The Zen of Travel

Hmong girls in Sapa

Traveling is one of those activities most people either love or hate. I don’t mean the kind of travel where you become part of a group of tourists running through the ruins. I’m referring to backpack-type exploration in which you have no set itinerary, just an idea of what you’d like to see and where you might go. The rest is left to fate.

My partner and I travel this way in various third-world countries during her summer vacation from teaching. We have assiduously avoided the first world partly because it tends to be less interesting but mostly because it’s incredibly expensive.

All those years I spent as cubicle fodder, a dedicated wage slave, I thought that travel was a waste of money. Except for a few souvenirs, you wound up with nothing concrete to show for it. But when I was forty, I was diagnosed with cancer and didn’t know whether or not my story was ending. I recovered completely. But when my destiny was uncertain, I made myself two promises. One was to write and try to get my work published.The second was to see the world.  

Travel is a Buddhist experience. Even a somewhat-lapsed Buddhist like me is aware of this. When you descend on a place you’ve never seen before you are completely in the present moment. You arrive knowing not a soul and with no idea of what you will eat or where you will sleep. Chances are you only possess a sketchy idea of the meaning and depth of the culture. You are at the mercy of experience, the full range of potential occurrences.

These are sometimes wonderful beyond belief like dining with an extended Hmong family in Sapa Vietnam, having tea and cookies with Turkish women lace-makers inside their volcanic ash cave home in Cappadocia, going to an earth goddess Pachamama ceremony on a remote Peruvian hillside or simply drinking a mango smoothie in the night market in Chiang-Mai Thailand as dancing girls take the stage.

The experiences sometimes can be not-so-pleasant: like running out of water on a bus on the Raya Pass in Peru at 15,000 feet above sea level because the road running into Cuzco had been blockaded by strikers. Or being detained for six hours and eventually extorted for about 120 dollars each because of a “visa re-entry” problem in Vietnam.

Yes, anything can happen when you venture out into the world. The people you meet will be wonderful or awful just like those at home. But only they can show you how to turn the crystal in a new direction allowing you to see life in a way you could never have previously imagined. The value of that cannot be measured.

They Should Have Given Us Bavaria!

Holocaust Remembrance Day has just passed and May 14^th will be the 66^th anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel and all that I am able to say about this is how much it saddens me to be a Jew in this world.

When thinking of my grandparents, I could begin with the Russian Czar and the Cossacks. There is nothing left now of the huge Jewish community that flourished there, the Pale of Settlement, the shtetls where rural poverty was a fact of life along with a tribal culture where folks took care of each other. These villages were, for the most part, dirt poor and isolated. They had a daily life that now can only be glimpsed in a few rare photographs and paintings. Shtetl residents were ghettoized from the regional Russian and Polish populations by religion and culture but, most of all, by language.

In Western as well as Eastern Europe, Yiddish, the language of the Ashkenazi-Jewish people is now dead. In the colonialist state of Israel, the founders and survivors chose to resurrect Hebrew, a long-extinct biblical language whose correct pronunciation and inflection was totally unknown. They improvised and now Hebrew is a living tongue.

When it comes to Europe, the fact is that Hitler did what he set out to do. The results were just not immediate. European, Jewish culture has been obliterated. Not only do American secular and religious Jews no longer have a homeland, we are a dying breed. Folks like me in the USA are dinosaurs. In a couple of generations, like so many Native tribes, we will cease to exist. Specifically, people with two Jewish parents, raised in Jewish neighborhoods, not necessarily by choice but by covenant, will not have a square in our multi-ethnic, American tapestry.

I believe that this is a great loss, for Jews specifically, as well as for Americans in general.

Yes, the religion will continue to flourish as Jews intermarry and assimilate. Some rebellious couples will take up Judaism as a faith but, those who are ethnically identified/identifiable by descent, by cultural style, inflection, humor, introspection and a wide range of neuroses will go the way of so many other endangered species.

And now there is Israel, the most distressing component of the equation. The whole “land without a people for a people without a land,” is so obscene. The forced displacement and collective punishment of the Palestinian people by imperialist expansion, the bulldozing of homes, the checkpoints, the walls…I could go on and on but in this forum I know I don’t have to. I know you know.

It seems so unfair that a people so brutalized by history would now have to be victimized even further by those fighting oppression. But the atrocities of Israel are real. How childish it seems to state that I wish the whole thing never happened, and by that I mean the WHOLE thing starting with the persecution of Jews in all countries of the world.

But given that horrendous genocide transpired, they should have, at least, given us Bavaria!

Did you know that many of the laws used against the Palestinians involved in revolt against the occupiers bear an astounding resemblance to the Nuremberg Laws? To me, that says it all. The child whose parents beat him grows up to beat his own child. There is no excuse for it, but it happens all the time. And it breaks my heart.

Lesbians, Women and Equality

As the endless struggle for equal pay has illustrated, women we have a long journey ahead of us before we can see any semblance of equality. After much struggle, women are now citizens of the USA who can vote and try for almost any job as long as it is not too high profile like being president or hosting a late night talk show. But we are still limited by sexism which defines us by gender, appearance, social agility and acceptability to those males in power.  

Just yesterday I was searching the database NewPages for anthology and literary journal submission venues.The first “feminist” one I found had just run a special issue that contained the voices of male writers expounding on the subject of women. The second one was soliciting for an upcoming issue on women’s relationships to “the men in our lives.” Seriously?

Let me make this clear: women are not to blame for sexism. Having said that, it is also imperative that we stop being collaborators! As Judy Grahn said in her poem, A Woman is Talking to Death, “We do each other in, that’s a fact!” Lesbians can be guilty of this just like our bib-dyke sisters, but since we have so much less power in society it hardly matters.

And there is the crux of the problem. When it comes to the big picture, our existence, our struggles are most often not even footnotes. The female equivalent of the male gay civil rights spokesperson doesn’t really exist. Harvey Milk, Tennessee Williams, Bayard Rustin, James Baldwin, Tony Kushner, all these are names that come to mind historically when thinking about notable LGBTs. I know that Audre Lorde, Gertrude Stein and Adrienne Rich are notable lesbians, but as far as name recognition they are undoubtedly second tier.

The “problem” of the unapologetic lesbian is being dealt with inside the LGBT community where the word “queer” is now touted as a substitute for “lesbian” because it is more “inclusive.” I’m all for inclusion, but I also have to post the question, what exactly is being lost?

As that old movie “Tootsie” posited and the transgender MTF movement seems to express: men believe that they are better at absolutely everything and that includes being women! The truth is that yes, a less oppressed person has more distance from an issue and that makes both your self-image and everything you undertake, less fraught and therefore a bit easier.  

And, for many of us bio-broads, “being a woman” is not a set of feelings or behaviors. It is just a genetic fact, an anatomical category!

I respect transgender women. But they are raised with the privilege of growing up and being treated as males. Due to class issues, I am used to working alongside people of greater privilege. I don’t hate them. I just think that we all must acknowledge these differences and, as class warriors, fight the tendency to relinquish our power to those with greater access to theirs.

Women have come a great distance since acquiring the vote in 1920. Lesbians have made huge strides since Stonewall. But genuine equality is still a distant dream and ignoring this fact will not make it go away.

Consciousness, Drugs and Dying

Whether any trace of our human essence survives during and after dying process is, for science, uncharted territory. In some documented instances, the essence of consciousness continues on without the biological support of a living body. Severe physical damage throws the body into shock, so it seems logical that the same thing could happen to the conscious mind, triggering a physical reaction that causes it to take refuge elsewhere.

My partner, Deborah had an out-of body experience as a student in college. In her case, she woke up in her own bed, in the middle of the night with a stranger on top of her trying to strangle her. What happens next she describes as a scream so powerful it emanated from her mouth as a filament of light that went straight up to the ceiling of the room. That light contained the essence of her consciousness. From the ceiling of her bedroom, she watched the attack on her physical being with a sense of peace and detachment that would not have been possible had she remained present in her besieged body.

Deborah was not murdered and returned to her body at a point when she was able to communicate with and escape her attacker. In true instances of near-death experience, when the body is badly wounded or killed, some essence is perceived to proceed onward to a dimension most describe as one of boundless peace and connectedness.

Now I tend to believe that religion is not only the opiate of the people but the scourge of humankind. Still, I try keep an open mind especially when it comes to science, biology and physics. I don’t pretend to comprehend of the universe, but since all these people worldwide have had oddly similar experiences, that there might be something to this that science does not yet understand.

In the surgical profession, there have been numerous reports of people who have flat-lined on the operating table yet were able to recall conversations, music and exactly what transpired during the period when they were technically dead.

I have to admit a large part of the reason I remain open to the existence of other dimensions is the fact that I did a lot of hallucinogenic drugs as a young person. While tripping on various psychedelics, I witnessed the universe broken down to a molecular level where mathematical pattern and incredible geometric design prevailed.

In that vein, I just read an article, Five Amazing Things ScientistsHave Discovered About Psychedelics , posted a few days ago on Alternet. This piece notes that besides helping the dying let go of their fear of death, psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin actually suppress certain parts of our brains. It is this more limited capacity that opens up our brains to new information, not the other way around. It’s as though the filter breaks causing incredible hallucinogenic sensations to rush in.

Possibly, this is the state that autistic people and, assuredly cats, inhabit their entire lives.  The filter ruptures, the world rushes in. The mind continues without the body. The universe breaks down into connection and light.

It all sounds remarkably similar to brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s electrifying Ted Talk, “My Stroke of Insight,” in which she recreates her amazing sensory journey, conveying the intensity, beauty and transcendent serenity she experienced when a stroke shut down her brain functions one by one.

No one really knows happens when we die. A dying brain could produce many experiences, but can a dead one? These questions remain unanswered. By the time we are sure, it seems we are no longer able to pass on this information. We know only that the trajectory leading out of this life is one that each of us must follow. Rest assured, if I get there before you, and I can, I will send you a sign!

In Defense of Negativity

Sisyphus Couldn't Do It Either!

I’ve seen a lot of online posts and lately defaming a segment of the population blithely referred to as “negative people” Naturally, I’ve come to wonder what these folks have done to incur this disproportionate load of cultural wrath?

Doesn’t each individual have a right to a wide array of personal traits and characteristics?  What some people call negative, others simply consider realistic. Researchers have recently discovered that a healthy dose of cynicism in a turbulent, often intensely distressing world, just may be the most prudent, self-nurturing stance a person can take when it comes to enduring and fielding those “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Dark-sided people have lower expectations of the world and, for that reason, are less often disappointed with their fate. Sunny-bunny types face continual disillusionment aside from being a real pain in the butt. At times, I may enjoy a chocolate-covered éclair with gooey custard inside, but if I ate one for every meal, it would make me quite ill. However, due to the preponderance of happy posts, I have to assume that many people genuinely delight in continual sweetness, that perpetually bright-sided mind in all its soul-shattering glory.

Maybe I’m just paranoid about this because I’m Jewish. Jews have a long, hard-earned tradition of big portions of negativity with a heaping side of humor a la self-deprecation. It’s a survival tool as ancient and well-documented as the history of stand-up comedy.

All underdogs experience negative emotions. They are a natural response to institutionalized, omnipresent oppression. The word “negative” conjures up the word “edgy” which connotes walking a line close to the edge of acceptability, pushing the envelope of propriety. This is the domain of outliers, outsiders, a group of people who contribute the lion’s share of creative work to any given culture: people who doubt, who question, who refuse to sit back and smile. 

And meditate on this music fans: how would a room without a roof truly feel? Inadequate? Like a failure?

Now wipe that insipid grin off your face and tell me, once and for all, what’s so bad about a little correctly perceived and appropriately directed realism, er, negativity?

The Lesbian Movement Comes of Age

Those of us now referred to as boomers share a common history. We cut our teeth in a tumultuous era of love and war, protest and upheaval. The freedom riders fighting and dying to fight racial segregation and restore voting rights paved the way. The outcry against the draft and the Vietnam War galvanized massive numbers of young people.

Then the Women’s Liberation Movement descended with a vengeance and split organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) wide open. When women stopped taking notes and fetching coffee the patriarchal left began to crumble.
 

It was a time of relative prosperity. Drugs were widely available. The birth control pill had hit the market. Taboos were being exploded. Free love and sexual experimentation was everywhere. The rules of the old order were no longer applicable.

In 1970, at Ohio State University, I joined a consciousness-raising (CR) group. There was one lesbian among us when the group began. Two years later, when it ended, there was only one woman left who still considered herself straight.

It was as if a wall of shame and fear had fallen. All our wildest fantasies, sexual and otherwise, were suddenly okay. I made new friends in a group that called itself, Radicalesbians. These women were fearless. With proud names like Debbie Dyke and Lisa Lesbian and none of them looked scary or predatory like the old British “bulldaggers” in the movie, “The Killing of Sister George,”or suicidal like Martha in “The Children’s Hour.” Young and hip and angry about oppression, they looked a lot like me. Groups like the Lavender Menace and the Lesbian Avengers and became the persistent thorn in the side of the mainstream women’s movement, the specter of what heterosexual women feared most.

Today, we lesbians seem to be making grand leaps in LGBT civil rights. When folks claim it is all happening so fast, I want to smack them. Fast? The Stonewall riots were in 1969 so 45 years is not exactly the blink of an eye. But it’s relatively rapid when you consider the duration of slavery or how long it took women to get the vote.

Political change always feel geologic in its pace because we are sacrificing our very lives when we are denied full human status. Living to see some of the new dwellings rise over the foundations we laid is gratifying but no excuse to lay back and rest before the job is completed.

Former Classmates and Mortality

I carry so much baggage around with me that, if you could see it, I would look like a bag-lady with the biggest shopping cart ever. A sizable percentage of that baggage comes from the experiences of youth, those formative years when everything seemed daunting and overwhelming. Family is a large component of this weight but high school and junior high loom large in my legend.

That’s why I was caught off guard when I looked at a web page of my high school classmates from the class of ’69 and saw the large number of folks who have already died (about 50 out of around 650). While this percentage isn’t huge, it still seems like a lot for folks in their early sixties. I know it will grow larger with each passing year. That really hit home with concrete evidence of my own mortality.

I remember hearing about Kim’s death in the late seventies. She was found hanging in a jail cell tripping her brains out on acid. She had hung herself with her belt. Neil was killed in a car accident. But these recent deaths were from more natural causes. I googled them for their obits and found out a little about their lives as well as their deaths. Studious David had run a bookstore in Seattle before his number came up and sexy Sarah had worked for a lumber company for 40 years then finally retired and died the same year.
 

These facts are neither earth-shattering nor startling. In fact, of the other living classmates I found online some moved away and some stayed in Ohio, had gotten married, divorced, had kids or didn’t, were prominent or impossible to find. Some others, like me, had even come out as queer. 

The ways they died weren’t particularly noteworthy either. They include the ways all of us will probably go. Marcia died from breast cancer, Donna succumbed to complications of lupus and with Carol it was Crohn’s disease.

Then I realized the truth: the kids who made my life a living hell as well as those who made it worth living were simply people, totally blown out of rational proportion because of the pressures and lack of perspective that are part and parcel of youth.

None of these folks caused me to feel inferior or less than the person I truly was. Even my misguided, neglectful parents didn’t do that intentionally. I still can’t figure out exactly what it is about being young that can make some people mean and heartless. When I read about the bullying that still happens at that age, I don’t find more clarity.

But I can find greater compassion. We all do the best we can with the tools that are available to us at the time. Can I humanize and forgive those who were imperfect actors in this short, one-act play called life? At this point, I think so.