“A Dozen Years in Boulder” by Blake Stone
It’s 2003; I’m nineteen and at my great-grandfather’s hundredth birthday party in the “Brown House,” a farm he started with his father in the twenties. “You’re awfully social today” my grandmother tells me smiling and obviously pleased with my new friendly behavior. I had just come from snorting a bump of crystal meth off the top of the antique toilet in the dirty little bathroom that still has two faucets on the sink, one for cold water, the other for hot. I had lived in this house between the ages of three and five, and the two-story creaky hand-built structure still appears in my dreams thirty years later. I don’t remember much about that day, only that I talked to everyone, which was very unusual for me. Being a third generation only- child meant that all my relatives were at least thirty years older than me, if not several decades. My family was very small and very old; most of them are now dead. I have a cousin on my father’s side, but our families didn’t do holidays together. I do remember that at some point during the birthday gathering, Pa, my great-grandfather, stood up and recited from memory one-hundred verses of “Leaves of Grass” by Whitman. We were all very impressed but not surprised. My great-grandparents were some of the first people to go all the way through school and become college educated in that region of southern Tennessee.
Like most of my recent ancestors for the past two-hundred years or so, I was born and raised in the rolling alfalfa fields of Tennessee.
To an extent I was privileged and spoiled but also bored and lonely on seventy acres of wilderness with no neighbors or siblings. I tried out my mother’s Zen books but I also started drinking my Dad’s beer when I was twelve. I smoked weed a year later, and by the time I was an adolescent I was well into the throes of drug use and Richard Dawkins style atheistism. I read the “Skeptical Inquirer” and thought theists of any kind were idiots and increasingly selected my very few friends by their lack of subscriptions to Christian religious doctrine. At nineteen I fully knew what it was to wake up after a speed binge and not want to be living, and I was almost done with it by then. Most of the time I would have preferred not to exist at all, but I lived on the dream that I would move far away, to Boulder, Colorado, or at least go to college and not come back. In the end all this did happen, but the inter-years before I left were the hardest. I was very suicidal and without any beliefs about divinity; I made it out because I was curious about the world in a big way, and I was also convinced that things would be different when I moved away.
They say that American soldiers in the Vietnam War were addicted to heroin, but when they returned to the states most of them quit the drug without a second thought. The love of their spouses and the duties of family replaced the toil and therefore a need for the opiate. I don’t know if that is really true, but it is true in my case. Addiction is what you make of it; I never needed any kind of rehab because after the physical withdrawals, I had no interest unless it was in front of my face. At first I resisted trying any of the street drugs my friends were doing. I had even won an anti-drug essay contest, but slowly it became more fun; and I thought, a way to meet other girls. I did a lot of LSD in those days, along with ecstasy and everything else. By the time I was going to college I was done. It may sound trite, but I had no intentions of continuing my drug use and viewed it as temporary fun until I could move. I wish I could say the same for my friends at the time. But I was quite different in that I understood the culture I lived in was not mine. After the instability of puberty passed, I didn’t care about who was dating who, about football, or Jesus Christ. I was reading about world religions on the internet, and chatting with people from other countries for hours every weekend on my grandparents’ dial-up internet. Virtually none of the conversation topics people my age were into interested me in the least. I lost most of my friends who were girls after puberty because I didn’t want them to know I was gay, but also we had nothing in common, including my exorbitant drug use. I tried to date boys and be heterosexual but it never worked out, I could not fathom loving a guy as anything more than a friend. Being a horndog teenager, I used them for sex but I was usually disappointed. I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair or dress too unusually and so again and again a new boy pushed himself in front of me with a shy grin and a pocket full of money. My family was desperate for me to be straight and thus would let me go out all night with my best guy friends, who were also desperate for me to be straight. I used this to my advantage; my cover boyfriend and I would synchronize our stories of flat tires and excuses to tell our mothers so we could go party in Nashville all night and I could try to find other lesbians; I rarely did. I borrowed the IDs of older girls to get into gay clubs only to be surrounded by guys. At this time I learned to dance, and that in dancing was a kind of real freedom. Sometimes a guy who was a back-up dancer for Prince would teach me things at the all night raver dance club. I wasn’t interested in dancing with anyone and I still prefer to dance alone, but invariably the dudes I made take me there would bring me some coke and we would dance. Sometimes flattery can replace real connection, and in those days I was open to anyone that read literature and didn’t pray. In general, I’m still this way to an extent.
That I was never Christian is a big deal in a place where there are three churches on every block; so is being gay. I knew when I was 13, but chose to keep it a secret from everyone for three or four years. I didn’t really want to be gay, I thought it was something women did who didn’t like sex. While everyone was scared of being seen as a slut, I reveled in it. I felt extremely sexual and I wasn’t shy about it, but I also detested the sex I had with guys at the time. If heterosexual guys had to date other men first, and somehow hide their attraction to girls, this is how I felt. I came out a few times beginning when I was 16, and there were some violent responses (including sexual assault) but for the most part no one believed me. Lesbians weren’t real, or if they were, it was some kind of trick or sexual challenge for men. Girls still suspected I was hunting their boyfriends and guys still tried relentlessly to date me. I knew one other gay person in high school. He was like me--we couldn’t hide it. Others did hide it, but thanked me later for being open about who I am. My mother chose to believe it was a phase until I was twenty-something.
Not being Christian was perhaps worse because most non-sport extracurricular activities were church youth groups, or “x-ian brainwash groups” as I called them. My grandmother was a swim coach and I was a very good swimmer on the swim team in elementary school, but by middle school my parents made it clear they did not want to take me to practices or pay for any kind of sports. Girl Scouts was it, but even then my budding sexuality got in the way and I was forcibly separated from my best friend in the troupe when we were fourteen because we were caught being naked together. As soon as I discovered that sensuality it was taken away, and I did not find it again for a few years. Despite having no idea what a “team” really was, I made the varsity basketball team once, unfortunately my mother refused to let me play. It wasn’t until I discovered asana in my late twenties that movement beyond drugs and dancing became a major practice for me.
I cannot express enough here about how utterly alone I was as a kid. I had very few friends because most kids were afraid of my mother and found my house boring since it had no TV. Other girls were traditionally socialized and for the most part, I wasn’t. I spent a lot of time in the woods by myself, so when girls would come over to play it was very special and I would try to show them my places in the forest only to have them leave crying because they were afraid of the woods and I made fun of them for this. I loved snakes and dissecting dead animals I found. My parents yelled at each other a lot and separated a number of times before divorcing (much to my relief) when I was fifteen. My mother was a feminist but mentally ill and angry with me more than not. She was often uncontrollably violent but also believed wholeheartedly in corporal punishment. Time passed very slowly and I prayed to my future self a lot. I was specifically praying to myself in my thirties, so now that I am that future self, I am very relieved, and meditate that I am holding that younger version of myself, and this is very healing. I recall when I was sixteen I was very excited to get my first job, I became a grocery bagger at Kroger, and later I moved up to cashier. Every shift in those days my hands would start shaking after a few hours because I was not used to so much human interaction. In four short hours I would talk to more people than I had in my entire life up to that point. Because of the intense seclusion I was painfully shy at times, and it is only now that I have become something of an extrovert. I actually seek out isolation and solitude in the mountains for days at a time, whereas for some time into my mid-twenties I felt angry every time I went too far out of the city for too long. The shakes would come back and suddenly I was that person again who didn’t know how to talk to other humans.
When I moved to Boulder more than a decade ago I still had no idea of my possibilities, but there were a few things I had been waiting to try out. At twenty I knew how to make Kraft Mac & Cheese, toast, boil or scramble eggs, and “cook” Ramen noodles. Most of the time I ate frozen dinners or pizza. I tried to be vegetarian for a summer in high school but I didn’t know how to cook and I had never met a vegetarian, so I gave up after a month because I was hungry. The only person in my family that cooked regularly was my grandmother; the others were either dead, or too mentally ill. “All I want is to find a vegetarian girlfriend so she can teach me to cook,” I once wrote in my journal as a teenager imagining two beautiful nude women I didn’t know yet, dancing in a kitchen I had never been in. I feel I am now one of those women; my body is lean and muscular and I am stronger than ever before. Admittedly, the people who have taught me to cook over the past ten years have been mostly girlfriends and some housemates. I’ve gotten to learn second hand what their families taught them and from our own cooking adventures. I currently have the best diet of my entire life because I don’t eat processed foods or meats, and I have invested a lot of time and energy into finding out what my body actually needs versus what is ethical and how those two can be reconciled. Recently I have been exploring entomography to solve the problem of protein because I do not believe in killing sentient animals for more than mere survival. I read the “Conscious Cleanse” book a couple years ago and it also made an impact in the way I notice how food makes my body feel. Southern cooking and fast food was all I knew for so long, so the idea that food should be making my body feel good, that was new to me.
Yet I’ve learned a lot more than cooking in these twelve years. I came to Boulder trying to be a blank slate because everything that came before was incredibly toxic and I consciously knew this. For six years in my twenties I dated a much older woman. She was vegetarian, but more than that, a Buddhist leaning athlete who built a cabin in the San Juan Mountains on the western slope. With her, I sought out better ways of living, and this meant almost everything I did and believed in I began to question and change. I even questioned my sexuality because I was worried it was a reaction to toxic perceptions and relationships with the men I grew up around rather than an organic expression. Both my biological grandfathers were convicted rapists and I knew them and some of their victims as a kid, so I’m sure it had an impact. Yet after several years of being an adult in this body, it is apparent that this body only lusts for the supple skin and beautiful minds of females. There is no way to express the silkiness and utter sensuality of two womens’ bodies together.
As a Philosopher (and perhaps triple Aquarian), I constantly question everything, but I learned to keep this to myself in Boulder because people are sensitive here. It’s like their beliefs are their ground, but I don’t need that kind of ground. They didn’t grow up arguing religion with people, or with a mother screaming obscenities at them like I did, nor were they isolated and alone in the middle of nowhere with only books and cats that died a lot, or taught from a young age that their bodies were perfect no matter what, as I was. So, I have carefully examined my gender. According to postmodern doctrine it does seem gender is socially constructed. So what does it mean for me to be a butch woman? Or genderqueer? I’ve decided I can be any of the above. There is really no way for me to be “misgendered” somehow. I am whatever it is people think they see, and I don’t feel the need to change someone else’s language. I am masculine of center and often taken for a man, but that center is an illusion in itself. I reject the idea that there is only this binary of masculine and feminine and between the two rests the whole of our (gendered) existence. If you’re having trouble thinking about this, ponder the gender of Krishna, Iris, or Dionysus; consider the “being” that is outside our “selves.” If anything, the claim to be one gender or another falls away the minute we get any serious awareness of the metaphysical. Unfortunately, I am usually alone on this point because too often, people who are questioning their gender are the same who seek consolation from it, and to me this is like bothering to match your socks every morning, which I also don’t do. It has no meaning, no function, and only pervades a vague sense of order. Aesthetics are important to me too, but as a system of flow manifested by intuition.
My atheistism didn’t fair so well living in Boulder. A few years back my grandmother died and for a while I didn’t want to live in this world without her. I couldn’t hold down a job, talk to people normally, or really do anything but cry and sleep. No one quite understood because so many people never knew their grandmother. But for me she was my mother, the only sane caring person in my life offering consistent love and support. Now, this person is me. I’m finally on the other side of three very painful decades. I have overcome addiction, tremendous grief, and physical and sexual abuse, mostly by myself but also with the help of supportive girlfriends. Asana, writing poetry, hotsprings, and philosophy have been my therapy. I truly believe we are self-healing beings if only we are given enough resources, solace, and time to come back to ourselves and our breath. Also without the confrontation of fundamentalist Christians telling me what level of hell I was going to for my various proclivities and talents, I have been able to nurture a spirituality informed by the cycles of the Earth, my body, the Moon; the presentism of Ram Dass, the philosophies of Alan Watts, Nietzsche, Kant, Hume; the teachings of Pema Chodron, Jack Kornfield, and Boulder’s Julie Colwell; the old ways mixed with neo-paganism, and my own Goddess worship (Iris, not be confused with Isis). The practice of the eight limbs of yoga, the practice of The Middle Way, of Aristotle’s moderation or mean, and driving fast on my scooter all have their places in my life. I do not need to struggle over the question of the existence of a god just like I do not struggle over the existence of love. There is a lot of love, and maybe a lot of goddesses too. I see that we all want to be loved. We wish there could be an all powerful entity looking upon us, enforcing karma, but really there is nothing so exotic to me as to return to the Earth, enveloped in dirt and maggots. I went to CU for philosophy, but I learned a lot more just living in Boulder.
What I struggle with today is the notion that because we are privileged enough to live in this great city or in this state that somehow we are “chosen,” either by our good karma over many lifetimes, or God, or “hard work.” People justify the way they live in many ways, and I find in Boulder the “chosen one” is very popular as an excuse to be apathetic about people elsewhere, or even your own neighbors who are breaking occupancy laws just to be here. The influx and adoration of Eastern religions and philosophies in Boulder is amazing but the byproduct is an attitude of implied caste; that impoverished or struggling peoples exist because they do not have the same karma. I work in a nursing home with the mentally ill. I know it would only take a little head trauma or other illness to change my person completely, and so I am ever thankful for my life, yet I know I’m mortal and will rot and die regardless. Devoting my life to making others’ lives better now, in a tangible way everyday, this is a power we all have. Create art or whatever you do, but there is more work to do than teaching yoga in expensive studios or taking selfies. I invite everyone to the forest, to being comfortable with being uncomfortable. I probably won’t convince anyone of anything here by scolding people. Instead I say this: Remember to keep giving all you have.
[Optional poem by Whitman, totally understandable if you don’t have room to print this]
Whitman: “As I Ponder’d in Silence”
AS I ponder’d in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me, with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands, 5
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said;
Know’st thou not, there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles, 10
The making of perfect soldiers?
2
Be it so, then I answer’d,
I too, haughty Shade, also sing war—and a longer and greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune—with flight, advance, and retreat—Victory deferr’d and wavering,
(Yet, methinks, certain, or as good as certain, at the last,)—
The field the world;
For life and death—for the Body, and for the eternal Soul,
Lo! too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I, above all, promote brave soldiers.
It’s 2003; I’m nineteen and at my great-grandfather’s hundredth birthday party in the “Brown House,” a farm he started with his father in the twenties. “You’re awfully social today” my grandmother tells me smiling and obviously pleased with my new friendly behavior. I had just come from snorting a bump of crystal meth off the top of the antique toilet in the dirty little bathroom that still has two faucets on the sink, one for cold water, the other for hot. I had lived in this house between the ages of three and five, and the two-story creaky hand-built structure still appears in my dreams thirty years later. I don’t remember much about that day, only that I talked to everyone, which was very unusual for me. Being a third generation only- child meant that all my relatives were at least thirty years older than me, if not several decades. My family was very small and very old; most of them are now dead. I have a cousin on my father’s side, but our families didn’t do holidays together. I do remember that at some point during the birthday gathering, Pa, my great-grandfather, stood up and recited from memory one-hundred verses of “Leaves of Grass” by Whitman. We were all very impressed but not surprised. My great-grandparents were some of the first people to go all the way through school and become college educated in that region of southern Tennessee.
Like most of my recent ancestors for the past two-hundred years or so, I was born and raised in the rolling alfalfa fields of Tennessee.
To an extent I was privileged and spoiled but also bored and lonely on seventy acres of wilderness with no neighbors or siblings. I tried out my mother’s Zen books but I also started drinking my Dad’s beer when I was twelve. I smoked weed a year later, and by the time I was an adolescent I was well into the throes of drug use and Richard Dawkins style atheistism. I read the “Skeptical Inquirer” and thought theists of any kind were idiots and increasingly selected my very few friends by their lack of subscriptions to Christian religious doctrine. At nineteen I fully knew what it was to wake up after a speed binge and not want to be living, and I was almost done with it by then. Most of the time I would have preferred not to exist at all, but I lived on the dream that I would move far away, to Boulder, Colorado, or at least go to college and not come back. In the end all this did happen, but the inter-years before I left were the hardest. I was very suicidal and without any beliefs about divinity; I made it out because I was curious about the world in a big way, and I was also convinced that things would be different when I moved away.
They say that American soldiers in the Vietnam War were addicted to heroin, but when they returned to the states most of them quit the drug without a second thought. The love of their spouses and the duties of family replaced the toil and therefore a need for the opiate. I don’t know if that is really true, but it is true in my case. Addiction is what you make of it; I never needed any kind of rehab because after the physical withdrawals, I had no interest unless it was in front of my face. At first I resisted trying any of the street drugs my friends were doing. I had even won an anti-drug essay contest, but slowly it became more fun; and I thought, a way to meet other girls. I did a lot of LSD in those days, along with ecstasy and everything else. By the time I was going to college I was done. It may sound trite, but I had no intentions of continuing my drug use and viewed it as temporary fun until I could move. I wish I could say the same for my friends at the time. But I was quite different in that I understood the culture I lived in was not mine. After the instability of puberty passed, I didn’t care about who was dating who, about football, or Jesus Christ. I was reading about world religions on the internet, and chatting with people from other countries for hours every weekend on my grandparents’ dial-up internet. Virtually none of the conversation topics people my age were into interested me in the least. I lost most of my friends who were girls after puberty because I didn’t want them to know I was gay, but also we had nothing in common, including my exorbitant drug use. I tried to date boys and be heterosexual but it never worked out, I could not fathom loving a guy as anything more than a friend. Being a horndog teenager, I used them for sex but I was usually disappointed. I wasn’t allowed to cut my hair or dress too unusually and so again and again a new boy pushed himself in front of me with a shy grin and a pocket full of money. My family was desperate for me to be straight and thus would let me go out all night with my best guy friends, who were also desperate for me to be straight. I used this to my advantage; my cover boyfriend and I would synchronize our stories of flat tires and excuses to tell our mothers so we could go party in Nashville all night and I could try to find other lesbians; I rarely did. I borrowed the IDs of older girls to get into gay clubs only to be surrounded by guys. At this time I learned to dance, and that in dancing was a kind of real freedom. Sometimes a guy who was a back-up dancer for Prince would teach me things at the all night raver dance club. I wasn’t interested in dancing with anyone and I still prefer to dance alone, but invariably the dudes I made take me there would bring me some coke and we would dance. Sometimes flattery can replace real connection, and in those days I was open to anyone that read literature and didn’t pray. In general, I’m still this way to an extent.
That I was never Christian is a big deal in a place where there are three churches on every block; so is being gay. I knew when I was 13, but chose to keep it a secret from everyone for three or four years. I didn’t really want to be gay, I thought it was something women did who didn’t like sex. While everyone was scared of being seen as a slut, I reveled in it. I felt extremely sexual and I wasn’t shy about it, but I also detested the sex I had with guys at the time. If heterosexual guys had to date other men first, and somehow hide their attraction to girls, this is how I felt. I came out a few times beginning when I was 16, and there were some violent responses (including sexual assault) but for the most part no one believed me. Lesbians weren’t real, or if they were, it was some kind of trick or sexual challenge for men. Girls still suspected I was hunting their boyfriends and guys still tried relentlessly to date me. I knew one other gay person in high school. He was like me--we couldn’t hide it. Others did hide it, but thanked me later for being open about who I am. My mother chose to believe it was a phase until I was twenty-something.
Not being Christian was perhaps worse because most non-sport extracurricular activities were church youth groups, or “x-ian brainwash groups” as I called them. My grandmother was a swim coach and I was a very good swimmer on the swim team in elementary school, but by middle school my parents made it clear they did not want to take me to practices or pay for any kind of sports. Girl Scouts was it, but even then my budding sexuality got in the way and I was forcibly separated from my best friend in the troupe when we were fourteen because we were caught being naked together. As soon as I discovered that sensuality it was taken away, and I did not find it again for a few years. Despite having no idea what a “team” really was, I made the varsity basketball team once, unfortunately my mother refused to let me play. It wasn’t until I discovered asana in my late twenties that movement beyond drugs and dancing became a major practice for me.
I cannot express enough here about how utterly alone I was as a kid. I had very few friends because most kids were afraid of my mother and found my house boring since it had no TV. Other girls were traditionally socialized and for the most part, I wasn’t. I spent a lot of time in the woods by myself, so when girls would come over to play it was very special and I would try to show them my places in the forest only to have them leave crying because they were afraid of the woods and I made fun of them for this. I loved snakes and dissecting dead animals I found. My parents yelled at each other a lot and separated a number of times before divorcing (much to my relief) when I was fifteen. My mother was a feminist but mentally ill and angry with me more than not. She was often uncontrollably violent but also believed wholeheartedly in corporal punishment. Time passed very slowly and I prayed to my future self a lot. I was specifically praying to myself in my thirties, so now that I am that future self, I am very relieved, and meditate that I am holding that younger version of myself, and this is very healing. I recall when I was sixteen I was very excited to get my first job, I became a grocery bagger at Kroger, and later I moved up to cashier. Every shift in those days my hands would start shaking after a few hours because I was not used to so much human interaction. In four short hours I would talk to more people than I had in my entire life up to that point. Because of the intense seclusion I was painfully shy at times, and it is only now that I have become something of an extrovert. I actually seek out isolation and solitude in the mountains for days at a time, whereas for some time into my mid-twenties I felt angry every time I went too far out of the city for too long. The shakes would come back and suddenly I was that person again who didn’t know how to talk to other humans.
When I moved to Boulder more than a decade ago I still had no idea of my possibilities, but there were a few things I had been waiting to try out. At twenty I knew how to make Kraft Mac & Cheese, toast, boil or scramble eggs, and “cook” Ramen noodles. Most of the time I ate frozen dinners or pizza. I tried to be vegetarian for a summer in high school but I didn’t know how to cook and I had never met a vegetarian, so I gave up after a month because I was hungry. The only person in my family that cooked regularly was my grandmother; the others were either dead, or too mentally ill. “All I want is to find a vegetarian girlfriend so she can teach me to cook,” I once wrote in my journal as a teenager imagining two beautiful nude women I didn’t know yet, dancing in a kitchen I had never been in. I feel I am now one of those women; my body is lean and muscular and I am stronger than ever before. Admittedly, the people who have taught me to cook over the past ten years have been mostly girlfriends and some housemates. I’ve gotten to learn second hand what their families taught them and from our own cooking adventures. I currently have the best diet of my entire life because I don’t eat processed foods or meats, and I have invested a lot of time and energy into finding out what my body actually needs versus what is ethical and how those two can be reconciled. Recently I have been exploring entomography to solve the problem of protein because I do not believe in killing sentient animals for more than mere survival. I read the “Conscious Cleanse” book a couple years ago and it also made an impact in the way I notice how food makes my body feel. Southern cooking and fast food was all I knew for so long, so the idea that food should be making my body feel good, that was new to me.
Yet I’ve learned a lot more than cooking in these twelve years. I came to Boulder trying to be a blank slate because everything that came before was incredibly toxic and I consciously knew this. For six years in my twenties I dated a much older woman. She was vegetarian, but more than that, a Buddhist leaning athlete who built a cabin in the San Juan Mountains on the western slope. With her, I sought out better ways of living, and this meant almost everything I did and believed in I began to question and change. I even questioned my sexuality because I was worried it was a reaction to toxic perceptions and relationships with the men I grew up around rather than an organic expression. Both my biological grandfathers were convicted rapists and I knew them and some of their victims as a kid, so I’m sure it had an impact. Yet after several years of being an adult in this body, it is apparent that this body only lusts for the supple skin and beautiful minds of females. There is no way to express the silkiness and utter sensuality of two womens’ bodies together.
As a Philosopher (and perhaps triple Aquarian), I constantly question everything, but I learned to keep this to myself in Boulder because people are sensitive here. It’s like their beliefs are their ground, but I don’t need that kind of ground. They didn’t grow up arguing religion with people, or with a mother screaming obscenities at them like I did, nor were they isolated and alone in the middle of nowhere with only books and cats that died a lot, or taught from a young age that their bodies were perfect no matter what, as I was. So, I have carefully examined my gender. According to postmodern doctrine it does seem gender is socially constructed. So what does it mean for me to be a butch woman? Or genderqueer? I’ve decided I can be any of the above. There is really no way for me to be “misgendered” somehow. I am whatever it is people think they see, and I don’t feel the need to change someone else’s language. I am masculine of center and often taken for a man, but that center is an illusion in itself. I reject the idea that there is only this binary of masculine and feminine and between the two rests the whole of our (gendered) existence. If you’re having trouble thinking about this, ponder the gender of Krishna, Iris, or Dionysus; consider the “being” that is outside our “selves.” If anything, the claim to be one gender or another falls away the minute we get any serious awareness of the metaphysical. Unfortunately, I am usually alone on this point because too often, people who are questioning their gender are the same who seek consolation from it, and to me this is like bothering to match your socks every morning, which I also don’t do. It has no meaning, no function, and only pervades a vague sense of order. Aesthetics are important to me too, but as a system of flow manifested by intuition.
My atheistism didn’t fair so well living in Boulder. A few years back my grandmother died and for a while I didn’t want to live in this world without her. I couldn’t hold down a job, talk to people normally, or really do anything but cry and sleep. No one quite understood because so many people never knew their grandmother. But for me she was my mother, the only sane caring person in my life offering consistent love and support. Now, this person is me. I’m finally on the other side of three very painful decades. I have overcome addiction, tremendous grief, and physical and sexual abuse, mostly by myself but also with the help of supportive girlfriends. Asana, writing poetry, hotsprings, and philosophy have been my therapy. I truly believe we are self-healing beings if only we are given enough resources, solace, and time to come back to ourselves and our breath. Also without the confrontation of fundamentalist Christians telling me what level of hell I was going to for my various proclivities and talents, I have been able to nurture a spirituality informed by the cycles of the Earth, my body, the Moon; the presentism of Ram Dass, the philosophies of Alan Watts, Nietzsche, Kant, Hume; the teachings of Pema Chodron, Jack Kornfield, and Boulder’s Julie Colwell; the old ways mixed with neo-paganism, and my own Goddess worship (Iris, not be confused with Isis). The practice of the eight limbs of yoga, the practice of The Middle Way, of Aristotle’s moderation or mean, and driving fast on my scooter all have their places in my life. I do not need to struggle over the question of the existence of a god just like I do not struggle over the existence of love. There is a lot of love, and maybe a lot of goddesses too. I see that we all want to be loved. We wish there could be an all powerful entity looking upon us, enforcing karma, but really there is nothing so exotic to me as to return to the Earth, enveloped in dirt and maggots. I went to CU for philosophy, but I learned a lot more just living in Boulder.
What I struggle with today is the notion that because we are privileged enough to live in this great city or in this state that somehow we are “chosen,” either by our good karma over many lifetimes, or God, or “hard work.” People justify the way they live in many ways, and I find in Boulder the “chosen one” is very popular as an excuse to be apathetic about people elsewhere, or even your own neighbors who are breaking occupancy laws just to be here. The influx and adoration of Eastern religions and philosophies in Boulder is amazing but the byproduct is an attitude of implied caste; that impoverished or struggling peoples exist because they do not have the same karma. I work in a nursing home with the mentally ill. I know it would only take a little head trauma or other illness to change my person completely, and so I am ever thankful for my life, yet I know I’m mortal and will rot and die regardless. Devoting my life to making others’ lives better now, in a tangible way everyday, this is a power we all have. Create art or whatever you do, but there is more work to do than teaching yoga in expensive studios or taking selfies. I invite everyone to the forest, to being comfortable with being uncomfortable. I probably won’t convince anyone of anything here by scolding people. Instead I say this: Remember to keep giving all you have.
[Optional poem by Whitman, totally understandable if you don’t have room to print this]
Whitman: “As I Ponder’d in Silence”
AS I ponder’d in silence,
Returning upon my poems, considering, lingering long,
A Phantom arose before me, with distrustful aspect,
Terrible in beauty, age, and power,
The genius of poets of old lands, 5
As to me directing like flame its eyes,
With finger pointing to many immortal songs,
And menacing voice, What singest thou? it said;
Know’st thou not, there is but one theme for ever-enduring bards?
And that is the theme of War, the fortune of battles, 10
The making of perfect soldiers?
2
Be it so, then I answer’d,
I too, haughty Shade, also sing war—and a longer and greater one than any,
Waged in my book with varying fortune—with flight, advance, and retreat—Victory deferr’d and wavering,
(Yet, methinks, certain, or as good as certain, at the last,)—
The field the world;
For life and death—for the Body, and for the eternal Soul,
Lo! too am come, chanting the chant of battles,
I, above all, promote brave soldiers.