Uncomfortable Places I Have Slept 2

 

Not my vehicle

Chilcott’s Mechanics, Route 32, north of New Paltz, NY

 I spent a week at a retreat put on by Direct Centering, the cult I was involved with in the middle 80s. I’m likely to write more about this in the future, but this is what led to a morning spent at a garage.

I’d driven down two friends, and while I remember their faces, I don’t remember their names. When we returned to New York from Florida, I also gave a ride to Shelley, my occasional friend with benefits (although we didn’t call it that back then). The four of us left Florida, where the retreat had been, and drove the east coast home, dropping each person off on the way. One lived in northern Jersey, one in Brooklyn, and Shelley was staying in Riverdale with her mom. It was a long drive, and only two of us, Shelley and me, had driver’s licenses. I don’t remember how often we changed drivers but at one of them Shelley ordered me to drink a full cup of coffee.

Now, here is the place to talk about my complex relationship with coffee. Growing up, my parents had regularly downed cups of what they called coffee each morning, and it wasn’t for decades I realized what they were drinking was Sanka or sometimes Kava. The liquid smelled terrific, but the actual taste was like a brown crayon dipped in tepid tap water. I vowed never to become a bean head like them. To reinforce this, the coffee Shelley had me drink was from a pot of late-night percolated stuff on the back shelf of some station where we gassed up. It went down like moist grit.

Years after this, I was at a Rainbow Gathering where I was introduced to Cowboy Coffee at an off-trail kitchen called The Mud Hole. [Kid to the guy hunkered over a pot on an open flame: “You got any water?” The guy, from somewhere in the recesses of his gut: “Nope, got mud.” Kid: “Oh, I get it. You got any coffee?” Guy: “Nope, got mud.”] My reaction to drinking this black distillate was like The Simpson’s Barney Gumble chugging his first beer: “Where have you been all my life?” And by now, I am a fully confirmed java-head, whose father was unable to drink more than a quarter cupful generously laced with water when I made it.

Anyway, it may have been the effects of that cup that made me refuse Shelley’s offer of a nap at her mom’s place, telling her, “I’m an hour from home, I can do this.” It was also bravado, which I had in great supply.

The retreat was in mid-winter and while we were south, New York had a couple snowstorms, none very heavy, but there were a couple inches on the ground. I was renting an apartment in New Paltz then and was kinda anxious to sleep in my bed. Most of my drive was uneventful, I was holding steady at about 60 on the Thruway, a little slower than most traffic because there were patches of black ice here and there. But I was a New Yorker, had driven in snow and sleet all my life, and I knew how to avoid them.

Up until between the exits to Newburgh and New Paltz. I passed a car going slower than me and fishtailed, first to the right, then left, then careened out of control, between two other vehicles, and over the embankment rear-first, sliding through about ten feet of snow, ice, and slush to come to rest at an angle where I had no choice but to look at the sky.

My first impression was amazement that things I knew belonged in the back seat were on the dashboard. My second was that the music, in the silence now of snow and my car rattling like a tin toy slowly dying, was all too loud, so I switched the car and the radio off. The tune was Sting singing “Russians," a song I was familiar with from dozens of anti-nuke rallies. It’s funny to me when I think back how clear like window glass this memory is.

I was unharmed. I had a car with no airbags but my seatbelt held firm, and in the sudden quiet, when I turned to discover my window was broken—for days I was shedding glass shards from my long hair—I could hear the wet snow landing on the car and the drifts now beside me.

The woman whose car I’d careened past stopped and called from the side of the road to me, asking if I was all right. I’m certain the first words out of my mouth were “I’m all right!” This is a thing for me, that when I am in an accident where I ought to be hurt, I hurriedly assure whoever is around “I’m okay!” It’s a way to convince myself of my own safety, my ability to survive.

I disengaged my seatbelt and trudged up the bank to the woman’s car, my sneakers and pants cuffs soaked. This part is outside my memory: I’m certain we spoke for a while and she was very helpful to me, but I genuinely can’t remember what we said to one another and, in this decade before the first car or cell phones, can’t remember how she contacted the state troopers so quickly. Because, in my memory, a patrol car was there within minutes. I suppose I was in shock, because really the rest of my memory of this incident involves my car being pulled out of the snow and then towed, with me in the cab, to the next exit and eventually to the mechanic’s shop, a nondescript block of connected garages along the highway between New Paltz and Kingston. 

Shortly after arriving I made several phone calls to find someone who could pick me up. I found someone who could do so several hours later. In the last moments of this memory, I settled on the lounge couch, an old, overstuffed, dusty thing that reminded me of the couch in the three-season porch of the home my family moved to in the early 70s, where I spent most of my summers reading yellowed comic pages and pulp novels from the 30s and 40s. Despite my uncertainty about whether my car was repairable and how I was going to pay for it, and despite the commotion—many others had been sliding off the roads—going on around me, the couch was familiar and calming and I fell into a deep, comforting sleep.

258 candles-day 11

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: This is my online friend Tamara, a fellow member of the Rainbow Tribe. For the past several years she has posted photos like this one on the Rainbow Family of Living Light Facebook page on an irregular schedule: sometimes daily, sometimes every few weeks, sometimes a month will go by before we see another picture from her. They are all the same, Tamara somewhere, flashing the peace sign. It's very simple, almost simplistic, but I can't tell you how much it means to me to see a message from her showing her infectious grin and her peace sign. Hers is another example of how great a simple, outside-yourself action can be.  

merging

This past Sunday I visited the Unitarian Univer-salist church in Mequon, the nearest congre-gation to our new home in a new hub. I have been processing-although that word is overused in my profession it still means something important-my experience since then.

I struggle in some ways to articulate it. It was uniformly positive and I am certain I will join the church. But it was also disturbing in some ways, how comfortable and peaceful I found it. This is the part I have difficulty articulating.

I arrived early, earlier than anyone else except the member and her daughter responsible for preparing the sanctuary. I talked with them a while and then with an older woman who was chief greeter for the day, then with one of the church's two (!) ministers, then with several others as they walked in. My wife refers to this as my funeral director mode, when I wander around introducing myself to people, sometimes introducing them to each other.

So I was at ease when I sat in the sanctuary to listen to the pianist and watch the bulk of people filter in. It's a UU church, after all, so most of them showed up at 9:56 for a 10 o'clock service, with another 30 or so arriving after the welcome and first hymn. The second part of that sentence carries a measure of something that surprised me. Although there is another, larger congregation in Milwaukee, the church has a couple hundred members, probably 25 of them black or Latino, and nearly 125 to 150 were there that day. The speaker was the retired minister from the Milwaukee church so some were undoubtedly visitors from there to hear him; but at 100 were congregation members who generally showed, I figure.

The retired minister was a good speaker and had a good sermon about UU beliefs I couldn't argue with. But what I was most absorbed by was the feeling I had surrounded by the people. I felt outside myself, emptied into the sea around me. I loved the image from Star Trek: Deep Space 9 of one character's people as an ocean (beginning about 6:40 in) into which they subsume, every particle mixing, and what I felt was something like that. To call it feeling "at home" seems banal but nonetheless accurate.

Here is the best I can say: I felt as in family, as among my tribe, as comfortable as I do in my best times with the Rainbow Family or with vagabonds. A friend of mine calls it being accepted in one's integrity, a statement I think is good as any and more accurate than most. I was taken in not only for who I am, but given my anonymity, in spite of who I may be. As if all my sins, rather than being washed clean, simply have no place there. Unconditional love. Acceptance without boundaries. I felt comfortable leaving because I know it will be similar when I come back.

what the sun said

To help me deal with this winter, I've been reading several books that lie for at least part of their narrative on extremes of weather, whether cold or heat or rain or whatever it might be. One of these books is a science fiction novel from the mid-90s called Evolution's Shore.

It takes place in the early 2000s, specifically 2008, six years after Saturn's moons are observed winking out of view. A year later a meteor strikes Mt Kilimanjaro and immediately grows a vegetation no one can identify but that serves to fully cover the mountain and grow at an exponential rate. It immerses everything within in and nothing that enters returns.

So it's said. There is one person who has left. Peter Werther is an early victim of the meteor, a member of a hang-gliding group that was thought decimated by the landing. It turns out, however, that the vegetation, which has come to be called The Chaga (named perhaps for the ubiquitous chaga mushroom?), had kept him alive in a manner of speaking for five years before expelling him. Gaby McAslan is a reporter for SkyNet (based on BSkyB rather than on the developer of the Terminators) who has been put into contact with Werther and has come to hear his story.

But what has struck me best and is the reason I am transcribing some of McDonald's novel here, is that the group Werther has been staying with since his "release" are called the New Millennium Travellers and are a perfect complement to what the Rainbow Family can become in an international manner. Werther's reason for being with them, too, resonates clearly with me.

The Travellers' camp was only a few miles beyond...,down a long dirt road that turned off the track to the Safariland Lodge and meandered along the shore of Lake Naivasha. Their wagons were pitched in the shelter of a stand of flame trees. Some were propped up on cinder blocks, wheels removed, a final surrender to the fuel shortages. There would never migrate along the world lines again. A beautiful hand-painted wooden sign stood over the entrance to the settlement. WHAT THE SUN SAID was its name.

What the sun said was dust. What the sun said was flies. The sun said heat. The sun said melanomas.

Tents and awnings billowed limply in the slow, hot air. Wind chimes set on ornamental door-posts barely tinkled. Japanese fish kites hung open-mouthed, stirring their streamer tails. Stranger fruit hung from the branches of the flame trees: things like cracked leather cocoons bound with steel wire. There were three of them, each about five feet long. They turned slowly anticlockwise to Coriolis force. A long generator chugged, most of the camp's power came from silent solar panels. All the vans had small steerable dishes on their roofs: the economics of techno-nomadism was that the information revolution had made it not only a desirable lifestyle, but a necessary one. You followed the sun and lived the lifestyle in harmony with the planet until one day the fuel ran out and left you stranded in the heat and drought of Africa's Rift Valley. With the Chaga approaching.

The Kilimanjaro Event had made East Africa the social navel of the planet. International Bright and Beautiful, and those who clung around them hoping that brightness and beauty were contagious, followed the planetary media circus to the plains in the shadows of the mountains. Most had moved on when Africa and things African slipped out of fashion. Some remained. They found room for their humanity to resonate in Africa's great spaces. They made their camps under the big sky and settled into sun-warmed introversion and the evolution of white-boy ethnicity. The men of What the Sun Said were bearded and sat about with their hands dangling loosely over their knees, watching what was watchable. The women, naked to the navel, carried their babies slung at their waists and intimidated Gaby with the firm upturn of their breasts. Children in beads, feathers and zinc oxide war paint on noses and cheekbones came running to greet the visitors. Their skins were tanned hard brown, there were flies around the corners of their eyes and mouths.

"Are you the people come to talk to Peter?" they asked. "We're here to take you to him. Come on." They pulled Gaby...along...In one of the big, billowing saffron tents, someone was playing a thumb piano...

This was what a man come back from the heart of darkness looked like. His face was tanned that dark brown peculiar to Teutons gone native. His hair was blond, long and worn in the community style; shaved at the sides, plaited at the back...He had the palest eyebrows she had ever seen. He did not effect the white-boy ethnic chic of the Sun-Saiders. He was dressed in a relaxed linen suit over a simple white T-shirt. No jewelry. No tattoos or ritual scarification or body piercing. His only idiosyncrasy was a leather biker's glove on his left hand...A swirl of warm wind set the black pods hanging from the trees swaying into Gaby's peripheral vision.

"They are into rebirthing," Peter Werther said, observing Gaby's distraction. "Spiritual metamorphosis."

"There are people in those things?"

"In sensory deprivation. They let them out after three, four days. The thing seems to be that they don't tell you how long they are going to leave you hanging, or even if they are going to come back at all. Face the fear and pass through is the experience. I think that after three days upside down in this heat, you will believe anything you are told about yourself. There are always willing volunteers, and not just from the community."

...[Peter Werther continued,] "I am sure you are wondering, why this place, why these strange people with their strange rituals? Well, they are a good people, it is a good life they lead, but the real reason is simpler. They were the first people I met when I came out of the Chaga. I walked, you see. I was brought to the edge, and told I must leave now, and I just walked north. They do not ask questions, you see. They accept...[These] people, in their months of travel, gave me the time and space to learn about myself, and what I have been changed into, and what it is I must do. And now I think I know, and I am ready, and these people have let me bring you into their peace and calm because they agree with me that the world needs to hear what I learned, back there."

I've been everywhere, man

I've been putting together a new packet application for residencies for clinical pastoral experiences and rewriting some of the essays I'd done a year ago. This is actually a revision of both that one and one I'd written originally for my admission into seminary six years ago. I'm pleased with it.

I’m like the trucker in Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere,” only on a theological rather than a geographic level.  My parents were Seventh-Day Adventist—after my mother died my dad returned to his native Methodism—and I was raised that way.  They attended one of the German denominations, which is a pretty strict sect, although they weren’t as observant as they might have been—we ignored the ban on meat, for instance, and I don’t remember ever praying over a meal except when someone from the church was there.  My sister was baptized among them but I never was.

            When I was allowed to make my own choices regarding churches I opted not to attend one.  I’d read about Thomas Jefferson being an agnostic, and since that seemed to mean he didn’t attend church, that’s what I was.  Adventist churches can be a dismal affair, or at least they were in rural New York in the 1960s.  Agnosticism was attractive:  like most young adults, I was uncertain of a lot of things, and it seemed only right to question a divine presence along with everything else.

            My first wife was Lutheran.  We attended church a few times a year with her family.  When Barbara and I split I underwent a profound questioning of the meaning of my life, what I was intended for, how I was intended to live, and where I stood in relation to everyone else.  After a brief flirtation with nihilism and atheism, denying there was a purpose to any of it, I fell into radicality.  I’d been studying Jesuit education for a class, and the intense devotion to god suddenly made sense to me and seemed right.  The ritual and drama of the mass was comforting, as was the prescription that god had to accept me in return for confessing my sins.  Like Frost said of home, heaven was where, when you went there, they had to take you in. 

            Catholicism didn’t stick beyond two intense years.  Too many questions, too many strictures, too much solidity and order.  I’d had enough of order, I wanted chaos.  But in New York, where I was, even if you weren’t Jewish you were a Jew, and I became attracted to the controlled chaos of Jewish women. I was really attracted to the symbolism and mystery of Judaism.  I lived eventually with two Jews at different times, one Reformed and the other Orthodox and a sabra, and kept a kosher house with each.  That was an interesting experience, looking to the domestic to for the order daily worldly experience denied. 

            Eventually the desire for uncertainty moved me out of an apartment and into the streets.  I spent several months in New York City, alternating between people’s couches, some people’s beds, and the safe and relatively warm crawlspace beneath a fenced-in trailer on the Grand Central Overpass.  I visited the Hare Krishna kitchens downtown often and the Sri Chinmoy kitchens in Brooklyn, and listened to both while they filled my ears with chanting and my belly with rice.  I eventually wound up at the Krishna commune near the Newburgh airport for a month, sorting out what remained of my life and trying, unsuccessfully, to get sober.  My parents bought me a station wagon and I disappeared for three years into the US, visiting communes and churches, reservations and tiny communities.  I loved those years:  they were full of exploration, especially spiritual exploration.  I attended Rainbow Gatherings and Powwows, Festivals of Light, ashrams and intentional communities.  My consciousness expanded, as did my intake of drugs, which I saw as gatekeepers to the Absolute. Or something like that. 

            I read up on Buddhism all the time.  I tried peyote with a small Native Church congregation.  I dropped acid as often as possible, consulted Mescalito, took vision quests and Long Walks.  When I was camped for a month atop Wildcat Mountain in the Catskills I had a vision that involved Brother Blue, a storyteller I’d studied with.  I kept a milk crate in the back of the car full of books by Alan Watts, Stephen Diamond, Ram Dass, Carlos Castenada, Sun Bear, D.T. Suzuki, Krishnamurti, Robert Thurman, Robert Pirsig.  My copy of Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways is so well-thumbed I have to hold it together with a rubber band. 

            I never made my intended goal of Arcosanti in Cordes Lakes, Arizona.  Eventually, however, I found my way to sesshin at Dhammapada in Montreal where the abbot, a tiny wizened Japanese man, explained my deficiencies to me in terms even I could understand.  When I left there I was humbled, but no closer to finding some cogent spiritual sense.  I hung out with Santerians I knew back home, kept my head shaved, went to work in a health food store in Woodstock where I met up with cross-country skiing devotees of Ramtha and the community-sharing confrontational lovers of a man named Gavin who called himself Bayard Hora, and converted my upstairs two-room apartment into an electricity-less shrine to discipline.  I ran the four miles each day into work and back in the snow and cold, and eventually found my way back on the road, where I discovered I really belonged. 

            When my mother insisted I either join the Army or attend graduate school, I knew she was onto something. In Mankato, Minnesota I met my second, or as she puts it, my last wife.  Jayne was Methodist at that time, soon to return to Lutheranism and finally to settle among the UCC, and after we married and moved back to New York, she started carting me along to different churches, insisting that I ought to be grateful for the life I’d been given, even if it wasn’t everything I wanted.  I made contact with two delightful Dutch Reformed ministers who made me realize it was possible to be both clergy and relevant, and read Daniel Berrigan. 

            In 1996, returned to the Midwest, and getting a handle on both my drinking and my hitherto undiagnosed depression—I am a poster boy for the wonders of Prozac—I found the White Bear UU Church online.  I’d attended a few UU services back east in my wandering years and hadn’t been terribly impressed.  But something about the photos on the White Bear website suggested I should give this a try.  My first sermon by Christa Wolf, the interim minister, used the terms “Jungian” and “eschatological,” and hearing those I knew I was home.

            Years later I joined a different congregation in Menomonie, Wisconsin, smaller, in greater need of help, and trained as a Commissioned Lay Leader.  I became more and more involved in the ministerial aspect of the CLL position and had an affinity for it. Like Cash’s trucker intimates, Unitarian Universalism may not be where I stay.  I might continue to move on and find my journey takes me elsewhere.  The congregation I served housed Christian UUs, UU atheists, and UU devotees to Kryon, a channeled being. I came to love the difficulty of making current events relevant and comprehendible to their different sensibilities and found a calling among them. I’ve since left that congregation to serve another in the Twin Cities where the makeup is composed of secular and Christian humanists.

 

dancing naked in the road

I'm not working this week and have spent it at home, going outside only to get the mail, and only leaving our property to take one dog to the vet's on Monday and today to get a few groceries. My wife's residency requires her to sleep at the hospital once a week while she's on-call, and it was Tuesday night and Wednesday morning. Because we have a sick dog we haven't even attended dog classes this week. I have seen few people this week at all since Sunday.

Normally, seclusion like this drives me crazy, and if it was summer and sunny I would be dancing naked in the center of the road just to find someone to talk with. Perhaps it's the early cold weather we're having--most days have hovered around freezing during the day, dipping into the 20s overnight--and the general grayness of the sky that has kept me inside. I can't say I'm happy this way, but I would call it a strange contenment. Strange because my usual method for recharging my batteries involves talking with friends (and there really is no shortage of friends nearby who would like my popping in on them but they are just far enough away to make seeing them an all-afternoon affair and I feel just enough inertia to override or more passively to avoid making that move) and this week has been in fact a time when I hadn't thought of recharging my batteries but I simply haven't felt the draw to visit friends or even to be in public and seeing strangers.

I know four days with forays into public every other day does not a hermitage make but I wonder if this is what it feels like to purposefully be alone. I have gotten a lot of reading done, including in the Shane Claiborne book I find so troubling. He writes of this impetus, "Community is what we are created for. We are made in the image of a God who is community, a plurality of oneness. When the first human was made, things were not good until there were two, helping one another." But Claiborne connects his Simple Way with something called a New Monasticism and this appeals to some part of me. I have always wanted to live in community with other people in a cloister or an intentional community as I did for short periods with the Hare Krishnas and the Rainbow Family and other friends. Claiborne talks about how the members of the Simple Way pool together $150 each month (this was in 2006 so it's bound to have gone up by now, maybe to $250) with which they pay the costs of x number of people living in the poorest neighborhood of Philiadelphia. I can't deny that notion is attractive to me.

But my wife and I have tried living with other people before and that hasn't worked out at all. I would argue we lived with the wrong people but I know her wish to pare down the number of people she deals with on a daily basis. The truth is we come from very different backgrounds--my small family consisting of just my sister and me, her larger one with several siblings--and I suspect it's like the old saying of the homeowner dreaming of many houses and the hobo dreaming of only one. But I look around at the things I do around this house, making many comfortable places--the 3-season porch, the southwest corner of our property, the front yard labyrinth, the upstairs study and the huge picture window facing the fields--and contemplating changes to some of the buildings--boarding them against the elements and making them little oases of calm and retreat--and I wonder who I'm doing it for.

st. juggalo

I don't like the music of Insane Clown Posse but I'm not the audience for it either.  I do, however, like the fact that the Gathering of the Juggalos exists, and further that Juggalos and Juggalettes exist.  As with most distaff communities, it is meant to provide a family into which nearly anyone can fit. 

I don't know if I would attend a Juggalo Gathering myself, although judging from photo essays (most of them provided by Nate "Igor" Smith of the Village Voice) they are not unlike most Rainbow Gatherings, except with Faygo and more cigarettes.  There have been really well-done essays about the Juggalos as well as some trashy, sensationalistic ones.  There is even a backlash against writing so much about them (can a TLC reality series be far behind?). I haven't seen it written about but I've noticed in various photo essays the increase in the number of people of color, both Juggalos and Juggalettes, in attendance.  That pleases me.

But what I am most pleased by is the sense that anyone, of any body type and any ability, can be accepted as a Juggalo (so long as that person is not Tia Tequila, apparently, although to be fair I suspect her shit-tossing critics were responding to their being used for her publicity rather than their tribe's).  This is the impetus behind religions of the Book, that one can be a member of the hospitable desert tribe if one abides by certain rituals and accepts certain beliefs, no matter how one is born or the condition one finds himself in. Where you go I will go, and your people will be my people. There is no Jew or Greek, no male or female. When you pledge allegience to another person you pledge allegience to God.  Will we see in some far-off future a Juggalo-influenced adjunct to Abrahamic religious?  Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope came out a few years ago as Christians, so why not? Why not a Saint Juggalo, a Mother Juggalette? 

bringing peace to babylon

Here's my vision: Unitarian Universalism accepts a future as a tribal congregation and pioneers such a future by basing its identity on that. I envision a temple-tent with the best elements of the CALM tent at Rainbow Gatherings, thick rugs and pillows, incense, chimes, backrubs and massage. Constant music with a spiritual theme: Matisyahu, kd lang, Ray Lynch, Enigma, Sleater-Kinney, Van Morrison.  Books and other literature would be available for borrowing or for reading there.  Someone would be  available in the tent for 24 hours a day, one of two or three ministers whose job is essentially to be a presence.  Each morning, noon, and evening one would conduct a ritual (and these would be different each time, sometimes Christian, sometimes Muslim, sometimes pagan, sometimes Buddhist), and each day there would be a time set aside for guided community dialogue on a question noted on a chalkboard in front of the tent.  This tent would appear at Gatherings, Phish concerts, hobo camps, festivals, occupy events, protests:  anywhere people gather for the purpose of being together. Each person would be given something with the Unitarian Universalist Association's website address on it so they could follow up by visiting and possibly joining a local congregation wherever they settle.

Here's the hard part.  The UUA would have to fund this entirely--the cost of gas and trucking the tent to all these events around the country--as well as paying a stipend to the ministers (and yes, I envision myself as being among them) who would travel with the tent.  This is hard because of two reasons:  we don't have a tradition of missionary activity and so there is little experience to fall back on (on the other hand it means there is no tradition there against which we would need to struggle); and because most congregations, who would see no membership benefit to themselves, would balk at paying to fund this project (many already balk at the idea of paying dues to a national organization whose sole existence, in their eyes, is to collect dues).

Money will always be tight and will always be an issue.  But here's the hardest part:  these people whose experience will have been through Gatherings and such will expect the same type of experience at the local level.  In early Christian, Rasta, and Rainbow Family terms, it's bringing peace to Babylon.  Local congregations will have to learn to accept these folks, fresh off the road and smelly and dirty and sweaty who will come with their dogs and their packs and their ganja and who won't be much interested in UU history as in what UU says about them and the world today, who will come for a meal and may stay a week in the community, living in the park or sleeping on someone's couch, and may take off halfway through the service and head for the freeway with their thumbs out. But the first group will tell another group and they will tell another group.  And they will come, not all at once and not at first.  But they will come.  Their inclusion will force us away from a safe, middle class, suburban church and back into something dangerous in the best way: a fellowship made up of real experiences, few of which will be exactly alike.  I see this as the future of Unitarian Universalism.

who needs to be warned?

this is the text of a letter to the editor I sent to the bradford (pa) era in response to an article they'd printed (and which doesn't show up on their online edition, although this followup headline did). I've been told by my dad it was published the other day, although the era doesn't have a practice of printing their letters to the editor online.

To the Editor: I take exception to the characterization of the story about the impending visit of the Rainbow Family as needing a "warning," although that's probably how officials from Pinedale worded it. I am visiting your area after the death of my mother and will be at the Gathering in another week with several thousand of my family. A veteran of many Rainbow Gatherings and a 50 year old teacher of college english and lay minister, I am likelier the demographic most of your readers will meet at their businesses and on their streets than the people against whom they're warned to "look out [against] for theft, take keys out of cars, lock up houses and anything else of value." Of course there are addicts and thieves among us, just as among any group of 12,000 people. There are approximately 8400 people living in Bradford: don't you have any crime? If the Allegheny National Forest were hosting the Republican National Convention, there would be similar offenses (the difference of course is that for all their rhetoric they're not likely to spend money anywhere around Bradford). We are your kids and grandkids, your aunts and uncles, your cousins and childhood friends. We're coming to celebrate being alive and a number of us will purchase water and chocolate in your towns and fill up our cars and for the most part we will come and go quietly. Just as in the old days of the carnivals and circuses some of your kids might leave with us and some of us might stay around. But what puts the real lie to the need for a "warning" against the Rainbow Family is a story several pages in: the suburb of Chester, population 37,000, has had 11 murders since January. Perhaps the Rainbow Family and others need to be warned against visiting that town. It sounds a lot deadlier.

list of my family I met at the 2010 rainbow gathering

· Bickel and his girlfriend: driving a truck with MO plates but coming from Florida to help set up Oz Kitchen; had a cab-full of dogs and a cat that rode on the driver’s lap; parked at A Camp cuz they feel safe there
· Harold and Katy: a pair Bickel picked up hitching outside Warren, PA, who were from Baltimore; been on the road about a year
· Dog Bite Girl: came across her on the road into Welcome Home after she’d been bit by a dog near Bus Village; was pretty rattled; gave her a toke from my cigar after she asked for a cigarette; wore a “Fuckin Homeless” printed like “Dunkin Donuts” t-shirt; strawberry blonde and about 6 foot; ran into her that night again with her hand bandaged up and on antibiotics from the hospital; told me the litany of tests and shots they did and then crowed to her companion, “He gave me a smoke off his cigar and it was a Black and Mild, man!”; companion gave me the thumbs-up
· Sparrow: also came across him on the logging trail but he was heading the opposite way with a cartload of stuff; stopped to tell me he was from Boston and was tired of being without a female in his life; “I mean, girls, at least flirt with me, I’m wholesome;” about 20 with coke-bottle glasses and sandy hair, tall and thin
· Elmo: young woman about 25 carrying an open Japanese parasol who came up to bum a cigarette off Sparrow while we were talking; looked kinda longingly at him for a moment and after he gave her 1 I said, “Elmo, will you kiss me?”; she did, a warm hug and full-on lips, and I said to Sparrow, “That’s what you got to do, brother;” he shook his head and went on his way and Elmo and I walked on chatting until I dropped her off at Kiddy Village; from Denver and heading out to this year’s Burning Man with a theater group
· Tony: at Main Circle; from the Delaware Water Gap; we traded stories about 209 and Dingman’s Ferry before he went off for food
· Grandfather Woodstock: an old man with long white hair and long tobacco-stained beard naked under a rainbow-dyed robe; had set up a small shrine at Main Circle complete with chair and bicycle horn; told me he was 100 and he looked it; saw him with a camcorder the next night standing on the chair to video the drum circle
· Magic: another old man staying at Kiddy Village; old cracked leather vest and drawstring pants; giving his great-granddaughter a ride on the logging road in a plastic cart; she said, “Grandpa, I wanna pick berries” and he wheeled her right into the brambles and she laughed
· Aviva and her fiancé and Katy and the Jersey crew: most of these were from south New Jersey, except Katy, who they picked up in Philadelphia; Aviva came from west of the Pine Barrens and was carting in a heavy dufflebag full of food; I offered to help her carry it in and shouldered it and walked it the mile and a half to their camp; she was astonished I didn’t drop it or slip once in the mud and called me “a rockstar” to her campmates; she was short and kept her dark hair in braids while Katy was tall and had her blond hair in dreads; once we got to their camp near the Rusty Nail Aviva packed a bowl and held it out to me saying, “That’s for you;” I only took a few hits off it, opting to share it with her and the others around the fire; like almost everyone else she had a dog
· Red and Chef: I know Red from Menomonie where she and her family used to attend the church that I served; I recognized her my 2nd night wandering around Main Circle; she had more barbs in her lips since I’d last seen her but I recognized her immediately; she and Chef had to drive to Erie the next morning with a bunch of other kids who’d been ticketed for underage drinking and possession of paraphernalia a week before; I said I was leaving the next morning and offered to head that way but they said they already had a vanload of kids going but appreciated the offer; they’d been there already 3 weeks; we traded stories of people we knew and I was surprised when I asked about 1 of her brothers that she’d had a restraining order taken out on him; turns out he’d been abusive for years; I apologized and said I didn’t have a clue and she said she knew, it was always kept quiet; she said she hoped to smoke pot with her dad this year (she’d long ago done so with her mom); she hugged me when I got up and we determined to meet up again out in Babylon
· Trashcan: came in off the road, originally from Florida; offered me some crank and asked if I knew anyone who wanted meth; I said no to both but got him talking, which wasn’t hard, and he told me a long rambling story about his hitching east, most of which was muttered and pretty unintelligible; but he was friendly enough and hugged me when we parted
· Duluth: I met up with her on my way back from Back Entrance and we took to talking about where we were from; she’d spent a long time in Minnesota—“I keep ending up back there”—although she’d been living for 6 months in Ithaca, NY, and expected to stay another few months; she studied herbology; she was normal height, heavy-breasted and slim, with big glasses; she seemed pretty stand-offish and didn’t even tell me her Rainbow name (I called her “Duluth” and she didn’t argue); she melted into the crowd at a kitchen we passed
· Steve: from Denver; his 1st Gathering; he’d come in with a group of guys for the experience of it; we’d been talking for a while on the trail in from Welcome Home before we stopped and helped Aviva and Katy carry in stuff
· Adam: I met him at Main Circle a couple days later; he was 1 of the guys who’d ridden in with Steve; big-bellied young guy, maybe 25, also born and raised in Denver
· Black Hills: a very monkish-looking fellow from South Dakota, raised near Spearfish; wore tie-dye robes and long shirts and linen trousers and what looked like a dreamcatcher on his head like a sunbonnet; not very talkative but as we were walking a brother stopped to hug him and said “You actually smell clean”
· Dog Runner: my name for a tall thin man I saw running a pack of 6 or 7 dogs of various sizes along the lumber trail each morning; shirtless and wearing thin runner’s socks under his sneakers; dreadlocked; I don’t know if they were his dogs or he was running them for other people
· Mica, Jackson, and Goose: a trio who’d arrived the same afternoon I did from Jacksonville, FL; traveled with Henry the dog; Mica was a big girl in a billowy muumuu and her mom was a police officer in FL; Jackson was a young bearded guy with the look of someone who’d been on the road much too long (Henry was his dog); Goose was a tall kid with a wispy mustache who’d never been out of FL in his life and he and Mica acted as if they’d been friends for a long, long time
· Benny: had been there 3 weeks already, arriving with the intent of being part of Council; pudgy like an early beer-belly but friendly as all hell
· Kevin: Benny’s dad who’d just retired after 30 years with the Coast Guard; had gone to the Academy and graduated into the Guard and had decided to live in VA; this was his 1st Gathering, which was funny since I’d started talking with him cuz I thought he might have been someone who’d been there back when I was; shirtless and pasty but with heavy arms, someone accustomed to hard work
· Dog Girl: from FL and traveling with 11 dogs, a mom with slackened tits and her 10 pups; tall and green-eyed with wild red hair and freckles; maybe 19 or younger; told everyone the pups had all been found homes so she didn’t have to deal with explaining to some people why she didn’t think they would be effective dog companions; I wanted to call her Diana because of her pack but didn’t think she’d get the reference; she was probably the person I was most comfortable talking with and if she’d been interested I’d have taken her with me just for the company
· She Slips: when I told her my name she said she wanted to come up with a clever one too and finally settled on “She Slips in the Mud and Falls on Her Ass” after doing that 6 times as I walked with her back up the trail from Main Circle to her camp near Welcome Home; dark hair and burnished skin; talked a little crazily and muttered so I often asked her to repeat things; came from the St. Regis Reservation in New York near the border; kept up a running muttered monologue as we walked; good-looking
· Michael: a cyclist from Ohio I met on my way out; I’d stopped at a stream I knew of in order to bathe and he’d spent the night there; 1st words to me were, “I’m lost;” worked as an occasional tree-lopper and grew trees and flowers in his nursery; had made enough money cutting trees to buy land and build his home and nursery and now had no bills and lots of free time; a little taller than me and sinewy and burned; gave him most of the food I had left (granola bars and dried fruit and peanut butter) and gave him what I hope were accurate directions

alternatives to church, number 4

One of the nicest scenes was in the movie “Ray” when Ray Charles, when he’s visited in his apartment by Atom Egoyen to discuss a record deal, asks him to hurry up: “You see I’m in church.” It’s this notion of church being where you find it and being a state of mind rather than a building or even a congregation that appeals.

I’m considering this after a couple days at the Rainbow Gathering near Warren, Pennsylvania. There were more dogs and fewer naked people than I remember from the 80s and early 90s. The road to the Gathering, like much of life’s journey, is long and arduous and full of many sideroads that lead nowhere you want to go. But it was on just such a sideroad I met some other Family members equally lost—actually more lost than I was since they’d been over the same mountain roads for 3 hours while I’d only been over them for 1—and we teamed up since 10 eyes were better than 2. While they gassed up their truck I found a local and she gave me back way directions to the site. We knew within 10 minutes we were on the right road, found Welcome Home, parked and unloaded their kitchen, and I drove on to a more remote spot and settled in for the night.

I stayed a little over 36 hours, far less time than I used to spend but enough for this trip. I’ve decided it is my final one. I had a good time, probably better than the previous 2 I’d attended in the early and mid-90s, and decided it was a good way to say goodbye. I was disappointed because I’d come in the hope of seeing people I’d known or at least would recognize from 20 years before, but that didn’t happen. It was early of course—most folks don’t show until around July 2nd or the 3rd—although I did see 1 woman from Wisconsin, which surprised me as I hadn’t known her for Family. But most of the men my age fell into 2 camps: the pale, big-bellied, t-shirt riding high on their paunch, desperate types and the stringy, rough-ridden types who’d been on the road for decades and forgot where they’d lost their teeth, and I didn’t care to be associated with either one.

But what really sealed it for me was a comment I heard someone say yesterday about another brother he’d been discussing. This brother was “one of those corporate types who gets all his Rainbow lifestyle 1 week a year and then heads back to his corporate life.” And I realized, in my Guggenheim t-shirt and my cargo pants and my New Balance sneakers, he could have been talking about me. It is a lifestyle and a good one but it’s a lifestyle for people 30 years my junior. Not only were there fewer people my age and the ones who were there unappealing, but some accommodations had been made for a younger crowd—Main Circle is only a mile and a half from Welcome Home, the shortest hike I ever remember; there were dozens more busses at Bus Village than I’d ever seen this early; also, harder drugs were easier to get, while people seeking out hash and smoke were offered meth and crank. One couple I met trundled in 8 pounds of dip and they offered it up for free, which was kind, but snuff is better than tobacco in the way heroin is better than ditchweed. Similarly, there was a larger black and Hispanic contingent than I remember 25 or even 16 years ago—true, smaller than in proportion to the general population, but the Rainbow Family used to be whiteout central and now there are dots darker than the tan that comes from lying naked in the sun.

But in the key of church being where you find it, being out in the woods with the hundreds of hippies and freaks I choose to call family was like the best religious experiences: short, intense, intimate, frank, non-judgmental, and welcoming. When I sniff deep I can still smell woodsmoke and incense and sage and ganja on my skin as if I’d been in a temple where it doesn’t matter whether I was worshipping or being worshipped. In these spaces, it’s easy to smell stale beer on people’s breaths and so I avoid them—I like my beer as well as anyone, maybe more than most, but I go to Gatherings so I don’t need to drink. Despite the harder chemicals people managed to find a way to carry in, alcohol is still the dominant nastiness at the Gathering and it still wastes people’s ambition and commitment to anything other than themselves. This is why the revolution will not only fail to be televised but will not be well-attended. Some churches are too hard to get to.