Honoring the Ancestors

Today I got together with 2 dear friends and celebrated Beltane, or May Day, together. We were a little low energy and it was raining so we changed our original plans a little. Indoors instead of outdoors, short and sweet. Because we were all so low in energy we decided it would be a nice addition to give each other the May Day gift of telling one another what we appreciate about each other. We are very different women who came together by chance, but over the years we have formed one of those bonds that you always hope will be a part of your life, a friendship where anything goes, where we can always speak the truth to one another. They each let me know that what they most appreciate about me is my direct communication, my willingness to be open about my life and my feelings, come what may, and that by doing that I have let them in on a perspective they did not realize existed.

They echoed what several folks told me at my teacher training. ***WARNING: Now I should warn anyone under the age of 18 that our culture takes a dim view of the combination of sex and truthfulness, and I plan to talk about both here. So, if you're under 18 you should go do something else, not read this, and let us grownups keep our fantasies that we can control your experience as children. Thanks.*** One of the items I packed for my month in Costa Rica was my vibrator. When my partner realized I was taking it along she asked, "What will you say if they search your luggage and find it?" "I'll tell them I'm going to be away from home with no sex for a month! I've got to have something to entertain myself with." During the course of that month, sex was a big topic of conversation and I was very open about my own arrangements, that I had brought my vibrator and was unwilling to go without masturbating for a month, that I had more than one relationship, that pain and power were part of my sexual identity. Near the end of the month one woman made a point of pulling me aside to tell me she was both surprised and appreciative of my honesty, because it opened her mind to a different perspective.

I am humbled when I hear that because I know that I still have so far to go in becoming completely open, completely honest. The kudos to me for what I have done so far just continue to remind me that I have so much more to do in becoming transparent. And this is the difficulty for me-how to become transparent, to allow people to see me completely, while being respectful, doing no harm to others, giving people space to draw away from what may frighten them.

Two nights before our May Day celebration, my sweetie and I watched Milk...finally. Honestly, I had avoided the movie a little because I knew how it ended and I did not want to mourn the loss again. But in watching it, I mostly found myself remembering my early days of coming out as a lesbian, and my discovery of my community, the history of those who had become my people. My ancestors. I thought about the changes my partner and I have seen; 19 years ago we couldn't hold hands on the street without fear unless we were in the gay part of town. Now we do it almost without thought. And it is because of people who had the courage to allow themselves to be seen.

When you begin to come out, you realize that the archetypal coming out story is a myth in some ways, because it's always spoken of in the singular as though you do it once and you are done. The truth is you do it almost constantly, over and over again. After a while it gets exhausting and you just want to go live your life and forget about it.

Lately I have been seeing little reminders all around me though about why it is important to keep doing it. Our culture seems to have a strong desire to put everything and everyone into one big easily defined box. When that happens, there is a pervading feeling that anyone who falls out of the box deserves whatever bad thing happens to them, and that it only happens to a few fringe people anyway, so why should we care? And for the ones who know they don't live in the box it can be terrifying and lonely.

Now I have no interest at all in writing details about my sex life here. Despite the warning above, this is not a "Dear Diary, last night I had such a great time..." kind of blog. The stories are true and personal, but not private, and while they probably tell you a lot about what I think and feel and believe as a human being, they don't tell you much about how I live my mundane everyday life. But part of what I think and feel and believe as a human being has a great deal to do with my sexuality and I don't want to erase that from my writing, presenting the sanitized Disney version of my life. Any child who has read "The Little Mermaid" and then watched the Disney version has the right to fury over the betrayal of truth. We keep trying to force everything into the box, especially for the kids, because we want them to believe that somehow all the confusions of youth smooth out and fall easily into line as we grow up, and everyone has a happy ending.

We also have methods in place to reinforce the box, to prop up the illusion of sameness. Every time I go to the doctor and check the box "single" I erase myself a little. It is a lie and there is no place for the truth of the web of relationships I live and love in on the form. I can explain and protest all I want, but the form remains implacable and unchanged, recording my life on paper as something it is not.

That experience makes me even more aware of the accomplishments of the people who came before me. My family values family ties and family history strongly, and my mother has often exhorted me to remember and honor them in making my life choices. I don't think she realizes that when she says that I tend to think not as much of my blood relations who made my physical existence possible, but of the people I discovered along the way written down in history, who lived their lives so honestly and visibly that they managed to be recorded that way for me to find and follow. Somehow they managed to check the box "other" to show me and others a way out of the box. To let us know that we can live and breathe there and be happy.

I began writing this post many months ago and, at the time, I thought it was connected with the yogic principle of satya, truthfulness. After watching Milk, I returned to my writing with the feeling that I was actually writing about ishvara pranidhana, surrender to the Lord. The Lord in yoga is understood as a pure divine awareness, as Stephen Cope puts it in The Wisdom of Yoga "...the Witness behind the Witness." Cope understands the concept of the Lord as being almost a gravitational force that draws us in, and in yoga we work to align ourselves with it, the idea being that we can't resist gravity anyway so if we can be aware of it and align with it, we can let go of resistance.

I think initially it can be confusing, all this talk of resistance and surrender in connection with real life. Because aren't I being resistant by being so stubborn and contrary about forcing the truth of my life out into the sight of others? And can't I surrender by just being quiet and going along with the status quo? The problem with that is that it is not the Box we need to surrender to, but the Lord. The Box is something that is constantly created and shored up by fearful people trying to control, understand and quantify something too big to control, understand and quantify. People like Harvey Milk understood that we need to surrender to the truth of our own lives, live them out in the open and transparently, understanding and accepting that there will be consequences we can't control, but that surrendering to that larger force behind us requires this of us. We can become the ancestors, showing a way out of despair for those who can't find the right box to check, until finally we can all understand that there is no box.

You thought I was going to talk about sex, didn't you? I am. There is no separate box for sex. I am always talking about it, because it is always in my life. Not dirty, not secret, not scary, not separate. Just life.

copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles