Tag: Eckhart Tolle

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Setting Up House, by Gail Klock

This is my third and final attempt at writing this piece on
“Setting up House.” I struggled with it twice yesterday, both attempts were
wiped out with the delete key. I woke up this morning asking myself why it was
so hard, what was the struggle all about. As all of you in this room know
getting words down on paper requires an act of God, well not quite, but it does
kind of require a coming to terms with yourself. My first two attempts
sufficiently covered the superficial aspects of setting up house, all the
details were there, but none of the heart. I am attempting to reach into my
soul and rectify it with my brain to get to the emotions of this piece.
“Setting up house” represents to me the essence of life, the
determining of how I am going to live my life. Am I going to set up house by
myself and find contentment in the doing or am I going to attempt to set up
house with another, and perhaps realize my hopes and dreams. When I’m honest
with myself I know I desire the latter as I am a social person and I really
enjoy being in a loving relationship. I had a couple of dreams lately which
relate to this topic. In the first one I was trying to get out of Golden on a
highway, but I didn’t know which road to take. The one I was on led to a
flyover which was very high and narrow with an arc so great at the top I
couldn’t see where it was leading. I wasn’t sure if it was the right road to be
on, but I knew if I could focus on the road and not on the frightening aspects
of the path itself I would be okay. I awoke at this point and began to analyze
this dream before the details of it escaped me. I knew why I was leaving
Golden, it was where my former partner and I had lived with our family, and our
family as we knew it then no longer exists. Much of the setting up house which
we had done so well unraveled. We, my partner and I, had not paid enough
attention to the infrastructure of our dwellings. The road being high and
narrow spoke to two of my fears, height and confinement. The “focus on the road”
aspect of the dream is literally focusing on knowing that “I am”. I lost sight
of my existence when my little brother Karl died, when our family crumbled
under the grief. I thought I could regain my mother’s love and attention by
giving her back her happiness. In the process, I gave up myself as I tried to
anticipate what her needs were, if I was only good enough I would make her
happy and she could return to the loving mother she had been before she lost
her baby. I tried to “set up house” at the age of four, almost five. The
materials I used worked for the time being, they were at that time the best
available. But it was a bit like using asbestos, the long-term damage was
potentially greater than the original benefits gained. I’m using better
building materials now which are being supplied by more informed builders, not
a four-year-old, but sessions with a very skilled psychologist, Vivian
Schaefer; readings by authors such as Brene Brown and Eckhart Tolle, which are
supplemented greatly by the thoughtful discussions Betsy and Gillian and I have
concerning the meaning of these writings, particularly Tolle’s; and by the
relationship Trish and I are forming. Without Trish, very little of the
progress I am making would be taking place. It is not possible to develop
relationship skills without relationship and both Trish and I are bringing the
integrity needed which allows us to grow.  Through these efforts I am regaining my awareness
of myself and my emotions and the infrastructure of my life is being rebuilt.
My other two dreams involved the living spaces I was
occupying. The first one was rather shabby and run down with locks on the
exterior doors which a man was trying to break into. In the next segment of the
dream I was living in a new apartment which had very secure locks, but was
incredibly small; as I looked around the rooms I realized there was space for
cooking, but no space for a bed. Upon awakening and further analyzation of
these dreams I recognized the locks I have use in life are perhaps not as sturdy
as I expected them to be, but rather false providers of security. I tried for
too many years to protect myself and my emotions by locking them up, which in
reality created a less safe environment. The small safe living quarters allowed
me access to provide sustenance for myself, but it did not allow for a bed,
which was the metaphor for an intimate relationship.
From these dreams, I would conclude that “setting up house”
requires unlocking the emotions within. In order to be safe in a relationship I
must be aware of my own needs, wants, and desires. I must also allow my
vulnerabilities to be known, because they are the infrastructure which left
unacknowledged will destroy the housekeeping. It is unreasonable and unfair to
think another person should be able to intuit my areas of insecurities and thus
respond in the understanding, loving manner I am hoping for.
When Lynn and I set up house there
were never any conflicts over where we lived, the décor, who would do what
chores, landscaping, the amount of money each of us was contributing, or any
other domestic decisions. We were building our lives together, knowing each
person was making a fair contribution and accepting and respecting the fact
that together we would be happier and have more. We lived in rental properties
for the first eight years and finally acquired the finances we needed to afford
our own home. The first house we lived in was designed by my brother Eric, as
he said, to compensate for how horribly he had treated me when we were kids- I kiddingly
told him it was partial payment. Lynn and I did a great deal of the work on the
house ourselves in order to make it affordable, we insulated the house, worked
with the electrician as a gofer, stained all the wood in the interior, painted
and wallpapered all the walls, and did all the landscaping. It was a lot of
hard work, yet exciting at the same time. We did a good job with the
housekeeping aspect of “setting up house”. We had a lot of love and respect for
one another, but we didn’t have enough internal integrity to support the
housekeeping for the duration of our lives. We didn’t know how to be vulnerable
with one another, we used strong locks which provided false security.
I want to combine the aspects of my
relationship with Lynn which contributed to our long-term relationship and our two
wonderful daughters, with my internal integrity which allows for the “I am”.
This combination will provide the most beautiful house I have ever set up. It
is the house I have been seeking for the past 65 years. I have no doubt I will
find it as long as I stay focused on the road which will lead me there and not
allow my fears to distract me. Slowly, I am unlocking the rusty locks which I
put in place many years ago and I am finding the unshackling to be rather freeing.
I’m still a fledgling beginning to test my wings, but I trust the inner
strength which I know is within me, that which will allow me to soar like a
hawk.
© 12 Sep 2016 
About the Author 
I grew up in
Pueblo, CO with my two brothers and parents. Upon completion of high school, I
attended Colorado State University majoring in Physical Education. My first
teaching job was at a high school in Madison, Wisconsin. After three years of
teaching I moved to North Carolina to attend graduate school at UNC-Greensboro.
After obtaining my MSPE I coached basketball, volleyball, and softball at the
college level starting with Wake Forest University and moving on to Springfield
College, Brown University, and Colorado School of Mines.
While
coaching at Mines my long-term partner and I had two daughters through
artificial insemination. Due to the time away from home required by coaching, I
resigned from this position and got my elementary education certification. I
taught in the gifted/talented program in Jefferson County Schools for ten
years. As a retiree, I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter, playing
senior basketball, writing/listening to stories in the storytelling group,
gardening, reading, and attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.
As a retiree,
I enjoy helping take care of my granddaughter, playing senior basketball,
writing/listening to stories in the storytelling group, gardening, reading, and
attending OLOC and other GLBT organizations.

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Endless Joy by Gillian

I’m not sure why but that phrase, the entire
concept, makes my skin creep a bit. Maybe it’s because the only people I can imagine
making me a promise of endless joy are fundamentalist preachers from the mega
church, urging me towards rebirth, and the corner drug dealer urging me towards
powders and pills. It also, to me, conjures up a vision of a constant and
rather scary manic condition.
Not that I’m suggesting there is anything wrong with joy
itself, but, like so many things, it is probably best taken in moderation. The
Free Online Dictionary defines it as intense and especially ecstatic
or exultant happiness. Now really! Who can keep that up for a lifetime? We
who are fortunate enough frequently feel joy in our lives, but it goes away;
either crashing down or floating gently away as we return to the usual
mundanity of everyday living. Christmas comes to mind, as I am writing this at
Christmas time. The word joy pops up frequently in carols, and we often
associate the holiday season with joy. Sadly, this anticipated joy does not
always manifest itself to those who expect it and they are doomed to angry
disappointment. Others, even more sadly, are realistic enough about the
situation in which they currently find themselves that they expect nothing; and
are not disappointed.
But let’s
suppose, for now, that we have a perfect Norman Rockwell Christmas. The kids
are joyous as they unwrap their presents and delve eagerly into the stockings,
the parents and grandparents rapturous as they watch. We build a snow man on
the lawn, then enjoy a perfectly dinner, after which we sit around the tree and
lustily sing joyful Christmas carols. We drop into bed, awash with Christmas
joy and egg nog. We are still pretty joyful in the morning, even though the
go-to-work alarm wakens us rudely before dawn. This Christmas was pure joy, we
congratulate each other silently. We totter into the living room which we find
completely covered in tattered wrapping paper, ripped-off ribbon, and abandoned
toys. The dining room looks almost as bad. When did all that gravy end up on
the floor? And what might that be, all that sticky stuff trodden firmly into
the carpet? And, oh God, the fudge somehow got left out and the dog ate it,
then threw it up in the corner. That joyous high is dissipating in a hurry but
we are also in a hurry. No time to do anything about anything right now. I dig
my way out to the car through that foot of snow that we were all so excited
about yesterday. Ooh, how perfect. A real White Christmas! Bloody fools,
I grumble to myself, digging out the car and beginning to register a slight
pounding in my head. How and why had I left egg nog for rum punch? Now I’ve got to get out on the icy freeway with all
those fools who don’t
have a clue how to drive in this stuff…. and I’m developing road rage before I even get the
car in gear. Not one ounce of yesterday’s
joy remains.
Weddings are other occasions
frequently linked with joy, indeed endless joy to be carried forward from this
joyful wedding to last a lifetime of marriage. A wedding crowd is very often a
joyful one, attending a truly joyous occasion. The happy couple overflows with
joy and we all rise with them onto some euphoric cloud. They rush off to the
airport only to spend three miserable hours waiting for the arrival of the
plane which by now should have already winged them away to that luxurious hotel
on the beach. When they finally do arrive there, exhausted and irritable, it is
pouring rain and colder than the home they just left. After a week of cold,
wind, and rain, viewed from the streaming window of the over-priced hotel that
euphoria bubble has truly burst. The honeymoon is definitely over.
Of course it isn’t just positive emotions which don’t go on uninterrupted forever. Negative ones
don’t either. If you marry
him you’ll
have nothing but misery. Not quite accurate. Maybe he will,
does, bring you much unhappiness, but it’s
not endless, with never a break. Surely miserable lives are, even if only
occasionally, treated to some relief, a little levity, perhaps even some rare
moments of joy. Years ago I saw a homeless woman pick up a small white flower
someone had dropped on the sidewalk. The expression on her face as she held
that flower up to the light was very evidently an expression of pure joy.
Don’t we need the bad times so that we can really
enjoy the good? If we did have endless joy, would we appreciate it? Would we
even feel it? I’m
not sure. And how could we have empathy for those not feeling so good? Helen
Keller said, “We could never learn to be brave and patient, if there were only
joy in the world.”
Eckhart Tolle, a name I’m sure you’re sick of hearing from both Betsy and me,
and sometimes Pat, suggests that if we live each moment in the now, never being
distracted by the past or future, every moment will bring us joy; not the
Christmas or wedding kind of joy sometimes engendered by an external stimulus,
but the spiritual joy of simply being. I work hard at it but doubt that
I will ever attain that spiritual strength. If I had been practicing it my
entire life I might have some hope of getting there, but I only really started
paying the attention I should to my spiritual needs after I retired. I am
making progress, and have experienced enough of those tiny shots of spiritual
joy to feel the beauty of it, but it is far from endless. In fact it is absent
more than it is present. The closest I can get is a kind of inner spiritual
peace, which I revere. It is almost continuous, though being a spiritual novice
I sometimes let it get away. So far, at least I am able to get it back. It is,
I believe, as close as I will ever come to endless joy. Will it be endless
inner peace? Only time will tell.
©  January 2014
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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25
years. 
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Anger by Gillian

I know a number of women, and perhaps a few less men, who are nothing more than tightly-wound little balls of anger. They are wrapped so tight that if something loosened just one strand, I feel that they would completely unravel. Most of us are not so extreme, but I think many of us have at least some anger inside us, and we don’t know what to do with it; perhaps don’t even understand what it is about. Perhaps we fear it.

I used to think that men actually handle anger better than women. Now I have come to believe that none of us deal well with it. Men perhaps respond to it in a simpler, less complex way, than many women, but not better. There can be nothing more irritating than that rather too-frequently used ploy of an angry woman, essentially declaring, yes, I am upset, and I’m not going to explain WHY because you should KNOW why. Yes, certainly, irritating. But if the net result of a man’s anger is going on a shooting spree then that can hardly be deemed to be a better outcome. And many of us have read the recent article pointing out that in the last 33 years there have been 71 mass murders in this country and 70 of them had one thing in common; they were committed by men. I’d call that a clear case for improved anger-management.

Aristotle expressed very well our difficulties with anger, and I would say little has changed over more than two millennia.

“Anyone can be angry – that is so easy. But to become angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right reason, and in the right way – that is not so easy.”

Huh! Easy for him to say!

Earlier in my lifetime, and I suspect many women have this problem, I didn’t even recognize my anger for what it was; and if you are unable to know something for what it is, you most certainly cannot deal effectively with it. I would cry when what I really felt was anger. I would feel depressed or sad when really I was angry. When I did feel anger, I inevitably lost my temper. That really scared me. Well, I guess we all hope that as we struggle with many things over a lifetime we also learn to deal more effectively with ourselves and our emotions.

Through hard work I am strengthening my spiritual self, which in turn helps with my emotional self. I have also found that occasionally spilling my messy guts in Story Time has helped me understand myself more clearly. I have come to accept anger when it chooses to visit itself upon me; not to let it disguise itself as something other, and to understand its cause. I can truly say that I rarely feel anger these days, and when occasionally I do, it tends less to be personal than collective. My favorite spiritual guide, Eckhart Tolle, refers to it as the collective pain body versus the individual one.

I’m not a great Bible quoter though I sincerely believe that if we followed Christ’s teachings the world would be a better place. And, yes, I have frequently been heard to say that although I do not believe in the divinity of Jesus, and don’t call myself a Christian, I am, in the way I conduct my life, a far better one than oh so many who scream their Christianity from the rooftops. But clearly I’m digressing again.

Anyone sensing a wee little bit of ANGER? Yes, I do have collective pain body anger at the evil such faux-Christians perpetrate. Not on me personally, or at least only indirectly, but on so many other innocent souls.

Jesus said, and I paraphrase because there are many differing versions,

“What you do to the least of these, you do also unto me.”

And isn’t that what the collective pain body is all about?

I feel great anger at the evil being created in Uganda by American, so-called Christian, homophobes. As a fellow homosexual you do it also unto me. I feel rage at the abduction and clearly dreadful fate of Nigerian girls; and, sadly, so many more before them and doubtless to follow after them. Just being female, I am violated along with them.

I detest the hatred of Obama, which I believe to be in great part racially motivated, but it doesn’t awaken my collective pain body; I am Caucasian. On the other hand, I dread Hillary Clinton running again for President. The vitriol against her will be every bit as hate filled as that against Obama, but I am her age, and white, and female. It will all be directed at ME and all those like me; all the women who over the years have been vilified because they tried to enter male territory.

They suffered from some delusion that they were equal!

Nearing the end of my ramblings, I took a break to watch BBC news which turned out to be all about the 70th anniversary of the D-day landings.

Yup, you guessed it! Up popped that collective pain body, and along with it the anger.

No-one really knows how many died in WW11 but even the most conservative estimate is 50 million. 50 MILLION!

Oh, I do believe that that one was what they call a “just war,” Even the pacifist Quakers accept that if you are attacked you must defend yourself. But when will it ever end?

The newscast showed some very low-key Germans placing wreath’s on German graves at Normandy. One said, to the TV interviewer,

“At least Germany has not been involved in any war for many years now. We did learn something.”

A child of that terrible war, up leapt my collective pain body.

Why hadn’t we, the U.S., my adopted county, nor, to a great extent Britain, my native land, learned this lesson?

OK. OK. I still seem to have plenty of anger.

But at least I see it for what it is, and for the most part understand why it is.

And it no longer carries me away.

I don’t fight it: I feel it and let it go.

No, of course I don’t deal perfectly with anger, but at least I am no longer terrified of it.

© June, 2014

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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Mom by Gillian

Most of us are, of course, via nature
and nurture, to a lesser or greater degree a product of our parents. I can
easily identify many things; good, bad, and ugly, that I got from mine. On the
whole, though, I think what a received from my dad was of a simpler, less
complex nature, than the traits I received from Mom.  My father was essentially an uncomplicated
man. My mother was not an uncomplicated woman, although she put on a good act.
Probably most people who knew her, especially the many children she taught and
their parents, found her to be a warm, patient, conscientious, motherly woman
with a good sense of humor. She was all those things; but a whole lot more that
she never presented to the world, or to me, though eventually I caught at least
an occasional glimpse of what went on below that smooth veneer.
So it’s little surprise that for the first
forty-odd years of my life I found it relatively easy to hide the real, gay,
me, from the world and to a huge extent from myself, and play a very convincing
part. I learned those skills from Mom. Not that my mother was a lesbian, at
least as far as I can ever know, though in fact how can I ever know? I
can’t, but I just
don’t sense it, and
I believe I would. Her issue was her son and daughter who both died before I
was born. She never once talked about it; not to me nor to anyone as far as I
know. She buried her tragedy deep and set about developing a shell, never to be
broken.
At least I eventually broke free of
mine. My mother never did. I learned the truth from my aunt. OK Mum, (which is
what I actually called her, not the more American Mom) you didn’t tell me your
secret and I didn’t tell you mine. Na na na na naaa na!
So I guess that leaves us even in our
dysfunction.
I always felt that there was
something. Something missing. I can’t really express what I felt, or why,
it was simply a child’s intuition. And now, after all these
years, I wonder if a mother’s intuition told Mum that there was
something, something indefinable, missing in me, in who I was, and in my
communication with her.
Somehow, despite our chaotic psyches,
Mum and I were close and I always knew I was loved unconditionally, by both her
and my dad. They both also had a great sense of humor. Mum loved to giggle. I
loved to make her giggle. It was all part of the very complex hidden
relationship in which I knew it was up to me to heal her wounds, though I only
knew of them subliminally, and make her happy. It was up to me to make her
laugh. So in this way she helped me develop my own humor and we laughed a lot
together. My dad’s humor was completely different from
Mum’s, and I am
fortunate enough to have a wonderful mixture of both, but he would look on
fondly in puzzled silence while Mum and I giggled helplessly over something in
which he could find little humor.
Mum was, as were many people but
especially women, I think, back then, very concerned with appearances. I don’t know if any
of you ever watched Keeping Up Appearances on PBS, but the show always
reminds me of my mother, although she was a much nicer person that
Hyacinth Bucket! Mum had a bad case of don’t do it in the
street and scare the horses. I could wear that tattered old sweater I
loved so much in the house, but I couldn’t venture outside in it, and if there
was a knock on the door, I had to bolt upstairs and hide or change clothes
before I came back down. My dad didn’t have to wear his tie in the house
but had to put it on in a rush if anyone came to visit, and he had to wear it
outside even if he was gardening. Someone might see him without it! I,
on the other hand, don’t give a tinker’s curse about
what anyone thinks of the way I dress, or come to that the way I live, or
anything about me. That, I think, is greatly a generational thing, but in my
bones I feel that a lot of it is purely a reaction to Mum’s obsession
with what will people think? On the other hand, of course, it did take
me the first half of my life to come out of that bloody closet, so I cannot
have been as freewheeling as I’d like to believe.
My mother’s other
obsession was with her weight. She did seem to gain weight easily, though she
never ate very much and only drank once a year, on Christmas Eve. It was always
some kind of home-made wine: pretty strong stuff. After a couple of glasses she
was bright red in the face and invariably stated in rather slurred words, how
strange it was that although she only drank once a year, it never had any
effect on her! Oh Mum, ever in denial! She was never obese, just pleasingly
plump in a motherly kind of way.
But my dad and I could never convince
her of that. These days I think it’s much easier to get a good feel for
just how overweight, fat, or obese, you are, and how you look. With endless
photographs of ourselves easily available we can compare ourselves with others
only too often. In the days of only occasional snapshots, my mother constantly
needed assurance.
“Oh dear!”
Mum would
exclaim, eyeing a woman of roughly her age bulging out of her clothes, “I’m not as fat as
that am I?”
Well that was an easy answer in the
negative, whatever the truth. But worse, she would sometimes ask that classic
unanswerable question, “I’m not as fat as I used to be, am I?”
Just try to get that answer right!
I struggle to stay well clear of
denial, because Mum relied so heavily on it. She would cry, not shedding a
quiet tear but sobbing uncontrollably, over things with no direct relation to
her; miners dying down coal pits, a race horse with a broken leg having to be
shot, the death of King George V1. A therapist friend explained to me, many
years later, that this was a classic example of transferred grief, my mother
being way too terrified of facing her own grief, while needing to release it in
some other way.
Poor Mum. She lived in the wrong time
and the wrong place. Her children died in 1940 in a war torn Britain where
people died every day and you just sucked it up and soldiered on. These days
she would have had the benefit of therapy and support groups and various
spiritual teachings to ease her way. Of course you never recover from the death
of one child let alone two, but she would have had a lot of help in dealing
with her heartbreak.
On rare occasions I catch myself
glancing uneasily at an overweight woman and wondering if I am in fact more or
less fat than she is.  I panic. Oh God, I’m becoming my
mother! Eckhart Tolle and I try to keep me grounded in reality and dealing with
my own self, leaving Mum to rest in peace. I am what I am and whether all or
any of it comes from Mum and Dad hardly matters.  I recently accepted that my struggle to keep
the weight off is little to do with heredity and a whole lot more about beer.

© Dec 2013

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 now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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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.