Tag: Buddha

Posted on

Evil, by Gillian

I’m just sitting here gazing blankly at an equally blank page. I can’t seem to get started with this one. The basic problem is, like all of you I try to relate the topic of the week to some personal history, and I have none regarding evil. I can’t say I have ever met, or even had a passing remote acquaintance with, anyone I could ever see as evil.

Sure, I know of people who are frequently described as evil – Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Osama Bin Laden, Charles Manson, Kim Il-sung and now Kim Jong-Il, Saddam Hussein; on and on and on. I have on not so rare occasions called The Tangerine Tyrant, and all who sail with him, evil. But I do not know any of them personally. Neither, come to that, do I want to. I must have been touched, at least indirectly, by Hitler, but I was too young to connect the dots.

And, just as I write this, it occurs to me that evil, and/or the direct results of it, seem to be creeping ever closer. With madmen on both sides of the Pacific, some kind of horrific confrontation between The U.S. and North Korea looms ever larger. Meanwhile, our country drifts rudderless on international waters with no-one at the helm. Our military, overburdened with the weight of international policy, now abdicated by Trump, in addition to traditional military decisions, flounders. While here at home the evildoers threaten ordinary hard-working law-abiding citizens – the vast majority of us, in fact – with cruel and unusual punishments: worsening working conditions, decreasing environmental protections leading, quite probably, to increased sickness at a time when they are taking away our healthcare. Utter madness. Or evil.

I suspect they are frequently entwined.

And does it matter? It is what these people we choose to call evil do which is evil. Whether the perpetrators are evil themselves, or just crazy, or have a belief system very different from our own, is not important; at least, not unless I need, for my own satisfaction, to judge them. In that case, what it is which causes them to do things which I judge to be evil might be important. I might be robbed of my righteous anger, or seething hatred, of the Orange Ogre if I had to accept that he is mentally ill, or was severely traumatized as a child. Personally, I have no intention of going there. I know, from long experience of trying, that I am incapable of getting inside the heads of those who hold attitudes and beliefs very different from mine. I no longer try. For whatever reason, they are what they are. I cannot change them. All I can do is fight back, not against the person but against the evil that they do. As Edmund Burke so famously said, all it takes for evil to triumph is for the good to do nothing.

My second responsibility is to myself; my own sanity. I must not allow anger to take over. It will destroy me. It’s a completely negative emotion with no positive outcome. Buddha said many wise things about anger, as he did about so many things.

You will not be punished for your anger, he says, but by your anger.

He also says,

Holding onto anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.

Someone – other than Buddha but apparently anonymous, maintained,

Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.

Evil, alas with greater odds than the peace which passes all understanding, will probably be with us and remain with us always. If I fight it every way I can while keeping myself free of the clutches of anger, I will say I have done my job. And, seeing that I have fallen once more into quotations, as I so often do to save further effort of original thought, I will try to keep Mahatma Gandhi’s philosophy in mind –

When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it–always.

© June 2017

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty years. We have been married since 2013.

Posted on

Don’t, by Pat Gourley

“ Do or do not. There is no try.”

The Buddha


This quotation, ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.

The above quote may remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not. There is no try.” The Empire Strikes Back.

Supposedly Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at least several millennia prior so I am going with Buddha as the originator of this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.

At first blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful. A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas? And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand soap was you just used.”

Perhaps I was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/19/nyregion/larry-kramer-and-the-birth-of-aids-activism.html

I’ll get to the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots. The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s. Kramer as a result was persona non grata in the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.

Kramer also has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.

Quoting Kramer from the NYT’s article: “I don’t basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life. I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”

I have been keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very controversial proclamations and actions since 1978. He has pricked my conscience on numerous occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.

It is 2017, almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots, and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the struggle continues: “I don’t think that things are better generally,” he said. “We have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us. The fight’s never over.”

© May 2017

About the Author

I was born in La Porte, Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Posted on

Don’t, by Pat Gourley

“ Do or do not. There is no try.”
The Buddha
This quotation,
ostensibly from the Buddha, is on my current favorite t-shirt. This is my
favorite shirt since it has a long tail and easily covers my big belly. The
belly fat is due in large part to two things: my major sweet tooth that seems
to primarily kick in between seven and nine PM every night and my HIV meds that
rapidly accelerate the metabolic syndrome that leads to abdominal fat
deposition. My protruding belly is in stark contrast to my gaunt, wasted
looking face that makes even Keith Richards look good on his worst days. I
won’t even address the current sorry state of my ass.
The above quote may
remind some of you of a line from Star Wars spoken by Yoda. The Yoda version also
goes something like this just with more dramatic punctuation: “Do. Or do not.
There is no try.” (The Empire Strikes Back).
Supposedly
Yoda lived to be 900 years old but the Buddha still has him beat by living at
least several millennia prior, so I am going with Buddha as the originator of
this famous line. This I suppose could be a phrase comparable to the infamous “shit
or get off the pot”. No hanging out on the throne reading the paper. For
god-sakes focus and commit to the task at hand or not.
At first
blush with this topic I thought I want to be a ‘doer’ rather than responding to
the often-harsh command: don’t! Then it quickly occurred to me that there have
been many “don’t-directives” in my life that I have to say have proved helpful.
A few that come to mind are: don’t play in traffic, don’t own a gun, and don’t
eat lead paint chips, don’t pick-up that snake or don’t sashay into a straight
bar on Bronco Sunday afternoon and ask, what ya watchin’ fellas?  And the one that I saw recently on Facebook, “don’t
come out of the bathroom smelling your fingers no matter how fragrant the hand
soap was you just used.”
Perhaps I
was overly primed to see the following based on today’s topic but in reading a
nice long article on Larry Kramer in the NYT’s from last week I was
particularly drawn to several quotes by Kramer using the word “don’t”.
I’ll get to
the quotes in a bit but for those of you perhaps not familiar with Larry Kramer
he first came on the national gay scene in a significant way with the
publication of his prescient 1978 novel Faggots.
The novel was a rather unflattering though brutally honest look at the wild sexual
abandon of gay male life in the later half of the 1970’s.  Kramer as a result was persona non grata in
the gay world but with the onset of the AIDS nightmare a few years later Faggots took on an air of prophecy.
Kramer also
has significant accomplishment’s in the worlds of film, theatre and literature
but perhaps in some ways most impacting were his successful efforts around AIDS
activism. He was a seminal founder of both the New York based Gay Men’s Health Crisis and a few years
later of the iconic and change creating movement called Act Up. I have included a link to this NYT piece on Kramer and
highly recommend it as an important historical snapshot of this great gay man
and his many accomplishments. He is a consummate example of the real life
advice contained in the phrase “don’t be afraid” or to again shamelessly
exploit an old Buddhist bromide “leap and a net shall appear”.
Quoting Kramer
from the NYT’s article: “I don’t
basically have fences to mend anymore. The people I had fights with down the
line, some are dead. But even when we fought, I think we were always — I love
gay people, and I think that’s the overriding thing in any relationship that I
have with anyone else who’s gay. Never enough to throw them out of my life.
I’ve never had huge fights with anybody. Much as I hate things about the system
and this country, in terms of the people I deal with, I don’t have any.”
I have been
keenly aware of Larry Kramer and his many bold and often at times very
controversial proclamations and actions since 1978.  He has pricked my conscience on numerous
occasions shaming me actually to do more than I would have without his kick in
the ass but still never achieving his level of fearless integrity. I still
today in many ways lamely persist with my own at times crippled activism.
It is 2017,
almost 40 years since the publication of Faggots,
and as Larry reminds us, at age 81, in his last quote in the article the
struggle continues: “I don’t think that
things are better generally,” he said. “We
have people running this government who hate us, and have said they hate us.
The fight’s never over.”
© 21 May 2017 
About the Author 
I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised
on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40
plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS
activist. I have currently
returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California. 
Posted on

My Happiest Day/Leaving, by Pat Gourley

From
the Pali Canon:

The Buddha was speaking to a
group of monks. He said, “Monks, suppose that this great earth were totally
covered with water and a man were to toss a yoke with a single hole into the
water. A wind from the West would push it East; a wind from the East would push
it West; a wind from the North would push it South; a wind from the South would
push it North. And suppose a blind sea turtle were there. It would come to the
surface only once every 100 years. Now what do you suppose the chances would be
that a blind turtle, coming once to the surface every 100 years, would stick
his neck into the yoke with a single hole?”


And the monks answered, “It
would be very unusual, Sir, that a blind turtle coming to the surface once
every hundred years would stick his neck into the yoke.”


And the Buddha replied, “And
just so, it is very, very rare that one attains the human state.”

My happiest day was
January 12th, 1949. This was the day of my birth and it took place
in La Porte Indiana.  Based on the
Buddha’s thoughts above I was one lucky fella. Putting blind turtles aside and
relying instead on actual current knowledge of the development from a
fertilized egg to viable fetus your chances are probably less than 20% of
making the grade. A very significant majority of embryos never make it beyond
the first couple days or weeks following conception.
If according to the most
extreme “right-to-lifers” human life begins at conception then heaven is
overwhelmingly populated with embryos. Or do embryos have fully actualized
souls with developed human personalities? Sorry but that is a bit beyond my
comprehension. And if you do believe in God having a direct hand in inflicting
his will on all sentient life on the planet then that would make him by far the
world’s leading abortionist. There really are a lot of holes in this whole “God
thing” when you start to critically ponder it, which of course is why the whole
business of “faith” was cooked up. To quote Dana Carvey’s SNL character the Church
Lady; “how convenient”!
 And the gauntlet doesn’t end with a live birth
but the odds of making it to at least the age of reason, which the Catholic
Church tells us is age seven, is certainly much better than in ages gone by.
If, however, you are born in many of the poorer countries of the world your
chances of dying in infancy are still considerable.
So I must say that the
happiest day of my life came with the added bonuses of being born a white male
in the United States. This could only have been better if I had been born white
in a western European democracy, post 1945 of course.
I suppose I could also say
the happiest day of my life, the one with the greatest long-term daily benefit,
was the day I came out. Only problem there is pinning down the exact date. My
coming out was certainly a process with at times fitful starts and stops, a
gradual evolution lasting from about age ten until my mid-twenties. I was
certainly much happier at the end of this process than at the beginning. There
was though no particular day filled with bolts of lightening from on high and a
choir of angels singing to usher me to the promised queer land.
I therefore must return
to my day of birth as my happiest since this provided the opportunity for all
that was to follow. I am very happy that I was not one of the millions of
embryos that inadvertently wind up getting flushed down a toilet or expelled
into an open sewer. I truly am one lucky son-of-a-bitch.
I am now left to often
ponder what it will be like to take my final leave. Let’s face it all the other
leaving one engages in life is really small potatoes compared to the final
exit. It is often the paralyzing and at times incomprehensible fear of our vaporizing
into nothingness after we take our final breath that has spawned the very many
human creations of an afterlife and higher power. If only we aren’t really
leaving but rather transitioning to something better and eternal, the ultimate
bit of delusional thinking. The idea that I am so great that the Universe can’t
possibly go on without me is now in my mind simply deluded human hubris.
Though I am convinced
that the human dance on this planet is a going to be limited and very short in
the grand scheme of things that does not in any way diminish how fucking
amazing it will have been. In growing into the label of humanist, or atheist if
I am in a particularly ornery mood, I want to be able to say that when I do
take my final leave I will have left things a bit more conducive to other
sentient beings able to experience and enjoy the wonder of being one of those
lucky blind turtles.
© 29 Oct 2017 
About
the Author 
 I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled
by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in
Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an
extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.
Posted on

Coming Out Spiritually by Pat Gourley

“If you are too busy to sit in meditation
 for twenty minutes a day
 then you need to sit in meditation
 for an hour every day.”

Paraphrased Buddhist Wisdom

I am not sure that my spiritual coming out over the years has not really been more of a shedding of things rather than the cultivation of any particular tradition or significant growth and development on my part. If I try to put it on a life trajectory I guess maybe as my queer and political identities blossomed my religious/spiritual side seems to have waned significantly over the decades, with the exception perhaps of a resurgence in the last 20 years of my often helterskelter Buddhist practice and an ever evolving atheist ethos.

I am aware that it is trendy these days in certain circles to say, “No I am not religious but I am spiritual.” The spiritual part of that is often for many defined in very vague terms involving some sort of unity with the whole Universe. One person though who has thought through this “one with the Universe” thing is my current favorite atheist Lawrence M. Krauss:

“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way to get them into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.” Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing.

The root motivation for all religious or spiritual seeking seems to me to be very succinctly summed up in the following phrase, which I am quoting from Stephen Batchelor’s great work Buddhism Without Beliefs; “Since death alone is certain and the time of death uncertain, what should I do?”

The Catholic Church teaches that one reaches the age of reason at seven and then real sinning becomes possible, a rather rigid view of child development. My spiritual journey from this age of seven until about age seventeen was certainly laid out for me, no thought required, just a lot of something called Faith. The indoctrination in the Catholic religion though started in my Irish family much earlier than age seven of course. My adolescent discovery that sex with another man could be simply divine and that much of what the establishment had taught me about how the world worked in general needed to be seriously called into question. This was in large part thanks to a wonderful rogue Holy Cross nun and resulted in a rather rapid jettisoning of my early Catholic upbringing and beliefs.

Much of the 1970’s where spent in the proverbial lifestyle of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll and then lots more sex with no particular spiritual bent. I did hook up with the local chapter of Dignity, a group of mostly Catholic gay men, who I think in hindsight were desperately trying to square being queer with being a good Catholic. Not sure that all worked out so well for most of them. I attended more to cruise than anything else really.

In the late 1970’s I entered my “pagan/earth mother” phase and this was fueled by contact with many feminists and the Radical Fairies many of whom also shared this spiritual worldview. I was influenced by the writings of a wonderful witch named Starhawk. One of my dearest possessions from those years is the first stained glass piece my loving companion David made for me, a beautiful and very colorful pentagram.

The eighties were probably my least ‘spiritual’ in any fashion with delusion setting in that Goddess worship may not have been all it was cracked up to be. The struggles with mortality were also coming home in a big way as many started dying from AIDS. Nothing like a lot of death around you to force the question “What should I do”? Chanting, however fervently, to the Goddess didn’t seem to help much.

In the early nineties and up to the present I guess my “spiritual trip” can best be defined as Buddhist. A ten-year stint with the Kwan Um School of Zen and work with great teachers cemented my practice or at least I learned how to better sit still and be quiet.

In pondering coming out spiritually I think it must be an ongoing process, as most coming out is, and I am drawn back to the Stephen Bachelor’s injunction I quoted earlier and that is “What should I do?” This question presented itself in rather stark fashion this past Friday on my walk back from the gym.

Around 11:00 in the morning walking down Logan Street heading south toward 13th I was approaching a favorite panhandling corner. I noticed a body lying on the sidewalk, unusual placement for those with signs and in pursuit of the very hard work that is surviving as homeless in our big cities today. I could already see a couple folks stepping over the prone figure or walking around and no detectable movement. On approaching I saw it was a man and he could have been any street fellow, way over dressed for the weather but layers are important when you are on the street 24/7, and desperately in need of a shower. He was strategically sprawled in the shade of the only tree on that corner. I quickly started trying to process what was going on and whether or not I needed to try and intervene here. I did not have my phone with me.

I stepped around him as several others had already done and I kept walking. I continued walking across the street and down the block looking back and thinking, “What should I have done”. That is a really totally bogus and useless question, and not what Batchelor asked, his question was “What should I do?” On my next look back I saw two guys with leaf blowers work their loud obnoxious machines right around him and this disturbingly seemed to elicit nothing from the prone body.

What I should do then became obvious and I walked back to where he was. I saw more clearly then that he had his arm curled under his head, a good sign, not a pose for someone in extremis. I then tapped the bottom of his foot with my shoe and said in a loud voice: “Hey man, are you alright?” To my great relief he immediately responded partially sitting up and trying to focus on who was disturbing what was obviously a nap in the shade, a break from being on a very hot, exposed corner asking passing motorists for change. His crumpled and very poorly lettered sign stating ‘anything helps’ and invoking God to bless whomever was serving as a makeshift pillow on the concrete. Our society has substituted the time honored Buddhist begging bowl with a begging sign.

I then said that he should think about moving before someone stepped on him. This seemed to register a bit and then he responded that he would as soon as he finished his hamburger. I then noticed, what quite frankly looked like garbage, on a small cardboard container with some sort of scraps, salvaged from the garbage perhaps and showing the wear and tear of being in the 90 degree heat. This had been strategically placed on the sidewalk right under where his chin had been on the pavement. Right wing conservative ranting’s aside I was sure he was not finishing up a serving of crab legs purchase with food stamps. And a lecture on food poisoning would have been way too middle class and certainly of little benefit.

Satisfied we were not in any sorts of 911-territory I said again “Don’t get stepped on,” and headed home, once more convinced the question should always be “What should I do?”

June 2013
Photo by author

About the Author

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.

Posted on

Favorite Place by Pat Gourley

I actually have many favorite places currently and have had many different ones over the years. Implied in a favorite place for me is the component of safety along with joy and contentment. Unlike many in the world now, into the future and certainly in the past, being able to experience safety, joy and simultaneously contentment is illusive much of the time. For many of us I imagine our most favorite place often exists in our head and we find ourselves trying to go there often.

The trick for me is to make where I am at the moment, which is always an undeniable reality that should be honored, my favorite place. There is often no other choice. I rarely succeed at this but am getting better at it than I was for much of my life. Before I wonder too deep into the woods with Eckhart Tolle’s Power of Now or Ram Dass and Be Here Now or the Buddha’s timeless invocation to simply sit quietly with the breath, I need to acknowledge many places cannot be called “favorite”. Like being stuck in traffic on a hot day, or on an airplane next to a screaming kid or driving across southern Wyoming or recently having to be with a good friend who has shared he may have metastatic prostate cancer, this after decades of HIV.

I also have to acknowledge that I have really led a pretty privileged life. I have never been in a crowded jail cell, tortured or worse perhaps put in solitary confinement. I have never been in an abusive relationship and my childhood was pretty idyllic despite the stifling reality of the Catholic Church. I don’t live with the constant sound of an American drone hovering above and the horrific but occasional blasting of relatives into oblivion as unfortunate collateral damage. I always felt safe with and experienced endless unconditional positive regard from my parents. I can only imagine the constant horror and struggle of trying to get to a favorite pace if you are a child in an abusive and unsafe environment.

I imagine nearly all people have a favorite place the trick is just being able to get there as often as possible. So should we all be trying to cultivate this “favorite place” as somewhere we can go to mentally rather than always be physically present there? How often have we all imagined if only I was there it would all be perfect? Once we got there however it soon became boring and we wanted to be onto the next favorite place. That certainly has been my M.O. Craving is the ultimate cause of all suffering according to some guy called the Buddha.

So I have a basket full of real favorite places ranging from the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park to my own small patio in the early morning hours with that rare east breeze carrying the scent of fresh mown alfalfa. The smell of freshly cut hay particularly when mixed with the scent of a recent rain has been and remains like mainlining Valium for me invoking my best childhood memories. So in those situations I guess that makes my favorite place an olfactory one. Another favorite place is hearing and dancing with 9,000 of my closest friends at Red Rocks as Furthur launches into a favorite tune like Golden Road to Devotion or Franklin’s Tower. Oh and of course that favorite place of savoring the taste of a pint of Ben and Jerry’s Karamel Sutra on my living room couch and sharing licks of the vanilla with my one cat, Cassidy, who eats dairy. These days a favorite place are the Capital Hill neighborhoods I walk through on my way to the gym and taking in the rainbow of flowers blooming this time of the year and enjoying the daily changes in the many small vegetable gardens popping up with more frequency. And of course a very favorite place is the state of sexual arousal leading to orgasm, that one never seems to get old. It seems perhaps that favorite places vary with the senses and a key for me is to focus on the one sense being stroked most intensely at the moment.

Not to be greedy or in a terminal state of craving but how wonderful it would be to be sitting in the Tea Garden with a pint of ice cream while being jacked off by George Clooney with my ear buds in listening to a recent Furthur jam in the Fall right after a nice rain shower and the Japanese Maples in their brilliant red glory in full view. But really I suppose my head would then explode and it would all be over rather abruptly. To be fully appreciated perhaps it really is best to take my favorite places one sense at a time.

© 28 August 2013

About
the Author

I was born in La Porte Indiana in 1949, raised on a farm and schooled by Holy Cross nuns. The bulk of my adult life, some 40 plus years, was spent in Denver, Colorado as a nurse, gardener and gay/AIDS activist. I have currently returned to Denver after an extended sabbatical in San Francisco, California.