Baptismal Blog

When I was a kid, there were 3 things one simply did NOT discuss at the dinner table: Sex, Politics and Religion. So far, my career path has encompassed 2 of those, one of which I'm about to pursue in grad school.

I got accepted to the GTU at Berkeley fro my MDiv. Right now, we're in the middle of attempting to sustain the structures that provide us income, prepare to move, sort, clean, reduce, maintain, sleep, eat, poop regularly (you really can't afford to underestimate the value of that), make more money so that we can move, walk the dog, clean the cat's ear, do the dishes, pack, cry (me mostly--Lawrence is holding up like a champ) and generally hold it together. So whadda I do? Start a blog, of course!

There are many delightful, tasty, challenging aspects to this major life transition. I'm trying to make sense of them. As a mystic, I believe that there's really only one of us here (a notion supported by quantum mechanics--individuation in unity) and that there are ways to function as an apparetnly discrete being while sustaining unitive states. And because there's only one of us here and we are all connected in a profound web, net of life, it behooves us to get our acts together and learn how to do this human thing a little better. Me first.

That's my goal. To become all of who I really am, without judging any of it, and use that beingness to help end the suffering of all beings. Suffering, in mysticism, is not getting stuck in the illusion of "I" or the illusion of "that;" suffering is when one gets stuck in the illusion that there's any difference between the "I" and the "that." Part of how I've gotten to this point has been through alternative sexual modalities. God wears black leather. To hell with the head of a pin; how many angels are dancing on the tip of it as it's inserted beneath skin (okay, so that'd be a lance or needle instead of a pin, but I'm hoping you get it anyway).

Pema Chodron wirtes, "Discipline is the conduct that de-escalates suffering." Right now, I'm suffering. I'm suffering from the illusion that the way I feel right now is permanent and will never change. I'm suffering from fixating on the details that I think are necessary to the upcoming transition. I'm suffering from a rising anxiety centered around a feeling of not-enoughness. I'm suffering from my own PR. So, technically, discipline can de-escalate my suffering. Believe me, I thought about going out and finding someone to discipline, til I remembered that the kind of discipline she means is self-discipline. If I can get myself to consistently do something I love, who *knows* what might happen!

I've tried as many encourage-self-to-write experiments as most overweight, over privileged Americans have tried diets. None of them have worked. But I mean to end my suffering by seeing the true nature of things (pretty Buddhist in that department) and by disciplining myself to do something I love doing and somehow manage to constantly talk myself out of. My thanks to Lee Harrington for the idea that writing when it's scary is good, and Janet Hardy's reminder that one can get hooked on writing scary.

It may suck.
It may be boring.
It may be irrelevant.
It will certainly be irreverent (either everything's sacred or nothing is, like Einstein said about how you can live your life--like everything's a miracle or like nothing is).

Tellya what. I'll just write, and not worry so much about saying the right thing in the right place and see how it goes, mkay? At least I did it today, and I liked it. That bodes well for tomorrow.