Tell me your story,
so different from mine.
In the morning mist,
In the rising sun.
When you stand so still,
I have only words
to tell my stories,
and you do not have my words,
on your own words,
your own language,
which I can never know.
God, grant me the humility
to accept what I do not know,
and cannot hear,
but can only feel,
if I shed my arrogance
and learn to listen
So I can hear your story.
What does it mean to be secure? In America, the idea has come to mean health insurance, a fat IRA, a half-million dollars tucked away for retirement, money to pay for a nursing home or assisted care. To not burden your children. To pay outrageous medical bills to stay alive by all means at any cost, sometimes beyond what is rational or meaningful (to me.) We are not encouraged to think about how we want to age and die, only to pay a lot of money to do it.
“What are you afraid of?,” I asked an anxious friend this week. “Dying,” she said.
“What are you afraid of?,” she asked me. “Living a small life,” I answered. Security is not about what is outside of me, I said, but what is inside of me.
I have always been mesmerized by the idea of the coming out. In our culture, this is most often applied to gay men and women, for whom coming out is a seminal rite of passage, a literal coming out into the world in the eyes of your friends, family, lovers and community. Sadly, in the birthplace of freedom, the cradle of liberty, the place where all men are created equal, this has become a controversial idea. If you love history (or love animals, for that matter), you know there is never any shortage of people in the world telling you how to live your life, usually in the name of morality and self-righteousness.
Coming has always been a beautiful idea for me, perhaps because I see it as an idea that transcends homosexuality. It is personal for me. I have come out. So has Maria. I came out when I went on this blog and said I was falling apart, terrified, depressed. I acknowledge that I had work to do, and I shared the process of trying to do it. Maria came out when she began her own blog, and talked about her struggles to be an artist, when she overcame her fear and shared her life and put herself and her work out into the world. There are always small people living small lives waiting for those who come out, too, if you are authentic, they will find you. Good friends and supporters, too. That’s the tax, the toll.
This week, I was privileged to experience another very stirring and powerful coming out, that of my friend Pam White, long terrified to open her life up into the world, but also very determined, as I am, to share her stories, her art, her work and to be relevant in our time. She asked me recently why I thought I needed to put up a blog and and share my work and my life. For the same reason, she did, I said. So I could come out, be authentic, be honest with myself and others about my life and its many shortcomings. Because I wanted to be relevant, not just secure.
And what is security, I have often thought? Is it really the American idea, because if it is I am doomed. A few years ago, I decided to change my life, to find love, to come out. In that process, my IRA’s disappeared, and I have no pension, no company giving me health insurance. I will have to earn my keep for as long as I am walking around, like so many others. I accept that, willingly, happily. I accept death as an integral part of life, and they are one and the same thing to me. I can promise you I will not be spending 10 or 20 years in a nursing home, so I don’t need all of that money, the banks and insurance company’s notions of security. Security to me is what Pam did on her blog this morning. To be authentic. She came out, yet again, with a roar and a flash of beautiful art and integrity. I saw Pam yesterday and I suggested a theme for her new blog, a kind of coming out. This morning, it was done. We are so alike. I appreciate her integrity. And bravery. In our society, this is the path of the individual, not the mob. For coming out, like renewal, is not something you do once, but life requires one to do it again and again. God for you, Pam, good for you.
