comfortably silent together

A friend emailed me this quote by Eckhart Tolle:

With any human relationship, the question is, "Is there space?"  Use that as a little mantra.  Is there space in this relationship?  Put bluntly, it's a space when thought becomes unimportant, and any judgment of your mind, even emotion, becomes unimportant when something deeper is there: awareness, stillness, alert, alive, stillness, as space.

This is the type of quote that you could throw out to a dozen people and get a dozen different interpretations, which is one reason why I like it.  I reminds me of an experience I had the summer after moving to Portland.  I believe I had fairly recently come out to my friend KaRyn and we were at the Oregon coast with a couple other friends.  She and I were walking along the beach chatting and eventually the conversation petered out and we just walked in silence for bit.  Then KaRyn said, "Aw, we're now the type of friends that can be comfortably silent together." 

To me, that quote is about allowing that stillness and silence to exist in relationships as a...um...silent partner.  It's a stillness that allows you to see beyond the roles you need the other person to play, the expectations you have for each other.  It allows you to get a sense of their essence instead of their ego.  It lets go of trying to think of the next thing to say in order to preserve the narrative you've created together, and as a result opens up the relationship to unthought of narratives that might be more substantive and healing. 

I think it also creates sustainable relationships.  How often do you tire of certain relationships but you can't quite put your finger on why?  Maybe it's because the relationship is trying to follow a narrative that no longer serves a purpose but there's fear to alter the chemistry and balance of a relationship because it's worked in the past and is the basis for the relationship. 

I've discovered that one sign of a good friend is one who allows you the space to be something new each time you meet by leaving everything they know about you behind and letting you re-create yourself, much like Skye's Sweet Onions of Forgivness.

What about you, kittens?  How do you create space in your relationships and what does it feel like to you?

an eternity of now

Sometimes I find the idea of living forever completely exhausting and depressing. I think this feeling started to surface when I started exploring and questioning what I really do and don’t believe, especially about what happens after this life. Think about it though, existing for-ev-er is a really long time, especially when I really have no idea what a next life would look like and really only have this life to go on.

I’ve come to appreciate the idea that every moment is perfect and is exactly what I need, if I am just patient and present with the moment and listen to what it has to teach me. The other day I was wondering if maybe there won’t be a separation into kingdoms as rewards in the next life, but that maybe we’ll all end up in the same place. Maybe the separation will only come from our own ability or inability to appreciate the now.

If you’re able to find and appreciate the beauty in each moment, you’ll probably be more successful at enjoying eternity than if you were constantly wishing for a better situation or for whatever might come next. Maybe if I were better at finding the beauty in each moment then eternity wouldn’t sound so exhausting…

sherri wants to live with me

Sunday afternoon I sat down on my couch to watch some TV and noticed an envelope taped to my sliding glass door.  I retrieved it and found a hand written letter inside that said the following:

Hello my name is Sherri and my mother lives in the unit directly across from you.  She informed me that in the recent past you had a roommate and may possibly be looking for another, since the previous roommate has moved.  I just moved back home to Oregon  after living in California for several years.  I will be looking for my own place of course, over the course of the summer, however, in the meantime, I am looking for a room to rent.

I am 37 years old.  I work as a veterinary surgical nurse, however, I do not own any pets.  I am a non-smoker and I do not use drugs of any kind.  I am clean and you will find that I am hardly ever home.  In closing, please call me if you are interest.

Sincerely,
Sherri

PS How does it feel to have craigslist come to you? LOL

I'll be honest with you, Sherri, the envelop taped to my sliding glass door was a little creepy.  I felt this urge for the rest of the day to close the blinds. 

Now I have several questions.  I realize that it's not unheard of for people of the opposite sex to be roommates, but I would think it would happen when there was already some kind of established friendship or at the very least an acquaintanceship.  I find it odd that a woman would want to move in with a man she knows nothing about.

My other question is if your mother lives across from me, why don't you move in with her? 

I'm kind of tempted to take her up on her offer and then make things as weird as possible.  Like keep jars of urine on the shelf, or hang out in my Snuggie with nothing on underneath, or pretend like I have Tourrette's, or keep a blow up doll around the house and act like she's real (Lars and the Real Girl style).  I could also resurrect Jarrett's severed arm from last summer. 

reclaiming god

I wrote the following for a discussion group I belong to in an attempt to explain my relationship with God.  I thought I'd post it here as well.

I’ve found that to make the gospel come alive for me, I’ve had to rewrite the narratives of what the voices in my head tell me about who I am, what the gospel is, who my Heavenly Father and Savior are and how they feel about me and what role I play in the grand scheme of things. That rewriting comes about through the help of the spirit and through personal revelation. I think we too often allow others to define who God is and what his relationship is with us. I find that the perception others have of God often doesn’t resonate with me, (he’s vengeful, he hates gays, he’s the God of one particular political party, he dangles carrots in front of us to get us to do what he wants, he sends trials if we cross him, etc) If I rely on others’ perceptions of him, I think it makes it difficult to conceive of a God that I can relate to and resonate with. If I rely too much on others’ perceptions of him and those perceptions don’t work for me, it’s almost like I let them take him away from me. I let those voices and narratives dominate, which leaves me feeling no connection to my Heavenly Father.


I find though, that proactively taking on the creation of a relationship with him through the spirit allows me to create new narratives, new perceptions, new relationships. I think that’s a big part of why we’re here. To learn how to create. As I’ve created this new relationship, I’ve also found that I need to keep a couple of things in mind. One, I can share and talk about my relationship with God with others, but I shouldn’t try to force others to adopt my perceptions or feel frustrated when how I perceive things doesn’t resonate with them. Related to this idea, if I feel comfortable and confident in my relationship with and perception of God and the gospel, I don’t need to feel threatened by others’ relationships and perceptions. We are all in different places and I think we perceive the God that we need (or even sometimes feel that we don’t need) at certain times in our lives. The second thing I try to keep in mind then, is that I need to be open to the relationship and the perceptions changing, as I grow and mature and become. The God I needed as a child is different than the God I need as an adult. And not that they are two different Gods, I just think that as we grow and mature, our knowledge and understanding of him can become more full and nuanced and personalized if we let it happen.

increasing bandwidth

In my last post, I said that I believe that if we are downloading the gospel, we are probably less than 1% to completion.  I think a lot of members of the church, however, believe that we've already downloaded most, if not all of it. One of the stumbling blocks of Mormonism is the belief of its members that it is the only true church on the face of the earth.  Like I said in my last post, I think it can lead to complacency, which greatly reduces the bandwidth of our connection to the divine. 

I think something that could greatly increase that bandwidth is being open to the fact that we might be wrong and then owning up to it when we discover that we are.  The following TED talk is by Kathryn Schulz and she talks about the importance of embracing our fallibility, and what opens up for us as a result.  Sometimes she seems like she's trying just a smidge too hard to be an engaging speaker, but she has some really great things to say.  Below are some of my favorites:

"Trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous."

"And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweet heart and move back to your home town and raise a bunch of kids together and something else happened instead."

"This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly."

"For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us."

looking for diamonds with a slow internet connection

I think it's inevitable as a gay Mormon that at some point in coming to terms with your sexuality, you will also do a fair amount of wrestling with your religious identity.  Everyone approaches it differently, but so far, I've taken the approach of sifting through the culture and the religion (I don't think anybody can really say exactly where one ends and the other begins) and pulling out stuff that resonates and makes me feel good about myself and my relationship with the divine and I keep it.  Then there are the things that don't resonate with me or that I feel detract from my relationship with myself and the divine.  Sometimes I have to chip away layers of accumulated calcified (that one's for you, Dan C.) cultural baggage to get to a pure and simple truth.  Sometimes I'm not really sure what I've found, or if or when I've chipped away the unnecessary baggage enough to find the gem. 

One idea that is commonly shared in a Mormon testimony is a gratefulness to have been born when we have the fulness of the gospel.  This is what I'm currently dusting off and taking a look at, and it makes me really uncomfortable.  It makes me uncomfortable because I think it leads to complacency.  It also makes me uncomfortable because I don't believe that we have a fulness of the gospel.  If we are downloading the fulness of the gospel, I think we are probably less than 1% to completion and right now I feel like we have a pretty slow connection and I think it's because of complacency. 

I think the mind set of many is that we have the fulness of the gospel, so now we just have to sit around and wait for Jesus to come back, instead of seek to understand how the LGBT population fits into the picture, or what role our Mother in Heaven plays and what a knowledge of Her could teach us about ourselves.  And what about gender?  Is gender really eternal, and if so, what does that mean?  Are we talking about physical manifestations of gender?  What if someone is born intersex?  What does that mean for them? 

I could go on with the questions and I'm sure all of you could add your own and we could come up with a pretty healthy list.  When you start to ask yourself these questions, it becomes easy to see that there are a lot of questions that the gospel doesn't answer.  I think that in order to get the answers, we have to be willing to live into the tension that those questions create, remembering to breathe, paying attention to the stretching that occurs, the challenge to balance.  Most importantly though, we need to remember our greatest responsiblity as humans on this planet is to love our neighbor as ourself.

my body

I just read John G-W’s post about surrendering and stretching and it got me thinking about some of my own experiences with those same themes. I’ve recently mixed up my exercise routine to include more yoga and I love it. I love that it’s a more contemplative and peaceful form of exercise than some of the other things I do. I also love that it’s more holistic in that it focuses on the development of not just strength, but also balance and flexibility.

I think one of the gifts having our physical bodies is the ability to engage in ritual and to physically act out and experience what happens in our emotional and spiritual lives. The stretching, struggling to maintain balance, the holding of a difficult pose. Sometimes I tense up my whole body in order to hold a pose and I make it much more difficult than it needs to be. Then I’m patiently told to only work the muscles that need to work and let the others relax. My body seems to particularly enjoy tensing at the shoulders. I realize when working my abs that I tense up my neck and face and shoulders and thighs to protect those poor ab muscles from doing the work that I actually want them to do.

Sometimes I don’t fully lean into a pose. There is some stretching that’s going on, but not what it could be. I’m told to tweak my pose just a bit. Open up your hips. Draw your right or left hip forward. Engage your abs. Relax your shoulders. Lead with your heart. Breathe into it. Never stop breathing.

That’s probably another favorite of mine. Holding my breath until it’s over, instead of breathing into the difficult pose and making those tweaks, always conscious of the change that occurs, conscious of the additional stretching that’s able to happen, the challenge to my balance. I assess and breathe and balance. Then I move into the next pose and begin again.

During this type of exercise, it’s much easier to recognize and internalize what a beautiful gift my body is.

a gay fantasia on national themes

This past weekend I went to NYC to see Angels in America and do some shooting for the documentary. We met up Friday night with some other gay Mormon guys who live in the city so they could show us a proper night on the town.  We met up at Vynl for food, where he had a large corner booth with a table top that was a tile mosaic of Liza Minelli's face.  I wanted to get a picture of it, but it was covered with all our dirty dishes.  I did, however, get a picture of the life size tile mosaic of Justin Timberlake in the bathroom.

After we got some food, we went to a few clubs.  First up were Therapy and Industry, which were right across the street from one another.  Therapy and Industry kind of sounds like a state motto or something and not at all like the clubs mentioned by Stefon during Weekend Update. They were nice, if not a little bit pretentious.  It seemed like those were the clubs where pretty gays with tight shirts congregate for others to look at them.

After that, we went to The Stonewall Inn, mostly for historical purposes.  All I'll say about this one is that it was a very quick visit that I'm trying to forget.  Before calling it a night, we went to a place next door to Stonewall, and I can't remember the name of it.  Upstairs they have a little improv and a lot of singing along to showtunes.  Jack, the guy who was filming everything, was the only straight guy there and the female MC immediately honed in on him.  Let's just say she was more than a little bit thrilled to have a man in the audience who was attracted to women.

Saturday, Kendall and I went and saw Angels in America and this was definitely a highlight of the trip.  I forget how amazing and powerful live theater can be when it's done by real professionals.  I'm including a few clips of my favorite parts, as portrayed by the HBO miniseries. 

Here's the trailer, in case you've never seen or heard of AiA.

Opening scene, with Meryl Streep as the Rabbi.


This is probably the scene that really got to me the most during the play.  The actress who played the pioneer woman did such a beautiful job with it, and there was something about her delivery of it that elicited a fairly powerful and visceral reaction from me that was kind of unexpected.  Almost like she was reaching inside me, as is described in this scene.  I felt like she so beautifully captured what that process of change is like, not just with the words, but her delivery of them.


Harper's monologue on the plane to San Francisco was my very favorite the first time I saw the movie.


And of course the final scene is a really beautiful one.

seek after these things

The 13th article of faith of the LDS church says that "if there is anything virtuous, lovely, or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things."  I've been spending a lot of time listening to podcasts and watching documentaries and have experienced some pretty great stuff.  So I thought I'd share.  Below are links to things I think you should check out as well as descriptions (that I pulled from the websites) of what each one is about. 

RadioWest: Borderlands: How do you write a play about coming out when the only gay character in the script is already out?  The Mormon playwright Eric Samuelsen says he had personal experiences to draw from - his daughter marrying outside the faith, his oldest son deciding not to go on a mission.  Samuelsen explores the idea of admitting uncomfortable truths in his newest work.  (I've heard mixed reviews about the play itself.  I haven't seen it, but I enjoyed this discussion of it on RadioWest.)

RadioWest: Hidden Reality:  Doug talks to physicist Brian Greene about this question: is our universe the only universe?  Greene's latest book is called "The Hidden Reality" and he says that major scientific developments have opened the door to the possible existence of parallel universes.  It may sound like something from science fiction, and the idea is controversial and speculative, but Greene's goal is to help us imagine how the boundaries of reality could one day be redrawn.

Pray Away the Gay?:  Through intimate portraits and perspectives, Lisa Ling takes a look at one of the most polarizing debates in Christianity today: Is is possible to be gay and Christian at the same time.  (This is pretty even handed look at the topic.  The focus is more on the stories and experiences of the individuals, as opposed to devolving into dogma and/or polemics.)

This American Life: Parent Trap:  Rebecca was 16 years old when her mother Elizabeth died of cancer.  But before she died, she wrote letters to Rebecca, to be given to her on her birthday each year for thirteen years.  At first the letters were comforting, but as time went on, they had much more complicated effects. 

This American Life: God's Close-Up:  An artist, his Jesus-model, the model's girlfriend, the girlfriend's father, and a bunch of bearded men all converge in Utah.  An elaborate artistic tableau is set up in the desert, and there are several attempts by the faithful and the not so faithful to bridge the divide between them. (If you don't watch or listen to anything else, at least watch this one.  It's only about 25 minutes and well worth those 25 minutes.  You can stream it on Netflix)

Dig in.

scrubbing out the gay

I have a question to toss out to all of you.  I think all of us at some point have been, and some might currently be in that stage of trying to root out the gay.  By root out the gay, I mean trying to eliminate it or change it into a heterosexual attraction.  This probably includes trying to reform or change or eliminate activities or behaviors or relationships that we think might be contributing to the gay.  This process might be an effort to change orientation or it might be just to eliminate stuff from your life that might give away the fact that you're gay.  Anyway, I think you are all aware of this degayifying process of which I speak, to some degree or another. 

So here's the question, what things do you or have you tried to eliminate from your life in order to eliminate or hide the gay?  For example, like probably many of you, I've always gotten along famously with the ladies.  We are like best friends.  I went through a phase in which I believed that my relationship to women was contributing to my inability to be attracted to them.  Kind of like I was going in the back door and becoming one of them, eliminating the possiblity of becoming attracted to them.  So I thought that I needed to not get along so well with the women in my life, go in the front door and interact with them in a way that would encourage an attraction to them.  It seemed fool proof and made total sense to me at the time.  It resulted in me not having very many friends and feeling a little dead inside. 

So what about you?  Other things eliminated at an attempt to degayify might include not wearing certain things that might be "too gay", not participating in certain activities (dance, fashion design, etc.), not associating with openly gay people, you get the idea.  Please don't be embarrassed about sharing, no matter how ridiculous you might think it is now.  This is a safe space. :)