Rainbow Pitta

Freedom from "ism"?

2011-04-27T09:49:00.003+09:30

I have recently felt the need to start writing more about issues that stem from my emergence from the vine thicket of my Christian background. I have come to the view, that it is people who are good and that the doctrines, dogmas and behaviours of the Christian Church may well be driven by things other than the spiritual "truths". The latter may well be the dressing on the windows, closets and boudoirs of the institutional churches and their adherents. Perhaps, indeed, these trappings of the Christian religion may be the carving on the doors which lock Christians in as surely as they lock non-Christians out from what many Christians often believe is grace or that which Jesus often referred to as "the kingdom".

I have been a born again Christian and a leader of sorts withing the Uniting Church of Australia. I would not claim that now. I do not believe in the kind of god promoted by many Christians. I am a skeptic and am what I would call an atheist. I however, do not believe that there is no god, nor do I believe that there is one. I am not a believer, I simply don't know. I am what Jesus might have called a "seeker".

Just as the prefix "a" in front of the word "typical" forms atypical, the prefix "a" in front of the word "theist" forms atheist, which I take to mean, not theist. In my opinion there is no such thing as atheism in which to believe or not believe.

I find the suffix "ism" synonymous with a word such as "door" or "gate", and its use is to divide some ideas or some people from others. If some Christians would find it difficult to embrace Christianism rather than Christianity perhaps they should consider people who don't believe in the kind of God that they do, as people who have atheity. Similarly I wonder how comfortable many people who do not believe in God would feel if they were asked to identify with atheity rather than atheism?

In a similar vein I am not a Christian, I am an" achristian". I find no reason to believe in the concept of a christ let alone ascribe that role to Jesus of Nazareth.

I am, however, a follower or student of Jesus of Nazareth and his reported teaching, something I have found it much easier to be outside of the Christian Church. In my experience, the doctrines and culture of the Church filter experiences of Jesus and his teaching through heavy layers of christology and their own peculiar theistic dogmas.

A New Post and a Return to a New Day

2011-04-27T09:22:00.002+09:30

Having left this blog idle for some time I have decided to revive in closer to its' orignal intention, which was to do with spiritual matters. Originally this was to find the synergy between the emergence of my identity as a homosexual or gay person and my spiritual understandings.

Over coming weeks I will refurbish aspects of the blog and continue that which was always a journey, learning to understand the workings of the minds of those who put together these tools of the world wide web.

The blog was originally called Rainbow Pitta because this small bird, a secretive inhabitant of monsoonal vine thickets in the northern Australia was, to me symbolic of my "coming out". Many people who walk through these thickets may not be aware of the Rainbow Pitta. Inspite of its colours it is well camouflaged in its environment. It is, however, curious, and will approach closer to you if you see it, stand quietly and rustle the leaves at your feet.

A place to live

2009-02-28T07:20:00.005+09:30

I have come across this short video about having a place to live when you gay and you are old. It seems to have been made about a particular commercial development in the US where a new gay friendly apartment building has been built.

Here is a link to a similare video on IMDB

A Place To Live Trailer - LGBT Seniors in Crisis - video powered by Metacafe

How do you tell whose old then?

2009-01-18T16:40:00.002+09:30

Last week I spent two days training for the National Prescribing Service peer educator program on "Quality Use of Medicines" and shared the learning experience with five women. I adored being in their company, loved their wit and was humbled by their intelligence of every flavour you can imagine.

Special mention of T who was 28 years my senior and put me in the shade with her sharpness and focus on the practicality of our task.

I joked to my friends about learning to be an "old" and you know, I think I did.

And what about diversity? Whose old when by my estimation there was nearly a sixty year age span in the group and the youngest would probably be considered as old by the standards of some.

Can we in the gay community look up to our role models? Do we know who they are? I hope so.

Mind the children

2008-12-25T14:19:00.002+09:30

So in his Christmas address the Pope says we should get rid of all kinds of child abuse, unless of course they are gay in which case we need to tell them they are enemies of the human race. This is real abuse to impose on a struggling young person the dictum that they are God's enemy just because of who they are. This man is unbelievable, an open mouth on an empty head and a complete antithesis of any kind of loving saviour.

Perhaps he is doing the world a favour and showing us the poverty of spirit of the fat cats of the Church of Rome,, who put him where he is. This man is a heartless bureaucrat, nothing more nor less. He hides his faux pas behind the flavour of the decade, child abuse , an opportunistic and cynical refuge for a rabbit on the run. No mention of the centuries, if not millennia of on-going abuse by the Church. With this man in the top job God needs no further enemies.

It is time for the Church of Rome to take stock of itself, it can no longer go around spouting what God wants when it can't even carry off the slightest semblance of morality. There are any number of people standing on street corners pontificating much more convincingly than the Bishop of Rome. The Pope speaks not for God but for himself and the vested interests that vested him his position.

I do not intend this to be an attack on people's religion I wish only to denounce a very human man who attacks the very love of God and dresses his attack in the fancy robes of deceit and in the process undermining the faith of the faithful. I just don't think that kind of behaviour was on the job description.

I think the Church might find it was Jesus who taught by his life that if you engage with people as they are you will approach more closely to the kingdom. But of course the Church has other ideas. And I say to the church and the laity, when will you allow yourselves to truly engage with humankind as did the man of Nazareth?

The Pope gets in a cheap shot at homosexuals

2008-12-24T21:56:00.006+09:30

I was at a military concert the other night put on a professional government funded band of the Australian armed forces. An item on the program was played badly. Why? A reasonable question I think. These were professional musicians paid for by the tax payers who were present. It was unforgiveable in my opinion to offer something which the person who put the program together must have realised was not up to par.

And so to the Pope! His comments on homosexuality, saying it was as big or bigger of an issue for humanity than saving the rainforest were beyond the pale. This is the head of the Church of Rome who we expect, if nothing else to be a consummate professional. This may have been a small part of his address to the Curia but it should not have been performed, it was badly scripted. That is, unless he truly meant it. The apologists are at it already saying it was a mistranslation of his words, it was but a small part of what he said or, tellingly, it was a mistake.

To me the interpretation is clear. I expect the head of the Church of Rome to mean what he says and his words are thus way beyond the pale. In the lead up to Christmas, surely a time when God supposedly endorsed humans by at least assuming human form. Instead the Pope says God made a mistake but hides his comments by saying it is homosexuals who are making the mistake and perverting God’s purpose. The timing is way out because the teaching of Jesus, unfiltered by the later dogma of Rome, offers no support for the Pope in his attacks on homosexuals. His comments are destructive of human kind bringing only division and dissent, not healing and conservation in any so-called human ecology that he pretends to promote.

This is totally unforgivable. The Pope’s message is clear, homosexuals are perverting God’s plan. Forget the clap trap about being homosexual is OK provided you don’t act like one. Try that as being a Catholic is all right but acting as one is something else again. The Church of Rome is preaching hate pure and simple. They deserve to be condemned from the top man to the bottom woman.

This is Christmas for God’s sake and we get hate from the Pope. Yeah right! Wrap it up in tinsel and let a fat man deliver it and no one will notice!
Read also:
ABC News
CBC News
Telegraph

Christmas is also a new frog

2008-12-24T16:49:00.003+09:30

Litoria caerulea, a green tree frog from northern Australia emerging as a neophyte from our garden pond

The annual death that is Christmas

2008-12-23T08:11:00.003+09:30

A familiar empty feeling has crept into my bones. I ‘m not sure I felt it on my first Christmas in 1947 but it is anaesthetically clear on my sixty second in 2008. This is the fag end of the year for me and as I look back it seems that it was always so. Each year I live in denial until sometime around the twenty third of December I suddenly realise my word is rapidly dying. You would think I would have learned by now to prepare for it, to expect it, to manage it better. But no, suddenly I realise that I can’t talk to people, I can’t email people because they are not listening and not watching.

It is the shock of it more than anything. It’s not that I begrudge anyone one a few days or even a few weeks of disappearance. It’s realising that I have no defence, nowhere to go, nothing to do but to put myself on hold like everyone else.

Perhaps it is a sign of getting older that my realisation of this annual death is getting more disturbing. It doesn’t seem to have helped that I have retired from the workforce. I might expect that this could make me immune from slow-downs in the normal business of existence. But it seems not.

I haven’t told my partner about this yet as he is looking forward to his few days of other existence. There is no point telling him anyway as this lethargy is in the very air and independent of lovers, family, friends and acquaintances and in some ways is finely tuned by their proximity.

I have resolved to keep breathing the moribund air, allowing it to infiltrate my lungs only in so far as it need to cling to the hope of emerging into life again next year when I can relax and move on.

Perhaps the tropical low moving across the Top End will stir the Batchelor air bringing rain and storms to distract me from my forced hibernation?

Australia supports UN Statement on human rights and non-discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation or gender identity

2008-12-20T07:14:00.016+09:30

In the UN General Assembly on 18 December 2008 an important statement supporting the human rights of gay and lesbian people was read and signed by 66 nations. I am posting it here as it is not easy to find the full text of the statement in news reports.

Statement on Human Rights,

Sexual Orientation and

Gender Identity

We have the honour to make this statement on human rights and sexual orientation and gender identity on behalf of signatory States.

We reaffirm the principle of universality of human rights, as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose 60th anniversary is celebrated this year, Article 1 of which proclaims that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights”.
We reaffirm that everyone is entitled to the enjoyment of human rights without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status, as set out in Article 2 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 2 of the International Covenants on Civil and Political, Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, as well as in article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
We reaffirm the principle of non-discrimination which requires that human rights apply equally to every human being regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
We are deeply concerned by violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms based on sexual orientation or gender identity.
We are also disturbed that violence, harassment, discrimination, exclusion, stigmatisation and prejudice are directed against persons in all countries in the world because of sexual orientation or gender identity, and that these practices undermine the integrity and dignity of those subjected to these abuses.
We condemn the human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity wherever they occur, in particular the use of the death penalty on this ground, extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, the practice of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment, arbitrary arrest or detention and deprivation of economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to health.
We recall the statement in 2006 before the Human Rights Council by fifty four countries requesting the President of the Council to provide an opportunity, at an appropriate future session of the Council, for discussing these violations.
We commend the attention paid to these issues by special procedures of the Human Rights Council and treaty bodies and encourage them to continue to integrate consideration of human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity within their relevant mandates.
We welcome the adoption of Resolution AG/RES. 2435 (XXXVIII-O/08) on “Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity” by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States during its 38 th session in 3 June 2008.
We call upon all States and relevant international human rights mechanisms to commit promoting and protecting human rights of all persons, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity.>
We urge States to take all the necessary measures, in particular legislative or administrative, to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention.
We urge States to ensure that human rights violations based on sexual orientation or gender identity are investigated and perpetrators held accountable and brought to justice.
We urge States to ensure adequate protection of human rights defenders, and remove obstacles which prevent them from carrying out their work on issues of human rights and sexual orientation and gender identity.

Australia was a signatory to the statement and I find this a matter for some pride.

The United States refused to sign it, apparently in case it cut across the rights of each state to legislate against things like gay marriage. The Vatican said that the statement went too far and placed other, unspecified rights in jeopardy. The Vatican made its own statement which in my view is a vague and thinly disguised opposition to the rights of homosexual people.

So much for the leadership of the land of the free and the exposure of the moral bankruptcy of the Vatican as more concerned with protecting its own peculiar views than emphatically speaking out against human rights abuses and environments where people can be detained tortured and even executed for their sexuality regardless of the criminal law.

A full list of the signatories is as follows:
Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chile, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Montenegro, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Paraguay, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Sao Tome and Principe, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, United Kingdom, Uruguay, and Venezuela.

Rainbow Pitta re-emerges

2008-12-20T07:08:00.001+09:30

Perhaps the rainbow pitta has found its colours and has decided to venture from the depths of the forest to the depths of the world outside the forest. Shall we see?

Spiritual Rest

2007-06-26T06:31:00.000+09:30

In this blog as in my others Ihave been quieter and quieter. Perhaps this will continue. I am seriously thinking of depriving the rainbow pitta of his blog.

In recent times my spiritual situation has settled into something that I think about less and less and put words to even less than that. This is perhaps a measure of my indifference but indifference is a spiritual act, indeed it may be the prime function of the universe. And I am comfortable with that, not that I will allow it, though Iwill. Not that Iwill will it, but I shall.

My exploration , if and when I think of it, brought me closer to the object of my previous profession, to Jesus, who emerged as a man, a historical figure and a poor misunderstood mystic. Of if I'm wrong about that, I actually don't think that matters at all.

Outside the cool morning air is moving wind-like through the trees. Memories of this time, of other times, good bad and everything else. Winds move branches and leaves and spirit pervades all. If I stop to think, then I am comfortable. If I don't stop to think, then I am comfortable not knowing how comfortable I am.

If spirit is journey, and perhaps it is, then there are times when the journey appears to pause and reflection intrudes, there are other times when journey is all and reflections are few and those that there are, are moving so quickly that they merge into life.

The wind blows where it will or at least I brush the air as I journey by. And the wind blowing and the journeyman journeying cease to be because they have merged and are one.

Good Friday

2007-04-06T06:53:00.000+09:30

I’m finding a memory of Easter emerging from the delicious coolness and clarity of air. The chorus of dawn dresses the freshness of sunlight’s promise. Winged creatures possessing, inviting, overcoming the cool moon with their metallic sounding warmth. Born also on the still air , the redolent soil and dew laden grass drifting imperceptibly, joining from the east.

April, early with Easter in tow is a time of change, of newness of life that belies human preoccupation with drama and resolution, with dualities of death and life. It is all living. It is all promise. It is all wonder. Give me the spirit which is this time in the Top End. No! No need. It is here.

Reflections on hope in 2007

2007-01-03T06:35:00.000+09:30

At the change of years we often stop to reflect on where we have been, what has happened and what changes have been made over the previous twelve months. My partner and I did that when we had a champagne breakfast to celebrate the dawn of the new year. Together we have also reflected on changes that we have made in our garden since moving in to our new house in May 2006.

Often it is difficult to live in the moment. We look to the future, wanting something different, something that is a hope for what we believe we currently don't have. That hope might be for increased wealth or relief from some worrying situation or one of many other possible hopes. Sometimes we even hope for heaven.

It is a paradox, is it not, that we can often find comfort in the face of seemingly unfulfilled hopes by refelecting on the past? I walk around our garden daily, impatiently wanting it to grow. When, however, I reflect on photographs I have taken over the last six months , they can show me that indeed the garden has grown and grown spectacularly. The spectacle just appears to be less impressive when viewed only in the now and without the perspective that reflection can bring.

But is this a foolproof method of gaining a better sense of hope? It is certainly not a method that brings universal comfort. There are times when reflection reveals what appears to be a deterioration. Growing older can be one of these reflective perspectives that may not be seen as entirely positive. There may be other reflections on the past that bring dismay for the future rather than hope.

When I was in my teenage years many people seemed to be full of dismay for the future. The "cold war" was at its most intense and the arms race seemed to promise only that one day, someone would inadvertantly "push the button" that would start an action-reaction escalation of nuclear war that would result in the annihilation of humankind. Interestingly, of course, there were others who thought that the development of nuclear capabilities would in someway safeguard the world from further major conflict and usher in a new age of unlimited energy that in turn would introduce the world to unprecendented wealth and prosperity.

In 2007, the year that I will turn sixty, neither the fear nor the hope have been realised. Our major conflicts have remained ideological but are structured into skirmishes and on-going running battles rather than all-out warfare. Wealth and prosperity have continued to be developed but are enjoyed by a minority of the population, a minority that is getting proportionately smaller and smaller literally moment by moment. The world is filled with dismay about what so called terrorism will bring while at the same time there are those who would speak of hope for a better future. Upon reflection, for a soon to be sixty year old, it can seem that very little has actually changed.

As I move into 2007 with this blog I wonder about what I can do to in my writing to reflect and present hope for 2007 and beyond. During 2006 I have been reading, thinking and meeting with people in various ways for discussion and reflection on spiritual things. By the end of 2006 I was prepared to say of myself I am no longer a Christian, indeed I enter 2007 not wanting to hold to any label too tightly. I don't want to give up the label of one religion and exchange it for another. No, what I am prepared to call myself is "a seeker" and the corrolary of that which is that I am "a finder".

Perhaps this blog will be an aid for me to write down reflections on some of that process for me.
Perhaps this may be of interest to others? I hope so.
Perhaps some others will comment and provide me with new perspectives? I hope so.

Before I finish this particular post I want to speculate on the shape of that hope by calling on a recurring theme that has been part of my 2006 reflections. This theme is all about reflections on the past and their implication for the future. I am fascinated by the ubiquity of the idea of a "fall" or some separation from grace that exists in many, if not all religious and spiritual traditions. In my own christian tradition this idea of a fall seems to be at the root of all things to do with that religion. Somehow we have all become separated from God and we need to tap into God's plan for our redemption.

In other traditions or spiritual practices the theme can be more subtle but is present nonetheless. For those who have not achieved enlightenment, for example, presumably enlightenment is a future state of present hope. And what is karma if it is not a reflection on the past that generates hope for a future which is somehow better or more desirable than the past?

There is a common theme, perhaps that we can move from this place, this state, this level of understanding, this quality of knowing to a better one. Even if we aspire through meditation or whatever to live more fully in the moment there is an underlying notion that our moments are not lived now and that somehow we must come alive in some future moment that is yet to be and which will never come.

For if we are not alive in this moment there is indeed no future moment. If we are not alive now then we are not alive.

Recently when talking with a long time friend who is in the midst of struggling with changes in his chrisitian church I used an idea that I have expressed in various ways before. If there is god, the kind of God that we might envisage, then there is nothing but god. How then can we believe in a "fall" that separates us from god. If there is god, there is nowhere to fall but into God.

Father

2006-10-24T06:01:00.000+09:30

I never know what title to give my blog entries. Perhaps I don't practice enough!

My mother is slowly recovering and there is room for optimism but we are a long way from knowing how far that recovery will go.

Pretty much daily I now chat to my father. He give me the news over the phone and then he hangs on and we chat. We inconsequentially chat. But is anything inconsequential? In many ways my mother's illness over the past three years or so has brought me very much closer to my father.

Does it take that long, this passage of time and the pain of watching a companion/mother close to death? I don't know, but I am enjoying being more of a friend to my father.

Is there a heavenly father? I think I know one. He's just as insecure and in need of companionship and friendship as me.

Father to a Pumpkin and Mother to Grief

2006-10-11T19:05:00.000+09:30

Blogging is so time consuming and my time is consumed elsewhere, as are my emotions and my desires.

The other day I took my small brush and walked down the garden to the pumpkin patch. The three vines were the product of the waste from one of our evening meals. Pumpkin seeds sown in straw and potting mix sitting on top of dug over grass and lots and lots of blood and bone.

Graeme said his mother used to pollinate pumpkins with a small brush. Of course. Having found a small brush I went to the pumpkins and there was one female flower and lots of male flowers. I took pollen from the male flower and brushed it on the sexual parts of the female flower. The next day the pollinated flower was growing into a pumpkin as I watched. But I was in a hurry and the female flower that was there that next day did not get brushed, I thought a friendly bee might do it for me. There were, it seems no such friendly bees, or perhaps they were too coy to brush themselves on the female sexual parts of the next days flower? So only one pumpkin is growing at the moment. There have been no female flowers since, but I see one that may be out tomorrow or the next day, as will be my brush.

My father called to say my mother had a chest infection. She is lying in intensive care, thousands of kilometres from here, on life support after an operation to replace not one but two heart valves in her 85 year old heart. After five days she is beginning, barely, to wake. And it took me a long time to admit to myself openly and without regret that I had wished that she might not survive the operation. That not welling into greater care needs might be what she would want and that would give my father the respite, albeit final, that he so badly needs? Am I mother to my grief, conceiving of a desire for her demise.

Dying can be so difficult even when there is welcoming spirit. Will the infection in my mother's chest be the angel of mercy?

It was easy fathering a pumpkin: much harder mothering grief. But mother. I will not hurry.

There is no doubt in my mind that that pumpkin will be a a eucharistic meal some day and my grief will be mother to me.

Top Hat and Tails

2006-10-10T06:09:00.000+09:30

The outfit in the photo opposite got another outing last Saturday. Graeme and I were asked to try and stir up some interest in "promenading" for the Darwin Symphony Orchestra "Last Night of the Proms" concert.

Well we were out there and up there with a handful of others. But I think that is the last time. I think the large corporate contingent in the audience was left cold if not plain embarrassed by our presence. So we gate crashed the after concert corporate party, had a drink and left.

Even though the conductor of the orchestra invited us to put on a show, and we did, for me the curtain is down on being out there on other people's terms.

But dear readers. I say dear because perhaps you are so few and select that you must be very dear. The waistcoat is still hanging in our wardrobe but the top hat and tails have been returned to the Cavenagh Theatre Company wardrobe.

Is there anyone else out there who goes to these functions to have a good time, enjoy the music and enjoy themselves? Well yes. Even though I'm feeling a bit like the resident freak or the village fool, there was also admiration from many in the crowd.

And how does this post relate to my last one. I guess I'm feeling like while my mother lies in intensive care deciding whether or not to come back to her universe or leave it for the rest of us, the thoughts and feelings that she taught me to bottle up deserve to be outed. I owe it to her.

Just before she had her operation I telephoned my mother and we chatted inconsequentially. We said goodbye and she told me she loved me. I can't remember when she did that before.

I can remember that my mother once, no more than once told me she had commented to a friend that I would end up either in the pulpit or on the stage. Well the former I have done, so perhaps I owe her the second.

Where does the universe go when I'm asleep?

2006-10-08T12:15:00.000+09:30

My mother is lying in intensive care, quite possibly recovering from major surgery. AT 85 her mortality is no doubt on her mind when she is awake, as it is on mine when I'm awake.

I was thinking about her universe and what will happen to it when she does die. Will the universe get smaller or will her universe go on?

When I awoke this morning my universe returned. I recognised it even though it had changed somewhat. When I awoke this morning my partner was still asleep and his universe was no doubt gone to him but it was all around him for me. Not just my universe but his.

This afternoon I will visit my two month old grandson. I can't see or understand his universe but already I feel it has changed mine. Did his universe exist before he was born?

Is our experience of the cosmos entirely subjective or is it an objective reality wating for out discovery? Are we creators or creature?

I am wondering if my grandson is creating a new universe that is new but has always existed. Does the big bang or the succession of bangs get bigger as we all add our universe to the totality?

Creating a universe is very tiring. If I can't sleep long enough I have to keep on creating so naturally I feel tired. Is dying an act of exhaustion, having added all you can create?

Perhaps.

Sighing

2006-07-04T05:49:00.000+09:30

Spirit moves within me
And without me?

I move
Within me?

Let me find my way out
so that I can see in
Let me enter
so that I may look out

My sigh
bridges this gap
for sighing
is substance
is energy
is journey
is destination
within
without
with all

Spirituality of the The Way

2006-06-27T06:17:00.000+09:30

I have often heard the reference to religions of the book. I am now wondering about spiritualities of the way?

When talking to my friend the other night we were discussing the differences in the way we expressed what we both called sprituality. It occurred to me that he was always looking for guidance, for some form of answer even it if was to questions he had not yet asked.

On the other hand I'm less enamoured with answers or guidance. I'm not sure that there is a way. But many forms of spirituality seem attached to some "way". Language used in spiritual contexts is often riddled with ideas like "path", "journey" . .

I am reminded that Jesus is supposed to have said that he is the way, the truth and the life. Was he perhaps saying something that meant he is actually not the way? I think it is worth taking Jesus's words and assuming he was taking the mickey!

Because for me I'm not sure if there is truth that there can be a way? I'm not sure that if there is life there can be a way.

I am going on a journey to find truth or to find life does not ring true.
If I am is the way, then there is no way. For I am, is all. For where you are I am. For where I am you are. Truth and life and blinding flashes that obliterate all ways.

When my friend seeks help from his guides I respect his need and his uses of the moment. But for me , somehow if I realise there is no answer and embrace the lack of answers, then the questions become more real and life giving.

And again. The rich young ruler knew the way, he had been seeking it , refining it, practicing it, buying it perhaps. He was rich in ways and means. Jesus told him to give up the way. I don't imagine that Jesus was really just telling the young man to give away his money!!

How many of us are too attached to the idea of there being a way or to the idea "There will be an answer". Was Jesus not saying give this idea up?

Chosen

2006-06-18T08:19:00.000+09:30

Last night the Rainbow Pitta's rainbow waistcoat had another outing, at a dinner dance in our little village. This event was the unlikely venue for an approach by someone, a "straight" man, who I had only met yesterday afternoon to tell me of a homosexual relationship he had had decades earlier. The unlikeliness was in the newness of our meeting and in the intensity of the story of a relationship that ended very tragically.

Taken aback by this sudden and totally unexpected revelation from someone who I'm not sure I can now call a stranger I wondered what I was to do with this unasked for gift of confidence,

Why was I chosen to be the hearer of the story and what was I to do with the "gift"? Should I do anything? Was I someone who this man had waited years for in order to reveal something that needed to be said out loud? Or did I just happen along when the story was ready to spill out? Or maybe I was not the first recipient of this gift?

I have been reading some more of Daniel Helminiac, this time Sex and the Sacred, and while there is quite a few points of disagreement I would have with Daniel I am attracted to his notion that spirituality is an inherent part of our humanity. When things happen like my meeting with this man, I am really moved spiritually and while I don't really understand the processes that might have occurred, there was to me a definite spirituality about this encounter. In a real sense I feel like the chosen of "God".

Spirit that I would not usually see as part of what I call me, sought out or maybe even stumbled across what I do call me. I wondered what more was expected of me? I still wonder.

One thing is clear to me. At the time I was told the story I felt calmness. My head raced, initially, thinking of a possible response. But there was rest in the revelation and I am content to be moved in spirit. That which was not me is now part of me or perhaps it always was? Whatever, perhaps God does move in mysterious ways of each of our larger choosing.

The Myth of Maturity

2006-06-16T07:02:00.000+09:30

Which moment shall I choose?
Which moment shall I cherish?
Which moment is more here than now?

Will there be a moment that is not now?
Will there be a moment that is better than now?
Was there a moment that was worse than now?

Can anything be better than now?

For if I imagine a moment that is better
My imagining is but anticipation of a memory

What was now and is now not now is memory
And memory of nows that are past is but for a while
For memories fade

And anticipation of future nows
Is anticipation of future memories
And also fades

So what is it to grow?

If I imagine growth
I imagine future memories
I anticipate memories
All of which fade
And pale

Shall my spirit grow?

Is it not a chasing after fading memories
To imagine spirit
Other than now?

So if I imagine growth
I imagine a fading memory
And devalue what is now
In favour of something that pales

If I covet maturity
I seek to forfeit
My now
And replace it with anticipation
Of a fading memory

If I covet maturity
I define my now as immaturity
And reduce it already to a fading memory

If I imagine maturity
Then I place it beyond reach
Devalue my now
And am diminished

Not full but overflowing, not hidden but here

2006-06-10T06:22:00.000+09:30

The main flurry of moving to Batchelor is passed. So now we, my partner and I, are moving in earnest, becoming what we and this place will be.

I return to the Rainbow Pitta blog thinking about a theme that keeps returning for me. Why is it that there is an ubiquitous need to see negatives? For example, sin separates us from God, or the light and love which is hidden and must be found, or we need to meditate to achieve some improvement in awarness of our spirituality. No matter where I turn there is always some variant of the theme of lack. A lack that might be remedied by one spiritual practice or another, one belief or another.

The very idea of growth is also fundamentally negative, especially when applied to spiritual things. I have seen that some people like to use the term "unfolding" but I'm not even sure about that word.

When reading my one of my favourite bloggers, "The Grateful Bear" I noted that he had posted a poem about the "hidden" light. Well I wonder! If there is light, who would, who could hide it? If there is God, would God hide?

Is it perhaps not true that when Jesus is purported to have said something like, seek and you will find, was he not alluding, in his certainty, to the fact that finding is seeking. There is nothing to find other than the seeking itself.

When I awaken and notice my spiritual cup, does it need filling? No. My spiritual cup is filled. This is the nature of spirit. Fullness.

When I awaken, that which I thought was lost is here with me. That which I thought was hidden was neither hidden nor hiding.

Be still and know
The blind see
The Deaf hear
Be still and know

Conviction

2006-05-22T06:11:00.000+09:30

My partner and I have just moved to Batchelor a very small town an hours drive south of Darwin. Our move has coincided with the Darwin Pride Festival so unfortunately this will mean missing some of the event and being late home after some that we do attend. Today the Dean of the Anglican Cathedral in Darwin is running a fringe event to hold a forum about being gay and Christian. I will go to this and in preparation I was looking through some old bits of writing. I have learned that this is something I should do because I uncover things that later I like a lot more than when I wrote them perhaps. Here is an example. I have loosely based this on the Apostle Paul's comments about not being able to be separated from the love of God.

Conviction

For I am convinced that neither principalities, nor powers, creeds, theological ideas, spiritual ecstasies nor religious affiliations can separate me from the love of God. If I make my life in hell, God is there. If I make my life in a heaven of whose ever making, God is there.

If I commit myself to the love of another, God is there. If together we raise a family, God is there. If the other or others I love are of my own sex or the opposite sex, God is there.

If I give my life to the pursuit of pleasure, God is there. If I sacrifice all, for others, God is there. If I choose to believe this or that, God is there and there.

Like the apostle Paul I am convinced that, as shown by Jesus, referred to as the Christ, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can separate me from the love of God. The love that is of God is at the core of existence and non-existence, it pervades all that is and the spaces that are in between.

The love of God is not dependent on what I believe. I canÃ’t limit God by what I believe or hold dear, but if I try to do so, neither will this separate me from the love of God. I do not need to accept or confess anything, for the love of God is not contingent on , cannot be qualified by nor can it be measured, extinguished or brought into being by my own internal processes.

My life, my love, my belief or the lack of these is my partaking of the love of God. What, if anything, I hold dear may raise my awareness of the surrounding love of God but it is neither a pathway to that love nor a prerequisite for that love. There can be no prerequisite or pathway to a love that is in constant and universal revelation.

Shall I try to leave the universe, putting my own volition above all else? Shall I try to reduce the is-ness of all things to a figure and ground of my own imagining? Shall I float freely and alone in a bubble of self, magically, unilaterally excommunicated from everything and everyone? And shall I imagine that what I believe is more important than who I am?

Or will I, on the other hand, notice that the universal atoms, spread thinly, yet thickly enough through the lumpy cosmos are indeed myriads of similar bubbles bound endlessly, serenely, indifferently and changingly into infinite fields of all that is or can be imagined. And what is there that can be or that can be imagined, if not GodÃ’s love.

Calling myself gay is a spiritual act

2006-05-03T07:11:00.000+09:30

I have just posted some thoughts in my Darryl's Ramble blog about using the term "gay" to describe myself. I have conversation with a number of men who have come out later in life about adopting the term "gay" and I have often heard comments about a reluctance to use the word, because it conjures up images or meaning with which people don't identify.

In writing about this I have commented that for me the term "gay" has ceased to be infused with too much particular meaning but has become part of my ground of being. It doesn't define who I am but acts as a signpost to understanding.

In many ways the act of using the term gay is therefore part of my spirituality. God didn't make me gay, gayness, as part of my ground of being, is was and will be part of God. Being gay is part of the inclusion of God and just as we look into the face of a child we learn something more of God, or look into the nurturing heart of a mother we learn more of God, when we look into the life of a gay man or a lesbian we learn more of God. All are signposts to our understanding of God.

Good Friday

2006-04-14T07:56:00.000+09:30

Here it is, the morning of Good Friday and I’m aware of a crass and increasingly vulgar spirit around me that translates into:

§ greetings of “Happy Easter” from some,

§ commercial exploitation of bunnies and Bilbies

§ worship of chocolate that is twisted into many more than egg shapes

§ circumspect avoidance of the subject of Easter by many

§ and I imagine devotion and/or ritualized attendance at services of worship by others.

Here in Darwin in the Top End of Australia’s Northern Territory the biggest Easter buzz is about getting out of town and camping or fishing for the first time after the Wet Season. This year, however, the season is seemingly against the recreational revelers. Heavy rains through March and now, in mid-April, have extended the season. After a tantalizing dry spell last week, the last of the storms are top dressing the saturated soil with fresh layers of mud and extending verdant defiance of the impending annual drought throughout tropical woodland and monsoon forest alike.

But what do I feel in side? What does Easter invoke in me? What, if anything, other than nothing, does this “Holy” season mean to me?

At the moment, as I sit in the humid and embracing warmth of a ceiling fan breeze, naked from my bed, typing in alternate, yet simultaneous spurts and sighs of heart, soul, body and mind, I am spirit. The awakening gloom of morning, folds back. Emboldened by the sun’s apparent vertical passage from the eastern horizon and its arms-length dance with a round, round silver moon, vertically bisecting the western horizon, this morning does its unfolding in absolute familiarity of newness.

Although I can’t see it, I can sense and am fully aware of the sea, of the Easter sun and Easter moon driven, flooding morning tide of the harbour. This fecund spread of salt and water is refreshing mangroves and shore together. The boundaries between the sea and the land are merging briefly, urgently and yet fully as this day begins.

And all this includes me. And I am aware that I have, since walking away from my church ten years ago, found a much more authentic place. I no longer need to be unthinking about Easter or any other moment on the Christian calendar. I feel free. I feel the death of the religious certainty that I previously embraced, if even then, uncertainly. At last I don’t need a god-man Jesus weaving perverse magic on a stylized gallows to sacrifice himself for me or anyone else.

Looking inwardly or outwardly I can now find Jesus at eye level, looking every bit as pathetic as me. And I can hear him say. “This day, in this place and in this way you are with me in paradise.”

And at last I am free to doubt, to forget, to find, to learn, to explore and to create. Free to be spirit.

Torrid Zone Spirituality

2006-03-31T19:05:00.000+09:30

Posting about calling Graeme I was reminded that this morning I phoned him while I stood at the back door, looking out on the dampness of the back courtyard garden and beyond to the park that is over the fence.

I commented to him that the dank smell of the rain drenched soil and foliage was filling my nostrils and infiltrating my being.

The tropics is so spiritual because it rises in a breath and becomes part of you so openly, so freely. It fills your lungs and soaks into your membranes, joining your blood in an orgy of surging cells feeding every toe, every last part of you. And for me, my body responds by relaxing outwards, coming home to the elements it has just ingested.

Our Wet Season is mounting its finale I am sure, the rain filled sky has many cloud mountains. But I will be sad to see it go. But still, the richness of the fetid and palpable air will soon give way to sweetness and the lighter olfactory tones of the inland, as the airflow returns, like last year and many years before, to its south eastern trajectory of the Dry.

And so will I.

My horizon, which was empty of him, was full,as if he had appeared.

2006-03-31T18:13:00.000+09:30

I called in to see my one of my friends in Batchelor. He shares his spiritual gifts freely and will often reflect what he feels from me uninvited. I know my partner Graeme has had difficulty with this habit of our friend.

Today he said to me that he felt I was down and "depressed". He was of course correct. I was not ready to admit that, although I did admit to feeling impatient and disillusioned that our builder had not made more progress with our house. At a detailed level I could see that the builder had done lots of work but the house did not look much different to a week ago and it was in a builder's mess. I was disheartened and my friend read it in me. But he had another friend there with him. Someone emerging as special to him and someone I had just met, and so I refrained from speaking more of my feelings.

But I am me and my spirit is where I am, for I am spirit through and through, not potentially, but actually. I can own my depression, it is me, it separates me from nothing.

In quiet and in noise, in serenity and irritability east meets west and north meets south the inner becomes the outer. As I stand in the energy that courses upward and downward, I am empty and I am full, I am the channel and the channeled. There is no distinction.

I do miss Graeme while he is away visiting his parents. Our Batchelor Pad has become home and today, sitting on the back deck on my own I realised how much home includes Graeme. I called him and my spirit, which I own fully was soothed by his voice. My horizon, which was empty of him, was full, as if he had appeared.

Darryl

Spiritual Discussion on JUB

2006-03-23T15:27:00.000+09:30

One of the websites that I visit is Just Us Boys (JUB). This is basically an online community built up around gay porn. The site is very well put together and has a range of "forums" or message boards. One of these is on the broad topic of Spirituality and Religion, and can from time to time present some interesting threads.

Yesterday I came across one thread ostensibly started by a guy who is not gay. The post and the discussion thread commences with a relatively lengthy essay that this guy had written about Christianity and its response to homosexuality. The essay was interesting, though not ground breaking. I was interested, however, in the way in which the poster of this thread was pushing and shaping his horizons in a very public way.

The gist of the thread, called "I need some opinion from the gay community" was just that, a request for feedback on what had been written.

I was encouraged by this post and the copious replies and by the fact that it appeared on what is basically a gay porn site, posted by someone who claims not to be gay and definitely someone who is moving into a spiritual understanding apparently way beyond that engendered by his church background.

I had been thinking about following up my post on horizons with some thoughts about the horizons of Jesus when I saw this other post. I thought it was good illustration of the fact that horizons, static and moving emanate from where you are, not from some other point of view.

Darryl

Horizons

2006-03-10T07:14:00.000+09:30

I can remember back to when I was twenty and had travelled to the other side of the world. In fact this was the first time I had left home. I was all alone and did not immediately have the money to flee back home, as I often wished.

I walked along a beach, not the beach in this picture, and looked at the horizon. And I realised that the world ended there, at that horizon. I can remember thinking that the end of the world was the extent to which I could see and I was always at the centre. And If I moved, the end of the world moved too.

That existence, beyond the horizon, that lived in my longing, was just a longing. While the other side of the world was real for the family that I had left behind, for me it was out there, over the horizon. All that was previously me was over the horizon, almost imaginary, but always hope.

And I remember thinking, that one day I would return to that once familiar horizon. That was a comforting thought at the time, but it also opened the door to other thoughts. I realised that there were many other horizons that I could have, if I moved to another place.

And so I lived in the place that I was, within the horizon that I had, and explored its fullness, realising that there were other horizons that I could have if I moved myself somewhere else.

When, after two years, I got home, the horizon that I remembered was not as I thought I remembered. And I realised that home was not where my heart was but home was what was within my horizon.

The photograph I have posted is a favourite corner of my universe. That lone mangrove tree looks out on a single horizon in Darwin Harbour. The tide goes out and life walks around it. The tide comes in and it is inundated by the sea. Sun bakes its leaves and tropical storms wrack its branches.

It stands alone, a sentinel. It looks over the Monsoon Vine Thicket that clothes a shoreline on which the Rainbow Pitta scratches out its existence. And me. For me somehow this special tree, with its feet in the salty sand, has become a reference point to all my various and changing horizons.

In or Out

2006-03-08T06:57:00.000+09:30

The warm red brick wall was indifferent to looking in or looking out but it supported the white frame of both possibilities.

I am . .a Pearl of Great Price

2006-03-08T06:10:00.000+09:30

I am working on ways to embrace myself moment by moment, day by day and am coming up with some thoughts.

One thought that went through my mind was the words of a song that I rightly or wrongly associate with Billy Graham Crusades . . "Just as I am, without one plea . . etc" Just as I am, not as I could be, not as I want to be . . is there anything better than Just as I am?

And . .
If I am, how divisible is that . . or how may it be multiplied? . .If I am in hell . .I am . . if I reach perfect stillness through meditation, I am . . if I rush to this appointment or that, I am.. if I grow into a spiritual giant, I am

in my discouragement and despair that I can't cope with the issues of getting our new house just right , I am . . if I write ramblings in my blog, I am . . if I gain great skill in this or that and accomplish many things, I am . . if I apparently waste my life in idleness, I am

Can I not be I am, when I am? Can I be less than I am when I am? Can I be some other kind of I am when I am? If I am already, can I ever be less than I could be?

I do suspect the song I referred to and the Billy Graham context distorts the message with an implication that if I come as I am than I can be a better I am. If that were true, however, I would not have come, as I am.

For me, therefore, there is no coming, there is just I am.

When Moses looked for God in the burning bush he heard I am.
When Jesus spoke of the way and the truth he spoke of I am

When the woman searched for the precious pearl I imagine she was anxious, afraid, probably feeling inadequate that she had not kept it safe, maybe she was cursing herself and the universe, but just as I am she found the pearl of great price. Is this what Jesus was saying in the parable? The pearl of great price is the I am.

Embracing, the day, the moment . .

2006-03-06T06:40:00.000+09:30

I have a friend. We have coffee reasonably regularly. She is perhaps an unlikely friend for an out there gay man. She about five years older than me. A writer. A woman who I met by chance and for whom I have great affection. I learn a lot from J. We have a number of threads running in our relationship and one of them is "angels". I think we each have a role to play as angel for each other.

J has taught me something about what might be called a spiritual practice that flows from one of my themes (see previous post). I am working on this. It is about embracing what I am as I am where I am warts and all, with no thought, desire, agenda possibility even of making things better, more spiritual or more anything.

I am trying to work on this practice. At the moment I seems to be worrying a lot about things that are not to do with me but are about others. My background in teaching and psychological guidance and counselling might suggest that I dispute or"let go" of some of these things. I am practicing, instead, embracing my day, my hours, my moments. It's too early to say what this is doing but it is helping me at an emotional level.

My friend J. Who lives alone once said to me. I want a hug from you. You can get them all the time. Well so I can. Graeme is there and so is our life in all its ups and downs. Can I turn to every part of my life and say "sweet embraceable you"? Maybe its worth a try?

Darryl

Time to Contemplate some of my anchor points

2006-03-01T05:39:00.000+09:30

Currently I’m reading The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Green and while this is not rapid or easy reading, I am enjoying it immensely. At the same time I have been thinking about how this relates to the spiritual scratching that I undertake. And at the same time I am thinking about where am I at, spiritually. There are themes that seem to be crystallising for me. Not positions, not pathways, not traditions.

If nothing else, reading in cosmology takes me outside my usual spiritual haunts and perhaps helps me get some different perspectives.

Whatever! It seems timely to set down for myself what my themes might be. So here goes. I suspect all of these are beginnings, if not pre-beginnings and certainly not ends.

I am attracted to what might be called a theosophical approach. Looking at things through different windows may yield different views and understanding, even when the same object, thing, idea, “reality” is being viewed. And there are many windows, even if there is only one ultimate reality.

The first theme is true whether I am being the observer or the observed or both or contemplating how I might be the observed without a need to understand the observer.

Duality is window building and from time to time I might linger at different windows.

Unity is probably unachievable and as meaningless as infinity or it may be a retirement between windows. But I’m not unanimous on that.

All so called spiritual pathways lead me to where I am now. Being where I am now is not something I need to learn about or do, it just is. Being in the now is an everyday experience, not something special. I do not need to do or be anything to be now. Being in the now is as much an attribute of my activity, anxiety and aspirations as it might be about stillness or any so called “in the moment” practices.

My spirituality and my humanity are inseparable, neither have to be learned or cultivated. I am not growing or evolving spiritually or humanly. My spirituality and my humanity are both ultimate attributes of the I Am, no matter how I am expressing them. So called spiritual practice are human practices and so called human practices are spiritual.

And on the subject of my Christian cultural upbringing, my theme or fascination is Jesus the teacher, the fellow seeker, a spiritual and human giant who has brought me closer to God, whoever, whatever, if ever that is. And why the hell did my experiences in the church hide him from me?

So there I am for the moment. Some anchor points, for me to tether to, to strain against and to learn from.

Shall I tell you of the rainbow

2006-02-27T07:33:00.000+09:30

My cyber friend the Grateful Bear has written of disturbance in spiritual paths. While travelling by air recently I was moved by the ordinary sight of light falling through a plastic "glass" of water on my tray table. Was God not there in that disturbance? I was moved to reply:

God’s light shines through me
Red
Opening my transparency
A moving pattern
Given back
From
Surfaces around me
Within me

When God shines green
My dancing image
Is revealed in other hue

Shall I tell you of the rainbow?

Batchelor Pad

2006-02-27T07:12:00.000+09:30

As each weekend, Grame and I travel "home" to Batchelor, our "pad" takes more shape. We are building a nest. Consciously we would like it to be a nest. Our tropical climate has allowed us to build a shelter that opens through an awning at either end, east and west, to form a breezway for living as part of the movement of air, of spirit. The awnings shelter our coming and our going. Our home and our hearts are open and we are looking forward to visits from those who want to share our nest for an hour or for longer. We build in hope that our pad will be like all good nests, a place to feel at home and a place to launch out in any direction.

Nest Builders and Nest Seekers

2006-02-21T06:18:00.000+09:30

I was writing a post to a forum where a young gay guy had asked a question about establishing a long term relationship. He wanted to know something about how to achieve a relationship that had a long future. I had some thoughts but what occurred to me was that there is a restlessness in us all. Perhaps men experience that more then women? At least that seems to be common wisdom.

On the other hand I wondered if there is a difference in style in the way we deal with our restlessness. Oh restless spirit! I long to find you in your rest. Can I join you there?

Some of us seem to be nest builders. That is we seek to draw in to our selves, things, and other people in particular, so that we accumulate our rest in the nests that we build.

Some of us seem to be nest seekers, looking for that rest in different places, with different people or with different ideas.

Sometimes we change our style or play with them both until we find rest in the style itself, the style that is more self than not. Perhaps we could see "feminine" in the former and "masculine" in the latter?

Many gay men, like men generally, are nest seekers. Some of these men become frustrated when they seek a long term relationship because they are seeking amongst the seekers. They are seeking amongst those who are not ready or willing to give up their seeking. Perhaps some gay men think they want to be nest builders but they themselves cannot give up their seeking.

So do I think a long term relationship is only possible between a seeker and a builder? No not really. But I think the issues gay men face in forming and keeping relationship can be seen differently in the way in which builders and seekers pair.

Two men who are builders will face issues of coordinatiing and synchonising their nest building. Two men who are seekers will need to find their inner builder in order to build something that will allow them both to be the seeker that they are. A builder in a relationship with a seeker will need to build something that nurtures the seeker in the other person . . perhaps?

Hmmm. Interesting. There is a lot to think about here. So far I have not been reading about the dynamics of gay men's relationships. It is much easier to find writing that takes a more morality based view of how gay men's relationships "work".

D

New Spiritual Event for Darwin Pride 2006

2006-02-20T06:48:00.000+09:30

I notice that planning for the Darwin Pride Festival this year includes an event for "the Gay Christian"

There are not details in the link but I will find out from Dean Mike Nixon of Christ Church Cathedral what the event include. This is great news and congratulations to Mike for organising a spiritual event connected with Pride this year.

I hope that there are lots of GLBT people of all faiths who might think of supporting this event. I will find out more about it if I can and post more information later.

Ohh and I have to give a plug for the Quiz Night, Graeme and I have been asked to do the questions again this year, so we are looking for a theme.

Darryl

Going Out - Seeing Brokeback Mountain in Darwin

2006-02-14T06:26:00.000+09:30

Last night Graeme and I joined a cinema full of people in Darwin for a preview screening of Brokeback Mountain. Yes it was a preview screening for Darwin as we appear to be off the list for release time, which in Australia was Australia Day, 26 January.

It was good to be part of a largely GLBT crowd watching this great movie. I had re-read the story just a couple of days ago and Graeme read it again when we got home.

Interestingly the crowd was keeping its responses to itself. Perhaps like Graeme and I they were keeping their tears in check. No doubt we will talk to others in due course about what they thought of the film.

For me it was a most beautiful film, faithfully rendering Annie Proulx's story, which touches home in so many ways. Apart from the obvious tear jerking moments such as when Ennis finds his shirt inside the dead Jack's jacket, I shed a tear for Ennis's wife at the moment she realised what she was facing. For Graeme and I, and perhaps for many others who have been married and had children there are other tonalities in the great performances in this movie.

The film opens in Darwin on Thursday 16 February. I hope it is well patronised and I can think of one or two guys I really hope will see it. I'm not sure that I would go over the top about the impact of the film like Rodney Croome but I do think it is a piece of cinema that has the potential to reap change in individuals as it has already done, perhaps, socially.

Coming Home

2006-02-13T04:06:00.000+09:30

Life is busy at the moment and my blogging is not regular.
This is Graeme working on some clean up of unwanted foliage with our new house taking shape.
We have both decided that although we only do the hour-long drive to see the place at weekends, it is now time to call it home.
We can't wait to be there and actually join the new small community which will also become part of "our home".

North West Monsoon

2006-01-18T07:12:00.000+09:30

My postings have become few and far between. Our phone line has had problems for a while and the onset of the monsoon has played havoc with the connection. Water is in everything and as thick in the air as on the ground.

Graeme and I are now negotiating the various bits of responsbility for different lengths of the line so that all the problem parts of the link can be fixed. But we have some improvement, so thus I am blogging today.

Apart from its effect on the destruction of our telephone connection I love the Monsoon, it is the physical and spiritual renewal of the Top End of the Northern Territory. It connects us in a special way to the northern hemisphere. The air that is blowing across our shores, starts as cold descending air over the Tibetan and Siberian Plateau flows downward and eastward into South East Asia, swings westwards toward the equator, and then eastwards again over the norther Indian Ocean and over our shore and into the rising air of the low pressure systems over the Australian continent.

For last few days heavy and violent squalls have been racing in off the sea, sometimes with lightning and thunder, always with driving rain. It is cool, and the very air grows mould if you allow it to be still. And the land drinks it all in even if the people are ambivalent.

Recent Reading

2006-01-09T04:16:00.000+09:30

I have been meaning for some time to post a list of my reading. But unless I happen to not be sleeping (like this morning) and get out of bed in the wee small hours, it seems not to be happening. Anyway, courtesy of this morning's wee small hours, here are a couple of recent books.
I just finished God is a Verb:Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism by David A. Cooper

This is my first excursion into mystical Judaism and I must say I was blown away by this challenging, full-on book. My partner Graeme had to put up with me interrupting him and reading him bits, frequently. At the end my head is spinning and I will need to re-read the book.

Another recently read book which is on my list to re-read is You Are the Light: Rediscovering the Eastern Jesus by John Martin Sahajananda This blending of Indian and Christian traditions was for me "just what the doctor ordered" for my spiritual enquiries.

One thought that recurs for me when reading these books is "Why did I not experience enquiry and spiritual teaching like this when I was active in my church?" Why wasn't anyone in the church really interested in Jesus's teaching, his life and what the world was like for him?" "Why is it that in my experience of the Chrisitan Church, Jesus was pretty much treated as a brand name instead of a teacher?"

Surely, if church people believe that Jesus is The Way, this is really just the beginning of the enquiry rather than the answer?

I liked a metaphor used by John Martin Sahajananda of the Church as a nest rather than a cage. He speculated in "You are the Light" that the Church was often much more intent on gathering people into a cage than it was in nurturing them and then teaching them how to leave the nest and fly. Unfortunately this fits pretty much with my experience, although in retrospect I can remember a few individuals who were urging me to the side of the nest and encouraging me to spread my wings.

Darryl

Into 2006

2006-01-03T06:49:00.000+09:30

Into 2006:
I'm growing my hair long and it is very curly and darker since I was shaved last year

Our new house at Batchelor is under construction and Graeme and I are making our first steps into community life of a town of around 600

My youngest son is getting married this month - by year end I will have three step grandchildren and one non-step grandchild

My eldest son is coming from Germany to stay with Graeme and I and to attend the wedding.

Graeme and I are preparing quiz questions for the Darwin Entertainment Centre and for the Darwin Chorale quiz nights - we are becoming in demand as quiz night question writers - we expect to be invited to the questions for Darwin Pride Quiz Night in June

And I have been reading a great deal and will publish my list of reading here soon. Writing on the other hand seems to have taken a back seat, although my reading is giving me some ideas to use. I Plan to revisit some of my earlier writing and re-do it using the ideas from my reading.

I'm wondering about doing a meditation on the Lord's Prayer based on some of my writing. I will look around for some other examples of such meditations to read these first.

Well, the year has begun and its off to work this morning.

No Soporific Puppy Eyes for Jesus

2005-12-04T15:21:00.001+09:30

We are in "advent". I would know this if I was still interested in the Christian calender. Perhaps as an unconscious response to Advent, I suggested to Graeme that we watch a recently purchased DVD the movie "Ben Hur". Not having seen the film for forty years or more I thought we would perhaps not be too bored.

Well a number of things were evident:

The similarity to Ben Hur and the whole Star Wars thing was astounding, right down to the snatches of themes in the music, the desert landscapes the pomp of the empire etc etc. It was quite startling to see the debt that both Lucas and Williams have to this now very dated epic.

In Lisa Daniel and Claire Jackson's second edition of "The Bent Lens" they say that Ben Hur is steeped in homoeroticism. What an understatement that is! Right down to the delicate finger touches between Jesus and Judah Ben Hur.

In the film Ben Hur Jesus is portrayed as almost a disembodied faceless "presence" who draws ethereal music from the soundtrack and soporific puppy eyes from a rapt and speechless crowd of extras. His teaching is heard in "grab" sized snappy phrases and always reported, dewy eyed, by the owners of those puppy eyes.

And I thought. At advent, how apt that I see this film that represents the hiding of Jesus the teacher behind disembodiement, texts that are like curb-side television news grabs and cloaks it in dewy eyed sentimentalism.

Having been thinking lately of Jesus the teacher and the challenge of his ideas, I am reminded by viewing this old film of how the identity or Jesus can be hidden by the Church in meaningless cliche and inarticulate deification. And how the power of Jesus' teaching to excite, to challenge and to point us to true seeking has been made as formularised as an epic movie and as has become as repressed as the homosexual love between Judah Ben Hur and the Tribune Massala.

I am reminded, this advent, that if there is anything to be salvaged from my tattered Christianity, it is not to be found in a manger, not to be found under a star or even on a bloody cross and an empty tomb. Rather I will be a seeker as Jesus instructed and I will start in the good dirt at the feet of a most perplexing teacher, whom many in "Christian" circles have hidden away for too long.

Be Not Afraid

2005-11-22T06:26:00.000+09:30

I have been out of blog land circulation for a few weeks. Life is very full and sitting in front of a computer has not figured highly. But more of that awhile. I do log on to an Australian weather site called Weatherzone and post the occassional comment, often against my better judgement. But today I reproduce here my comments on a thread about the so called War on Terror. My comments are in the "Forums" section of the site, under the "Lounge" which is a place for non-weather topics.

This has been an interesting thread to read and I am probably not very qualified to comment but I have some views.

Firstly the world for the whole of my lifetime (58 years) has been a very dangerous place. I am simply not convinced that it is any more dangerous now than it ever has been. In fact I could be convinced that in actuality for the majority of Australians life is much safer now than it was when I was a lad, all things considered.

There have always been so called terrorist groups, we have had "reds under the beds", we have had the "yellow peril", attrocious things have been happening around the world for a very long time. What seems to be different now is the peddlers of doom have got their foot into the door of government and are wanting to convince governments and us that we should be engaging in some battle of global scale. And thus we live in very reactionary times. And that is a worry, to me.

On the matter of the media, for the bold and courageous, an experiment. Don't read, don't look, don't listen. So many contributors to this thread, of one persuasion or another have very eloquently told us that we cannot trust the media because they are too this or too the other. Well ditch them! Take away their power the only way you can. Ignore them. All media is and always has been at leat 95% gossip and dependent on advertisers and money peddlers. Dry up their source of income by becoming ignorant of what they and their sponsors are saying.

If you can't relax and let go completely then just use your internet and scan headlines, nothing else, you may be surprised as how little of the so called detail or commentary actually means anything more than you could glean from the bare announcement that something has happened.

And we should remember that terror is actually not something that people do, it is an emotional reaction that we have to something. It is therefore a lot more subjective and less tangible and measurable than many would have us believe. And equally, terror is therefore something that we can modify, not by fighting it but by confronting it and owning it as something that we do to ourselves and not what other people do to us.

Anyway. I said I wasn't qualified. But I have survived, Red September, the PLO, Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), The Baden Meinhoff, the Cold War, Star Wars, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Reds under Beds, the Yellow Peril and the Domino Theory etc etc and governments of various persuasions. And I am waiting patiently for the next outbreak of sanity before I am consumed and my enjoyment of life, if not my freedom, is become a victim of what used to be called "friendly fire".

Descent into the New Dark Ages?

2005-10-18T06:36:00.000+09:30

A magazine that I pick up occasionaly is "New Scientist" and I did so when in Brisbane last week. The 8 October edition of New Scientist had a series of articles on "Fundamentalism: Descent into the New Dark Ages"

I found it interesting that this series of articles was raising the question of a threat to science from the recent rise of religious funadamentalism, although the questions was also posed as to whether the resurgence of fundamentalism might be a "last hurrah"? I would recommend reading these articles for anyone who is perhaps more used to considering the rise of fundamentalism from more religious or spiritual perspectives.

Fitting perhaps that in the same edition there was an article on solids passing through other solids. At least this articles raises the vision of immovable objects that might just pass through the other immovable objects. All we have to do is cool them to as close to Absolute Zero as we can . . .excuse my mischevous smile.

D

Does it Matter how Homosexuality Arises?

2005-10-10T07:08:00.000+09:30

I was browsing the blog Gay Spirituality and Culture and came across the article in the link about "Why Does it Matter" about the "causes" of homosexuality.

I wrote the following comment which would not post because I was not registered. As I couldn't find any link on the blog that might enable me to become registered. so I thought I would post my comments here on my own blog.

Apart from remaining deeply sceptical about the whole idea of cause and effect anyway, I suspect that a lot of the nature-nurture debate is misguided because it is predicated on some notion of control. I don't really think it matters if there is in fact a "cause" for homosexuality even if causes of anything are real.

What seems to be being missed, however, is that our sexuality is a spiritual issue. Do we look for the causes of our spiritual nature? We discover our spiritual nature, own it love it and nurture it. Is this not so with our sexuality too?

The comment I wanted to post:

I am 58 years old, I, at long last came out to myself maybe five years ago and out to my wife of 31 years four years ago. My birth as an acknowledging and out there gay/homosexual/queer/whatever? man was anything but pleasant, but I'm so glad I am reborn, and so is my male partner.

I am totally underwhelmed by the debate about the causes of homosexuality. Whatever it is is I got it, have it, became it, was it and am it, am discovering it, am nuruturing it.

My coming out was very much a spiritual rebirth and I really wonder why many people who see themselves as religious or spiritual don't really get the point that homosexuality is a spiritual quality and is an on-going part of the rich tapestry of all human spirituality. As a quality of spirit my sexuality includes and involves, body, mind, emotions, social identify and spirit. Genes and nurture figure in there somewhere, but only amongst all the other bit players.

Spirituality and sexuality is about celebration and growing not dissection and categorisation.

Darryl

Hisses, Thumps, Squelches and Sundry Other Noises

2005-10-10T05:42:00.000+09:30

My birthday piece below is one which was stimulated considering cycles or at least recurrent events in life. (It occurs to me that there are no recurrent events as they are all different, but never mind fo the moment!)

Today I'm hopping on a plane to go to Brisbane. My annual check-up from my cardiologist. I expect all to be well again, well I know it is in some respects as I would know by symptoms if my cardiomyopathy had got worse.

So anyway the next annual trip to Brisbane is about to happen. Last night, Graeme and I spoke of how he came with me last year. I wish he was coming this year but not to be. Anyway I plan to catch up with a friend or two and go to the Opera. Queensland Opera is putting on The Marriage of Figaro.

I will be staying at a gay pub called the Sportsman in Springhill. The rooms are , basic old pub but it is just a short stroll from where I have my medical appointment.

I don't really like travelling on my own these days and will be glad to get back. But I often get the urge to write when I'm travelling so I am heading off with a new notebook. (Old fashioned pen and notebook).

So another year goes by and I will lie still on a couch, whilst I hope a cute young male operator greases up my chest and presses a sound probe against it. I will listen to hisses, thumps, squelches and other sundry noises which the machine exposes from inside me and ponder the hisses, thumps, squelches and other sundry noises that have gone before and the hisses, thumps, squelches and other sundry noises that are yet to come. And if I do get the cutie who did my echocardiogram last time, I will quietly, eagerly, absorb his excess warmth as he sits beside me and leans around my body. And I will be glad to be alive.

Darryl

Rainbowpitta 23:5

2005-10-05T21:50:00.000+09:30

Here's a little meme for bloggers, from the blogs of Jon (The Wild Things of God) and Twyla (whimsical mystic):

And posted from the Blog of the Grateful Bear

1. Go into your archive.
2. Find your 23rd post (or closest to it).
3. Find the 5th sentence (or closest to it).
4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions.

My 23rd post was on May 25 2005

The bloke down the street might say getting the hell out of A, burning rubber and compressing the time to get to B is the only thing that makes life worthwhile.

But I still wonder has he got anywhere other than were he was? And is that indeed what makes life worthwile? Life is to be found right were we are and we drag it with us when we rush from A to B?

Darryl

Happy Birthday -to a Friend

2005-09-29T16:40:00.000+09:30

Happy birthday!
My dear friend

One more time our world has whirled through space, around the sun
and arrived back to where it began a year ago and years ago.
At the same time the earth and the sun have been hurtling, at speeds we can't imagine, outwards,
ever outwards, from a Big Bang, a beginning we can't understand
and toward an end that we may, but not yet, understand.

And on that journey we two shared a similar path through space with each other
and with every other person on earth, all of us whirling and hurtling through space.

If we, you and I, could stand way back, away from the earth and see each and every person on it as a light emanating from their souls, we would see every person's path as a trail of light, much like the trail a sparkler leaves when whirled around in the night. We would see what looked like threads of light spiralling in parallel through boundless space. These threads of light would intertwine as the earth spun and be knitted together into a shining cord of humanity, journeying outward together through the eternity of time and space.

Pick a person, any person you know or don't know, born or not born, past or present and they would be there as shining strands of that shining cord growing, growing and lighting the universe.

And if we could stand back a little further, that shining cord would look, in the vastness, like a single glowing silken filament unravelling into a timeless trajectory traversing the endlessness of all that is and was and is to be, a beacon of humanity, marking, in its brightness, the far reaches of everything.

And if we could stand back even further until we had the vantage point of God, that pathway of light would seem like a speck of brilliance surrounded by the entire cosmos, yet at the same time filling it like time itself. And when we found that place to stand, at the vantage point of God we would see that there was nowhere left to look because outwards would be inwards. All that was and all that was becoming, would be in that same brilliant speck of light in the eye of God.

And in that moment we would realise that God was within, and in all time and that the place that we arrived at this year was indeed the place from which we started a year ago. For in truth we never left that place and its brightness, just as we never left the people who travelled with us.

This yearly revolution, birthday following birthday, like the beating of our heart and or the ebb and flow of the energy of our breathing, reminds us of that shared journey and can remind us again, that time, space and we two too, begin, exist and end right here.

Arms

2005-09-29T16:13:00.000+09:30

The arms of god are open, wide
For all who stray,
For all who hide.
The arms of god are ever wide.
The arms of god,
Can’t be denied.

Darryl
September 2005

The Topology of Falling

2005-09-18T06:35:00.000+09:30

Presently we are on a spiritual journey. Or are we? Many spiritual or religious traditions use journeying or notions of attaining an ideal perfection - salvation, the Kingdom of Heaven, Nirvana, Mukhti. It is as if, the great given, the great assumption is that we are less than ideal, less than perfect. In my own tradition this is sometimes referred to as “the fall”. It seems at first like common sense. Our collective glue, it would seem, is an all pervading insecurity and a profound sense of inferiority.

But if I have fallen, toward where would I fall? What is the topology of reality that would direct my fall away from perfection? I can find none. The universe teaches us that falling is always toward a centre. Perhaps in cosmological terms there is nothing but centre toward which to fall. As we look toward what might at first be thought of as the edges of all things, rushing away from us, expanding all, we in fact come closer to that which was at the beginning. To look out is to look back. To fall out is to fall in.

If we fall there is no direction in which to fall but toward the centre. If we have fallen we are at the centre already. For the centre is all there is, whether or not we realise it, it is so.

The higher states of realisation about which the various spiritual traditions teach, are perhaps attempts to remove ourselves from centre so that we might look back and recognise it. Is this why they require effort? Is this why these spiritual realisations are referred to as journey? But are they not also topologically counter-intuitive. We climb to the mountain top for what we believe is a better view, undoing the fall which only becomes a fall by virtue of us climbing the mountain.

A fall is the only way we can console ourselves that when we look back to what we have left behind, we imagine we might see centre. So we think we have fallen or we convince ourselves that to return to the centre we must climb higher, so that we may realise the centre all the better from its distance.

But we cannot escape our falling, for no matter how high we climb, we are at a place toward which we could fall if we climbed higher. If at last we reach the summit, there is nothing left but descent. So just as when we look outward to where the edges of the cosmos might be imagined, we in fact look inwards to all that was and will be. Just as we climb upwards on our various spiritual journeys to imagined mountaintops, we move closer to the place where the only inevitability is our fall toward where we began.

Can I fall from grace? Or is the fall grace itself?

Falling into Grace

2005-09-14T21:45:00.000+09:30

I have not done much photography for a while but the other day I was moved to try and capture something of what I have been feeling, in an image.

As I examine this image that I have made, I am finding more and more in it that speaks to me and helps explain to me why I called it "Falling into Grace".

Darryl

Apologies Nay Acknowledgement for Paul

2005-09-06T07:20:00.000+09:30

For I am convinced that neither principalities, nor powers, creeds, theological ideas, spiritual ecstasies nor religious affiliations can separate me from the love of God. If I make my life in hell, God is there. If I make my life in a heaven of whose ever making, God is there.

If I commit myself to the love of another, God is there. If together we raise a family, God is there. If the other or others I love are of my own sex or the opposite sex, God is there.

If I give my life to the pursuit of pleasure, God is there. If I sacrifice all, for others, God is there. If I choose to believe this or that, God is there and there.

Like the apostle Paul I am convinced that, as shown by Jesus, referred to as the Christ, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can separate me from the love of God. The love that is of God is at the core of existence and non-existence, it pervades all that is and the spaces that are in between.

The love of God is not dependent on what I do or do not believe. I can’t limit God by what I believe or hold dear, but if I try to do so, neither will this separate me from the love of God. I do not need to accept or confess anything, for the love of God is not contingent on , cannot be qualified by nor can it be measured, extinguished or brought into being by my own internal processes.

My life, my love, my belief or the lack of these is my partaking of the love of God. What, if anything, I hold dear may raise my awareness of the surrounding love of God but it is neither a pathway of nor a prerequisite for that love. There can be no prerequisite or pathway to a love that is in constant and universal revelation.

Shall I leave the universe of my own volition? Shall I reduce the is-ness of all to a figure-ground of my own imagining? Shall I float in a bubble of self, magically, unilaterally excommunicated from all else? Or will I notice that the universal atoms are indeed myriads of such bubbles bound endlessly, serenely and indifferently into infinite fields of all that is. God’s love.

Retreat into Spirit?

2005-09-01T06:30:00.000+09:30

I'm going through one of those times when life is crowding out life and I need to absorb myself into that, to experience the fullness of it.

Graeme and I have moved house, vacating our Fannie Bay place so it can be fixed up for sale. That is taking longer than I would like. Our new house in the small hamlet of Batchelor is moving ahead and we expect a start to the building very soon.

In the meantime we are temporarily in what was Graeme's townhouse in Coconut Grove in suburban Darwin. The Festival of Darwin is just over and the rush of theatre-going and Graeme working late in the box office has subsided, for the moment.

I had great fun being involved in a dance show during the festival. My first time on the stage, just as a highly visible "stage hand" but it was the best experience. Loved it.

Graeme and I are now working on a supper club cabaret that he is staging for his fiftieth birthday in October.

Financial settlement with my estranged wife is amiable but taking much longer than either of us would like. Damn the social order for interferring in our lives and making us spend time and money on what we both agreed on a very long time ago.

So I am reading, not writing for my relaxation at present. Completed the Armistead Maupin series of six novels on life in San Francisco. "Tales of the City" etc. Just completed "Sushi Central" by Alisdair Duncan, an amazing teen novel set in Brisbane, blunt blackly funny and surprisingly spiritual. For some light relief I am reading Qentin Chrisp and Donald Carroll on "Style" and thoroughly enjoying "Fairytales" by a guy called Peter Cashorali . . just delightful.

I must admit to being somewhat discouraged again when thinking about the various spritual paths that I see people writing about. They all in some way seem to involve a "fall from grace". I am feeling more and more that there is no fall and that we all as we are here now and always are in a state of grace. There is no heaven, there is no nirvana, there is nothing to be gained by way of striving or relaxing into a higher state of grace. If there is grace there is none but grace. There is no difference between karma and grace. But anyway .. I will get back to thinking more about these things when life is as Quentin and Donald would have it, full of "style". Or perhaps there is no style either as I whirl everywhere and nowehere.

Darryl

The Importance of Length in Relationships?

2005-07-31T11:28:00.000+09:30

I'm taking a moment to reflect on relationships, how long they last and the value we place on the length of relationship.

Two years ago this weekend, Graeme and I started our live-in relationship. Three years ago last month my wife and I separated, after 31 years of marriage.

The end of my marriage was catalysed by my coming out. Although my wife and I spent considerable energy exploring the possibility of a "mixed orientation marriage", we eventually agreed that neither of were able to or wanted to achieve that aim. So we have moved on. We are currently in the process of sorting out financial and property settlements in a very amicable way. Whether or not we finally get divorced is still an unknown. In many ways, that might be a good "closing" ritual to perform. Neither of us, however, is in a rush to take that step. We have moved to a new kind of relationship. I imagine that there would be a number of people who would find it hard to understand why neither of us is too fussed about formally and legally ending the marriage. The marriage has indeed ended. Yes in all practical senses it has. But on the other hand the friendship and the relationship have moved not to a point of disintegration but to a new and very different phase.

To some, my marriage may be a "failed" one. This, however, is a conceptualisation I can't agree with. How can it be a failure when it has delivered both my wife and I to a point where we both can move toward what I think we both regard as greater authenticity in our lives? How can it be a failure when it has allowed both of us to find a greater depth and honesty in our marriage.

After two years with Graeme I can also reflect backwards and forwards on what might be the future of our relationship. Both of us are mindful of the all pervading concept in our society that the success of relationships is somehow measured by their length. This is no less true in gay circles.

But length is such an inadequate measure of what is important in any relationship. Length of time, it would seem is used as an indicator of such things as "commitment", "fidelity", "constancy", "depth" and "faithfulness". There are a host of social and spiritual meanings that we, as a society endow on marriage or committed relationships, which we almost magically equate with length of that relationship. In reality, however, length has little to do with the importance of a marriage relationship to the individuals concerned or to the society in which they live exept in one important way. Length of a relationship is a strong indicator only of the extent to which the intent to have a long relationship was realised.

In my own case, it seems clear to me that my own marriage relationship, in the form that it was originally entered, did not last for much more than a few months or a year anyway. The nature of that relationship was, over the years, constantly moving and being re-negotiated. The only constancy was the legal framework and in a very unreal way I think that legal framework tended to induce what my wife recently referred to as "sleep-walking". These days the sleep-walking is not an issue. On the other hand, in subtle and not so subtle ways the politico-legal system of Australia now punishes my wife and I for charting our own path. It does this by imposing requirements and costs which distress us, demean our maturity, invade our privacy and in the process squander our physical, emotional and spiritual resources.

In my new male-to-male relationship with Graeme we have intent of longevity. We have come together to support each other into our old age, to share our maleness through a sexual, emotional and spiritual relationship which is as unburdened by politico-legal-social-religious metaphors as we can make it. The commitment of our intent is showing itself externally through us entering into joint property and domestic arrangements. Others will make whatever they like of that, perhaps they may see as a homosexual version of a heterosexual norm? To us that is of little consequence in shaping the nature of our relationship.

As Graeme and I move through into year three of our live-in relationship we reaffirm that our relationship is not about exclusivity, possessiveness nor complacency. We see it as having commenced in utility but progressively assuming a more enduring romantic quality than mere romance. Our relationship is a "home-base" a datum point from which we can move outward and towards which we can move inwards. Our process is mutually supportive and change oriented. Through this process we intend building each other as much as we build ourselves and we intend giving ourselves as completely to those outside our relationship as we give ourselves completely to each other.

Our fidelity exists in this intent and in it’s unfolding through our own relationship and our joint and individual relationships with others. The length of our relationship will not be a measure of its success. Success has already been achieved and will be achieved daily. We are beyond that. We don't need spiritual or social metaphors to explain, justify nor uphold our relationship. On the other hand we both rejoice in and celebrate our relationship as fitting worship of the divinity which is in us all.

Industrial Relations on the Forest Floor

2005-07-20T07:06:00.000+09:30

A couple of guys I know in their twenties to thirty age group have recently engaged in a public argument on an on-line forum over recent changes to industrial relations laws introduced by our conservative Australian government. In the past I would have wanted to weigh into the argument and lend support to the more left wing point of view. But I've realised, not without some dismay and associated guilt, that I really don't care.

A similar situation has arisen at work. Conditions that used to exist for employees of "my Department" in more remote areas have been removed and must now be applied for on an individual case by case basis. There is great concern amongst my colleagues about the unfairness that is being introduced to the workplace. How well an individual presents a case has replaced any notion of reasoned response to a shared need and equitable treatment even for those who's ability to advocate for themselves is less that that of others.

Again, I am surprised at my level of apathy. I go to work, having made a decision to earn a certain amount and leave it at that. By failing to engage with the issue or make an application of my own, am I letting other people down. In my good union past I would have thought so. But now, I struggle to care.

Yesterday I sat next to a twenty something who was travelling around the country assisting in some workshops. I was attending the Darwin workshop. The subject of "career" came up and I hesitated only slightly before saying I did not have a career, I went to work instead of having a career. I told her I was going nowhere other than where I am. I was sure that I had really "been there and done that" and that the basis of my place in the workforce was nothing to do with any notion of "career".

Am I turning into a cynical, selfish old man?

I can justify my focus away from these things onto more important things, like my relationships, or my pursuit of spritual matters, struggling to write down some of the ideas, thoughts and emotions that rush through my consicousness like orbiting comets. But is this the beginning or at least the noticeable beginning of an inevitable turn inwards as I age? Is this expereience that I am having spiritually enriching and a positive thing or a retreat into a unipolar self-centred existence. CAn anything not be spiritually enriching, even though it seems selfish?

And the scary thing is, I even have to make an effort to ask these questions or to care about pursuing an answer.

I am going away from home for a week from tomorrow and won't be blogging but I will be thinking. I will first visit my ageing parents (in their eighties) and then on to another city for a conference on research next week. I hope to find renewal in my relationship with my parents.
I will struggle with boredom and relevance at the conference.
I will miss my man.
Am I patting the head of the black dog of depression?
Should I shoo it away?

These experiences will perhaps be fruitful ground for the scratching for morsels in the leaf litter of the life of the Rainbow Pitta. I will take my notebook! At least the Poetic Pitta may make an elusive appearance.

The Light of the World

2005-07-19T07:18:00.000+09:30

This morning, before dawn, while walking along the path through the monsoon vine thicket on East Point I was dazzled by the headlights of an on-coming car. I looked downwards to the path, but it, along with everything else had disappeared into the glare. Continuing to walk by a kind of dead reckoning I spotted what seemed to be the light reflecting off the white painted line that ran down the middle of the path. It was to my left, so I moved across only to find that what I thought was a line of paint was in fact the raised concrete edging along the edge of the path. My feet caught on the raised concrete, I stumbled and fell. Fortunately I had the presence of mind to roll as I fell, I landed on the back of my shoulder and continued rolling onto my back, coming to a halt in the relatively soft leaf litter. I was shaken but not hurt, not having tried to save my fall nor having hit any other solid objects.

As I picked myself up, slighlty embarrased that I had performed this acrobatic stunt in the full glare of someone else's vision I (if you will forgive the pun) reflected on the situation in the following way. I wondered about how many people had fallen by the wayside blinded by someone elses clear vision. I wondered had my clear vision from time to time caused others to fall. And I wondered had the person driving the car seen me and I wondered in what way they interpreted what they saw as the only vantage point they had was the reflection of their own bright light.

As I walked on, the car driver proceeded in a cocoon of light of their own making whilst I returned to the clear vision of the pre-dawn softness of starlight and the gentle glow of dust particles in the air, illuminated by the distant city. I merged back into the gloom and once more could see clearly where I was going and all that was around me. And I thought again. was it not true that real darkness is caused by too bright a light and too much certainty from only one vantage point?

Un-forgetting Eden

2005-07-09T12:39:00.000+09:30

Graeme and I are getting quite excited about the way in which our planning to move to Batchelor is progressing. Yesterday we went to see "our" architect to see some initial concept sketches for our modest house. With low cost and the tropical climate as key drivers we were impressed and excited by the simplicity of the design.

A week or two ago we had met our architect on our new block and we had looked at the existing trees and considered how the house might be designed to integrate with what would become our garden. I remember expounding on my concepts for gardens and today I have been thinking about how these concepts are an apt metaphor for life.

To me a garden is a small corner of the universe in which we consciously mould the physical environment, integrating it with our own universal views and with our own spirit. In the end we can't grow a garden. It grows. We can only engage with the natural processes in such a way that we end up recognising the garden as an aspect of ourselves and an aspect of the Divine.

The beauty we experience in a garden is the beauty of self recognition in all its reassuring familiarity and in its exciting surprises.

Recently I enjoyed seeing for a second time the film "MY House in Umbria" starring Maggie Smith. In this film, the character played by Ronnie Barker sets out to make a garden for his host, played by Maggie Smith. There is much to read into the metaphor of that garden, but for the moment I want to focus on a comment that the Ronnie Barker character made about the garden and about life. In the story, each of the characters is recovering from a shared traumatic event and struggling to find a future for themselves. The comment is made that to plant a garden requires a future orientation, an expectation that there will be a future, a more colourful and altogether satsifying future.

I was attracted to the sentiment because I think it is one that I share. But there is more. In my idea of a garden, it should be designed as a series of spaces. None of these spaces should be visible from the other, so that there is created a sense of the garden disappearing around corners and going on for ever. There is also a sense of surprise and newness when moving from one space in the garden to the other. The final element in my concept is that within each space in the garden there should be a point of focus that draws your attention and that some way sets the tone or mood of the space, whether that be one of utility or transcendent beauty.

Today I have been thinking of these things and I have a real sense of having moved into a new space in my life. A trigger or focus for this was the redolence of the smell on the morning air of dew dampened earth and dry grass that was floating in from inland of Darwin. In some way this experience caught my attention and it arrived as a profound feeling of recognition and even homeliness mixed inextricably with newness and the surprise of a renewed outlook of optimism.

In thinking about writing this post, I opened the Bible and read again the story of the Garden of Eden and I wondered. Did we ever leave Eden? Is it not true that as life unfolds we experience new vistas, new aromas and a new self which if we allow it to be is also profoundly reassuring and familiar?

Gardens are about futures and newness. No gardner is without a future nor a sense of welcome for things new and the unfolding of creation, not forgetting the gardener's endless quest for an alignment of their knowledge, skill and spirit with the fabric of the garden itself.

I will take the liberty of re-writing the Eden myth. For I don't think we ever left Eden, for Eden is all and the Divine is in all. The profound sense of separation which the myth makers seemed to have had is one that I no longer share. I resonate with the sentiment of the Apostle Paul when he asserts that nothing can separate us from the love of God. Our nakedness is not our shame before God, but on the contrary our shame is our nakedness. The cherub doesn't guard the tree of life but is a metaphor and a beacon for its existence.

Today as I move into another space in the garden of life I am reminded that I do not need to remember Eden, I have noticed instead that I had for a while forgotten that I had never forgotten that I never ever left.

Emergent

2005-06-14T07:45:00.000+09:30

I walked this morning through the monsoon vine thicket. As the stars lit the path and the sky slowly lightened in the east, I merged into the musty smell of the dessicating leaf litter and trod on the rain of tiny Poinciana leaflets let loose by the trees in order that they might survive this season of drought.

This film of adaptive vegetation and the even thinner film of emergent humanity barely separated the earth from the shiny firmament. A jet was flying across from north to south, coming in from another hemisphere, so high above that I could feel the feet of the people surfing the edge of our airspace, shifting tiredly, keeping their lifeblood flowing so they could renew its anticipated use upon arrival in Sydney, or wherever they were going.

I have not seen a rainbow pitta for months now. I believe they still exist, scratching that litter into which I was merged. But as I looked upward I became the pitta and from my feet on the ground and my upright stance I prayed that the feet above me would keep their people standing too. And that like the blood pumping through me in response to my walking, their blood would be renewed in its journey with them.

And then I turned my eyes to the path that was emerging with the morning and made a way into my day.

From A to B

2005-05-25T07:38:00.000+09:30

Does life ever go from A to B? Who to ask?

The creationists might say it started at A, strayed to B and needs to get back to A.

The social evolutionists might say it started at A and moves on to B which is really a better A, leaving us with another B, read better B, to move up to.

The spiritual evolutionists might say there is only ever A but you have to move to B before you can realise this impossibly simple concept.

The bloke down the street might say getting the hell out of A, burning rubber and compressing the time to get to B is the only thing that makes life worthwhile.

Some church folk I've known might say that if we trust God enough he will reveal our purpose and if we submit to his guidance we will realise that B is really G and exactly where we should all be, giving A the big A.

Some “realists” might say, it doesn't matter which B you are thinking about some B is trying to rip you off so hang on to your A and to hell with those other Bs.

Need I go on. There would appear to me to be no dearth of advice on the subject, gratuitous or otherwise.

But what is the evidence of my own life? Well for a start I can't walk up or down stairs purposely setting out between bedroom and living space for some purpose that gets entangled in the myriad tangents that I follow. Tangent upon tangent. Oh, that needs cleaning, I'll just go and get a cloth and do it now. Now what was I coming into the kitchen for? God yes! I'd better look what time that movie is on. Damn, where did I leave my glasses! Was that the washing machine beeping? I wonder if my boyfriend wants this shirt ironed for tomorrow? Speaking of tomorrow, I wonder if that cutie (censored) would come and spend some time with us?

Maybe, if your reading this, a light of recognition flickers briefly as you switch between this and that, occasionally realising that something actually does get done? Amid a life that oscillates between upstairs and downstairs, this and that, goals and happenings, purpose and randomness, faith and perfidiousness, outness and in-ness, we inhabit unknown places in a blur of movement and stillness and are apparently pointless and completely incomplete, just like this sentence.

Well anyway! Life's like that for me. But where was I? Oh yes. Somwhere between A and B? Or was I? Do A and B really exist? Is my question wide wide wide of the mark? Maybe so. Perhaps there is no A and B? Perhaps there are no beginnings and no ends? The As and Bs of this life are the excrement oozing out of the prisons of mind and spirit we seem to love to inhabit?
I sometimes imagine standing back , back back, so far that I can take it all in and then I don't find it hard to imagine that there is no A and no B.

Well, anyway, that maybe as good an excuse as any for being a ditzy quean.

Behold

2005-05-10T07:06:00.000+09:30

If your eye offends you

pluck it out

and look not on beauty

but on emptiness

but if not on emptiness

then fill yourself with emptiness

and let beauty be your eye

and you

and fill beauty with your eyes

and wonder

can one eye

be so much

that it can see naught

but beauty?

Gay Christians: Consume the Bible in Free Enquiry

2005-04-20T23:01:00.000+09:30

Once I was a Christian. More devout than most, I dabbled as a young man in lay preaching and later as worship leader. I gave my life to Christ as a young teenager and stayed in the Church actively for 35 years. I was a good Chrisitan family man. All along I read the Bible in the planned guided way of Scripture Union.

So am I now a Christian? I'm not sure I know what that is anymore. I have come to realise that the Christian Church held me at arms length from the God of the Bible. I have come to realise that I now join Jesus Christ as mystic, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim, Hindu or whatever. Rightly or wrongly I consider that Jesus would have the same trouble that I now do in continuing to identify with the institutional church and many of its people, who claim his name.

So what brought about this change? Was it realising after a long and difficult struggle that I was what I call a gay man. No. I'm no more Gay than I am Christian but I certainly am a gay man and quite possibly a christian one. No, coming out to myself as gay simply provided a catalyst, perhaps a final push that gave me occasion to flee bewildered and hurt from a Church that seemed to have no place for me, that never knew me and that never ever really wanted me at all.

We can always trace things a long way back but I think the beginning of the end as far as my Christianity was concerned was when my pastor advocated to his people that they read the Bible avidly. Read it book by book, all through, again and again. I took up his challenge and put it into action and it changed me.

All my life I had been brought up in a tradition of micro-scriptural enquiry. Fortunately I didn't have the memory or the concentration to learn texts, a short-coming that I now see as an advantage. So it made a difference to me to read for half or a whole hour at a time, consuming chapters and books. Just try it for yourself. It is hard to do the text learning thing or the micro-study of underlining words or lines, when you are reading great slabs of the Bible and having it come alive. Whole bits of it are incomprehensible, so you skip over them and find that it doesn't make a lot of difference, the adventure is not diminished. Next time you come back to those sections you will find you might jump over them again or read bits you couldn't read before or see them in a whole different light.

As I read, all sorts of possibilities opened up and they were all possible and they were all good. And they all lead me to find a God who was both revealing and being sought. A God who was evolving as a social history and a God who was in the intimate lives of some very interesting people. A God whose reality, whose revelation and whose social reality is still evolving today.

At that stage I had a problem with Jesus because I had believed him to be my saviour and the Son of God, yet this did not seem to be what the sweep of scripture was saying. Or at least this belief was a poor imitation of a truth I had yet to find. I paused, but not before realising that Jesus was in everyway much more than he was portrayed by the Church. What they worshipped was a paper cutout, a non-person, the meaning of whose ministry and life the Church largely ignored or more often misrepresented. Much of the doctrine, the theology and the dogma that I heard, was sprouted by a Church which seemed incapable of listening even to its own words. No, for me the Jesus who emerged from the Bible was a much more believable character. The Church parodied him by spouting words about him that it clearly did not believe or act on.

Exhibit A the phrase “God is love.” Is this the greatest of lies perpetrated by the Church? You could be forgiven for believing it was a lie. Test this. Just try saying: “If God is love, then love is God” in any church and you will get bowled over and rebuffed with the qualifications, the nit-picking the exclusive definitions that will be thrown up to bar your way to believing that love is God. Some forms of love will be excluded. If, for example, all love is not God, then how can God be love? If the love of a man for a man is not love, then God is less than God, for God cannot be love. If there are limits put on love then there are limits put on God. And if God is limitless then God is love and love is God and love is limitless. And if love is limitless then the love of man for a man is as much God as the love of a woman for a man or a woman for a woman. Reading the Bible I found a limitless God, living in the Church I found God hidden. Reading the Bible, I found a Jesus who demonstrated the limitlessness of love. Living in the Church I found a limited Jesus.

I digress and my story is long, but my exhibit is perhaps instructive for gay people. The God who emerges from the Bible is indeed a God who can be epitomised as love, unqualified. There was none more passionate a lover than King David, the lover of men, the lover of women, the soldier, the liar, the cheat, the adulterer, the murderer, the man whose kingship is seen as the quintessential pointer to the Christ. And Jesus, who claimed sonship of David, was himself a man of passion and love. He reportedly turned his back on his family, he consorted with the worst in society, he once allowed a woman of dubious reputation to perform erotic acts on his feet in public to the shock and horror of even his closest friends. I think this Jesus was actually a passionate man who believed that God is limitless love and love is a limitless God, whereas the Christian Church, on the other hand gives every indication of being a non-believer.

Now if you read the Bible, for yourself, in the Spirit, without the filter of the locked up microscopes of dogma and doctrine, God will emerge for you. God may emerge in a way that is different for you than for me. No doubt this will be so. And if later, we share those differences, we will both be enlarged in God.

I return to my exhibit A. Since I realised that I was a gay man and allowed myself to find love for myself and to cherish my love for everyone, including my boyfriend and other men. I have also found I can love my wife, my children and my mother and father in a way I had never before thought possible. I have found love more abundantly than I have ever known, I have found God, the God who emerged from the Bible, not the God I was taught about in Church.

Forty four years ago, when I gave my life to Christ in a Scripture Union Summer Camp, I had an amazing emotional experience. I was told at the time, not to trust my emotions. Yes, I was told, it was an emotional thing to do, to accept Christ, but that I should not focus on the emotion but rather think about what my decision meant and to act on it. Dutifully I discounted the experience. But what I experienced was not just an emotion and I now know that it was moment of mystical revelation, an encounter with Spirit that was a more powerful link to the stories of people and the God I met in the Bible than anything I ever experienced in my Christian life. Love reached out and for a moment I was empty of everything, an innocent boy surrendered,and died to everything but love. That was no decision for Christ it was revelation and surrender to Spirit. Since then I have met angels and saints but by and large the Church utterly failed to nurture me in Spirit and truth.

Amazingly, in my current life I am finding lots of spiritual learning and nurture by reading philosophers, poets, the Quran, ancient Indian and Chinese scriptures and whatever I can get my hands on. I read these the same way as the Bible, in big gulps. The meaning and reality of my mystical surrender is slowly being restored.

But I go far to far for this article. All I wanted to do is to say to gay and queer people who are Christians. Read the Bible on your terms. It is not the Word of God. That is a dangerous belief that will blind you to the Spirit. The Bible is a book. God, on the other hand, is the Word that emerges when you read and lay yourself open to Spirit. Spirit is that which was active in the stories and is active in history and in you.

Darryl

Prayers for a spirit of transformation

2005-04-20T07:37:00.000+09:30

Now that we have a new Pope I think we should all in prayer invoke the Spirit of transformation and power on behalf of our brother Joseph. As he begins his imprisonment as the gatekeeper on the edge of eternity, shout with loving voices so that he may turn and see his Christ in the faces, nay as the faces, nay as the very multitude for whom his Christ emptied all on a rubbish heap.

May he see that if there are rubbish heaps then there are no gateways. May he see in revelation that just as there is no need of a temple in the kingdom that there is every need to embrace the living space of the most holy that is in the hearts of all the faces.

In Josephs face, put up the mirror of your own face and will that the all, the in all will fill him with transforming grace. Will that he will turn his face toward Christ and set aside the vestments of doctrine and embrace with tears the filthy extravagence of the multitude of Christs feet.

Darryl

Of Hope and Popes . .

2005-04-04T07:32:00.000+09:30

I'm not a Catholic and definitely not a papist. I suppose it is debatable these days as to whether I should call myself a Christian. But I do think it fitting that, on death of John Paul 2, the head of the Vatican State, I acknowledge a life lived in tension with Spirit, a tension that holds us all and holds us all together by our various and diverse strings. We should share in Spirit the life of this man and take on the mantle of his office in rainbow colours and in none.

As I buzzed about tidying and cleaning last night, my partner had put the television on to a documentary on the Pope's life. I stopped and watched as it portrayed him as roaming the world inclusively spreading the word. And while I celebrate with the program the greatness of the man's life and his achievements, he is after all as great and no greater than the woman who the film showed, who spoke to him in Bolivia, child in arms and empty frying pan in her hand to signify her hunger, he could but reach out and kiss her forehead, a generous, pious but nonetheless pitiable gesture. The richness of the Vatican could only acknowledge this woman's destitution and the riches of his contemplative life resulted in no more than the greatness of the humanness of a kiss.

On the passing of this great man, we should reflect on the greatness of the least of us, whatever "least" means. For the least in us is the more.

There is no doubt that the mark of John Paul 2 is to leave opportunity for his successor to stem the tide of the religious slide back into tightness and gate keeping. Fear has gripped our religions and they hold tight to that which they imagine will save them and us all, the keys to the kingdom that they hold so tight in their hands. If John Paul did hold the keys of the Kingdom in plain view, I look to his successor, to not just venerate the Holy Mother, as John Paul did, but acknowledge and embrace his own feminine and Goddess and throw the keys to all the children wth abandon, not just offer them as an incentive, while holding them firm in his fingers.

D

Feeling Ken Wilber

2005-03-23T07:39:00.000+09:30

I bought my first Ken Wilber book a week or two ago and have been luxuriating in the liberating prose of “The Simple Feeling of Being”, which is really an anthology of Ken Wilber's writing.

My reaction, I must say, whilst overall is one of liberation, I do vascillate between that feeling and “Oh no! Here is just another moralist dressed up in fine clothing.” I struggle with the evolutionary concepts that Wilber refers to, as these seem to be at odds with what I am finding in his writing overall. I have to confess to a strong tendency to find the inherent dualism of evolutionary concepts as being at odds with integral vision.

But at the moment, perhaps because Easter is upon us, I struggle also with the question. Why, or how in the fifty years I spent in the Christian Church did I now hear spiritual teaching such as this? Does the Christian Church have to be such a wasteland of spirituality?

There again I think, “Perhaps it was there all along and I just didn't see or hear it?”

One thing is for sure Ken Wilber's writing is turning me on to lines of learning in spirituality generally and in particular sending me scurrying back to the doubts, the awkward questions and voids I experienced all through my years in Christianity and already I'm finding new light and new meaning and the “Spirit” which was always “out there” is coming more clearly into view as “in here”.

And I'm intrigued with my wondering about the reality of the gay and not-gay. Can it be that the integral is not without the dual is not?

Selectively Indiscrimate Love

2005-03-01T07:28:00.000+09:30

I'm going away from my computer for a while on an interstate trip. I have been wanting to post something else about love and have decided to let Mary speak. . .

Mary

Mary was a nurse

she never married

days for Mary were filled with people

all shapes

all sizes

Mary loved her work

it exhausted her

nights for Mary were filled with days

all day

any day

Mary loved Bill

she didn't tend his pain

hours she nursed him, with care

all his life

and death

Fred loved Mary

he found her hope

moments with her were rich

just that

no more

Mary would change places with Alice

Alice glowed

time stood still

for ever

until

Mary never rested

she didn't need it's calm

refreshment was timeless and cot bound

unfailing

failing

Mary went to church

it was her habit

decades compressed, possessed

time out

not in

Mary abided God

like a relative

she feigned, times up, visiting hours are gone

goodbye

tomorrow

Mary hated

yes, she could hate

eternities of indifference

to cancerous love

and death

Mary knew herself

a disciple, acolyte and servant

briefly and for ever eternal

of gods

layed out

Darryl
January 2005

Profound Moments

2005-02-17T07:08:00.000+09:30

Sometimes the passage of time is something we take too much for granted. On a cosmic scale the blink of an eye is as a thousand years and a millenium is but the blink of an eye.

As scientists strive to achieve fusion of hydrogen gas in a tiny moment of time by massively compressing it in magnetic fields, the sun burns out its life of hydrogen fusions over millenia, just the same passing moment of time. What the scientist's strive for is the energy of our sun and the life force of us all. The sun's life span, on a cosmic scale lasts no longer than the scientist's experiment.

I wonder how many generations of beings live out their lives and loves in planets that circle the experimental sun that lasts for microseconds in the scientists' fusion experiments?

And so with our loving. Condensed in time that brief meeting we had with someone who passed by may be the very essence of loving, condensed and purified by it brevity.

It happened to me again this morning when I was out walking. The universe opened up for me in the eyes of a brief encounter with a man passing by on the walking path.

Love Indeed

Our eyes met for just a moment

but for just such a moment

abandon

generosity

selflessness

empty

yet complete

timeless

yet in perspective

with all

that was and could be

for a moment

How long does love last?

If it lasts for such a moment

it is love indeed

Normal relating.

2005-02-02T05:34:00.000+09:30

My thoughts seem to have taken a holiday. No posts for nearly a month.

In truth there are many things I have started to write but, exhausted, I put these writings aside before they are finished and when I return, they are not there, the universe having expanded. I imagine, my writing has fallen onto a new part of the fabric of things and, not used to the shape and texture, I fail to see it anymore.

I have been musing over relationships, well mine I suppose. Over recent times I have sometimes read thoughts about the nature of relationships. I react quite negatively when I read normative comments about relationships, especially when values are applied to imply scales of value, levels of maturity, stages of development and things like that.

Once I got myself very much into another blogger's bad books by sharply reacting to their assertion that a monogamous gay relationship was in some way better than serial relationships or so called promiscuity. I actually was quite critical, so I guess I deserved an angry response from the other person?

The pervasiveness of the normative concept of the healthiness of fidelity in 1:1 relationships is perhaps undeniable. But is it helpful? If allowed a continuum to reply to that question, I'm more inclined to see the one to one ideal as unhelpful rather than helpful. In fact I see it as a powerful cultural norm which confines our spirituality and which can make it difficult for us to see and experience the fullness of ourselves and the divine. It certainly contributes more than its fair share to human unhappiness. And I think, the normative aspects of 1:1 thinking devalue the choice that many people make in confining aspects of their relatiohships to one single other person. In many cases, perhaps, the choice is stolen by the normative cultural processes. People enter 1:1 relationships exercising a choice, not necessarily for the other person but because of the normative processes within which they live. It is after all what you do. And it is right. It is written in the stars, is it not? It is at least symbolic of the nature of God, that there be a one on one. Is that not true?

For me this is where it all comes unstuck. One on one fidelity bears very little relationship to the God, the all in all, the bigger we that emerges for me from the mists of my existence. In fact, the more I seek the less inclined I am becoming to be satisfied with nornative ideas about the high value of one on one relationships. I'm going to allow myself to think on this and write a little at a time.

But my credentials in relationships? Well I lived with one person for 32 years, another for about five months and with my current partner for eighteen months. I love all three. I also love others that I would not yet call or may never call partners, or perhaps, there again, I will.

New Year Celebration

2005-01-09T10:46:00.000+09:30

The QntEsence New Year Dawn breakfast was indeed a new beginning, small but hopefully significant. We were just six men gathered in the gloom of a monsoon morning sheltering from the rain and cooking up our breakfast on the barbeque. The dawn came and the sun, we must assume rose magnficently behind the overcast as the day progressed from dark grey to light grey.

Over breakfast we shared thoughts and anecdotes about being gay, being out there with a spiritual presence that might support and encourage other gay people in their spiritual journeys, however expressed. We also reflected on the fact that on its journey from the plateau of Tibet and swinging through Asia and across the equator to us, the "North-west monsoon" connected us to millions of people in Asia and in particular had a passage over the tragedy of the tsunami zone in Summatra.

Afterwards we retired to Graeme and Darryl's place and enjoyed coffee. The rain that had stayed light over breakfast came on with a vengence.

A simple gathering but a beginning. We collected a payment for breakfast from each person and last week I delivered cash to the Northern Territory Aids and Hepatitis Council to place in the account they have set aside for supporting people living with HIV-AIDS.

For me the breakfast was a new beginning as a "first event" in what I have called my QntEsence project. For me personally I went out the night before and saw in the New Year at the only bar in Darwin that passes as a "gay bar" where a relatively small group of friends, acquaintances and strangers rather quietly welcomed the time we defined as being after mid-night.

Doing the breakfast and then crashing was a great way to start 2005 for me and it was all a great conection with my partner Graeme. For various reasons Graeme didn't go out the night before but he consented to be my taxi and come and pick me up from the bar when I was ready . So it was a night of mutual support, each looking out for the other and sharing joint activity in organising the breakfast.

The small group at breakfast built on already established communication bridges in regard to our spiritual interests. Our groups effort to raise money, while somewhat modest in amount, was a connection with other people and hopefully sent a message to whoever, that we saw the "fruits" of our spiritual observance as wider than ourselves and something that has a practical and beneficial outcome.

Next Year - The Bridge of Light in 2006
I have been reading about the development of a new GLBT celebration for New Year and am excited about linking our 2006 breakfast into a larger and international celebration. Do read visit the link.

In the meagre and disconnected monsoon vine thickets of North Australia a small and colourful bird captilises on the bounty of the monsoon rains that arrive from over the seas. It builds a nest to fill this time of year with the promise of its progeny. The Rainbow Pitta, the bird that has allowed me to adopt it as my icon, has also allowed me to unmask its secretiveness. It has allowed me to share whatever spiritual morsels that can be found in the sparse earth which is the foundation of our existences. An earth that flourishes in the generous gift of monsoon air that has known its genesis in the rarity of the highest peaks of the Himalyas. On its journey it has been breathed by millions and moistened by warm oceans that cover amazing depths. May we both be children of its largesse.

Darryl

New Year Dawn Breakfast in Darwin - QntEsence Project

2004-12-31T16:17:00.000+09:30

Q_ntesense

New Years Dawn Breakfast 2005

QntEsence is an open project on gay or queer spirituality in the NT. To date it has involved only men in the Top End. An irregular “newsletter” and a page on the Darwin Pride website (courtesy of Sparkie) are currently the major outputs.

<>Darryl Butler
<>QntEsence Project

Why New Year Dawn?

For Graeme and I the idea came from Graeme for us to celebrate the new year with breakfast as the sun came up at dawn on New Years Day in 2004. We didn't make it, we partied too hard the night before and crashed!

For 2005 we were determined to do our dawn celebration and to help us we added a layer of commitment to others. We advertised that we would make this a QntEsence event and invite others to share.

At the same time Darryl has been reading of plans by some gay spiritual writers and “activists” in the USA developing a new gay spiritual celebration. Firstly this was focussed on the queering of “Yuletide”. Several commentators, including Darryl, proposed as an alternative that the secular New Year might be a more universal occasion to develop a six day queer spiritual celebration. (See Gay Spirituality and Culture).

Maybe in 2006 our dawn breakfast and a wider New Year gay celbration could come together.

Our New Year Dawn 2005

The Rainbow Flag affirms our queerness and our pride in our gay involvement in spirit.
A queer viewpoint is a contribution we make to spirituality and world religions.
Welcome and support is offered for all regardess of their spiritual journey, their beliefs or lack of them.
Newness and the creative potential of this day and all subsequent “this day”s is a focus for meditation.
Energy is in our union and symbolised by a shared breakfast and the rising sun.
Unquenchable love, however expressed, binds us and reaches out to our brothers and sisters wherever they may be.
Hope is in gathering, expressed through gay citizenship of the Northern Territory, the world and of the greater mystery.

Shared and unshared hopes. . . . .

An Angel Speaks out on Toxic Prayer

2004-12-14T16:03:00.000+09:30

I was reading Darrell Grizzle's article on Toxic Prayer on the Gay Spirituality and Culture website and was reminded of a story I have not previously written about.

There was a time not so long ago when I would have not even contemplated the thought that Christians might pray for someone's death just because they were gay. I would have, in fact, been shocked. And shock is exactly what I felt when I heard of this for the first time. A story was told to me over a cup of tea and a biscuit in the most traditional of Australian Uniting church halls. This story sickened me and sobered me in regard to any complacency I might have acquired about the extent to which some so called Christians might show a lack of compassion and deny the nature of their Christ.

Last Summer in southern Australia my partner and I went to visit his parents and mine. We were staying with my partner's parents in a coastal town in the State of South Australia. My partner's father had recently moved from a Christian congregation that he had worshipped in for some time. He had moved into another congregation in a neighboring town. He had done this because of the intolerance being shown toward gay people in his original congregation.

My partner was proud of his father and the stand that he had taken. I felt that pride too and I felt the warm and accepting love that my partner's one-time missionary parents had shown me by welcoming me into their house. As our stay was over a Sunday, my partner and I decided we would accompany his father in attending a church service in his adopted congregation. I was pleased to do this, even though I have felt quite estranged from the church. I guess I saw it as a means of supporting my partner's father who is a lovely principled man, and a way of supporting my partner by sitting beside them both. Dare I say it, I might just have also seen us as a witness to the loveliness that springs forth from what the people in the congregation might interpret as God.

The service itself took me decades back in time. Even though neither of us are spring chickens, my partner being in his fourth decade and I in my fifth, I suspect we lowered the average age rather significantly. I was quite frankly, totally bored, unsympathetic to the feel good theology of the sermon and I realised I had descended rapidly into a sense of righteous duty. The earnest indifference of the performance from the choir and the hardness and warm stickiness of the bare lacquered pew reminded me that here was one gay man, suspending his tireless quest for pleasure for at least an hour or so.

After the service, the agony promised to continue as we lined up to shake the preacher's hand, and that of his wife, before filing out into the hall for a cuppa and fellowship. My discomfort was relieved briefly by a delicious sense of fun when the woman standing behind me offered me a welcome and the breezy reassurance that she was very pleased to see me again. She warmed to her task and gushed slightly at the relief she no doubt felt at having achieved the initiative of the welcome. I was filled with admiration for her efforts and I suppressed my wicked desire to inform her that I had never set foot in that place before and that she was no doubt referring to my partner's previous boyfriend. Thank you I said. I always like coming here with Graeme. Neither of us knew what else to say, so we resumed our dumb smiles, mine all the bigger on the inside as I silently self-talked my justification for the little deception and simultaneously woke in myself a slightly greater sense of connection with those around me.

Having survived the practically inarticulate hand of the preacher and the bemused presence of his wife, Graeme and I arrived at a bare table decked with plates of biscuits. A matronly bustle soon made sure we were handed, balanced in saucers, our respective cups filled with tea and coffee, customised to match our desires. Graeme and I were then left to the secrets each of us held in the other's eyes. We, as chastely as possible, sipped our drinks and pivoted politely at the hip in an effort to convey an impression that we in the room rather than in our own private space.

Neither Graeme nor I were prepared for the tears that the approaching face would bring to our eyes. She was careful, this angel whose name has gone from my memory, although her pain stays with me. Are you two a couple? We acknowledged that we were. With some apparent relief this woman then told has that she was pleased we were a couple, she was pleased to see us there and she was pleased to be able to speak to us. Her welcome was not earnest, but heartfelt. She went on, saying that she especially wanted to welcome us because My daughter is a couple too!

The conversation developed rapidly and almost before we knew it, Ann (I will call her this for ease of telling the story) was telling us of the lack of acceptance her daughter had experienced in her own church congregation when it became known that she was lesbian. Some members of Ann's daughter's congregation had apparently made it very plain that they were praying for her to give up her lesbian lifestyle and were blaming of her when this outcome did not occur.

In obvious pain, Ann went on to tell us how her daughter had then been involved in a road accident and was very seriously injured. At first, it was not known whether she would survive. Although Ann then told us that her daughter had survived and was recovering, she also told us that some members of the congregation where her daughter had worshipped, had come to Ann to discuss her daughter's future. They had told Ann that they believed the accident was somehow sent from God as a punishment. These church people had then told Ann that they were praying that her daughter would die from her injuries as this would be the best thing for her, somehow saving her from her evil lesbian existence.

It is hard for me to describe my feelings at hearing Ann's story. I guess there was shock, outrage, anger, compassion for Ann and her daughter all mixed together into an overpowering feeling. I could barely contain my tears, although I desperately did not want to draw attention to our little group and the beautiful woman who had chosen to quietly share her pain and turn our ordinary morning into a dawning of the deepest spiritual significance.

Graeme and I walked away and the rest of our day was taken up with a gathering of his family and then travel. We were returning to our home in the Northern Territory. The events of the morning left our minds, but lessons have remained.

The angel of the universe who chose to speak to Graeme and I taught me not to underestimate the extent to which apparently good people can distort love into the most gross and inhuman of actions. She taught me that prayer can indeed be toxic. The angel also taught me not to underestimate my opportunities for learning. She also reinforced to me that love, compassion, hospitality and inclusive kindness spring effortlessly from suffering.

I wonder. Is suffering always necessary?

The Expansiveness, Flexibility, Malleability and Inexhaustability of Love

2004-11-30T07:00:00.000+09:30

I'm not sure about that title. Maybe there should be some more adjectives in there? You can mix and match your own adjectives.

I suppose for a Christian the quintessential stories about the endlessness of love are the stories of Jesus feeding the multitude, be it five thousand or four thousand, from what was originally a meagre supply fish and bread. What are the similar stories from other religious traditions? Someone might let me know?

In this time and age when a lot of noise is being made by ultra conservative religious zealots, we are apparently being told that there is a limit to the love of God. According to some such people there is only so much love to go around and what love there is, is reserved for those who believe or practice quite prescribed things. For those outside of this prescription, God's love is dangling like a carrot, just beyond reach, unless of course you chant the right mantra, get yourself born again or give up your gay lifestyle or . .whatever. Another variant of this story is that the majority of us are not going to experience God's love anyway, most of us will burn in hell, while the "in-crowd" is raptured into God's presence.

The debate over gay marriage has recently drawn out attention to another notion that is very prevalent, even in gay and lesbian circles. This notion is that love is such a precious thing that it can be reserved, or perhaps should be reserved for just one individual. If you are straight of course there is special dispensation that allows you to love your offspring in a quite intimate way, as long as it is in a very different kind of intimacy and ultimately a relatively more distant way. For all of us we are also permitted to love our parents and if we must, our own brother and sisters and even particular members of our extended families. But woe betide us if we feel like loving more than one person intimately and sexually.

To me, these and various other points of view on love both overestimate its importance while underestimating its power and its ability to be present in an infinite number of forms. Some of these points of view, perhaps by implication, also underestimate loves inexaustible and creative supply. I'm personally not too impressed by those philosophers and theologions who describe only a few types of love, as though it was a commodity that could be confined into categories. Religious people like to define love in neat little ways of course because the descriptions can be used to divide the world and people into paddocks of different types, including the great big paddock of those who are falling short of God's love.

On the contrary:

Every parent knows that when and if they have another child they will love the next no more or less than the first and if they have another child again, they will love that one just as much as the first two. But each will be loved in a way that is unique to that individual.

Every person who has ever fallen romantically in love with more than one person knows that love can be equally strong for more than one person.

People who have entered blended families know that they can grow to love a new step parent or a new step child.

Many who enter arranged marriages know that love can grow as strongly from obligation as it can from other things.

Many, who have loved and lost, know that they can love again without losing their love for the lost one.

Many know that love is not bounded by time. Many do love someone for a while and the move on. Perhaps they do this more than once.

Many who have a close circle of friends know that their love can be equally shared and be different for different people all at the same time.

These are everyday, ordinary experiences. Not doctrines or laws or dogmas of religious cultures that will pass away.

My own Christian tradition teaches that "God is love." Is this just a metaphor or a spiritual reality? Or is it a sick joke on those who do not believe? For me there is much to think about because I believe that the God is love thing is a truly spiritual reality, not just a platitude to be mouthed with little thought. I also think that the flip side of the statement , "love is god" is an important pointer to an understanding of the spiritual reality which some of us call God. It also works if you don't need a concept of God.

It also works for gay people, many of whom love greatly, many of whom love generously, many of whom love expansively, many of whom love indiscriminately as does the God who emerged for me, inspite of and because of my Christian tradition. I have found it helpful to put aside preconceived notions or definitions of what love is and simply meditate on what I experience and see as love. So what is love. I don't know, but if what I see or experience raises the question of love, then that is enough for me to regard it as love and meditate on it.

As a gay man I think of the multitude of ways that men love men and wonder what this teaches me about God or godliness or truth or the all pervasive spirit or the nature of the universe. So far I have found this meditation expands my appreciation of who I am and who we all are.

On good and evil, respect and the utility of anger

2004-11-21T11:21:00.000+09:30

For the last month or so I have been struggling with the technicalities of setting up a blog. In the process I have not been focussing on what I want to do with the blog. Enough. I have the blog itself to a workable stage and I will continue to learn how to make it look and feel the way I would like. I have made progress in using HTML, not that I understand what I am doing. But I press on.

I have commenced a second journal style of blog which is linked in the side panel. I may also start a a group blog soon for another project about exploring a forum on spirituality for gay people in the Northern Territory. I have called this other project QntEsence.

So, finding a direction and a spiritual journey for this blog has been a task that I have kept at the edge of my awareness. This morning, however, as I sat out on the patio, under the spreading fig tree in the closeness of a beautiful tropical dawn, I realised that I found a direction for my rainbowpitta project.

The Rainbow Pitta (Pitta iris) had emerged from the gloom of the forest floor and become brighter than the blackness of its head and the olive green of its back. This morning the emerging pitta did once again what it does for all who see it and stop to pay attention. Its apparent drabness became irridescent and the exquisite redness of its short tail, the bright blue on its shoulder and the colours under its wings and on its breast made themselves visible.

Tap gently on the leaves of the forest floor and Pitta iris will confide even further as it hops closer, hugging the musty earth to explore your interest and enlist you with its spell.

As I sat and had my breakfast looking out at the green lushness of the tropical garden of our townhouse complex, it occurred to me that I am very interested in the way in which the “either-or” view of the world has found its way so profoundly into my being. I was interested in dichotomies. It seems to me that the dominant culture here in Australia and perhaps in all of the western world is built on a view of the universe that says everything may be divided into either-or camps. In my recent reading on spirituality I had come across the term “duality”, which I think is similar. I am certainly interested in the philosphical side of dual thinking but I am more interested in how this thinking finds it way into the everyday lives of ordinary people.

I have come from a “so-called” Christian tradition which seems very much predicated on a dichotomy of good and evil. I am interested in how this fundamental dichotomy has aquired the status of “Law of the Universe”. I am interested in the way this duality pervades everyday life and has hijacked the way we understand ourselves and how we relate to each other? Can I map this into the hopes and expectations, the joys and miseries of Sunday to Monday for Joe and Floe?

As I sat and had my breakfast looking out at the same green lushness of the tropical garden of our townhouse complex, it ocurred to me that an interest in dualities connected with what I had learned to accept as fundamental. Over the last twenty years of so I have journeyed toward belief in the underlying respectfulness of the Universe. This belief has in many ways overtaken the beliefs I grew up with in my Christian tradition. A fundamentally respectful Universe is, for me, growth from a traditional view of divinity, at least as I learned it. Can I explain what I mean? Can I learn what I mean? Can I convey that meaning to anyone else?

As I sat over breakfast, this second theme, that of fundamental respect, came together in my mind with the theme of dualities. So often in my daily life I use and I encounter a duality between respect and disrespect. In my writing as the rainbowpitta I want to explore this duality and the related ones of respect and lack of respect and respect and non-respect.

Before I leave my breafast in the garden I want to mention one other thing that is important in my journey of spiritual exploration. It is perhaps a dynamic process rather than a theme. That process is anger. For I see anger not so much as an object, an emotional state, but as a process of controlling. As is often the case, even in the idyll of my tropical breakfast, I was aware of anger as a process. Anger was present for me this morning in the guise of guilt. It has different guises. But more of that another time.

Over the last three to five years particularly, I have become conscious of a deep well of anger that seems to exist inside me. It surprises me. It dismays me. My friends, I suspect, will not often see this anger as I jealously guard it and hide it in my internal cloak of guilt. I am struggling in my attempts to own this anger because I have not been able to locate where it has come from or why it is there. I cannot find in my past life anything that has happened to”cause” such a deep seated anger. But the proverbial “chip on the shoulder” does give me a clue that I have things to resolve in my relationship with power, with control and with authority. It gives me a clue that I have things to resolve in regard to my relationships generally and in my gravitation toward some form of peace with the universe.

A month or two ago I was reading the blog of a gay man who was writing about relationships between gay men. Although I was new to blogging I can't say I was new to life and what followed next was, I say defensively, an out-of-character act of disrespect on my part. I posted a reply and attacked the views being expressed on the blog quite dismissively. This is something I now feel quite shameful about, the more so because in response to this person's rebuke, I again posted implying that the person had things to learn.

I feel regret for what I did but I also feel a lingering sense of guilt. That guilt is saying to me that my anger was involved and that I was engaging or attempting to engage in a power struggle. The issue of power was in a real way confirmed for me when the other person removed themselves from the battlefield and excluded me from accessing his blog. Disengagement is an effective strategy in dealing with others who invoke power battles. I have therefore, not had the opportunity to apologise to that blogger, but if he should happen to read these words, this is a public apology.

Some on-going part of that power struggle has been my own internal struggle to control myself. In a style typical of myself I turned my anger inwards and transformed it into guilt. But that was not the control issue that sparked my outburst in the first place. In hindsight, my anger was my attempt to deal with dichotomies of good and evil and a sense of disrespect that I felt, thought and “knew” in the ideas that were being expressed by the blogger..

The ideas that I reacted to were acceptance of a point of view that gay men tended to lead sexually promiscuous lives and that stable long term relationships between gay men were rare. On top of that I thought that what was being said was that the supposed state of promiscuity was somehow bad and that long term stable relationships were good. Apparent acceptance of this notion by a gay man, was a trigger for my anger. I felt that this was an unthinking acceptance of the disrespectful dichotomous idea of a heterosexual culture, and I said so. What I was not aware of at the time was that a great deal of my anger arose not just from my desire to control a view expressed by another person, but from the profound and deep seated tendency of my own, to live in a “them and us” frame of mind. That blogger, that I attacked, has since become a catalyst for learning for me and so I must add a public thanks to my apology.

Perhaps I can devote my blog to this spiritual journey. I have few answers and lots of questions. I have a beginning but no sense of where it will end. I have a modest view of my ability to write, at least my ability to write in a simple and clear way. Hopefully the blog will help me improve my writing skills and my assessment of them. I do want to write from an experiential, daily life point of view. Like my iconic creature, the rainbow pitta, my scratchings hopefully might be in the warmth and the honesty of the poor and infertile earth that yet gives birth to the beauty of the the vine thicket.

If anyone looks in on my spiritual journey and wants to add their views or comments I will be pleased and grateful.

Bitchiness and the art of being

2004-11-16T06:48:00.000+09:30

I've been feeling so bitchy and out of sorts. What the hell is going on! Got pissed off at work yesterday, kicked myself for getting pissed off. I thought I was over getting my self worth from my work.

Last night, after a beautiful tropical storm I went out to a discussion group with a few of the guys . .the topic . .getting old. I was a great discussion but I fear I was bitchy and dismissive to a lovely man. I'm not sure when I'll see him next, I don't have a contact and I really feel like apologising.

I can see myself as a drop of water dancing across a red hot piece of metal and I don't know why. A couple of weeks ago I was feeling so serene and energised. Both my lover and I seem to be afflicted with something similar and we are doing pretty well allowing for each other. Our standard excuse is that it is troppo season here in Darwin . . .but . .

Sometimes I have this sense that emerges from somewhere that I am barely adequate container of some seething mass of discontent and anger. I have made progress, at least I thought I had. I used to bottle all this up and not even let myself know it was there. Chronic depression and I believe the non-congenital aspects of my heart condition are some of the physical fruits . Spiritually I feel disconnected, I feel my boundaries and the danger they may hold for me or others.

As I have become more attuned to this and able to recognise it I have stopped punishing myself but now I often let the anger out on others when they don't deserve any of it. This frightens me and sometimes I want to crawl right back into myself where the only person I will hurt is myself.

Is this akin to the notion of demon possession? It sometimes feels like I have a demon within. But I can't say I feel possessed. More like desperately wanting to emerge into newness. Or perhaps that is what's happening and I need to carry a sign saying "birth in progress, unexpected bloodiness can be expected!"

The discussion last night group was good . . .seven gay men chewing the cud of life . . .and even though I was a bitch I wasn't a total one and in some ways I felt much more open to them from having exposed my inner bitch.

The floor of the monsoon vine thicket where I live is rock. The soil is very thin or non-existent. The leaf litter is getting more moist now and the worms and cockroaches will hurryits decay sending it almost directly into into the vines and leaves . . .unless I can intercept their nutrifying goodness and take it into myself . . scratch

Inspiration

2004-11-10T08:07:00.000+09:30

I have just read the linked post on Gay Spirituality and Culture
A sermon given by Dr Penny Nixon of the Metroplitan Community Church in San Fransisco. It is well worth a read and some further thought.

Spiritual Tension

2004-11-09T11:43:00.000+09:30

I have not posted for a few days as I have been trying to write something meaningful about my assertion in last Thursday's post that if there is spirit then there is gay spirit. I have made several attempts. Each piece of un-finished writing is worth keeping and working on but I feel hard pressed to know what I think about gay spirit, let alone write that down.

So perhaps for the moment, this more “stream of consciousness” approach will at least unblock me?

Joe G wrote the words “when I was a born again Christian” and tickled my fancy, for I was too. And of course what tickled my fancy was that if I ever was “born again” then I always will be, even though my spiritual growth has taken me to a point where I have very much more liberal views. Come to think of it I think I always had very liberal views.

So in keeping with what to me is a fantastic piece of humour . . .When I was a born again Christian, as late as the mid 1990s, I used to read the bible. I could say I did it more thoroughly than religiously as I read it cover to cover several times. More lately, with my liberal personal I like to dredge out my broad sweep understandings of the biblical journey to illustrate, at least to myself that many fundamentalist Christian views have missed the biblical point almost entirely. But, hey I'm not a scholar so I only know what I know.

Anyway, the point is I have recently felt a need to revist the Bible and reaquaint myself with texts, whose memory I have to admit has faded. It is a journey to find the new queer twists of revelation my emerging “gayness” has spawned. So far I am reading the gospels in big bits so as not to get bogged down in trivial detail. I am perhaps wondering whether I will meet the Jesus who I imagine would rather not call himself a Christian and who might embrace his own queerness. I am looking forward to finding the text where Jesus taught that God was spirit and must be worshipped in spirit and in truth. I wonder if anywone really understands what that means?

I am also reading more modern texts. I bought a second hand book when I was in Sydney recently “Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning” edited by Mark Thompson. This book I see was published in 1987 so it is quite old, but it is new to me. I have also just finished reading “The Celibate” by Michael Arditti and enjoyed the journey even it some of the coincidences in the plot were a little cute. I have read some of Toby Johnson's work and will red more. I am looking around at blog writers and have enjoyed the work of Joe Perez: The Soulful Blogger.

But. And it is a big but. Where do I get the time to do all this? At a time in my life where I was just beginning to find and appreciate the blessing of quietness and the mindfulness of inactivity, I am bumping up against a world of mind boggling complexity and huge volumes of words. I am bumping up agains a world of what seems to me to be spiritual and life achievement, driven intellect and striving and I am, frankly, daunted. I long for the blissful solitude of my ironing or the quiet comtemplation of place and eternity that sweeping my floor can bring.

The rainbowpitta hops and scratches and rummages in the detrious of the monsoon vine thicket. It is only because it needs to eat that I see it there?

A New Day in an Old Story and am I asking the Right Question?

2004-11-04T06:47:00.000+09:30

As I woke to find it is a hot and humid Top End November morning, I remembered that I'm asking the question is their gay spirit?, when the western world is joining the rest of the zealots in division of the planet not only into camps of haves and have nots but skirmish groups of good and evil bent on hell in the form of a long drawn out Armageddon. Am I asking the right question?

I suspect that I am. Maybe the plunge into fundamentalism and the battle over truth and justice, as though it were a commodity to market, possess and promote, is just the environment where spiritual awareness and an emerging and desperate desire for real truth can emerge.

The question is there gay spirit is really the question is their spirit at all. The agnostic in me knows that if there is spirit then there is gay spirit. But I'll think about that, sweat over it and write some more tomorrow.

The forest floor looks messy now with leaves blown from droughted trees. But the first rains of the Wet Season have appeared and soon the forest floor will be a rich source of food for the rainbow pitta.

Is there gay spirit?

2004-11-01T21:52:00.000+09:30

I wonder is there a spiritual perspective that is gay. Sometimes I'm sure there is and sometimes I wonder. Whenever I get close to this subject with someone who is not gay, I get no recognition whatsoever. So is the idea of a gay spiritual perspective just another "in-crowd" view or a piece of jargonese?
What do I know for myself? What would I know for myself?
Right now I'm feeling pretty disillusioned about things, at the tender age of well closer to 60 than not, am I at last losing my innocence? Is this an inevitable result of coming out of decades in the closet? Do I have to "grow up" now?

I think I would rather not but I'm losing the knack of stopping the process.
Can I be a "two-spirit" while trying desperately to integrate my identity?
Perhaps I should go back, return, never stop, oggling boys, maybe it's more spiritual in the end (ouch)!
At least when they open to me their eyes I can believe in something. Not thee not me but we in the singular. But can we, not thee not me hold that gaze and hold the singularity or is this the ultimate duality? Not that it is but that it grows.
Gay and not gay? . . . .

2004-10-28T06:45:00.000+09:30

Taking Life as it Comes . . .

I have always been interested in the weather. Where I live, in tropical monsoonal Australia the weather can be very interesting particularly in our Wet Season, with storms and massive rain events. I love the Wet Season, although it is also the hot season.

For some time I have made an occasional contribution to an on-line weather group. I find difficulty relating to many of the posts on the discussion groups however, as the other people in the group seem obsessed with severe weather, fervently wishing it to occur. The also seem very much less than satisfied unless they can predict occurrences of severe weather and can sometimes be scathing of professional forecasters, when they get things wrong.

For a start I don't long for severe weather. I enjoy it and revere and savour its majesty when it happens. I'm not that fussed about predicting the weather either, although others seems to find this incredibly important. I just don't see it as important. I can and do enjoy anticipation of a weather event if I can see the signs of it arriving. But I can't help feeling as though those who want to precisely predict the weather are trying somehow to develop a sense of power over their lives and the lives of others, which leaves me quite cold.

In many ways I therefore feel on the outer of the weather group. I actually don't really care if we get an afternoon storm today although I will greatly enjoy it if we do.

I love the climate in which I live and love most of what it serves up to me.

How much do I want to be in control of what happens later today or tomorrow if I'm happy with whatever life gives me? Is this about living in today or am I just being lazy and not wanting to exercise my intellect and learn what there is to learn about predicting weather? Maybe a bit of both . . .

2004-10-25T07:53:00.000+09:30

Just Looking?
A friend of mine who visited from elsewhere once told me he thought that Darwin must be one of the perve capitals of the world. Lots of boys wearing relatively little. I have to agree. Although a recent trip to Sydney and Brisbane showed how these places could reward the expectant viewer of eye candy.

It makes me wonder about the connection you can get with other men just by looking at them and admiring and sometimes lusting after them. So is lust a deadly sin or a spiritual reality and part of our interconnectedness? Of course I would like to believe the latter but is this just wishful thinking or a justification of my own behaviour.

Just looking is a relatively hot current issue. Is it possible for us to divide our "just looking" into categories of goodness or badness depending on our motives?

Still thinking

2004-10-18T23:33:00.000+09:30

My comments on an article "Confessions of a Political Junkie" by Joe Perez , The Soulful Blogger http://www.joe-perez.com/weblog.htm

Thanks for this article Joe. The simple concept of accepting that no-one is 100% right or wrong is so easy to pretend to uphold but so difficult for me to maintain in honest reality.

We have just had an election in Australia and the previously governing party was returned and Prime Minister Howard has an improved majority. This is a result that has shocked me because I do not believe like a majority of other voters that this is the best thing for our country.

Your article, however, has challenged me to focus my spiritual growth and nurture it on the things that can be changed.

In some ways coming out to my sexuality and my spirituality later in life (at 54) has meant that I have found it harder to deal with different opinions and values as I, at long last, come to value and cherish my own.

Perhaps I have, in the past, acquiesced and surrendered my own opinons to those of others. The challenge I see now is to grow in my ability to cherish myself and my own values and beliefs whilst also valuing the very real difference of others.

For the first time in my life I did not vote for either of our major political parties over their bipartisan approach to legislating against same sex marriage. Perhaps I'm not the political junkie here, nor the political flunkie but certainly a babe of a spiritual voter.

Thanks again.
Darryl

The Rainbow Pitta Emerges from the Thicket

2004-10-02T13:49:00.000+09:30

This is my inaugural post. Somehow I have stumbled into blogging. Blogged if I know how to do it but I guess I can only try.