GOD'S COCK

Some days lessons lie around every corner. Browsing a used book store recently, I happened upon a book of Eastern European fairy tales. It includes a story called "God's Cock." This title delights me. As both a chicken enthusiast and as a gay man, I find the idea of God's cock, um, divine.

According to the Serbian fable recounted in the book, God sees the earth is barren and sends a cock to make it livable. Right away, this divinely empowered rooster rolls a powerful egg out of a cave. The egg cracks. Out of it flow seven rivers to water the earth and make of it a paradise. The landscape grows lush, green. Animals arrive, and people.

God's cock watches over the human beings. He spreads his wings over the earth. He crows at regular intervals. He wakens the people at sunrise, signals mealtimes, work times, when to rest, when to sleep.

For me, a cock's crow represents one of the joys of country living. But not everyone feels this way. The people in this story grow tired of listening to God's cock. They want to make their own decisions about how to order their days. They pray God to remove the offending creature. God answers their prayers and banishes the Great Rooster in the Sky from paradise.

Before he leaves, the cock flies down and crows this warning, "Beware the ocean!" 

Alarmed, the people send a watchman to the top of a nearby mountain to keep an eye out for the ocean they've been warned against. There is no ocean to be seen, but the watchman dutifully trudges up the mountain every day.

Without God's cock to wake them up and keep them on track, the people eventually grow lazy, bitter, mean and greedy. In the end—their end—they bring about the destruction of their own paradise.

They break wide open the divine chicken egg. They don't want to lug water from here to there. They figure if they break the egg, water will flow evenly all over the land, no need to carry it from the rivers. 

At first this seems to work. But the water keeps coming and coming until it forms an ocean in which they all drown. Their own greed destroys them. The danger is within. The sole survivor is the watchman on the mountain. 

I shudder as I finish the story. My own nation courts ecological disaster, races through natural resources like there is no tomorrow. Maybe there won't be. Every day I do my part to chip away at the egg. What am I thinking?

This is one way I read the story.

On another level, the story says to me, "God sent you a cock for a reason. Listen to what it has to say. Pay attention." 

For many years I lived as if I didn't have a cock, as if what I had between my legs had nothing to say to me. Sure, it grew hard at the thought of men, but I discounted and ignored the implications of this message. I knew what church, mother and wife demanded of me. Why should I listen to what some cock has to say? I chose to suppress, deny, go numb/dumb. The enemy is within. 

And don't think the matter has been settled entirely in my favor. I continue to wrestle with a strong streak of repression.

Hearing this, a friend tells me he faces the opposite challenge. "My problem is I think with my little head instead of my big one," he says. "I recently had a breakthrough. I've committed myself to slow down, breathe and think with my big head before taking any action."

We are all different. Maybe this is why one of the two admonitions scribed on the temple of Apollo was, "Know thyself." Maybe this is why the other was, "In all things, moderation."

Maybe this is why we are gifted with bodies—and cocks—and good books in the first place. Do we know? Can we listen? Will we understand?

THAT MAY BE A MIRACLE YOU'RE (NOT) SEEING

I see miracles every day. Every day. I am in touch with the miraculous, hold it in my hands. Oh, I go looking for miracles--you bet I do. Stumble after them in the dark sometimes. Other nights, I shine a flashlight in the nests, reach in and take the eggs I find there. Eggs, the everyday miracles that populate my world. Eggs, amazing containers of possibility and life—breakfast, too.


Maybe I have a low threshold for wonder. Maybe not.


Each evening I gather the dozen or so eggs our hens have laid that day. Our mixed-breed chickens lay eggs in an assortment of colors, sizes and shapes. Some eggs are, well, egg-shaped. But others are pointy, roundish, squat or as near rectangular as an egg can get. Some have thin thin shells, others are almost hammer-hard. Colors range from white to beige, ecru to ochre. I've learned to associate certain eggs with particular hens. Mrs. Lapinski lays long white missiles, thin and pointy at both ends. Now in her dotage, CeeCee lays wrinkled, light brown beauties with what look like vertical stretch marks. One unidentified hen drops gargantuan bombshells. You'd think she'd be easy to spot—find the stiff-legged hen walking about with a look of perpetual stupefaction. Apparently she's in stealth mode.


It takes but a moment for a hen to stand, squeeze her pelvic muscles and allow an egg to gently drop onto a bed of straw. She usually climbs into the nest well in advance of this final production, however. Settles in, sits quietly, bides her time. The process began 18 to 36 hours earlier when her body released an egg cell into her oviduct where it could be fertilized by the rooster. Layers of white formed around the nascent yolk, then a membrane, last of all, the shell. The miracle of life in so humble a casing.
After laying the egg, the hen cackles to announce her success to the world around. The higher her status, the more likely the rooster and other hens will echo and amplify her cry. Me, if I'm within earshot, I'll echo anyone's cackle.


Despite what a rooster might tell you, a hen will lay eggs whether or not he's in the picture. In his absence, her eggs will be infertile. Great for breakfast, but no little chick will ever hatch from them. Most store-bought eggs fall into this category. Commercially-raised hens may go their whole short lives without ever seeing a rooster. Our hens should be so lucky. They lay fertilized eggs; our rooster sees to that. He never tires of sexual activity, goes at it almost every chance he gets. Let him mount a hen, bend his cloacae to hers, spray his misty sperm, and the egg she lays will contain the potential for life.


Take that fertilized egg from the nest, refrigerate it, and nothing more exciting than omelets will happen. Keep it consistently warm in an incubator or under a broody hen—one whose hormones have kicked in, convinced her she wants to be a mother—and in 21 days a chick will hatch from it. It never ceases to amaze me.


You've seen the inside of an egg. There's no chick in there. Only a big blister of yellow pus floating on a clear sea of slimy snot. How such glop and goo can be transformed into a living creature, a wobble-legged chick, wet, blinking, bedraggled, now dry, fuzzy and fluffy, ready to run, scratch and come to mother's call--how such a thing can be boggles my mind. This is the stuff of miracle.


It happens every year about this time out in our coop. Out of nothing, something. From snot and pus, peeping cheeping life. Happens out of sight, deep inside. Transformation and change.


Reminds me of the coming out process. 


Reminds me more may be going on inside at any one time—inside me, you, or anyone else—than anyone could ever guess. Even now, today, a miracle may be hatching.

DEAR BULLY

Here's a question for you: what is it that ultimately defines us, says who and what we are? Is it how we look? Act? What we say? Think? What we believe in? Value? 

And who does the defining anyway? We ourselves? Are we whoever and whatever we say we are? (I can't altogether think so. When I was a child, I declared I was a kitten and when I grew up I was going to be a cat. This pronouncement no more made me feline than my fervent belief I was heterosexual male made for a happy marriage to a woman.)

What then, do others get to define us? They try, certainly. Every social group sets rules and expectations for its members' behavior—and consequences for failure to measure up. Yet to be human is to be a walking set of contradictions and mystery. We each have a hard enough time getting a handle on who we are as individuals. How can we pretend to define who and what another person is? But others do hold the power to define us, don't they—in the end, we become whatever memories they carry of us after we're dead and gone. 

So I ask you, Kurt, what or who is it that determines what we are? I was 14 when you started in on me. "Jeezo," you labeled me. "Fag," "pud," "queer." I didn't know what those words meant. I didn't want to know. I knew you didn't intend them kindly. Whatever they meant, they didn't jive with my Sunday School award for perfect attendance. Didn't jive with how I wanted to define myself: good church boy, obedient Christian, godly teen.

I prayed for you, of course. Prayed you'd go directly to hell. Prayed your arm would snap next time you pressed me against the wall, next time you thrust your hand under my chin, pushed my head back so I could see only the ceiling, had to look heavenward from whence came no help.

Every school day you tormented me. I can still feel the jibes of your tagalong henchmen, hear the snickers of my classmates. I often felt helpless, hapless, humiliated at your hands.

I wonder which affected my sense of self more, your actions or my inaction? To what extent did I participate in my own abuse by allowing you to treat me as you did? Was I so helpless as I imagined? Under your tutelage, I came to see myself as a spineless loser, stupid sap, human push-around. What recourse did I have? Over and again I appealed to God without effect. I tried to tell my parents what was going on. How to explain, "Mom, Dad, your oldest son is the laughingstock of the school, the scum at the bottom of the barrel"?

I let myself be defined by your words and actions. 

What about you? I suspect you were defined in part by how you looked. You were the one dark face in a sea of lily-white. How was that for you? I never asked.

Were you unleashing on me pent-up anger you couldn't blast at your friends? You had friends, right? You lettered in golf—didn't that put you in the rich kids' club? Maybe not. Maybe doors were closed to you; maybe in a thousand prickly ways you were told you didn't belong. Was that it? Or were you lashing out at something in me you didn't like in yourself?

I'll never know. You peddling your bicycle, a couple years after graduation. A sudden roar. You never stood a chance against that Mack truck.

All that's left of you now are memories. Those, and the way I still shudder to think of you, the sour taste that rises in my mouth when I do. Some legacy, eh? I'm left to define you, Kurt, to shape you—not in the way you shaped me, but still. 

I wish I felt more kind.

This essay appeared in the February, 2012 issue of The Community Letter

NAMES I HAVE KNOWN

Donald, the name my mother wants to give me when I am born. No, my father says, they'll call him Donald Duck.

Douglas, the name they settle on. Douglas Jay. Where they get the Douglas, I don't know.

Jay, perhaps after the son of close family friends. Shortly before I am born, three-year-old Jay and his parents pull out of their driveway near the Shady Rest Motel. Two teenage boys are using Highway 2 as a drag strip. Jay and his parents never knew what hit them.

Douglas Jay Marlow! The name I hear when I am in trouble with my mother.

Number One Son. I love it when my dad calls me this.

Dougie, my name at home until I start kindergarten. What my grandmother calls me into my teenage years.

The Ugly Dougling, a name I give myself in third grade trying to redeem the deep sense I carry of being flawed, different, awkward, wrong. I want to hope against hope I might someday look into a pond and see reflected in its depths a beautiful swan rather than a place to drown myself.

Jeezo, the school bully's derisive label for me. And Eeeeeee. I don't have a clue what it means except that it's always accompanied his hand under my chin, thrusting my head up and back, baring my neck.

Queer, as in the game we play in gym class, Smear the Queer? But my classmates don't say it in a playful rambunctious tone.

Fag. Faggot. Terms I look up in the dictionary, tell myself it's not so bad to be called a bundle of sticks.

Pud, a name I know to be jeering, won't know until years later it carries derogatory sexual connotations.

Disco, not because I am a dancer. Because I have the audacity to confront my Christian college floormates about violating school rules by practicing dance steps in their dorm room. The name sticks like glue for four years.

Jay, what I call myself when I withdraw from college, go to live in Alaska.

Dewi, Welsh for David. The name I give myself after studying abroad in Wales. The name I am using when I fall in love with a man. The name I am using when I run horrified from that relationship into marriage with a woman.

Doug, the name I switch back to in order to please my wife who has always disliked Dewi.

Greg, what strangers most often call me when they are certain they know me from somewhere.

Melizza, my online persona in a role playing game, who meets and falls head over heels for a man. She/me/we don't know what to make of the very real accompanying feelings.

Bryn, another Welsh name I am enamored of. The one I give my online lover when we share our "real" names.

Dirty homosexual. Child-molester. Monster. Judas. Betrayer. Liar. Cock-sucking fudge-packer. Lowlife shit. Scum of the earth. Dog turd.Some of the nicer names I hear when I come out as a gay man.

Selfish, selfish, selfish. That's all you are, Selfish. I hear this so many times it's not funny. Never was.

Deceived of Satan, my brother's title for me. It helps him make sense of what is happening to our perfect family.

Reprobate. Damned. Consigned to hell. Delivered to Satan. Your name struck from our roll. Shunned by this fellowship of believers. So my church weighs in on how to address me.

Plaintiff, the court's cold legal term for me in reams of documents in divorce proceedings, child custody hearings, a case brought before the state court of appeals.

Bryn, the name I am using when my sense of self coalesces. The name on my revised birth certificate. On my social security card.

In Tolkein's Lord of the Rings saga Treebeard harumphs at the hobbits' names, so soon said and done. "In my culture, our names tell our story," he says. I add 10 middle names to mine. Verbal touchstones. I include references to my children, father and grandfathers.

Rab, a name that has lived in me since childhood. Since I read Esther Forbes' novel Johnny Tremain. Rab, the older, dashing good friend who looks out for his young friend.

Rab, the new name I am now trying on, trying out, ever so slowly living into.

Beloved, the root meaning of the name David, of the name Dewi. Beloved. Be loved. My experience of living with a man whom I treasure, who affirms, supports and treasures me. Be-loved. At root, the name I have for all life, all beings, all creation, all in flux, all changing, all in their own way, time and place, loved.

This essay appeared in the January 2012 issue of The Community Letter

AN AFFAIR OF THE HEART

Blood-red Horse of Course, hairless and stuffed with cotton batting. I loved him. He was hairless because I loved him, because I'd plucked out his fur bit by bit, fuzzed it against my face and in my ear each time I lay down to sleep. He'd gone threadbare for love. Threadbare and shabby. And because he'd gone threadbare and shabby, my parents disposed of him.

I remember it this way: we took Horse of Course for a drive to the county dump. Down one long dirt road, then another, ending in an clearing ringed by pine forest. A parking area afforded space for several vehicles. I only ever saw it full at dusk. In our northern Minnesota backwoods, the dump was where the night show took place. At twilight, cars sidled in, families, young couples, old folks. Drivers parked so their headlights would shine out over the star attraction, the black bears that came to rummage through the day's leavings.

But this was daytime drama under a harsh bright sun. Dad parked the '47 Chevy atop the small rise. Nobody else there. A fire burned in one of the garbage piles below. I watched my red horse tumble over the edge, bounce down the sandy incline, land in the burning waste. I do not remember holding my mother's hand as I stood there. I do not remember feeling any tears on my face. I was two, maybe three years old.

"That never happened," my mother said, an edge to her voice, when I recounted this memory to her a year after my dad died. She and I were standing in her dining room beside a china cabinet filled with dishes, dolls, cups, gee-gaws. My husband Dave and I had trekked to southern Missouri to spend a week doing house and yard projects for her. "That never happened," she said again.

"That's the image I have in my head--Horse of Course rolling down the hill and into the fire."

"Well, it didn't happen." A long pause as she looked off into middle distance. "I wish we would have let you keep him."

I pressed the issue no further. My mother already blamed herself for my having come out gay. I figured this was another case of self-recrimination. You wouldn't have turned out like this if I had let you keep your stuffed animal. Why was I so worried about what the neighbors would think?

The lesson I learned at an early age: You cannot love what you love because you love it. You will love what we tell you to, whom we permit you to, that which we deem acceptable.

The message I hope my kids catch instead: Follow your heart. Love what and whom you will. Love matters more than anything.

Our family relocated to Indiana when I was five. Growing up, I was taught I owed my first allegiance to God, then to mother, church, family and Minnesota, in rank order. I was to trust what God and church said over what I heard anywhere else, including my own heart. Especially my own heart. "The heart is deceitful above all things," my mother said, quoting Jeremiah 17:9, "and desperately wicked. Who can know it?" Not my heart but God's word as written in the Bible served as instruction and guide.

Listen for God's voice deep within? No way. Too much like transcendental meditation, Quakers or the Moonies. Too woo woo. Too tricky to determine when it was God speaking and when it was me.

I knew it wasn't God speaking when I found myself attracted to other boys. That was the devil. That was my deceitfully wicked heart. That was sin, pure and simple, complex and tenacious. That was my ticket to hell, sure-fire assurance I would burn for eternity.

+ + +

Christmas morning the year I'd turned three, much was made over one specific package with my name on it. I tore off the paper to find a stuffed gray donkey with lonesome eyes of two large black buttons, each sewn atop a drooping oval of white felt over a larger drooping oval of red. One floppy gray ear held a small jingle bell. Pedro, read the attached nametag. Set down in writing, no questioning authority. "His name is Peed-row," my mother announced.

Peed-row carried me off on many an adventure. I did the same for him, toting him about by his deaf ear. My mother sewed that ear back on countless times. When I at last lost the ear altogether she made a replacement from the toe of a white cotton sock. By then I'd plucked about half of Peed-row's fur. During my high school days, Peed-row became my confidant, listened with a grave and soulful expression as I poured out my heart, told him about how the kids pushed me around, what names they had for me. Peed-row listened and I loved him for it. I wrote out my last will and testament, directing Peed-row be given to my brother Steve, passed on through the generations. I tucked this document behind a loose brick in the school entrance hall.

Today my brother and I are estranged over my having come out. Today Peed-row straddles the headboard of the four-poster rustic pine bed my husband and I share, presides with somber eyes over the activity of love.

+ + +

Church told me if I had faith, prayed earnestly, threw myself into the arms of God I'd be given victory over temptation. Over the allure of Frank Stassek's square chin, enormous dark eyes. My attraction to the shapely curve of Rick Scheesler's shoulders. The pull of pounding thighs as Rodney Young ran the basketball court.

I believed my same-sex attractions were not part of me. They were a foreign incursion by an power that did not have my best interests in mind. My job was to fight, conquer and overcome these desires, never to give them place or purchase in my mind or heart. I tried to resist, to rid myself of these attractions to no avail. No amount of prayer, faith, fasting, self-flagellation seemed to matter. Same-sex desire constantly reminded me what a failure I was, how far I was fallen from grace and God, how weak my will to live aright.

+ + +

My parents had allowed my year-younger brother Steve to keep Teddy even when that faithful companion was bare of all fur, missing his music box, weak in the joints. At age 8, my brother David, five years my junior, still had his much-loved stuffed bears--Pinky and Big Teddy. Then 13, I knew I was different from both brothers, deficient. I coveted whatever it was they had that made their life easier. Somewhere I'd taken a wrong turn. I fixated on the fact I'd never had a teddy bear. I put it atop my Christmas wish list. My parents were puzzled by this odd request, but obliged. I knew they had when I checked the gifts secreted in their bedroom closet. But it didn't happen, whatever magic I was hoping for when I opened that package on December 25, acted surprised. I turned the wind-up key; Rock-a-Bye Baby tinkled forth, devoid of answers. comfort. I never pulled any fur off that bear.

+ + +

At 24, I married a strong-willed woman, sure she would be my salvation on earth even as I believed Christ would be my salvation in heaven. Didn't work that-a-way. I was still tormented by the allure of men. And despised myself for it.

Deep the lesson was scribed in my soul: hate yourself for thinking, feeling, being this way. And count this hatred your highest virtue. (Hate yourself and love yourself for it? Nowadays, I count this a simple recipe for insanity.)

At the time, I didn't know how or where to find the answers I was seeking. More to the point, I didn't know how to phrase the questions.

My coming out process held several turning points. I sensed God speaking to me one Easter, believed deliverance from this lifelong curse of same-sex attraction was immanent. I swore to do my utmost to help it happen within a year. Eleven months later I stumbled into an internet message board chockablock with the stories of people who claimed to be what I had believed was impossible--both Christian and gay. Could such a cross between fish and fowl exist? Yet I recognized myself in their accounts of the lifelong struggle, the never measuring up, the deep deep knowledge that something within is flawed.

Could I be gay? No way. Yes, surely. No, unthinkable. Your answer please.

Declaring myself a gay man would end my marriage, end so many things, so many relationships. And yet I reeled from the possibility there might be a place for me in the world, a name for who I was, a reason why I felt as I did. This got my attention, whispered of life to come, of hope.

But could I square this with what God had to say in the Bible on the subject of homosexuality? No, I could not. And this stopped me cold. Almost.

How do I know if I'm gay? I put this question to the online bulletin board participants. How could I know, really and truly know? Said one respondent, "If you have to ask, you can't be gay." There. I had my answer. But it didn't ring true for me.

Another man joked that he had a sure-fire test. I emailed him privately to say I was all ears. He suggested I imagine I'd died and gone to heaven; God offers me choice of two beds--one with the most beautiful woman in the world in it and one with the most gorgeous man; which would I choose?

My heart sank. This was not the test to lay to rest all my fears. "I'd choose the bed with the man in it, no question," I responded. "But since I'm in heaven, I can't choose a sinful response, so I would know God is OK with it."

This the crux of the matter: what would God think? What would my family think? My church? Minnesota? All these people and forces who held sway over my life. Whose opinion was more important than mine.

+ + +

Family shopping trips were rare excursions when I was a boy. The September I entered Mrs. Hewitt's third grade class, my parents took all five of their children to a department store in the big city. There I was taken by one particular stuffed animal--a six foot long snake in bold magenta. Cloth eyes, red felt tongue. I made sure my parents knew how much I wanted it. "We don't have money to spend on each of you kids right now," my mother said. I nodded. I knew our family wasn't rich. Come Christmas my heart leapt to find that pink-red snake in a package under the tree, my name it. My father had purchased it on that very trip while I was across the store with my mother. Now I smile to think of my parents giving me so phallic a symbol. And my naming it Ferocious. He was soon wrapped around my arm, my neck, my chest, my affections. In childhood he served as jump rope, lariat, repelling cable and more. In my coming out I took him with me when I moved out of the house. He served as touchstone, lifeline, reminded me I am permitted sometimes to love what I love.

+ + +

In coming out I made the conscious decision to look within my heart and trust what I find there, to believe in the value of my affections, the validity of my experience. To love what I love. Ferociously. To say yes to life in the form it presents itself.

This turned my world on its ear. Family, friends, church, employer, trusted others threw me out, consigned me to hell, eyed my tumble from grace. In mind's eye I stood alone on cliff's edge, stared out over a vast wasteland, flicking flaming tongues below, wondered what would happen to me.

Life.

Life happened to me. Pain and anguish and loss and loneliness. Joy and wild gladness, healing and acceptance from members of my own tribe. Laughter and love. Yes, love happened to me, too. Came along a man when I'd had all the stuffing knocked out of me. Picked me up and held me. At my lowest ebb, loved me.

Dared I trust him? Dared love him? I listened to my heart. Yes, it said. Yes.

Yes, I said. Yes. We've been together ever since, some 16 years.

With practice and a certain long difficult repentance, I keep learning to listen to my heart and to trust the wisdom within. On my best days I experience this as living in tune with the divine, expressing gratitude and love, celebrating those times when these manifest in exuberant joy.

Other days, life sucks. Finding the grace and gumption to say "thank you" and meaning it as much as possible, this is the heart's gift. To recognize weakness, inadequacy, failure, pain and to be present to it. Accept it. Say yes.

I shall never be perfect, not in the way I once thought I was called to be. But as I listen to my heart I discover I live in a world infused with the sacred. I choose awareness as often as I remember to do so. I feel my feelings, breathe into the moment, realize I am not alone, walk in wonder, embrace mystery. Say yes.

An abbreviated version of this essay appeared in the December issue of The Community Letter

THE MONSTER AMONG US

I had never seen anything like it, of that I was sure. The creature erupted spontaneously, grew quickly, gathered strength, energy and power right before my eyes. Soon it was massive, undulating, amorphous—and hungry. It sported 100 arms, half as many heads, spoke with one voice.

Only later did I realize I have seen it many times before. No, not so much have seen as felt it, feel it. In fact, I feel its presence almost every day—almost all the time.

But back to the moment.

Last month my husband Dave and I participated in a weeklong communal gathering that welcomes people of any sexuality, orientation, gender identity or expression. Over 100 of us camped in the woods of Eastern Tennessee, ate, played, worked, danced and drummed together.

At sun set Friday evening the weather turned unexpectedly chilly. A few people ringed the communal campfire. Several more lay huddled on a nearby grassy knoll, warming themselves by group body heat. Each lay his or her head on another's belly. Some interlocked arms and legs. "Look! It's a puppy pile," said one man as he hurried to join. The clew grew larger by the minute as others followed suit.

We approached with caution. Dave had sprained his ankle and was walking with difficulty. We opted to steer clear of the frivolity, aimed instead for the fire. As we made to pass by, arms reached out grasping, beckoning. Voices called, "Join us! Join us!"

We shook our heads, smiled our apologies to the multi-limbed creature, gestured toward the fire.

"Joooooooiiiiiiiin usssssss!"

From somewhere in the deepening twilight came a single voice: "No! Don't feed it! Get away while you still can!"

We laughed, walked on over to the fire, joined a drumming circle. I tapped out a repetitive line—one and two and three and four. But I kept an eye on the mass of people on the knoll. I loved what was going on there, a spontaneous action, an event, a happening. It embodied humor, served a practical function and fostered togetherness. Plus, the participants were having a lot of fun.

"We could feel each other laugh," one of the group members told me later. "We all had our heads on each others' bellies and we could feel the ripples of laughter. Words, too. A word would just erupt and we'd all chant it in unison. We called ourselves a 'pheno-moeba.'" My informant was located on the outer edge of the group. "I guess I was the asshole of the creature," he said.

One and two and three and four. The moon rose over Short Mountain. The pheno-moeba howled in delight. One and two and three and four. I marveled at how long they kept at it. And with such enthusiasm. With their bodies, their voices, their coming together, they were creating community. They were being playful with it. They were keeping each other warm. And having a great time all the while.

One and two and three and four. A fan dancer decked out in white feathers and sequined drag came by and presented impromptu entertainment. Flashlights served as makeshift spotlights. When the show concluded the howling resumed.

Then the single voice again, this time preaching a gospel of freedom. "You are all individuals! You each have your own mind! You can think independently!"

From 50 mouths erupted one word: "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"

"WE ARE ONE!" the creature insisted. "ONE! ONE!" The prophetic voice was silenced. Night blanketed the hillside; I couldn't see if the preacher-prophet escaped or if he was pulled in and subsumed into the group mind.

One and two and three and four. I pondered what was playing out alongside me. A parable of sorts about groupthink, about the unwritten codes that pressure us to conform, walk, talk, dress, vote, buy, spend, waste same as everyone else. The call to uniformity. In the larger society and in our subculture niches, as well. The comfort and warmth of being sucked in, feeling a part of a whole. The institutions—church, family, academe, work, legal system, politics—that define, reward and reinforce acceptable behavior. And punish anything else. The voices that cry in the wilderness, speak out against the blob, the pheno-moeba of social structure, stricture, prejudice. What happens to them.

A sudden chill of recognition. Although I do not see a physical creature called Societal Pressure, I feel it breathing down my neck in nearly every aspect of life: I can't do/say/think/love/be that. What will the neighbors think? What will my mother say? Will people like me? Will I be accepted?

Dare I stand against the pheno-moeba? Do I? Will I? Will you?

UNRESOLVED ANGER IS A LEAKY ROOF

A leaky roof? Been there. Worse, not having the money to fix it. Been there, too. So I sympathized a few years back with the neighbors down the road when they tacked a blue tarp across the east end of their roof. Not always easy, living in an old house.

I like old houses. They have character, heritage. They speak soulfully to me about the human condition. I want to honor what is aged. Protect, preserve, enjoy, learn from it. Yet the aging process is not always graceful. Left untended, a leaky roof robs energy, destroys what it was meant to protect.

Unresolved anger is a leaky roof. The problem is there all the time, even if not always evident. When storms hit there's no hiding it, no time to fix it; it may only get worse. It affects more than one person.

Over at the neighbors' house, the blue tarp crackled in the summer sun, autumn wind and winter weather. When spring rains came pounding down, I hoped the family who lived there was staying dry. I didn't notice them move out, didn't know they'd gone. But as I drove past the house one spring day I was shocked to see the huge trees that lined their lane all toppled. The trees next to the house had been felled too, willy-nilly. One had crashed through the middle of the garage roof, another had smashed into the side of the house.

"Did you see what happened to that house!?" Dave asked me when I got home.

"I did. I am so sad. Looks to me like someone was angry. To cut down trees like that smacks of rage."

"Funny you should say that," Dave said. "I thought the same thing."

If old homes are to be respected, I feel even more strongly about old trees. Seeing those trees—far older than me, alive longer than whomever hacked them down—thrown over without regard, without care, ripped at something in me. We cannot do violence to another—person, plant, animal, object—without doing violence to our souls. As I see it, whoever was responsible for this destruction tore at the spirit within.

When next I drove past, the house was gone. Those huge trees, gone. Had they dug a hole, buried it all? Had they cut up the trees and hauled them away? Only a large patch of trammeled earth marked the site that once housed a farm family, their hopes, dreams, pain, sorrow, despair, joys.

Later that spring the entire place was plowed under, planted. I felt gratified to see stunted corn grow where the house had stood, where the trees had been cut down. I was glad the harvest of rage was almost nil.

The next year's soybeans grew low to the ground. Scraggly things, nothing to write home about. And I was glad. I wanted that land to be as if it were sown with salt, never again to give birth to anything, to be forever cursed. That would show them. I wanted whomever exercised such anger to pay for it the rest of his or her life. I wanted that block of land to be blighted, to stand as testimony against anger and mistreatment.

But life is stronger than my revenge fantasies.

Corn again the next year. And I had to look twice, three times, to identify the place where the trees once shaded the long summer afternoons. Life was coming back into the soil, reaching up into the plants, filling out the grain. I was disappointed.

If I can nurse a grudge, why not nature? Must life go on, take over, will to continue? If I am sad and angry, cannot the whole world be sad and angry too? And if not the whole world, why not this little patch of it? Don't the consequences of our actions reverberate through a lifetime? How can healing take place so soon?

It's been five years now. The corn grew almost consistently well across the entire field this year. Life's message to me: Let grow and move on.

Life has been reminding me lately that I carry resentment, still wish ill upon those who reacted harshly to my coming out. I don't care to hear this. I've wrapped myself in a blue tarp, done what I needed to get by. Yet this old house of me requires structural repair. And that entails the hard work of forgiveness. The sun may be shining right now—but how long before the next storm hits?

Betcha if I keep my eyes open, life will offer me today some small chance to practice forgiveness, letting go, letting grow.

This essay appeared in the October issue of The Community Letter