Tag: Pat Gourley

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Where Do We Go from Here? by Pat Gourley

“Nothing new will be said here, nor have I any skill at composition. Therefore I do not imagine that I can benefit others. I have done this to perfume my own mind.”


Santideva; Bodhicaryavatara 1.2

I should really begin all my writings with this quote from Santideva, the 8th century Indian Buddhist monk, as a small way of reigning in my ego before putting pen to paper. I do though enjoy perfuming my own mind.

My first task in tackling this topic was to decide whom “we” is referring to. I suspect there was some group in mind by the person who suggested this phrase. I am going to take a bit of a leap here and define “we” as the LBGTQI etc. community.

I know it makes some folks skin crawl to here the word ‘Queer’ and I want to acknowledge that sensitivity but when it comes to ‘perfuming’ my mind I am quite lazy. The reclaiming of the word Queer, I think in the late 1980’s, in part by a group of often-younger AIDS activists was never perceived by me to be particularly offensive. It was an easy way to inclusively describe the many-headed beast that the community had evolved into particularly over the latter part of the 20th century.

And in this age of assimilation with major energy expended on marriage and military service, I find a bit of solace in the use of such a loaded reclaimed word. You really need to be member of the club to use it and get away with it even if it stirs a bit of dust especially if there are straight folks within earshot.

A significant part of queer-awakening at least since the mid-1800’s has been to define who “we” are and to come up with a suitable name for ourselves. This has been challenging and at times painful. Remember when The Center was started in the mid-1970’s the name was The Gay Community Center with ‘lesbian’ added a few years later and the B’s and T’s followed. Rather than add any more letters officially I vote for changing the name to The Queer Community Center of Colorado. I am not holding my breath for this change however.

Despite what seems like the mad rush toward respectability in the form of marriage equality and unfettered access to military service I am holding out hope that our intrinsic “otherness” will win out in the long run. Even for those who have opted for the marriage route after a couple of tours of duty in one of America’s many war fronts I think their queerness will bring unique and perhaps even evolutionary aspects to these petrified institutions. Our innate differences as queer people will win out. I doubt that many constructionist-leaning Queer Theorists are reading this but if they are I am sure their heads are exploding or perhaps more likely they are just dismissing my essentialist views with a snarky sarcastic sneer.

Since I am all about “perfuming” my own mind here I am inclined to approach this topic as more “where do I go from here”, since at the end of the day it seems to be all about me anyway. I have and am spending significant cushion time to overcome this ego driven view but there is still much work to do.

I will now make a pathetic attempt to cut myself some slack around my egocentric approach to life. I am a week away from turning sixty-seven years old and I have most likely been HIV positive since 1981, over half my life. I am here writing this in no small part due to the four different HIV meds I am on and that I take three of these antivirals twice a day. And then there are four other meds addressing the effects of the HIV meds and the fact that I have indulged in the standard toxic American diet for much of my 67 years.

Even though I feel quite well and for most of my waking hours having HIV is never on my mind I am forced to look it in the face twice every day when I take my meds. I am struck often by the fact that I am absolutely tethered to these pills and if I quit them I will succumb to my HIV. But then many folks in our society today are on meds that are required to keep them going. Certainly in part the answer to ‘where am I going’ absolutely involves getting older. And that has inevitable consequences.

So in an attempt to stay off my own pity-pot I really try to focus on the following bit of advice that was recently posted on that endless source of pop-cultural wisdom , Facebook: “Don’t regret growing older. It is a privilege denied to many”. Author Unknown.

© January 2016

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.

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Master of the Rant, by Pat Gourley

Dear fellow Queer
writers:
http://www.papermag.com/2015/10/larry_kramer_sour_times.php
Comments from Larry
Kramer on discrimination from the straight world he adamantly believes exists
towards gay writers.
© 23 Oct 2015
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.
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Coming Out at 70, submitted by Pat Gourley

I know many of you
listen to NPR so you may have seen/heard this already. I think the gay
collective the “old gay man” hooked up with is perhaps the Short
Mountain Sanctuary. Long a fertile hotbed of Radical Fairie collective living
in the hills of rural Tennessee. Do listen to the audio if you have 8 minutes.
He has a wonderful voice. 
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/23/460851160/90-year-old-gay-man-recalls-long-struggle-with-his-sexuality
Happy Holidays, Merry
Christmas and may the returning sun shine all over us in the coming year.
© 24
Dec 2015 

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. 
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Friends, by Pat Gourley

Looking back on my 66
years I have I guess been involved with what could be called many different
“cults”.  Starting with the Catholic Church and progressing onto
the Democratic Socialist Party, Wiccan Covens, the gay community & Radical
Fairies and Buddhist Practice etc. etc. The most enduring though has been my
attachment to this little band:
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/11/05/grateful-dead-china-cat-sunflower-and-i-know-you-rider-fare-thee-well/
The twirling paradox
here if any is that this was posted on a Wall Street Journal blog. Oh well,
still a great version of these two old songs performed with love and gusto for
many thousands of devoted followers this past summer in Chicago.
© 8 Nov 2015  
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.
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Grief, by Pat Gourley

“By meditating on death, we paradoxically become conscious of life”.
Stephen Batchelor – from Buddhism Without Beliefs. 1997

This is one of those Story Telling Topics that really brings home to me what a lazy undisciplined writer I am. My life certainly dating from the death of my father in August of 1980 up until my most recent shift in Urgent Care, which was yesterday, has been chock-full of experience after experience of life’s impermanence and the personal grief that causes. I should be writing at least several chapters on grief if I were ever to get off my ass and write a memoir. The reality though is that the topic of Grief is going to get less than a thousand words as usual.

If I were in a really self-indulgent mood I suppose I could conjure up reams on grief around my own HIV infection and that of many, many friends and clients and their suffering and too often deaths over the past 35 years. An issue of self-exploration here for me would perhaps be how much of my own grief over the decades has really just been self-indulgent wallowing in the pool of “poor pitiful me”. How unfair that I am “forced” to face my own mortality every day when I swallow my HIV meds. And even worse how come I have witnessed so much suffering and death of others? I really need to watch this tendency in myself carefully and continually realize that no one gets out alive and many through the ages up until this minute have it so much worse than I do or ever will.

Nevertheless, that all said let me delve self-indulgently just a bit into my own grief issues, as they seem to come into focus for me especially this time of year. Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of Jerry Garcia’s death. The Grateful Dead were an integral part my life for decades. During the darkest years of the AIDS epidemic, from the late 1980’s until 1995 when I was not only looking down the barrel of my own infection I was also the nursing manger in the AIDS clinic at Denver Health and living with the love of my life who was dying in front of me. The music of the Grateful Dead was a great solace in those years and remains so today actually. I was at the last two shows Garcia and the Dead performed at Soldier’s Field in Chicago July. 1995.

Those shows were not particularly memorable at the time in large part because Garcia was not well but it never occurred to me that he would be gone himself in a few short weeks. The memory of hearing the news of his death on August 9th, 1995 is indelibly etched in my mind but not for the reason you may think.

Minutes after the news exploded across the world of Garcia’s death of a heart attack in a rehab center in Marin County my life partner David Woodyard, who was battling several major HIIV related issues of his own at the time, was on the phone deeply concerned about me and how I was taking the news.

This was and still is for me the real lesson on how to handle the feeling of grief in my own life. I need to always take a moment or several no matter what the circumstances and look around, outside my own little puddle and attempt to be “conscious of life’ and what an amazing trip it is to get to experience that at all, even when filled with grief.

David was teaching me that lesson right up until his own death five weeks later at 9 AM on September 17th, 1995. That was when my own real grieving began in earnest with no Grateful Dead song able to console me. Not even the beautiful lyrics of Brokedown Palace, which we played at his memorial.

Fare you well my honey
Fare you well my only true one
All the birds that were singing
Have flown except you alone

Going to leave this broke-down palace
On my hands and my knees I will roll roll roll
Make myself a bed by the waterside
In my time, in my time, I will roll roll roll
In a bed, in a bed


By the waterside I will lay my head
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul
River gonna take me

Sing me sweet and sleepy
Sing me sweet and sleepy
All the way back home

It’s a far-gone lullaby
Sung many years ago
Mama, Mama, many worlds I’ve come
Since I first left home


Going home, going home
By the waterside I will rest my bones
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Going to plant a weeping willow
On the banks green edge it will grow grow grow
Sing a lullaby beside the water


Lovers come and go, the river roll roll roll
Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs

To rock my soul

Songwriters: GARCIA, JERRY / HUNTER, ROBERT

Brokedown Palace lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc., Universal Music Publishing Group

© August 2015

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.
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Away from Home, by Pat Gourley

My initial thought on this topic centers around on what a great metaphor “Away From Home” is for being in the closet and that the coming out process is really a unique and one of a kind act of coming home. Not to torture the metaphor too much, but what the hell, the process of coming home is often a long and winding road but for the vast majority of us we emerge largely unscathed and powerful human beings as a result.

Coming Out is a growth enhancing and change creating process that I contend has virtually no parallel in the larger heterosexual world. I do not want to blow-off the struggles straight folk have in coming to grips with their own identities, particularly in their adolescent years, but they really are provided with many road maps and forms of social support that are simply non-existent for queers.

Unlike any other racial or cultural minority we are sprinkled throughout the entire human race and this gives us great power to upset the apple cart. Not to deny that some of us come out to less than open arms from biological family and hetero-friends, we still give even the most homophobic in our lives pause and on some level they too have to grapple with the fact that there is a queer person in their lives. More often than not this eventually turns out positive and very change creating in attitude and beliefs for those parents, children, siblings and friends we have just laid this bit of news on.

Even President Obama was able to express the power of the coming out process in his remarks following the recent Supreme Court ruling on marriage. He acknowledged that the phenomenal societal change in attitudes towards queer folk was due in large part to millions of us coming out in our own lives over the past several decades.

Though he didn’t say so specifically let me put words in the President’s mouth and state that it was not court rulings, legislation or even the political action of many groups both gay and straight that resulted in this historic shift in attitudes. It was the action of countless individuals deciding to make the brave step of coming out in their personal lives. Coming out is a necessary pre-requisite for our own LGBT activism. The personal action of coming out creates the ultimate “ripple-effect”. Let’s face it if a butterfly on the other side of the globe can flap its wings and change the weather on another continent just ponder for a moment the impact of millions of LBGT folks shouting from the roof tops “I am here and I am queer.”

In my own life it was my first sexual encounter, an extremely vanilla escapade involving mutual masturbation that created an overwhelmingly warm feeling of finally belonging. I was a high school senior being smothered in 1967 with heterosexual vapors wafting my way at every turn and having to make up the most bizarre tales to keep my cover intact. In hindsight I wonder who was really buying my bullshit.

The day after this life changing experience, which amazingly occurred with no guilt attached and for which I am eternally grateful to the wonderful man I jacked-off with, I left for a week in rural Mississippi with fellow members of my high school Peace Club. We went down to the rural south to be near and hopefully influenced by the cauldron of the Civil Rights movement. The purpose of the trip was to follow activists doing literacy work among the mostly black folks in the poor towns of the rural bayou country of Mississippi.

That sexual high and sense of finally belonging has lasted until this day. Oh there were a few months of a detour in 1970 thinking I could maybe change to being straight after all. This involved a few disastrous sessions with a straight psychotherapist who I soon realized was much more fucked up than I was. As I recall though I quickly came to my senses after meeting a sweet man in one of the college gym showers on a Friday evening and going to his home for a delicious home-made beef stew and great sex play, ah the endless joys of coming home.

© August 2015

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.

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My Earliest Queer Memory, by Pat Gourley

This is more difficult to
write on than I at first thought it would be. I believe the realization that I
was different or as Harry Hay was fond of saying “other” was a gradual process
with many little steps and discoveries along the way. This process of
realization long preceded my actual coming out which I define largely as an
internal acceptance and certainly not an initial sexual act. Again paraphrasing
Hay it took years to realize that the only thing I did have in common with
straight people was what I did in bed.
I think this is true of
queer awakening in general in that it rarely initially involves the sexual but
rather a profound and deeply real sense that we are not like our peers in some
fundamental way.  This may take the form
of what society would call gender nonconformity perhaps in dress, actions,
mannerisms and speech but again I think it can be even less blatant and more
elusive than that.  These expressions
despite their honest innocence are often met with quick and at times harsh
rebuke. For me personally it took the forms of loving to cook and garden and
when we did play cowboys and Indians I always insisted on being Crazy Horse or
Cochise, an interesting twist on being “other”.
Oh and of course there
were those times when we played school and I was always the nun.  Prancing around with a couple bath towels
serving as a shawl and headgear for a makeshift nun’s habit. This was behavior that
should have been a siren-like clue to somebody that this little kid was not
fitting into the norm.
My first sexual encounter
with another man was a spectacular bit of mutual masturbation that took place
in the biology lab of my Catholic High School with a wonderful man 20 years my
senior in the spring of 1967. This was though preceded by years of many little
messages some subtle and some others not so subtle that hey I wasn’t like a lot
of other little boys. I date my real coming out though to almost a decade
later. The Gay Community Center of Colorado and the LGBT folks I met there
playing a very significant role in cementing my comfort with my queer identity.
For years I was
fascinated and aroused especially by older men and any snippet of their naked
physiques I could spot and believe me I went out of my way to catch a glimpse
whenever I could.  My dad’s beautiful naked
ass being on rare occasions a wonderful source of inspiration! I was in some
ways sheltered from blatant homophobia in the form of overt harassment because
of my fey nature in part by the all-encompassing cocoon of Catholicism that
totally enveloped my life at home and at school. Something that I really only
broke free of when I went off to college in the fall of 1967.
Though I have no doubt I
was exhibiting less than desirable “little boy” qualities from an early age it
wasn’t until about the 4th grade that I started to respond ever so
indirectly to little cues that this could be a bumpy ride. In hindsight it all
proved pretty smooth from about 1960 until the full Monty so to speak that was
my life by the mid-1970’s. I attribute my coming out being relatively smooth
with little drama , even though it took about a decade and a half, to wonderful
parents and a host of older teachers and mentors along the way that were
accepting and even celebrating of difference and not of course only in the
queer arena.
Queer awakening is rich
with possibilities for growth that are unique to us as a people.  If we make it through this process alive, and
most of us do, we come out the other side so often strong and vibrant
individuals. Despite gains in the areas of marriage equality and military
access the coming out process for most remains initially a unique character
building solo-process with still very few societal supports and unfortunately
to this day many very negative messages. These admonitions to shun the “other”
may not be as blatant and intense as in the past but they still remain and are
quite daunting for little queer folk.
Again it is amazing how
many of us make it through to the other side stronger than ever. And this is
why continued support of community-based organizations that programmatically facilitate
the coming out process remains paramount in moving the gay agenda forward. This
Story Telling Group comes quickly to mind as one such effort.
© 17 Jul 2015 
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

A Guilty Gift?, by Pat Gourley

In an effort to catch up with
the group topics I am combining “Gifts from Afar” and “Guilty Pleasures”.  I am using the title of this piece “A Guilty
Gift?” as a possible metaphor for my own HIV infection. Please don’t interpret
the use of this metaphor on my part as personal “slut-shaming” since nothing
could be further from the truth. Nor do I for a minute view my HIV infection as
a gift.
I was most certainly infected
in late 1980 or early 1981 and it could have been in the rectory of the
Methodist Church in Aspen Colorado or as likely at the Empire Baths here in
Denver. Either way I suppose that the behavior, most likely with my legs in the
air, that lend to my infection could be viewed as the result of indulgence in a
guilty pleasure.
By 1980 though I had long ago
stopped viewing getting fucked as something to feel guilty about. It had become
one of the true pleasures of my life. It did not start out that way though with
my first bottoming experience being with a cop in Gary Indiana in the summer of
1968. Note to self from that experience: do
not ever use shaving cream again as lube. This was a very unpleasant
experience that I did feel guilty about for a few years actually. However, in
large part on the basis of my first very positive sexual experiences with a
dear man a few years my senior the previous year (1967) I was able to work
through the guilt in time for my move to Denver in late 1972.  By the mid-1970’s I was a raging homosexual
activist and enjoying the many pleasures of the heady sexual liberation that
came with the blossoming of the emerging LGBT movement back then.
As I have written before I
have often wondered if a mushroom trip one night in the fall of 1979 at the
Empire Baths, that went a bit array, was not a premonition of a much bigger
nightmare to come. Were the gargoyles that adorned the walls of the outdoor pool
at the Empire Bath speaking to me, telling me that night to flee for my life or
announcing the arrival of a “gift from afar”? Maybe both! A gift in the form of
a resilient little virus called HIV.
It is now widely accepted that
HIV in humans originated from a similar virus found in a species of chimpanzees
in western equatorial Africa. This Simian virus was likely transmitted to
hunters infected when butchering these chimps for bush meat and it then mutated
in them into the HIV we know. Why this seems to have blossomed mid-20th
century is still conjecture but one interesting theory is that the European
colonization of parts of Africa forced the native Africans off the more
desirable land for farming and into the jungle areas where hunting bush meat
became a necessary source of protein. That would be one bitchin’ bit of Karma
wouldn’t it?
Hindsight can be a most potent
and effective teacher. The proverbial “if I only knew then what I know now” is
a frequently engaged mental exercise.  However,
we really aren’t psychics so feeling guilty that we are not is a big waste of
time. Living life to its fullest is inherently a risky proposition, and
mistakes will be made.
 I think it is certainly true for many of us with
HIV infection to view this virus as a gift from afar and that it is the direct
result of a guilty pleasure.  That view I
think though comes from very faulty thinking around health and illness, a view
still very prevalent today. The unsound and simplistic view is that being
healthy comes from being good and being sick from being bad. I would remind
everyone that no one gets out alive or as the Grateful Dead so succinctly sang
“if the thunder don’t get ya’, the lightning will”.
It may seem that I am blowing
off the reality that my actions have had consequences. Certainly they have even
if many of those actions were quite pleasurable in the moment and the
consequences a real bite in the ass down the road. I accept total
responsibility for my HIV but I really don’t engage in feeling guilty about it,
certainly not now 30 plus years down the road. I am much more likely to feel
very lucky to be alive today with this infection when so many in my life are
not. Guilt I think can be viewed as a form of regret about something that has
already happened and it is really a bit of toxic self-indulgence.
My main “guilty pleasure” these
days is primarily an addiction to ice cream almost always eaten in the evening
before bed. The “gift” if you will for my persistent indulgence in this
sugar-laden fat bomb several times a week may very well be Type 2 diabetes
eventually.
I was recently stunned by a
comment made by one of the Physician’s Assistants in the Urgent Care Clinic I
work. He had I think probably just seen a diabetic patient with unfortunate symptoms
related to diabetes, a necrotic toe perhaps that would require IV antibiotics
and maybe amputation. His rather forceful statement was:      “These
days I would rather have HIV than diabetes”.
Needless to say this comment
has stuck with me on more than one occasion when I am downing a pint of Ben and
Jerry’s, this shortly after taking my evening HIV meds. Guilty pleasures and
gifts from afar indeed!
© 17 May 2015 
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

Life is Experimental!, by Pat Gourley

The title for today’s group was “Any Writing is Experimental”. I guess I would say to that I hope so. Something experimental is based on “untested ideas or techniques not yet established or finalized”. Any other writing would seem to be merely regurgitating someone else’s thoughts. I would though like to expand on this theme and say that all life is experimental, especially when it is queer.

Life is quite the dicey proposition when you think about it – you only get this one chance at it, the fanciful notion of reincarnation aside. It really is all about trial and error from start to finish.

We queers though are masters at experimentation since how we are predisposed to live our lives and grow and develop in ways not sanctioned by society as a whole. We really are constantly in a test drive mode especially in our first few decades. We have to experiment since we are not given any road map and in fact constantly have to re-evaluate, sometimes even withdraw and then come at it again from an angle often more suitable to survival. You really can’t ogle your young peers in the grade school locker room and proffer an innocent wink and get away with it.

I am not saying that growing up hetero is not without its fair share of experimentation but let’s face it they have many more societally sanctioned suggestions and institutional support on how to proceed. And this hetero support starts quite early in life where as we LGBT people often can’t find the support needed to validate our life’s experiments until we at least reach late adolescence and for many of us it comes even much later in life.

That really is the role (identity validation) of Queer Community Centers like the one we are in today and that would apply programmatically right down to this very group we are sitting in this afternoon. Our experimental and often very successful efforts at creating our own institutions, that foster and support gay identity, are really quite remarkable. These efforts are fostered and sustained by our individual coming out process and then the very altruistic pay back to help others along the path. And I would emphasize how truly grassroots they are with minimal outside support financial or otherwise.

Hopefully we will bring our true sense of experimentation to the institutions of marriage and the military, which we have recently gained some tentative access to. Both are sorely in need of all the queer sensibility we can muster and bring to them.

I would close with an anecdote that I think underscores my points here. Last week was the first time I ran into an old friend named Tom at this group. We frequently run into each other at the gym and have for decades. When we spoke mid-week last week at the “Y” he related to me the sense of deja-vu he had on seeing me here at Story Telling last Monday and it made him recall our first meeting 40 years ago. I was apparently the first or one of the first folks he spoke with when he walked into the Gay Community Center on Lafayette Street back in the mid-1970’s. Though he didn’t specifically say so I hope it was a pleasant recollection that brought back pleasant memories and not a dreadful sense of “boy, are we in a fucking rut”!

© July 2015

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

Here and There by Pat Gourley

I realize that one of the great challenges of my life has been to appreciate that I am “here” and to not worry about being “there”. I have a nearly all-consuming preoccupation to be “there” and of course when I get “there” and that turns into “here” and then I am off and running in my head once again to get “there”.

In the early 1990’s when my partner David was feeling the ravages of HIV, I was the nursing manager of a local AIDS clinic and friends, acquaintances, strangers and folks I was working with were dying all around me. It was in those years 1990-1995 that I probably felt the strongest draw I ever have in my adult life to find some sort of spiritual solace, or maybe it was refuge I was after. My childhood Catholicism had long ago fallen by the wayside and a return to that worldview totally out of the question. I came to realize that most religions and my own prior belief in a “God” were responses to the fear of my own death and the stark reality that is it. Belief in an after-life was out the window with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. It was very hard to grasp that this amazing ego, “me”, will just come to an end at my death. Even today I find it at times unimaginable that this life is it and there will be no heavenly reward or more likely for me eternal damnation if I were to believe the bible to be anything more than bad mythology.

When I think about it religion and its belief in an after life is the ultimate “there” trap, truly a false illusion distracting from “here”. If it is really lousy “here” it will all eventually be better “there”, nothing but wishful thinking and snake oil at its worst. I suppose being involved personally and professionally in the AIDS nightmare up to my eyeballs was responsible for this longing on my part for a “there”. So I fell in with a group of local Buddhists. I was attracted first to the Korean sect of Zen called the Kwan Um School by a hospice nurse named Richard who worked with many of our patients in the AIDS Clinic. He was an active participant in the school and had close ties with one of its leading teachers a woman who was also a lesbian and hospice nurse herself, sort of the complete package I thought at the time.

Certain Buddhist sects are big believers in reincarnation, which I view as just another form of the “there” game though they would never admit this with all schools incessantly pointing to “being here now”. If I can’t escape the wheel of samsara in this life I will reincarnate and get another chance, or if I really fuck-up this go-around I may come back as a cockroach. My attraction to Zen practice was in part because they are not big believers in reincarnation and of course there is no talk of a god in Buddhism. The Buddha is viewed as an enlightened being, something we are also if we just wake up and see it.

At the time this Buddhism seemed the perfect salve for my HIV inflicted wounds and of course if I was honest it was my own HIV infection that was driving the quest. So for the next 12 years or so I was quite active with the local chapter of the Kwan Um School developing my own private sitting practice and being involved with numerous group retreats most often led by our teacher who came out from Rhode Island for these events.

I was involved to the point of taking the initial vows called The Five Precepts:

I vow to abstain from taking life
I vow to abstain from taking things not given
I vow to abstain from misconduct done in lust
I vow to abstain from lying
I vow to abstain from intoxicants, taken to induce heedlessness

These seemed to me way more realistic and appropriate suggestions for a moral life than the Ten Commandments ever were. Needless to say 12 years with the Sangha and lots of cushion time did not result in anywhere near full actualization of these vows.

One of the rather neat components of the initiation ceremony when I took my vows was the lighting of a small wax wick that was placed on the underside of your left forearm and allowed to burn down until you felt it start to singe your flesh. Talk about a strong method for getting you to focus on the moment. You don’t think about anything else but the pain of the here and now and putting that sucker out.

I no longer practice with the Kwan Um School but do still try to maintain some semblance of a solo practice. The whole goal of meditation, that I do really believe has tremendous benefit and lessons, is to be “here” now and not somewhere over “there”. To be banking on or even worse perhaps preoccupied with an afterlife really has the potential to rob us of appreciating the absolutely amazing reality that we are “here”. Our human birth is such an unbelievably unlikely reality as to be truly mindboggling.

The great teacher Ram Das summed it all up in three simple words: Be Here Now!

© May 2015

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.