The Journey Thus Far
(Spring, 1999)
It began with a dream I had when I was around eleven or twelve years old, a sort of vision I had.
Perhaps "began" isn't the right term, but it's the clearest most vivid aspect of spirituality I remember in my life.
I had this dream that there was this man inside a bubble, and he was smiling, and clearly very happy. But I wasn't happy watching him. I wasn't glad for him. I was horrified. I somehow knew that his happiness wasn't based on understanding, or knowledge, or love, or hope. It was just empty happiness with no meaning behind it, no soul behind it, like what I would later come to think of as a drugged out haze; a shallow, mindless high without reason.
And I remember waking up from that dream, that nightmare, with a start, and realizing that I had seen a vision of hell-- not fire, not brimstone, not pain and torture. Just an absence of meaning, of love, of hope, of change, of joy-- not the sort of false epidermal layer of joy some people wear to hide the pain, but the real joy that comes from a place deeper within one's self, that comes from knowing, from loving, from passing through the darkness.
It was at that moment that I learned something very important about myself: that while some people can blind themselves to their own lives, and the world around them, I have neither an interest or desire to do so. Years later, I developed a metaphor for myself about boxes, about how the world tries to place us into categories, into places, into the holes in which we're supposed to fit. I would hear from time to time a hammer and a nail, trying to box me into a role that wasn't mine, trying to tell me that I had to be heterosexual, that I had to be a man, that I had to be a Christian.
But as strange as this may seem, even though I could hear that hammer and nail, over and over again, I knew that paths for me were different.
When I was seventeen, I lived in the town of Marquette, Michigan. I was bicycling home one night, following the bike path by the shore of Lake Superior, and while the path was in the woods, I could see some of my way from the nearby street lights.
But there was a certain part of the path which was hidden completely in darkness, with no light available. I could have gotten off the bike and walked. I could have slowed down.
For whatever reason, I did neither of these things.
Instead, I closed my eyes. I felt a swerve, and a dip, and I followed what felt right to me, and then I opened my eyes again. I was on the other end of the path, back in the light again. I had taken a leap of faith, and trusted in the universe that I would be brought safely through that path, and knowing that my eyes would do me no good at that moment, that they would only distract me, I closed them.
To this day I do not know what motivated me to take that sort of risk. But it was an important one, and it shaped many of my thoughts of things to come. It also taught something very important: that even if I'm following a path that someone else had laid out, I don't need to follow it in the same way they did before.
Which brings us into Taoism. I started reading the Tao Te Ching when I was in College, around 19 or 20. I don't read it in any particular order, and I don't try to assess "meaning" from the text, as much as I try to just be with the text when I read it, knowing that the words themselves are merely a shadow of their content.
But the concepts were important to me. All my life I'd been beaten up and attacked by people for various reasons, to the point where I sometimes planned and expected it to happen because it was what was familiar and real to me.
I learned through the Tao that there were so many other ways, that the choices were not simply between being the bullied and being the bully, that one could step out of the pattern completely, and move aside, rather than accept or deflect a blow or an attack.
Even though "Tao Te Ching" translates roughly into "the way of life," it wasn't until more recently that I learned to put into words what this means. A lot of Westerners assume it means the method: how to live your life. That's part of it, but it also means the path as well.
I.e., it's also about how you travel through life, what choices you make, how you make your way, and in what direction you go.
And it's also about how you create choices when none seem available, how you learn to make decisions outside of what people say you must do.
Which brings us into music.
When I was sixteen I started learning to play the guitar.
I had always been branded the thinker, the mathemetician, the intellectual. This was not a bad thing, in some ways-- I was very good at logic and reason; well versed in things mathematical. I could argue my way out of just about anything, and debate circles around people. But it was used to define me, to shape me. We return again to the hammer and nail.
Music didn't allow for this. While my sense of math helped me understand chord theory, and how notes interact with one another as a system, it didn't help me create music. I spent years, practicing as much as six hours in a day, before I could actually play what I considered genuine music. And that didn't come from logic or math. It came from actually opening up inside myself; from finally exploring inside myself as to who I am.
It filled this void-- no one had taught me anything about spirituality while I was growing up. My parents were ostensibly Jewish and Catholic, but neither seemed much into their religion more than talking about it from an intellectual standpoint. The main thing I seemed to inherit from the Jewish/Catholic heritage is what I like to call "the double-whammy of guilt."
The main effect that this seems to have had on me is that I have now apparently developed an immunity to guilt trips. I'm capable of feeling guilty, but it doens't happen often, and it almost never happens if I get the sense that someone actually wants me to fell guilty.
I'm not sure what else to say about this right now. I'm sure there's lots more I could say, but this seems like enough for the moment. I do want to close with a single thought about risk. I've learned through the years that I survive by taking risks with myself, through challenge and growth, otherwise I start to stagnate. A lot of my choices when I was younger were not the wisest, and I used to take ridiculous risks for a variety of reasons. I used to walk too close to cliffs, sometimes balancing myself on top of the fences which were designed to keep people from going too close to the edge of the cliff. I used to just walk into traffic without looking.
I think I used to do these things because I was scared of life (but couldn't admit it) and that I felt so numb inside that I had to do something dangerous just to feel alive. This sounds like a contradiction-- being afraid of life while wanting to feel alive-- but it somehow fits exactly who I was at the time.
But I don't think any of those risks were real and genuine risks for myself. They were childish games that I played with my life. The real risks came when I started facing the fears, rather than doing obscenely stupid things out of fear.
So for me, the real risks that helped me grow were things such as acknowledging my bisexuality ten years ago and my transsexualism eight years ago. They were things such as embracing music, when people were trying to convince me that I had no potential for it. They were things such as embracing relationships which terrified me because of what they might have told me about myself.
I had a vision some five or six years ago, about that hammer and nail. I was thinking about that sound, and that sense that people were boxing me in, and trying to tell me who and what to be.
A sudden realization came to me-- that that hammer and nail weren't just building boxes. They were trying to keep me from being who I wanted to be in a way which, whether intentionally or not, would destroy me.
The picture came to me of exactly what they were building. It wasn't just a box that was being designed for me. It wasn't just a role or a guideline for appropriate behavior.
This is why I take risks. This is why when I'm afraid of the consequences of what will happen when I am direct and honest, I try my best to face it head on. This is why I don't allow myself the luxury of just letting things go unsaid that really need to be said: because that box isn't just a box that's being built for me.
It's a coffin.