home is where the heart is

Tears well up in my eyes, I cry and let them spill out, softly. I use the back of my forefinger and wipe them away, but still they spill. I cry as I am touched by a story of love and loss. I cry as I listen and remember all the young men lost: Peter, Butter, Mario. Young gay men I once knew who blazed their way out of the closet, drunk and happy as they found they could claim what they had always hidden. All these young men are dead, lost to a disease of sexuality and love making. All these young men are gone now and I miss them and I missed the opportunity to connect with them. These stories are my apology for not connecting when I had the chance. These stories are my squares in the AIDs quilt. I keep looking for their names, but have yet to see them.

I remember Butter clearly but I can’t remember his real name. We called him Butter after that silly margarine commercial that kept insisting that Parkay margarine was ‘butter.’ We laughed and joked with one another. I don’t think the name had any deep meaning, it just got us to laugh. We got high in the high school parking lot and in parks and in the woods and anywhere we could find privacy. We cut school and went to the beach as often as possible. We smoked a lot of pot, drank lots of cheap wine and beer, whatever we could get a hold of. Some of us kept our grades up knowing that we needed to get into college to escape this life, but we partied as much as we could in the interim. Enjoying our youth and freedom, we bellowed and stumbled our way into the world.

Butter came out to us in 11th grade. Of course, we all knew he was gay but no one had dared name it before. He had been teased for his femininity all his life. Our small clique of tolerant liberal-minded dope-smoking young women were safe friends for a young gay man. We were certainly safer than the high school boys. We wouldn’t beat him up for his sexuality. Butter had lived with that threat since grade school. He could try out his newly-named sexual identity with us. One day he told me jubilantly that he had a boy friend. He invited me to meet this young man. I remember cutting school and going to the boyfriend’s home, a young soldier on shore leave. Butter and the boyfriend were in bed together. I did my best to be cool. We smoked a joint and laughed. I felt awkward, mentally adrift, like when I get off an airplane in a country I’ve never been too before, where I don’t speak the language and I am terribly jet-lagged. I was confused and searching for a bearing or a landmark. I don’t know if I ever found one. I don’t remember seeing him much after that encounter. I think he ran away shortly after this, fleeing the taunting and torture of high school for the freedom of LA gay scene. I know we lost him to the bath houses and the sexual indulgence of the late seventies. I wish I could hear his story now. I imagine him at 17, discovering he could sell his body on the streets of West LA. I imagine him a play thing for an older man. I imagine him struggling to support himself and being drunk on the pleasure of gay community in 1976. I know we lost him to AIDs, someone told me that long ago. I know the bookends of his story, the beginning and end, everything in between is my imagination.

Mario passed through our circle of friends more briefly at the end of high school. He was flamboyant and fun, creative and edgy. We played word games and dressed wild and went to the Hollywood Bars to cruise. In those days underage women could easily get into bars and we could usually sneak a young man in with us. It probably would have been even easier to talk Mario in if he had been openly gay at that time. He provided some protection when things got out of control and we were in dicey situations. My friend Amanda stayed close with Mario through the years and I’d see him occasionally when I went home to LA to visit. Mario was successful and very out the last time I saw him. Running a swank restaurant and living the hip fashionable life. Living high and happy it seemed. And then the next time I returned to LA, perhaps a year later, he was gone. It seemed to happen so suddenly but it was only the time lapse of my occasional trips to LA. Another friend had slipped away without my staying connected. Again I had not said goodbye.

Peter was a soul mate of mine. We were so much alike. He didn’t come out to me until long after we graduated. We were both so busy looking good and trying to keep face with one another that I was probably one of the last to know. In fact we once tried to date in high school. We would have made a great looking couple he and I. But there was no spark, no attraction between us. We tried, but we were just good friends and no more. I remember another friend, Alvaro, who came to Liz and I to tell us that Peter had made a pass at him. Alvaro was disgusted and angry. I didn’t want to believe it, I knew that Peter had dated other women from time to time. He was good looking and not stereotypically feminine as Butter was. Peter didn’t ‘act gay.’ Alvaro’s story broke up that circle of friends. We scattered into a new constellation because Peter and Alvaro couldn’t be together any more. We all went off to college or to start our lives. Peter went to UC Santa Barbara. We heard odd stories through the grapevine. He was living with an older woman, a ‘sugar momma.’ I didn’t really understand that, but it was the late 70s and early 80s and we all tried various sexual configurations to see what worked. It wasn’t my place to judge Peter or ask too many questions. We drifted apart through graduate school and early adulthood, making our way into careers and respectability. We met again in the early 90s when I moved to the Bay area. Our old friend Liz was living there too, with her sweetheart Gina. I didn’t feel so confused any more with my gay and lesbian friends. In fact I got a kick out of all the art and humor they brought to my life. We lived across the street from women who were part of ‘dykes on bikes.’ On weekends a provocative gang of women wearing leather and riding Harleys would gather on our street. I was charmed by them. I liked living in a place where people could live so out and wild and comfortable. I liked living where people were so happily living on the fringes of acceptable behavior. My serious scientific life became colorful an interesting by association.

Liz had kept in touch with Peter through the years. When he heard I had moved to town, he invited Liz and I over to his house in the Haight/Ashbury District. His lover was an M.D. working with AIDs patients. I don’t remember meeting the lover. I remember Peter and how good it was to see him again. We were all putting our best faces forward. We were all looking good and trying to show off how we’d succeeded in life. It was important to us then. We were in our early 30s and we needed to be successful to be okay with ourselves. Peter seemed to be making good money as a landscape architect and he was living in a beautiful luxurious home with his lover. He looked successful and happy. I didn’t know he was sick and surviving on experimental medicine cocktails. He invited me to a Cinco de Mayo party in the North Bay where his Dad was living. I went looking forward to seeing his family again. I remember chopping cilantro for the salsa and feeling so at home again in a Mexican family, in a family that prided itself on its climb out of the barrio with children that had successfully crossed over into the white community. Peter and I were both trophy children of passing. Peter and I had both successfully made our way through the white academic world and into white middle/upper class culture. We were children our sweat shop grandparents could be proud of. Peter took me to see his brother Richard whom I had dated for quite some time in high school. It wasn’t a healthy relationship, mainly sex and drugs to tell the truth, but we tried as best we could to figure out something functional and appropriate to our age and time. By the time I saw Richard again, I had been sober for many years. But Richard was lost in his alcoholism and drug addiction. He was literally lost in the backwoods of Marin county and hiding from us all. He said hello to me and then retreated back into the woods. He wasn’t successful, he hadn’t passed as Peter and I had, and so he hid from us and we felt sorry for him. My heart yearned to connect with him again. My heart ached to talk and say “hello, tell me your story, what happened.” My heart didn’t feel any more successful than he. But I didn’t know how to reach out and make that connection through the haze of his alcohol or my accomplishments.

That was the last day I saw Peter. I meant to call so many times afterwards. A year or two went by as I was lost in my career and my push to be successful in the big academic world of Berkeley. I was much too busy to keep up the connection with an old high school friend. I was caught in the ‘publish or perish’ chronically overworked culture of self-important academia. When I finally called Peter again I talked with his boyfriend. Peter had died of AIDs just a month before I called. I had missed the opportunity to say goodbye. I had missed the opportunity of a true heart talk. I had missed sharing the real stories behind our facades. I miss Peter dearly. I wish I had heard his story. I wished that I had listened in high school when he hit on Alvaro. I wish I had asked him to talk to me then. Too many missed opportunities to really connect; too many taken opportunities to impress one another with our success. Our hearts were as deeply retreated in the woods as was Peter’s brother, afraid to tell each other the truth, afraid of being open and vulnerable because we knew each other’s truth so clearly: the need to cross over, the need to succeed, the need to look good, the need to impress others so that we could believe in ourselves. Peter and I were carbon copies of one another on the inside. I guess that is why I miss him so much.

Holly Near’s song, ‘Home is where the heart is’ plays in my head again and I cry. I can’t help myself thinking of Peter, Butter and Mario. Others too, but those three remain the closest to my heart. I mourn the lost connection, the lost opportunities to listen. A friend sings ‘Home is where the heart is’ at church and my sons sit beside me and I wonder what they think and understand. I realize that in spite of my desire to be liberal and open minded I stumble with my language. As my older son enters adolescence I stumble over my words and the assumptions they include. I don’t know if my son is gay or straight. He has never told me who he is attracted too. In fact, he denies all attraction to anyone all together. One of his friends betrayed him and told me that Gabe had a crush on some young girl, and yet, I don’t know if I believe it. He isn’t pining for girls, yet. He isn’t girl crazy. And there goes my assumption hidden gently in that ‘yet’ – ‘he isn’t pining for girls, yet’ implies that someday he will. I find myself making those kinds of slips, not knowing how to avoid the assumption of heterosexuality. I don’t know how to use the language in a way that says – ‘whomever you fall in love with; whomever you are attracted to’ I don’t know how to introduce sexual education in a way that isn’t heterosexist because heterosexuality is the only sexuality that I know. In my desire to be open and liberal and inclusive I stumble over my words and have to apologize for myself. I have to apologize and say, “You know that song we heard at church, what did you think of that?” … “I want you to know that it is okay, whomever you love. It is okay and I love you for who and all that you are.” I want to open the door so that my son can be safe regardless of whom he loves. I want to open the door to adulthood and sexuality in a safe and loving way. I don’t want sex to kill him. When I came of age, I ignorantly thought anything I could catch from sex was treatable with penicillin. Peter, Butter and Mario, are the causalities of our shared ignorance. I write this letter to own my ignorance. I write this letter to help myself climb out of it, to remind myself that ‘home is where the heart is,’ to open my heart to whomever my son might be. I write this letter because love is big and hearts are too easily broken. I write this letter because life and love are precious and vulnerable. I write this letter to remind myself of what is important.

Vajraland is being transformed into my dance journal. I realize that dance is what fixates my mind. I wake up thinking about dance. I dream about dance. I fill as much of my time with dance as I can manage. The cells of my body ache for it and my mind plays around it and my spirit soars in the dance. So here I am, I awoke again this morning thinking of dance and I will write about dance and share my dance life with you.

I took my sons to the Eugene jam yesterday. The week before Christmas, all the university students have gone and we are down to the ‘hard core’ contact addicts: David K, David S, David L, Josh, Heidi, Elizabeth, another woman whose name I do not know and myself. I was so appreciative of the group welcoming the boys. Yes, my dances were interrupted and that was okay because I had the deep joy of watching the boys engage in this dance I love. Summer threw himself right into the middle of the fray. He sat on people, he got picked up, he crawled around under people’s feet, he crawled over, under and through the mosh pit dance. He fits right in with his big strong stockiness, his mess of uncombed blonde hair, his joy of life and play. I was deeply grateful that the dancers welcomed the boys and brought them into the dance.

The biggest difficulty for me, mom, is that Summer is a loud child and the dance is silent. It is probably the strongest rule of the Eugene jam, silence. Don’t talk on the dance floor unless it is about safety. The only words are the occasional outburst of pleasure ‘cool’ or ‘wow’ or ‘beautiful’ or simply ‘nice’ or the stop, uuf, aaah that expresses danger or injury. Summer is much more animated and has a habit of narrating his life rather loudly. Perhaps silence will be something that he can learn from the dance as well.

And so, the boys learn to play with the big boys and roll around and become one with the dance and mom is happy in her bones and wakes up wanting to write a thank you letter to David K and that is what I will do next. I will write my thank you letter and wish David Happy Holidays and then go finish my holiday grocery shopping and bake cookies. It is a good day.

meaning and meaningless

In the path month I have had the opportunity to watch women legends perform: Deborah Hay at a small venue in Seattle and Nancy Stark Smith with Peter Bingham in Eugene. I loved watching these mature women’s bodies move. I was inspired by their grace, their stories, t heir power, their, beauty. I was inspired by women who dance rather than retire. My heart ached at the beauty and power of their movements, at the swish of the long braid, at the flutter in a voice.

Watching Deborah Hay was like being a voyeur into a life I could not understand. She showed us everything of herself. She narrated a life in abstract. In the first performance she was dressed in a conservative satin suit, using the entire stage and moving from place to place, telling a story. I kept searching for the meaning of the dance but not understanding. I kept feeling like she should be naked, that she had exposed so much of herself that she shouldn’t be wearing any clothing. It felt like she had let us in to glimpse that deep place where life cannot make sense and all our struggles to put meaning on it are moot in the end.

And then after a short intermission she showed us a video of a dance titled Beauty. The dance was of a beautiful aging body moving quite slowly around the stage. An audience member came onto the stage, Deborah stood in the back center, back to the audience. Standing very still Deborah had the woman undress her and leave her clothing in a neatly folded pile. This wasn’t about overt sexuality, it was about being 100% exposed and letting the beauty and the absurdity of the human body out into the daylight. A second film of the same dance played, but in the second film she had on a ‘blade runner-esque’ costume. Deborah read a libretto about Beauty as the films played. She drew a map of the dance and the meanings she was dancing. She exposed her heart and thoughts and still I did not understand, still I felt like voyeur.

Nancy Stark Smith and Peter Bingham performed with Michael Vargas and improvisational pianist as well as with the lighting artist. Their dance was titled Baseline. They performed trio, duet, solos, parallel solos. The pianist was another dancer, sometimes performing alone and sometimes a equal part of the dance. This life was more understandable to me. It was the story of people coming together, dependent upon one another, then falling apart, standing alone, struggling with finding grace alone, coming together again. Relationships that mature through periods of struggle and separation. This dance brought the meaning of the story to relationship for me.

And perhaps that is a story for my life as well. I need, I crave those moment alone. I ache for the illusion of silence. I ache for the stillness of those moments in the morning before anyone in the house arises and I have the illusion of seclusion. And yet the seclusion only has meaning for me because I know it is an illusion. My family is always here tugging at my awareness. I know that I am not alone at all. No matter how far away I am from my family, the strings of this attachment pull on my heart. I cannot find rest from that call and so I return and reengage in that dance. Right now, as I try to finish this piece of writing my husband is coming out of the shower and will soon come to tell my his plans for the day. My 8-year-old hammers on the bins of Legos and other toys that fill this family room and I ask him to quiet down. My 11-year-old tries to sleep in the room next door and I try to protect him from the noise of his brother. There is no real silence in my life. There is no being alone. And the meaning of my life is construed in these relationships to which I return again and again.

gotcha

We dance and fall into the rhythm of the music and our heart beats. We dance and play and fall into a creative space that is all about motion. Sometimes the music lifts us up and holds us in a spin of joy and sometimes it calls us to shake our booties and get down. Sometimes we dance without music inspired by each others presence, by the flow of time and the brush of our partner’s hair and the sound cars passing by on the street.

In these times when we have surrendered everything to the movement and to our creative flow there are ‘gotcha’ moments. Moments of sure pleasure or joy, moments that cause our heads to turn and cause us to laugh and break out of what we were doing. If we are performing we walk through those moments of absurdity and audience laughs as they witness the absurdity of joy, life, humaness. When we are just playing on a Sunday morning they break the rhythm and flow of the dance. The ‘gothchas’ change the direction of what we are doing by calling up our awareness like the ringing of a bell. They are the finger pointing at the moon that tells us we are humans: humans aware that we are playing; humans aware that we are ridiculous; humans aware that we are dancing; humans aware that we are vulnerable creatures seeking joy and pleasure and love.

There are ‘gotcha’ moments in ‘real life’ too. Sometimes they are absurd. Sometimes they are profound. They call us directly into the moment and shift our perspective. They happen on the street when we witness someone in true pain or in true joy. The happen in a moment when two people recognize the same absurdity instantaneously. They happen when emotion is real and raw and unhidden. They happen more frequently on the dance floor than in ‘real life.’ I allow myself to be vulnerable on the dance floor. I allow myself to seek what I desire and to give what others desire. I look into the eyes of my partner and I see the depth of who they are and I see our ability to play and create and I am struck with deep love. And that is enough to get me through each day.

why I dance

This morning there is that deep lovely ache in my flesh that reminds me that I danced for 3 hours yesterday. I entered that sacred room with about 20 others. Meshi chose music for us and we dropped into a space of relating without words. We dropped into the space of exposing our deepest desires, giving and receiving from deep in the core of muscle and bone. We were sexy and silly and joyous and sad and real. We allowed ourselves to be seen. We smiled that deep smile of recognition that arises when one soul sees the truth of another. We fell into each others arms and we graced each other with our true selves.

I dance to let the creative juice seep out of my pours. I dance to feel beautiful. I dance to stay healthy. I dance to connect with the hearts and flesh of other sacred beings. I dance to break the rules in a healthy way. I dance to watch the beauty arise in others. I dance because I have no choice anymore. It is what I do. I dance to dance.

A deep primordial need is filled in me by dancing. I feel full and satisfied and at peace. I don’t need anything else. I drive home on the freeway and pass between the Outlet Mall and the Wal-Mart. There are long lines on the freeway trying to get into those parking lots. Jay (my husband) comments that it feels like driving by the penitentiary. But this is a penitentiary that people are choosing to drive into. This is the penitentiary of false abundance. This is the penitentiary of feeding yourself with instant gratification. This is the penitentiary of stuff desire. Acquiring leaves us feeling empty afterwards. Acquiring leaves us always wanting more. Acquiring leaves us perpetually unsatisfied.

Creating fills us up. Creating satisfies.