amble back in about an hour later to his furious questioning of where have you been?  I would turn to him and say "oh I ran into this friend or that and we ended up talking."  His fury would always drain away because it would most often be one or more of our friends who he would then ask "oh how are they doing?" and I would tell him of their latest exploits even though we had just seen them a few days before.  Life moved so quickly then. 

While cleaning the bedroom last week I picked up a picture of Tyler and I.  It was taken during those same days by my paternal cousin Bonnie who had been visiting the City for a week.  We had met somewhere in Hayes Valley prior to having breakfast nearby and she snapped a picture of us standing against some leafy wall or another.  I held the picture closely while examining our faces.  We were so young then.  So full of life and promise as it seemed to be even though by then Tyler and I had been together for more than a dozen years.  

During those same years in the second half of my sophomore year at University I took a photo class.  My penultimate project was to create a series of photos depicting an event.  I knew what I was going to do and set about getting the props and asking my good friend Ralph to be my subject.  When I was ready we both headed up one afternoon to Lafayette Park, to that same expanse of green lawn.  I took seven photos of Ralph that day, photos that depicted him having an encounter with his former self from a previous life.  The series was of him walking down a pathway, then unwittingly walking though his former self, of them both turning to look back with some faint awareness of what had just happened, then recognition by both, of them both forcing another connection, then of his former self lowering itself into Ralph's body as he sat on the lawn, the last photo being of them as one looking straight into the lens.  Even then at that young age I somehow knew that time and space could be breached, that there was an Other or Others existing beside our own space time continuum.  That this life was not the only one out there.

As I have said before I have been struggling during this post Larry period of my life for a number of reasons.  One such reason is that Larry was the last connection I had to Tyler, to our life together, and by extension to those halcyon days of our youth.  I remember the gut wrenching grief I felt that first year after Tyler and I split after twenty five years of being together.  I felt that I had lost my very soul.  In addition to this seemingly unending grief  I was also dealing with the beginnings of my recovery from my childhood trauma which had begun resurfacing one month after we had split.  Of course this is as they say all water under the bridge except for one very important fact that I am now becoming aware of.   To put it  succinctly, I have not been a dead man walking since Larry's death as I had thought but since my childhood trauma began.  More importantly, what I had defined as the felt sense of being alive during Larry's lifetime and before was not real but an illusion.  This awareness came to fruition in drips and drabs over the last few weeks as guidance often does in my life.  A word here, a phrase there, all seemingly meaningless; until they are not.  The promises say, slowly and haltingly and sometimes in great bursts....  This guidance coalesced slowly and haltingly until it became a contiguous whole this past Saturday afternoon.  The fuller version of the awareness is this:  that during those times when I perceived myself to be alive it was only that via osmosis with another living being with whom I permanently shared my intimate space at home.  And that when these shared intimacies ceased I was not only grieving their loss but equally grieving the lost of my childhood self.  I have believed with all my heart that all things began and ended with Larry, that he was my life support system.  That I could not do this thing called life without him.  I have begun to take in that my felt sense of being alive with him was this aforementioned illusion, just as it seemingly had been with Crook, and Sylvia; and when Tyler and I were together, and when I was with my two partners before him.  No one ever says that guidance is not sobering.  

There is a scene at the end of the fifth episode of Brideshead Revisited that mirrors my current awareness.  It is when Charles Ryder is leaving Brideshead for the last time.

"But as I drove away I felt that I was leaving a part of myself behind.  And to ever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it and search for it hopelessly as ghosts are said to do.  I shall never go back I said to myself.  A door had shut.  The low door in the wall I had sought and found at Oxford.  Open it now and I should find no enchanted garden.  I had come to the surface into the light of common day after a long captivity in the sunless coral palaces and waving forests of the ocean bed.  I have left behind illusion I said to myself.  Henceforth I live in a world of three dimensions with the aid of my five senses.  I have since learned that there is no such world.  But then as the car turned out of sight of the house I thought it took no finding.  That it laid all about me at the end of the avenue."

I have left a part of myself behind with each loss I have experienced and in their aftermath I always find myself searching to somehow find a way back so I can reclaim that sense of aliveness I had felt.  Now that I know it was all an illusion....  

One of the main threads of my grief journalling since Larry's passing is the sense that I am forever destined to search for what I will never be able to attain; arriving home.  That I will forever be roaming this earth searching for I will never find within my post childhood trauma life.  Maybe the answer can be found in who I was prior to it.  I am in no way saying that I wish to erase what was done to me.  That I know I can not do.  I just wish to become more aware of what this guidance means for me.  I've been asking myself where do I go from here?  Can something real be found beyond this illusion?  Am I to look towards those parts of my existence that are an organic  representative of who I am?   Do those things actually exist by virtue of themselves or are they too just an illusion?  As I sit here writing I do not know the answer to any of these questions.  I only know that going forward I will do what I always try to do in my life and that is pray for guidance on what is the next right step for me.

The loss of one's Tribe

 I am innately a tribal person.  I suspect this has as much to do with human nature as it does with anything else.  I believe that it is quite natural for people to gravitate towards being part of a tribe.  We become a part of a tribe at birth, one rooted in our immediate family connections.  That in time it expands to include out maternal and paternal family's, friends in our neighborhoods, school chums, until such a time comes that we move into adulthood and venture out on our own.   Looking back I had strong connections to my wider family during my childhood as I did with my neighborhood friends.  Church was another tribal connection as was school and later into adulthood my work life, intimate partners, and long term relationships.  Tyler and I created our own primary tribe that included furry kids. Vester was his childhood animal companion that came to live with us when his mom moved out of state.  Some years after Vester had passed we adopted our own furry's, Larry and Sylvia.  When Tylers and my relationship ended my primary tribe became my kids until Larry passed some seven months ago.  This is where I seem to be struggling so deeply in this post Larry existence.  I no longer have a primary tribe.

In a more expansive way I have been reflecting on how tribal connections seem to be at the root of our political life, that many within our society seem to be saying that they feel that they have lost their tribe and their hope for a better future.  Or at the very least one that they knew from childhood.   I am grateful for growing up in the Midwest as it has given me the ability to look at politics from different viewpoints.  I can understand when one says that they fear for their future and that of their children.   My father grew up destitute because his father had died in 1929 when he was four.  I have pictures of him as a child literally clothed in rags.  After grandpa died and especially during the Depression my dad's older siblings were the primary breadwinners for the family.  More often than not when they had gotten married they brought their spouses to live with grandma or left only to come back with children in tow.  That changed when the war came.  Everyone who could work had a paying job.  Despite graduating from high school my dad struggled with writing as he had dyslexia.   He would have never been able to attend college.  However, after coming back from the war my dad had the ability to forge a work life that gave us a solid middle class existence, one that provided a roof over our heads, clean clothes on our backs, and a place to call home ; not withstanding the childhood trauma I experienced.   They were good at creating the logistics of home.  What my father and so many others attained post war has't been available for the average high school graduate for a number of decades.  Long gone are the days when a good union job with health care and a pension were attainable.  They have been replaced with the modern amalgamation of what is now being called the "Gig" economy.  Something that very nearly resembles what existed post WWI.  Dad's pension and post work retiree healthcare were the only things that kept my mom and dad from being destitute.  I get it when people say they are scared.  And I understand how such fear and vulnerability can be manipulated by demagogues.  We have seen it many times in our history.  The Huey Long's and Father Coughlin's of the world playing on the fears and vulnerabilities of others.  I see it happening all over the world today.  Those in power playing on those very fears and vulnerabilities while promising a return to greatness.  That old saying during the 1928 presidential campaign when things were rapidly heading downward just prior to the Great Depression.  Hoover promising "a chicken for every pot.  Wages, dividends, progress, and prosperity;  Vote for Hoover. " One only has to look at the news coming out of Europe and Asia to see how prevalent that myth still is.  Turkey, China, India, Russia, Hungary just to name a few are all in the grips of demagogues promising things that they can not possibly provide.  But yet they seems to sustain their power by hook or by crook.

I get it when I hear someone saying that they feel lost.  Most days I feel like I'm a ghost stealthily moving about a place full of memories, a place that is devoid of both life and breath.  Larry was that for me.  He brought both life and breath into our home just as Crook did and Larry's sister before.  That is what I seem to struggle with the most: what is this post Larry life that I find myself navigating. 

I was telling my sponsor last week that much of my work in recovery has been about coming to an accommodation with my childhood trauma.  I explained that the fact of my trauma changed how my body functioned, how my neural pathways work.  I said it was akin to losing one's limb.  You navigate the fact of it while attempting to create a quality life.  Historically, loss within all of its facets seemed to be the emotion that I am always trying to find an accommodation with and that is still fact.  I know Larry will never be coming back.  I know I can never recreate what I had with him, or  Crook, or with Larry's sister Sylvia before Crook.  I am also keenly aware that I felt for the most part content when Larry was alive.  The fact of him being with me, that we shared a life together.  That all things began and ended with him.  We were our primary tribe, the one that fed and sustained us both.  

The loss of one's tribe.  There is a deep sense of powerlessness there.  Of helplessness too.  Facts that most times seems too overwhelming for me to surmount.  Yet hope does exist there.  I see evidence of it everyday.  Extraordinary stories of people who have not only survived tragedy but have gone on to thrive.  I see hope in our impending change of political administration not that I am naive enough to think that all things will magically come right.  They will not.  My sponsor said something last week when we saw each other that reinforced the message fo hope; sometimes things have to die in order for others to live.  I would never presume to say that he meant Larry had to die in order for me to live.  What I heard was that change is inevitable.  That all living beings have a natural beginning and end and that I am subject to the same.  I heard that what one feels may be unsurmountable is also subject to change.  That not only can one survive what is thought to be insurmountable, one can thrive within that accommodation.  

I have no idea what my post Larry life will be  Or what continued accommodation I will be making to both my childhood trauma and my loss.  I only know that I am on a journey, a journey where I am seeking clarity from guidance while attempting to live an authentic emotional life.

Letting Go

When I left work around midnight it was a windless eighty-two degrees, a rare thing in San Francisco.  Nights like tonight entices one to want to take a long walk or go sit on a park bench while listening to the sounds of the City as it slows down readying itself for sleep.  In my birth town most summer nights were like this.  I remember laying in bed listening to the window fan in the basement, its belt flapping again the fly wheel as it pulled air through the open window above my bed.  I remember the sounds of the old Walker foundry pounding out steel with a methodical clunk some miles away.  The nights were so still that sounds would carry for miles.  Within that quiet of a balmy night there was a centeredness.  A place of unique quiet, much like what I felt as I stepped outside after work.  This felt sense of quiet is not the absence of something but the wholeness of nothing.  

In the weeks after Larry's death I felt the cacophony of my grief, a place where there is little quiet.  Rage was common place, so was my pleading, so was my crying.  Losing someone we cherish is like that.  Of us in perpetual movement as our grief overwhelms us.  I lost count how many times my closest friends held my space while I grieved.  Grieving during the End Times as I laughing refer to this pandemic wasn't easy.  When my friends wanted to hug me we couldn't.  For the most part we couldn't even be in the same room together.  Grieving in the Zoom generation.  Humor is a good emotion to have when all else looks bleak.  

I recently said to a few friends that this year feels a lot like 1968.  That year was as tumultuous as this one seems to have been.  There were assassinations, rioting, demonstrations, political upheaval, curfews, all seemingly co-existing with no end in sight.  There was a point then when we all had to let go and accept the reality in which we found ourselves.  To accept our powerlessness.  I suppose we all had to find a way in which to do that just as I have had to learn that recently; relearn it really.  For the most part I am powerless over most things in my life.  Not that my logical mind wants to accept that fact.  My logical mind, like my child trauma, wants to convince me that I am all powerful, all knowing, that in essence I am godlike.  To survive four years of untenable things being done to my body, things that started with the insane and ended with the unimaginable, one becomes convinced that to survive that one can effectively survive anything and more then likely control most all things.  Survival does that to the psyche.  It's raison d'etre begets the reality it has already manifested.   I had to laugh when I finally read the results of my physiological testing from 2009.  I went to be tested because I was having difficulty in doing the mundane motor skill tasks of everyday life.  What came out was a lengthy single spaced seven or so page document prepared by a battery of clinicians, all of whom were so rattled by my childhood trauma that had been revealed that they could not place me within any of their known categories, not that I was made privy to any of it.  It was years later when I finally got a copy of it and that was well after I had recovered memories detailing what they had saw.  It took me three weeks to get through reading it and then all I had left was the act of letting go.

Letting go.  It isn't a bad thing as much as it is a necessary one.  We let go of all sorts of things during our lifetime.  Of favorite childhood toys, friends we made in elementary school, clothes that no longer fit or that have gone out of style.  We let go of our school years when we graduate, of our childhood homes when we move on.  We let go of our grandparents when they die, of our friends who are taken prematurely from us.  Of our parents when the time comes.  Of our beloved animal companions.  None of which is easy.  Loss and death are messy and painful experiences but we are tasked with the necessity of living that truth until it is no longer our truth.  Acceptance is such a powerful act.  To accept ones emotions when one desperately want to escape them is an act of sheer courage.   Courageous acts done from a place of courage.

I was having a deep conversation with one of my oldest friends recently.  We talked about the need to let go when the time is right.  Nothing like hearing the guidance of my Higher Power through a trusted friend.  I do seem to be moving closer to saying goodbye to Larry.  The guidance has been showing up lately in the most mundane of places.  That's how guidance from my HP happens in my life; sometimes it is undeniably clear, most often though it is just found quietly within a larger unrelated entity.  Letting go does not mean that I will forget about Larry or stop talking to him, or lose all that he was in my life.  The act of saying goodbye is simply me changing in relation to the immediacy of my grief leaving the wider space it once occupied to which will alway be a part of me, my tangible memories of my precious baby boy Larry.  In the last six years I have had to say goodbye to many beloved people in my life; my mom, my dad, my rescue boy Crook, a number of beloved extended family members, and two close friends.  Change is inevitable.  As Plato said; "All is flux, nothing stays still."  

Letting go,  it's not a bad thing as much as it is a necessary one.

A Day Without Art

I can scarcely believe that today is the one month anniversary of Larry's passing.  Later on I will be taking down the purple fabric that I had draped across all of my art work the day Larry died.  The act of draping my art has been a mourning ritual that I have engaged in for nearly thirty years.  The origins of it are not familial but one that was started by the gay artist group Visual AIDS in Nineteen Eighty-Nine.  I had many gay friends who were artists at that time.  I met most of them during my college days, others I met in the neighborhood.  The Day Without Art project was created as a mourning ritual to honor those artists who had passed from AIDS.  Soon after it was expanded to also honor those artists who were living with the virus.  I began covering my art in honor of my artist friends who died.  As time went on it morphed into a way for me to honor those of my immediate family who had passed from this earth.  Sitting here as I write I can hardly believe that today is the day when I be uncovering my art.  I am thankful that the deep and grievous weeping has for the most part stopped.  The pain has not.  If anything it has deepened the further away from Larry I am.  When his dementia diagnosis came in some months ago I knew my time with him would be finite and I did wonder what my life would be like without him.  I thought about what it would be like not seeing his nesting spot on the bed, his fort in the living room, him not curled up sleeping on the perch in the closet.  What it would be like not to cuddle with him on the floor.  I guess in some ways I was naive about the relative nature of my post Larry life.  Maybe it was because I thought I had more time with him, that I could ease into my grief the way I did with Crook before he died.  Maybe it was because I didn't want to let myself go to "that" place again.  The one where I always go when someone I love more than life itself dies.  Sitting here as I write I'm also not surprised that I have been reluctant to work on my trilogy for some of the same reasons.  Jack has just lost his partner Patrick and is reeling within his grief at the sudden and tragic nature of his lover's death.  Last year I did try writing his truth but I found that I had just glazed over the surface.  I think it amounted to all of about three paragraphs.  Down deep though I knew that at the time I would one day return and walk beside him as we both navigated the depths of his grief, the depths of which I already find myself in.  What do they say about storytelling, write about what you know?
Two years ago I asked a writer friend of mine to do a manuscript read for me.  He had extensive training in the field encompassing both teaching and writing and I valued his input.  He was one of a few that I had asked for guidance.  After he had finished his critique we met for coffee at a cafe in the lower Haight.  The first thing he said when he walked in was, "I can't help but call you Jack.".   I suppose there's a lot of Jack in me and vice versa.  This is why I have been reluctant to bear witness to his grief.  I know that what is his pain will be mine and mine, his.
Writing can be cathartic; however, in the past few days I have been struggling with how one shares his innermost grief, the grief that only he and God bear witness to?  That was one of the beautiful parts of my life with Larry.  He bore witness to the laughter, the joy, the contentment, and the pain.  He was there for the deep sadness, the grievous weeping after Silvia, my dad, and Crook died; he was there for it all.  All the while being present in his body in the way only animal companions can be.  There's something to be said about the unvarnished ability to be free of ones baggage, to be in that perpetual state of grace that animal companions can be when their lives have been untouched by personal trauma.
Lately, I have again been questioning everything about my life.  How did I come to be where I find myself.  Why has life happened in the way it did.  Why seemingly insignificant decisions can grow into life shattering moments later on.  How the effects of trauma talking to trauma can make my life so unmanageable, information that I have readily shared with a few of my sponsees.  Many years ago I had made a conscious decision not to share the totality of my trauma history with many of my close friends. Only a chosen few know.  I made that decision knowing that my history is not for the faint of heart.  My childhood trauma was deeply insane at the best of times, and at it's worst, unimaginable.  To carry that reality in my conscious memory has been challenging.  Carrying it along with my grief......   I'll be frank in this moment about something that only my sponsor knows.  During the first week after Larry's death I thought about suicide.  I guess I'm much like my mother in that way.  After my eldest sibling Muriel passed away at five years old my mother ingested rat poison.  When that did not work she fled across several state lines to her oldest sister in Topeka refusing to come back.  After three weeks of pleading my father had to drive many hundreds of miles to get her and drag her back because she still had my one and half year old brother to care for.  My sponsor calls my thoughts of suicide trauma talking to trauma.  Nothing like having my own words reflected back.  I suppose in reality it is trauma talking to trauma.  The trauma of my multiple layers of deep grief speaking to and with the deep shame of my childhood history.  A lethal combination if there ever was one.  I told him laughingly but also seriously that at least I'm not drinking, drugging, or fucking my way out of myself.  Not that I haven't thought about it.  I have.  Thankfully the diversion from my grief has taken a decidedly more productive avenue of late as I have been doing the repair work around the house that needs to be done.  A much better way of coping wouldn't you say?
I have come to understand that grieving can be such a treacherous journey for me.  And I do my best to bear witness to the authenticity of my journey while taking ownership of it and the emotions that it entails but it can be such a convoluted mess at times.  I guess that is what grief is at its core.  Messy, convoluted, weepy, and full of unexpected emotional sink holes.