So many cycles are ending, the sand storm union is protesting its own retirement. Don’t try so hard to understand that sentence. Just picture yourself being pounded by waves, somewhere on the north shore of Oahu under an 89° sun, mourning the death of a friend that scared you, but that you loved anyway, feeling elated by the warm water pushing you into the shifting earth. It’s like that.
It’s also like the way it suddenly occurs to you, while drinking your morning fire, that every American baby born now will not think it is a big deal to have a black president. At least not with a decade or two of hive education and history memorizing, when, against all odds, thanks to a lucky combination of smarts, empathy and books, the story of US reveals itself to them in all its horrifying drama. I mean, geez.
I am gossamery. It’s a word. I think it means what I feel.
I am also heavy, struggling with the burden/blessing of perspective. Of always having to be the one with it, the one who swallows my lesser selves and shows compassion and understanding to people who hate me. People who are afraid of women, who are afraid of homosexuals, who are afraid of dark skin, almond shaped eyes, earthquaking social norms. People who are afraid of change. People who don’t see, and maybe don’t experience, the authenticity of a love that gives unconditional positive regard. The love that’s here and now and everywhere, sticking to everything. How it wants to be seen.
I want to get where they are coming from, these people who voted for Prop 8. They are protecting something they feel is being violated. Something that to them is sacred. Something connected to the infallibility of their god, and everything they’ve been taught about meaning. I forgive Barack Obama for not standing up for gay marriage. He wanted to be elected president. I wanted him to be elected president too. But separate but equal is not equal. It never was.
I am so crushed by the hardness of blossoming. I don’t want to keep growing, to keep fighting to become what I’m becoming. It’s all just very Shakespearean for me right now. Llike if Hamlet were a 29 year old girl raised by a gay man, and there was a protest growing in his heart, and an anger that raged in his teeth, making reconciliation seem impossible, and then Southern California started burning down around him.
I know that life happens all at once. I almost prefer it. I just want the volume to be turned down a bit. I’m resisting the truth it forces me to see about the cycles that are not ending, but only beginning. There’s no more light at the end of the tunnel, because I’ve come out of the tunnel. It’s all light. Everywhere. My eyes just haven’t adjusted yet. It’s so bright. It’s so so bright out here.
