I think the pieces are finally coming together for me.
I was born a misfit here. I did not fit into the rigid fundamentalist, misogynistic world into which I was born although I spent the first half of my life trying to, till it came close to killing me off.
Then I discovered that other worlds existed.
I found the broken but so beautiful world of my Native America brothers and sisters, who took me in when my own white world had spit me out. With them, I got my first ever sense of having a right to even take up space on this planet, and my first taste of what the words family and community really defined. If it had been possible for me to change the color of my skin stay there, I would have. But that urban NA community was in its death throes even then and no longer exists.
Then I found another world that had me convinced there really MUST be a heaven after all, right here on earth and I had just found it: the Women’s Community. I had come all the way home, surrounded by powerful sisters who tenderly took me in, and in essence told me that my own culture had lied to me for a lifetime: I was NOT defective or sinful, or selfish because I could not turn myself into a soft spoken, ever obedient, self sacrificing daughter/wife/breeding machine. (And that, wonder of wonders, I was not only NOT “frigid” or sexually defective or “damaged beyond repair” either! I was quite simply, a lesbian!! Who the hell knew?)
I stayed with my sisters a long time, closing out the entire male half of this world as best one can. In those years of healing from prolonged sexual/physical abuse, there wasn’t a man alive who would have been safe within ten feet of me, no matter what a good man he was. I was a proud feminist lesbian separatist and eager activist. (With hundreds my sisters, after being denied a parade permit, I once closed down one of the main freeway arteries heading into Mpls, for several hours, and will never forget the healing moment facing down that red faced, shouting policeman who thought he could intimidate me. He was the one who backed up, not me,
Then time passed and things changed for me in ways I could not understand then, and I had to eventually move on. As I healed I began to see the goodness is some men. Gentleness, in fact, that I did not know any man possessed. So I could not stay with my sisters, for this was not allowed. I wondered if there would even be anywhere I could know I belonged forever.
Next came the fascinating world of alternative spirituality, and the New Age Community. After my deadly fundamentalist Christian upbringing I knew that this, for sure, must be my home ground. All people were welcome there without judgments. I stayed there, too, as long as I could, learned all I could, and was only a few months from ordination in the Spiritualist Faith, when I came to know that no, this was not where I belonged after all. Too much of me refused to see only through that lens either.
Since, I have stopped seeking any established physical community or culture in which to “belong and stay.” I just can’t do it; there is always some part of me that insists on flopping over the established boundaries, every where I go.
I guess instead I have created my own unique “community” of a surprisingly small number of trusted others (in my face to face life,) that I don’t live with physically, but see often, and a huge number of others I have come to bond with and love through this incredible medium, not a few of which just might be reading this right now!
I think I am understanding more fully now, the reason I could not stay in any on place permanently, and why I have never felt like I had a culture of my own.
I am white, but I don’t want to only live with whites.
I am a woman, but I don’t want to only live with women.
I am a gay , but I don’t want to only live with other gay people.
I have a spiritual base but I don’t want to only live with people who share similar beliefs.
I’m poor, old and disabled, but I don’t want to live only with other poor, old and disabled.
I am an American, but I don’t want to live only with Americans, in the American Culture. I also do not really want to belong to anyone else’s culture either.
I want to live with people of all colors.
I want to live with men and women and all the variety of those differently gendered in between
I want to live with straight, gay, bisexual, asexual, and transgendered people.
I want to live with people of all faiths and all spiritual pathways or none, and with atheists, agnostics and secular humanists. (With one GLARING exceptional no evangelizing, spittle spraying. rabidly fundamentalist christian will ever be allowed near me again)
I want to live with all generations, and people of all differing abilities, and economic classes.
Yes, I am an American who fervently loves the best of what my country represents.
But I would leave it tomorrow without a backward glance, if there was a land I could go to where the only pledge that would be asked of it’s rainbow colored, wonderfully diverse people was that we live together in cooperation and peace, and be good citizens of this world, committed the greater good of the seventh generation to come.
Now where is the reincarnation schedule? I want to book my return for when this culture actually exists on this earth.
