258 candles-days 137-142

At the risk of inappropriate partisanship, the sort this project is meant to reflect against, I want to celebrate this project. Since the early 90s, Spencer Tunick has focused on large-scale nude photos, explaining "individuals en masse, without their clothing, grouped together, metamorphose into a new shape. The bodies extend into and upon the landscape like a substance." It's in this light that he's gathered one hundred women in a field adjacent to the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland before the start of today's Republican National Convention as part of his project, "Everything She Says Means Everything." What Tunick does by massing dozens and sometimes hundreds of naked bodies in juxtaposition to landscapes and architecture is to decentralize the nude body into a feature rather than a focus. It's possible to differentiate between bodies in a Tunick photo, to tell this one is male, this one is tattooed, this one pregnant, this one old, but it takes time and effort. The effect is like looking at photographs of large herds of deer or stones on a beach. The subject loses its specificity and thus, in the case of nude humans, our usual reasons for looking at them. In this instance, Tunick says his impetus for locating the shoot at the RNC "is for my daughters, for their future, for them not to grow up in a society with hate, for them to grow up in a world with less violence toward women and more opportunities for them."

the same stream of life

[I was asked to conduct the water ceremony for Unitarian Church North, the congregation I've been attending south of here in Mequon. This is the script I wrote.]

 

I want to be with people who submerge in the task, the task of living full lives. Today we celebrate both those who keep warm the hearth of our common home and those who have journeyed far from their homes as each brings to us a deeper understanding, renewed commitment, and ampler hope. Will those of you who have brought water from your homes, oceans, fields, streams, puddles, and those who will pour from this symbolic pitcher of water come forward now to merge the water of the world at this time of reunion.

The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and death, in ebb and flow. I feel my limbs made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride comes from the life throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment.

[Rabindranath Tagore]

I want to tell you at story. This was from 1987 one of my first Rainbow Gatherings in Nantehala National Park in western North Carolina.  I was hiking back into the site and I passed a pickup truck whose bed was filled with a series of huge, multiple-gallon plastic water jugs.
            Someone yelled, “Hey, brother, can you lend us a hand?”  There’s an unwritten understanding at the Gathering that, if you’re asked for help, and you’re not doing anything else, you’ll help.  This is not, I might add, a bad way to behave in general society. I said sure and stepped up.
            Eventually about ten of us lined up to help, including one fellow who was naked except for his shoes.  Let me explain a little here about the dress code at the Gathering—there is none.  It’s not unusual for most everyone to wander the trails naked at one point or another.  There’s something freeing about dropping trou and letting everything air out, and it genuinely feels good.  After about a day, you stop noticing the nakedness of other people.  Still, at least this guy had on sneakers. I was barefoot.
            We got all the water jugs off the truck—there must have been two, maybe three dozen—and then we split into several groups and plunged wooden poles through the handles of maybe fifteen or sixteen jugs spaced out at intervals and then we ranged alongside the poles and hoisted.  I don’t know if you’ve ever tried lifting water.  It doesn’t stay still like something solid.  It sloshes and heaves like a thing alive.  With ten of us in teams of two and the poles on our shoulders we still needed to shuffle under the weight and stop about every dozen feet to flex our hands and shift position.  Let me tell you a little about the layout of the  Gathering—once you’re past the barriers keeping people from driving in and most of the alcohol out, you still need to hike another three, sometimes five miles to achieve main camp, which of course was where the water was headed.  I don’t know how far it was that year, but if you told me it was ten miles, I wouldn’t dispute it.  And I spent the entire trip behind the naked guy wearing only shoes.
            So we started off.  Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.  “Wait a minute!”  Rest.  Hoist.  Grunt.  Shuffle, shuffle, shuffle.  “Wait a minute!”  It went like that for almost the entire hike to main camp, and I will tell you, it may be true that hippie men are more in touch with their feminine side, but it’s also nonetheless the case that not one of us was willing to admit he was ready to quit.  A number of people passed us going the same way on our route but no one asked for a replacement.
            Much of the way was dry road but it was straight up.  There were deep gouges on either side—it was a ranger’s access road—so we were limited to going down the center along a narrow band about six feet across. This may not sound very hard, but imagine it while lugging slippery, sloshing, slithery plastic jugs of water with nine other hippies, none of whom were really paying attention to where he was going.  There was much swearing when we’d veer toward one of the ruts on the side and on occasion we had to stop and back up a couple feet to avoid a gash that had opened out of one of the ruts.  And it seemed like no matter how much I tried to concentrate on my bare toes kicking up pebbles below me, I focused instead on the very naked hippie bobbing directly in front of me.
            Then of course there was the mud.  A part of the road was skirted by a stream that crossed the road, making a mud bog about twenty feet across.  This bog was further softened and widened by thousands of feet tramping through it for a few days, extending and deepening it so that walking through it was like walking through a deep layer of frosting, complete with little flourishes where our feet broke free and left tall whippets.  This was the point at which my bare feet probably came into their own, since it’s easier to slog through such stuff unencumbered by the worry that your shoe will be sucked into the earth’s core forever. 
            We started out joking and laughing and one or two guys were singing, but all that stopped after about the first half mile.  I stopped carrying a watch in 1983 so I have no idea how long it took us to carry that water to main camp but I can vouch that the sun, which was high overhead when we started was hovering somewhere on the horizon.  We were dirtier, sweatier, smellier and a lot less companionable than when we’d started.  But I can also tell you that it felt really, really good to finally drop those jugs into place by Main Circle.  People cheered us and lined up for some life.

There is a direct line between the things we do and the lives we touch.  Carry the water, drink the water.  Water, like help freely given by people who wear more than just shoes, is something we often take for granted.  But it’s as alive as we are. 

To take a for-instance: the water we use in the pitcher symbolizing other waters comes from the tap here at UCN. The water comes from our own well which is a part of the aquifer making up the Lake Michigan Basin, a great underground sponge that sops up water from as far east as Lansing, Michigan, and South Bend, Indiana, and as far west as the headwaters of the Fox, the Wolf, the Brule, and the Mishigamme Rivers. The Lake with its forests to the north and  the world’s largest freshwater dunes to the south acts as a giant  filter. It is so large it has exhibited small lunar tidal effects. Because of its cul-de-sac formation the water in it is in constant circulation, and the amount of time that it takes for water entering the lake to exit the lake is ninety-nine years. If you were fifty and could somehow mark the water you pour into the lake at St Ignace, your great-grandchildren could stand with their children at the port in Mackinaw City to watch it flow back out.

After our service, our children will pour the collected water into our gardens here at the church, but it doesn’t simply end there. It will join the waters of the basin and when it emerges through the Straits of Mackinaw into Lake Huron, it joins the Great Lakes Flow where it merges with water from Lake Superior to pour into the comparatively shallow shells of Lake Erie and then crash over the boulders and bleached bones of failed aquanauts at the base of Niagara Falls into Lake Ontario from which, by the St Lawrence Seaway, from which it will eventually spew through the Gulf of St Lawrence  between the provinces of Quebec and New Brunswick to merge with the glacial currents of the northern Atlantic.

But as we speak in our seventh principle, it does not end there. The web of interdependent existence demands that from the Atlantic, you may remember from your sixth grade science class, the water evaporates in the sun, condenses as it rises, forms clouds.  The clouds move across the land, across Virginia, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, meet with the freshwater condensation over Lake Superior, form larger, heavier clouds, drop their loads of precipitation on the fields of Manitoba and Ontario.  The runoff from the fields flow south, meet in creeks and streams and small rivers.  Science has explained that there is exactly as much matter in the universe today as there was several seconds after the Big Bang.  An altogether efficient system.

Another, final metaphor of living water.  Take the hand of the person next to you.  Get a good, solid grip.  Note the jump and flutter of that person’s pulse.  The thrum of what lies just beneath the skin.  This water that lives within us calls us to come together to feel the life’s blood under the skin.  This is why we come to this place. 

 

gratuitous nude

A few days ago I published a post about feeling monkish. I included a throwaway line about dancing naked in the road to find someone to talk with and used that as the title of my post and an old photo to illustrate it. I found that by Googling "dancing naked" images (NSFW).

One set of friends on Facebook took me to task for having used a picture in which the nude woman is featured prominently but the nude man's penis is hidden (although if you look closely you see his scrotum is prominent below his left leg, although that's neither here nor there; you don't need to enlarge the photo to see the woman's nudity, which is more the point). I hadn't noticed the absence of the man's genitalia. Their legitimate observation was that the photo objectified women or at least the woman in the picture. It's also a reinforcement of a distortion of society that presents nude women readily but is more reticent about nude men.

I mistook the conversation for a light-hearted one and commented that they'd put more thought into it than I had and I'd decided to reaffirm the patriarchy by leaving the photo up. My rationale for leaving the photo up is 1) I don't think it's right to ascribe contemporary questions to modern photos (the picture is obviously early 20th century), 2) I like the picture's drawing on the couple's awkwardness and grace and comfort, and 3) it's my blog. But I soon came to realize the conversation, if it had started light, swiftly turned heavier.

I ended up removing the link on that group's news feed after a few hours consideration. No one had requested it but I decided leaving it there was taking advantage of a privilege that I hadn't earned, and more importantly, I'd become embarrassed having answered their concerns so tongue in cheek before realizing they were serious.

While I think the more correct response on their part might be to say, essentially, "enjoy the cocks," that is to have pointed it out more publicly on their own blogs or by posting male full-frontal nudes, their point is taken. It was relatively easy to find that illustration while to find the one gracing this post required several tries and I wasn't successful until I added "man" to "joyous nude" (again, NSFW); even then, many of the results are porn and about a third are of women.

But I have other sets of friends also on that group's page who could make similar complaints that by choosing two people not in wheelchairs I'm being ableist, or by choosing a white couple I'm being racist, or by choosing a mixed couple I'm being heteronormist. Those arguments have a lot of validity, too, maybe even greater validity because I can't say I didn't notice any of those things, and didn't use any of those elements in my criteria for my Google search. The point isn't to suggest my friends' original criticism is absurd--it isn't, it's a good observation--but to point out that we are privileged even in how we criticize.

"enjoy the cocks"

This article on salon.com is an interesting read but it's wrong-headed in its allegation that a collage made up of photos of breasts contributes to rape culture. To argue that is to say the photo to the left does too. Rape is a serious topic and there are some nasty cultural memes going around that seek to make it a giggle. But to quote myself from the comments section, "the best response would have been for a swarthmore sorority to issue a booklet whose cover was a collage of male nudes with the note, 'enjoy the cocks.'"

teach naked

below is an essay defining my concept of religious education that I've worked on the past week. if it seems to follow a pattern, that's because it does. the idea is that we define religious--specifically xian--education in the 1st part, expand on that definition in the 2nd, and then give implications of it in the 3rd. that wasn't really very hard but it took me several days longer than it should have because of a cold that knocked me flat on my back all day tuesday, necessitating not only the length of time it took to finish the essay but also, as tuesday is a 6-hour day for me at my CPE site, requiring me to pull extra hours the rest of the week to make them up.

WE ARE CHURCH WHEN WE ARE GATHERED,
WE ARE CHURCH WHEN WE ARE DISPERSED

Part I: Based on my experience and on the books we’ve read for this class, I’d offer the following as my current definition for the way I see religious education. It’s a way of teaching children and adults how best to affect their world in order to make it more reflective of the type of world where they would want to be citizens. It reflects how they think a world of justice and equality ought to be (in Christian terms, bringing about the realm of God). Religious education determines the communities children and adults want to be a part of, discerns what is holy and how to talk about it, and most importantly, what the ethics, morals, and behaviors the members of such communities should participate in.

Part II: The church, any church (or synagogue or mosque or temple or coven or any spiritual gathering, and for simplicity’s sake I’m going to mean all of these groups when I say “church”), is a community, an ecclesia in church terminology. It’s a community made up of individuals but of individuals who, unlike a geographical community or a working or public school community, choose to associate with one another. Their connections with one another are outside place or livelihood. There are some geographical considerations that might complicate that—while an individual living in the rural Midwest might have several Lutheran congregations in a 20 or 30 mile radius to choose from, including choices between which ELCA or WELS congregation to attend, whereas a Unitarian Universalist or a Muslim or Jew might have only one choice, while the options might be the reverse in urban areas or on the coast—for the most part one chooses which church to attend out of consideration of the congregation more than anything else. Craig Dykstra notes

[Faith] communities have formative power in the lives of people, nurturing faith and giving shape to the quality and character of their spirits. Spirituality deepens in community, rather than in individualistic isolation. The beliefs, values, attitudes, stories, rituals, and moral practices of a faith community are the human forces most powerful in shaping a person’s spiritual journey. (83)

More than one researcher has noted that, all other elements being equal, what determines which church a person chooses to attend is his or her fellow congregants.

Once we’ve determined the ecclesia we must determine the message the ecclesia intends to spread. Dykstra writes:

The life of Christian faith is life in such intimate relationship with Jesus Christ that, as Paul says, we may live ‘in Christ” and that Christ is ‘in you’…Similarly, we are now free to live ‘according to the Spirit,’ so that ‘the Spirit of God dwells in you’…This is contrasted by Paul with life ‘according to the flesh’…The contrast is not one between life after death and our life on earth. Both life according to the Spirit and life according to the flesh are forms of present, daily, bodily, human living. But life according to the flesh is life aimed at and directed by things that have no ultimate lasting value and power. ‘Life in Christ,’ ‘life according to the Spirit,’ is life-oriented, empowered, undergirded, and sustained by the Source of life itself. (23)

Modifying Dykstra’s message, it’s in the gratitude for what is bigger than ourselves, bigger than mere individual “birth-school-work-marriage-children-death” life itself, that we find a purpose that can bind us together. For Unitarian Universalists it is in the recognition that two people together are somehow greater than the sum of their parts. For Muslims it is in the adoration of the gift of life Allah bestows on each of us. For pagans it is in the interstices of the web of life of which people are themselves only one part.

This is being in community that acknowledges all of what one is rather than simply a part of what one is. It is looking for a community of challenge over a community of comfort. As Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore points out, “Truth-telling is not easy to hear, and it demands a response, whether by individual action or social policy.” Her example of one such hard-to-hear truth-telling comes from historian Vine Deloria, Jr., who charges in “Open Letter to the Heads of the Christian Churches in America” that his addressees have “forced ‘opinions, myths, and superstitions on us…You have never chosen to know us. You have only come to us to confront and conquer us.’” Mullino Moore further notes that this “echoes the cries of South Africa and elsewhere, where generations of people have been denied basic human rights” (all quotes, 82).
Religious education should prepare people in the ecclesia to hear such questions, whether from Native Americans, the descendants of African slaves, undocumented workers and their children, the homeless and underemployed, and any of dozens of potential other aggrieved groups. It may not prepare them to answer those questions—it may be that the best answer is that they don’t have an answer—but it must give them the basics of what the aggrieved parties are referring to and that they have a right to be sore. It is in recognizing the legitimacy of these questions that religious education helps prepare citizens for the world of justice and equality they are trying to bring about.

How do we determine what is holy? And once we’ve determined what it is, how do we talk about it? It’s generally assumed that holiness differs according to the beliefs of individual faiths and to some extent that’s true. But while some of the particulars might differ—an icon is venerated by an Eastern Orthodox Church member while it is unconscionable to a conservative Muslim—the point is to find an agreed-upon perspective for all the members of the faith community without lapsing into lowest-common-denominatorness. Mullino Moore cites Orthodox tradition for her determination of what holy is (emphasis in the original): “[That] all of life is sacramental, that the church’s sacraments make visible the sacramentality of God’s creation, and that the human calling is to participate in the sacrament of life…[The] power of sacramentality and its interrelated movements…reveal holy presence in the rhythms of life” (217). My only modification to this otherwise excellent definition would be a change from “God’s creation” to “reality.”

Religious education, in order to make plain the opportunity for learners to hear the questions that should be demanded of them, must emphasize the holiness of life and experience. Everyone’s life and everyone’s experience. Dykstra notes exactly the sorts of questions that we ought to be prepared for: “Of what value are human beings, and how is that value secured? What is worth dying for? What is worth staying alive for? How should our lives be spent?” (7). If, as Mullino Moore points out, holiness is found in the very “rhythms of life,” the stuffness of daily, average life—and I think it is—then it’s in that very experience of everyone’s daily life, its celebrations and atonements, that learners begin to articulate what holiness is.

Finally, it’s in putting together these elements that religious education teaches learners what it is that their communities of justice and equality ought to look like and how they ought to behave. Dykstra’s retelling of Philip Haillie’s book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed provides an excellent and realistic example of the way these elements can be melded and the use to which that melding can be put. It is, he writes,

a story of how the gospel can be taught when the church comes alive to face both the dangers that beset it and the concrete needs and hungers of the specific world in which they live. It is a story of youth groups and schoolchildren, of classroom teachers and adult Bible study groups. It is a story of how worship and preaching and studying and acting all come together to make a community into a people of God. It is a story of how people read the Scriptures, lived their life with one another, and opened their doors to strangers as essential elements in their being the church in the world. But most of all it is the story of what happened to and in these people and in the world in the midst of what they themselves did. (57)

Part III: We can never be certain how our best intentions are going to be received—rather than flowers in the streets we may be greeted with looting and an endless war—and there’s no certainty that religious education delivered in this way will have the results we want. But there’s something to be said for trying and here are my hoped-for implications for this type of religious education.

Teaching religion this way, focusing on the ways, for instance, displaced people are treated by society and religion in order to provide context to understand the complaints of the aggrieved and, hopefully, a way to change it, can lead to greater participation by oppressed people in that church. Churches, especially in the US, have a long history of complicity in the way minority peoples have been treated as subjects rather than as persons by the majority. Being a place where such a history is addressed opens the church, and thus people, to healing. “People do not come to church in a vacuum; they come out of the totality of their lives. They bring the forces and experiences and needs of those lives to church” (Crain 1997, in Seymour, 101). When visitors feel addressed by church, that the church has something at stake regarding them, they become congregants.

The question of what’s holy is, for many churches, a matter of tradition rather than a matter of experience. We venerate the Bible not because of what it says to us but because our ancestors did. We venerate God in prayer not because of what God does in our lives but because we have been taught to punctuate services that way. Locating holiness in the everyday experiences of people lends those experiences not only familiarity but a sense of purpose outside routine. As Elizabeth Caldwell writes, in Christian terms, “Religious education seeks primarily to educate Christians for faithful living, for finding a balance between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the ordinary, between the sacraments in liturgy and the ways we live in response to our baptisms as we move out from the table where Jesus Christ is the host” (in Seymour, 80). Her example points up the benefit to be realized when the link between a duty and a sacrament (for instance) is bridged: “[learners] frame their lives in terms of a new way of seeing, hearing, sensing, being, and finally doing…” (80).

Ultimately, what may happen may be the actual discovery by adult and child learners that the world of justice and equality may actually be within their grasp, that it may be something they can actually bring about. Jack Seymour and Donald Miller articulate this hope:

While the problems of the world we address are complex and immense, we must address them through coalitions of people who are often very different from ourselves… Education empowers us to move from conversation to faithful living…[Religious] education fosters a movement theologically informed by the witnesses from the past to address the crucial personal and social issues of our day with faithful current analysis and a vision that is informed by the long-term history of God emerging in a people. [Religious] education provides open spaces to practice God’s presence and to share our lives and vulnerabilities in hospitality and love. (in Seymour, 120)

There is, of course, no guarantee that defining religious education in this way, as a means by which a church teaches its adult and child members how to make a world that’s more reflective of the just and equal world they want to be citizens of through determining the content of their communities, locating the holiness in those communities, and deciding on the appropriate behaviors and morals of its members, will lead to heaven on earth. But it’s certainly worth the attempt.





BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Caldwell, Elizabeth. (1997.) “Religious Instruction: Homemaking.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.
• Crain, Margaret Ann. (1997.) “Listening to Churches: Christian Education in Congregational Life.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.
• Dykstra, Craig. (2005.) Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices. Louisville, KY; Westminster John Knox Press.
• Mullino Moore, Mary Elizabeth. (2004.) Teaching as a Sacramental Act. Cleveland, OH; Pilgrim Press.
• Seymour, Jack and Donald Miller. (1997.) “Agenda for the Future.” In Mapping Christian Education: Approaches to Congregational Learning, Jack Seymour, Ed. Nashville, TN; Abingdon.

teach naked

I'm sitting in the coudersport public library where I have a solid wireless signal. reading last sunday's nytimes I came across this essay in the "week in review" section and was absolutely charmed by it. what does it mean for author tim kreider to say, "I hope kids are still finding some way, despite Google and Wikipedia, of not knowing things"? it means that there is some only partly acknowledged thrill to being the only one on your block--or in your county--to know of, let alone appreciate, the wizardry of devo or david bowie (to my knowledge there was only 1 other bowie afficienado in my high school and we argued fervently which was better, early ziggy stardust bowie [my position] or later thin white duke bowie [his]). when I was a student of secondary education I was told by a professor that the 3 most important words a teacher could say were, "I don't know," followed years later in grad school by the advice of my mentor that the 2nd most important words were, "you should find out." the years between are probably the important ones.

full frontal (and backal) nudity

the thing I think I miss the most from my former life is public, casual nudity. we were generally naked in the north chestnut house, going from apartment to apartment all summer long, leaving our doors open for neighbors to simply walk in and join in whatever we were doing (often alcohol and weed, although I was known to simply dance to records--and there is a wonderful memory that most people under 45 can't appreciate, the skipping shriek a vinyl album made when your stereo, no matter how well balanced, shook from the shudder of bodies slamming the floor pellmell).

the first year of our marriage my wife and I instituted what we called "clothing optional nights" when anyone coming to our apartment (and before we were married, the apartment she shared with laura and leia and allowed me to bunk at) had the option of stripping down to watch television or eat or play a game or whatever we were doing. this was never the sexy, oily, sweaty, funky orgy you might imagine it (or I may secretly hoped it might become): it was simply a load of friends getting naked together and doing stuff and being comfortable with one another.

I think I learned this first with my parents, for whom nudity was not a big deal. it wasn't unusual for my folks to stroll the house naked, especially in summer, since we lived in the woods with no air conditioning. and then decades later when I belonged to the cult called direct centering then, where every night we ended meetings and consultations with paganistic nude dancing, clothes tossed everywhere, sweat flying, sometimes not even to music but what sound played from the slap of our feet against the wooden floor. we were ecstatics then and it's that last I most miss, the sense of comfort in my own body around other people. we are still naked around the house now, but it's only us, and it's usually summer. sometimes we still lie naked out in the sun behind the house where the only ones who can see our fishbelly white bodies are the deer and turkeys. but I mustn't forget there was a time, and not so long ago, when little pleased me more than having friends whose bodies I was pleased to see and pleased to show mine to.

burqa update

france's senate has just passed its bill that will make wearing a full burqa a crime. in a world where people fear even things they can see such legislation is understandable but no less wrong. it is not my place, nor france's, to tell someone else what to wear or what not to wear. oddly, some places in france have also reserved the right to ban the traditional patristic right of bare chests. I say "oddly" because france is also renowned for its liberal view of public nudity. there is a schizophrenic mindset in france today: the state wants to tell people to cover up but not too much.

"strangely enough, everybody believed me"

I contend some of us are aware kids feel this way.

"The sexual energies that had recently surfaced in my own body were, I realized soon enough, not to be argues with. But that did not mean that sexuality itself, and especially as practiced by the adults around me, was to be trusted. As I saw it, the best strategy was to give in to my own sexual needs as vigorously and frequently as I had a mind to, meanwhile pretending to the rest of the world, and the rest of the household especially, that those needs did not exist. If I could not help being prey to sexual desire, and if I was, in fact, pursuing sexual fulfillment as desperately...as the adults around me were chasing after each other out in the open, I could at least have a say in how much of that desire I admitted to having. And I admitted to none.

"Strangely enough, everybody believed me. Of all the various cheerfully naked, patchouli-scented females who drifted through my life in those years, none, as far as I know, ever noticed that the pale, waxy-haired youth hunched over on the sidelines with his face buried in a book about sharks was, in fact, a cauldron--or at least a skillet--of fulminating and deeply confused sexual energy. Time and again, I watched in astonishment as my clumsily feigned lack of interest in all things sexual was accepted at face value.

"Thus when Zaba, a young woman Betty picked up hitchhiking, sought to perform a womb-regression upon me to get to the source of my lack of sensual attachment, she never even paused to consider that I might have been too preoccupied trying to conceal the embarrassing results of her hovering, massaging presence to concentrate on what it had felt like back when I was being born. Likewise...no one ever seemed to question why it was that I sometimes liked to sit down on the floor of the ocean in full scuba gear while a handful of female Atlantophiles were bobbing about above me. As far as everyone else was concerned, I was working on my underwater breathing skills."

--from Paradise Fever: Growing Up in the Shadow of the New Age by Ptolemy Tompkins

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.

50 year old pasty godzilla wrecks family outing

the one thing austin is known for, if it's known for anything at all, is the tragedy of a dam bursting 99 years ago, killing nearly 1000 and destroying the town. the ruins of the dam are now a park and a cold fish-filled stream winds through it. I spent most of this afternoon there, completely alone and silent except for the cars on the state road a stone's throw away. it was hot and I saw no reason to get my swimsuit wet. I was there to sunbathe too, so skinny-dipping was a way of reliving some past good times, and I slathered myself with spf 30 and lay naked on the grass, reading. finally, about 330, I hopped in for a last dip and when I stepped out of the shallows 5 minutes later I heard voices. I didn't even have my glasses on, so I stepped to my towel and slid it around me while looking for my specs. when I put them on I saw a carload of about 5 older people, including one person I thought was a child but discovered was a small wizened old woman with unnaturally brown hair, had pulled up to the ruins and was videotaping them from about 20 feet away from where a 50 year old, paunchy, very white and very naked man stepped like a pasty godzilla up out of the creek. being a gentleman, I said "howdy." they politely ignored me while I leisurely dressed and picked up my book and towel and walked to the car. it was only when I'd been associated with a vehicle that they took notice of me and the oldest fellow muttered, "'lo." did we learn at some point that it was impolite to speak to the nude, or that people can't see you unless you've got clothes and a car? think of the havoc we could cause by stripping down and acting up.

naked truth

I was not mtv's audience when it originated. a homeless 20-something with no disposable income and less inclination to watch commercials of radio songs I didn't like, I think the network could be excused for letting people like me fall between the cracks.

but the fact is that mtv was a great boon to the vagabond. when I was on the road, nearly every lonely rural laundromat television was tuned to it, nearly every roadside store clerk staffing a register had it on, nearly every bar television tuned to it between waves of laid-off factory workers. it was where I learned about what was happening or what mtv wanted me to know was happening. I can't diss it: I saw my first images of tiannaman square and tank man, heard my first strains of james mcmurtry, saw my first glimpses of the twisted weirdness whose existence warmed me in the remote dark. mtv, while not the revolution people like me had hoped for, was televised at least, and enough people appreciated it that wherever I went, I could witness it.

this is to say that while I'm not a child of the video age, I am alive to it and to its messages. the latest video to catch my attention, and that of a lot of other people's, is erykah badu's "window seat." I love nudity, of course, and while badu isn't nearly as naked as I might like her to be, it's the statement she makes by appearing as naked as youtube will allow that is important.

badu shows, in shot after shot, she has got some back and sags and her belly juts out where most women are taught to pull in. this is a real person stripping down on dealey plaza, and badu has opted to share the truth of her naked, common-woman body with the viewer. she struts, she rolls, she has folds and she jiggles and she is not ashamed. the song itself is pleasant way to spend time and not likely to be remembered in a year's time. but it's the act of taking off her clothes--and the sudden, jarring, dispiriting ending that most viewers seem to ignore or forget--that resonates for me. (the fined leveled against her by the city is a minor reminder of the truth of her ending statement.) I am the audience for this music video. they have finally caught up to me.