Well, I’ve had this “gender and sexuality” category on my sidebar since I opened this site, and it’s still the skinniest category there. It’s a topic I want to talk lots about – that’s why I put the category up in the first place – but I’m not quite sure where to begin. I’ve found it much easier to just put it off.

One of the thoughts I’ve been working with in the last year is the idea that sexuality and spirituality are somehow connected – maybe fundamentally so. And maybe when one’s sexuality is wounded or stifled or stuffed into boxes, one’s spirituality can’t help but become these things as well.

I grew up in a religious culture where bodies weren’t particularly celebrated. Modesty was. Dancing, in my denomination, was historically considered sinful, and though the younger generations no longer believed it to be so, the older generations cultivated a culture where bodies weren’t often free to move or flow or express emotion through much more than stiff hugs or formal handshakes. Sex was rarely, if ever, mentioned in conversation – especially not in the context of humor. When it was, everyone got squirmy and uncomfortable, and even felt a little hostile toward the person who brought it up.

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All fall I’ve spent my Monday evenings in the dance studio of a local high school, learning Tai Chi. Part of the class time is spent doing “Chan Si Gong,” or groups of repetitive exercises that are the building blocks for the movements of the actual Tai Chi form – the choreographed stuff you sometimes see groups of people doing in parks (or, in the case of movies and commercials, on beaches or the tops of gorgeous mountains). At the end of class we spend time doing meditation exercises (Qigong) that leave me so peaceful I practically float, rather than walk, back to my car.

My instructor is a remarkably gifted teacher. I’ve watched him introduce new movements with such an intuitive sense for what will be difficult for people, and what will need to be repeated many, many times for us to “get it.” I’ve watched him introduce concepts that we practice for a number of weeks before he gently helps us see that we’ve been doing the movements slightly wrong the whole time. I can tell that there is wisdom and intention even in this delayed “enlightenment”; were he to try to fine-tune everything from the very start, we would be overwhelmed and give up. We need a chance for our bodies to get used to new movements before the movements can advance toward their full potential. Like baby steps, I guess.

I love this class. I love the slow, repetitive movements. I love the freedom I feel to mess up and take a long time to “get” something. I love the acceptance and even love of our bodies that flows around the room – people of all shapes and sizes and weights and ages, doing gently what their bodies will allow them to do. There is no set standard we’re pushed to attain. There is no self-conscious laughter or posturing. There is silence, and the steady, gentle voice of our instructor, pushing us when we’re ready, backing off when we need time to just repeat things a hundred times, giving us encouragements every so often that mastery of these skills takes years and years, and it’s really fine and lovely to be at whatever skill level any of us happens to be at.

The whole experience leaves me feeling hugged and loved. And more gentle with myself and other people in the rest of life.
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Just read this that connects very much with my last post. So beautiful. Thanks, Blue.

Rain and wind are howling outside right now, pulling leaves from trees that haven’t had the chance to show their autumn colors yet. Cozy at my desk, I’m living outwardly what I’m longing for inwardly: stillness at my center, though storms of thoughts and questions rage around inside the rest of me.

Sunday a different storm passed through the area – less violent, less wet – and brought my mind over and over again to college days, when I lived in Oregon, and sputtering clouds marched through regularly (in fall, and really most of the year), along with spots of sunlight and golden leaves dancing on the wind. I got all nostalgic for some of the things I loved most about college, and noted that those things intersect well with what’s been on my mind of late.
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Well, it looks like I’m out $400 because of a mistake a mechanic made on a car repair I had done last week. That may be pennies to some people, but to our household budget, it’s a small fortune. The guy supposedly repaired a transmission oil leak, but then my transmission proceeded to develop an uncomfortable lurch every time I decelerated toward a stop, so I took the car back and a different guy at the shop looked to see – you guessed it – transmission oil still leaking. But this time it was around a very un-artistic smear of tar that the first mechanic had slopped over the real leak once he saw that oil was still flowing after the initial repair. He had conveniently not told me about this smear, or the unrepaired leak that it was intended to stop up…the “repairs” for which I had gone and paid $400.

The story goes on and on – trips back to the same shop, trips to a different shop, conversations with a very shifty-eyed original mechanic who of course doesn’t want to admit that he didn’t take enough time initially to correctly diagnose the problem. I haven’t got my money back, and I now have to pay $610 (to a different shop, of course) to repair the part of the transmission that’s actually been the problem all along.

But the point I want to make here isn’t about all these specifics (though I admit it feels good to vent on them a bit). It’s rather about the general idea of what to do with feelings of being wronged. And both being and feeling helpless to get the wrongdoer(s) to apologize or right the wrongs in any way.

How do I keep from allowing experiences like this to control me – to darken my mood and fill me with vengeful thoughts and less-than-complementary stereotypes of the entire group of people to which my wrongdoer belongs (in this case car mechanics)? Being wronged makes it feel so justified and appropriate to demonize individuals and groups. And to nurse bitterness, furrowed brows, and dark, grumpy clouds over one’s head. I know I’m not alone in this (think 9/11, think race relations, think Israel/Palestine, or any of the “isms” that women and gays and people of color and the elderly chafe so hard against). It feels terrible to be wronged, and pretty darn good, at least on one level, to feel righteously indignant.

I have no eloquent word to speak to this issue right now (frankly, I’m still mad). But I’m pretty sure that bitterness and vengeance aren’t things I want to spend my energy on. So what does one do, in response to being wronged, as well as in a more ongoing, lifestyle way, to be authentically human without getting stuck in the bitter, dissonant parts of that very authenticity?

Is this a theme I keep returning to?…

I take a day trip through California’s Coastal Range:
rolling hills golden with dry grass
scattered with crumbling rocks and gnarled trees.
It’s late afternoon and everything
bronze in the lowering sun.

I love these hills –
the softness of their curves,
the vastness of their open spaces,
the constancy of their presence,
holding me, enfolding me,
enfolding all of us in our little metal boxes,
winding our way through them.

Looking up and out, my instinct is a surge
of gratitude.
“Thank you. Thank you,” I say inside,
not knowing to whom.
A stripe of pain streaks through
the wonder in my soul
as I think on this.
Is God a conscious being
as I was taught?
Or an impersonal force?
A construction of human minds and yearnings?
Every option is riddled with
things I want
and don’t want to be true.

“I’m here,” I hear, my gaze on golden hills transfixed.
“We’re here.”
What can I make of this singular? This plural?
Mysterious reassurances.

Ahead the gentle curves are
penetrated by an enormous chunk of
earth from deep below,
its horizontal layers turned
vertical in their thrust toward air
and light.
Something far more ancient,
yet here, also new,
confronts the weathered hills’ monotony.

A picture of the movement
in my soul?

Windmills spinning where hills meet sky
speak more to me of movement
in the otherwise stillness
of the landscape.
Around a bend a power plant
converts their wind to that which
lights and warms and energizes:
the blood of cities,
pulsing through miles of wire veins
that start here:
in the golden wasteland
of silent, stolid hills.

Barrenness –
suffering, yearning,
wounds, confusion, losses,
the silence of a Holy
I’ve wished more deeply than life itself
would speak –
this barrenness, the windmills whisper, can be a spring,
life-sustaining blood at pulse from its center,
its heart.

I assent, but not gladly.

The hills in my rearview mirror are pink now
in the setting sun
as the freeway lanes multiply
and all around are overpasses
skyscrapers
airplanes crisscrossing the darkening sky.

In a sea of crawling taillights I feel strangely held.
You hem me in, behind and before
instinctually rises.
Golden hills now only inner rollings,
soul enfolding,
I inch my way toward Home.

I’ve just spent time this evening reading more of Pirsig’s sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, called Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, and came across a couple of passages that trigger many of my recent religion-related thoughts.

In one of these passages Pirsig is reflecting on the ways any society collectively works to uphold its ways of understanding reality. A collective worldview becomes a standard that trumps any individual’s experiences that challenge that worldview. Pirsig describes what has happened when a “student of scientific objectivity,” for example, has come across data that challenges the scientific assumptions he’s been making: “Wherever the chart disagreed with his observations he rejected the observation and followed the chart. Because of what his mind thought it knew, it had built up a static filter, an immune system, that was shutting out all information that did not fit. Seeing is not believing. Believing is seeing.”

Pirsig continues: “If this were just an individual phenomenon it would not be so serious. But it is a huge cultural phenomenon too and it is very serious. We build up whole cultural intellectual patterns based on past ‘facts’ which are extremely selective. When a new fact comes in that does not fit the pattern, we don’t throw out the pattern. We throw out the fact. A contradictory fact has to keep hammering and hammering, sometimes for centuries, before maybe one or two people will see it. And then these one or two have to start hammering on others for a long time before they see it too."

Here’s his most pithy next line:

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