THE PATH OF WATER

THE PATH OF WATER

Arafingol © 2013

 

So here we are living in a place and time where it is no longer cool to be homophobic. In fact, it’s actually sort of cool to be gay now as is evidenced by many people who just pretend to be attracted to those of the same gender. In my opinion this situation is far better than the age I grew up in where it was cool to pick on gay kids. We didn’t use the word “gay” back then. We said “kwee-yah”, (the 1950s New Hampshire pronunciation of the word “queer”). It was the worst thing one boy could say to another boy. It was a fighting word and once spoken as part of a dispute in anger, and it was almost always spoken in anger, a fist fight was sure to ensue. I used this word in anger more times than I can now recall, and the strangest thing was, I had no idea what it meant. This was during the period of approximately 1960 to 1966 during which I grew from seven years old to thirteen. Then I found out what it meant and PRESTO, there I was, a ready made homophobic male. Up until that time I had never really thought about people of the same gender being intimate with one another. Slow development by today’s standards, I realize, but this was a different time and life happened at a different pace. 

You might ask whether of not my newfound knowledge of the word I had been using in anger caused me to stop saying it, and I would have to sadly reply that it did not. I joined in with the gang as I had so often done before and called out “kwee-yah” to the lone kids who looked different, dressed differently, or were shy. Chances are they weren’t even gay at all, but that’s not the point. I used the word in anger and now I knew what it meant, which made my condition all the worse. It was nearly six years later when I developed a crush on a lesbian that I began to think in earnest what my mind had been doing. At nineteen I got it all wrong, of course, and feared that if I was attracted to a lesbian that in some sort of weird round about way I might be gay myself. I tried to reason that I had never had a sexual dream or fantasy about being with someone of my own gender, I tried to pretend that the woman I was attracted to just needed me to give her what she really wanted, and I tried to cover up the whole confused mess with enough wine to float a battleship. It was not for another three years that I would have my first “wake up call” as I thought of it to myself.

I was living in a group house, a large duplex with twelve bedrooms, and populated by a various assortment of students, teachers, and working people. At that point I belonged to the latter category and was framing houses in a suburb of Vancouver. It was a freezing cold November day that had tortured me with half rain half snow blowing sideways, numbing me to the bone so that when I started to drive home after work my joints hurt as they began to warm. The house was not very well built or appointed, but it had one saving grace, a good sauna. I stumbled through the front door, threw off my soaked rain gear and boots, and headed upstairs to turn on the sauna. It would take about half an hour to get really hot. I took a shower and went back downstairs to get a couple of beers and then headed back upstairs towards the waiting heat. My bones still ached and my fingers and toes tingled unpleasantly. My face felt raw and sore from the wind. One of  the other residents, whom I shall call Jake, a great chap who always paid his rent on time and was constantly lending a hand with any chores that needed doing, asked if I had turned on the sauna. I appreciated his responsible life style as I was the house manager and replied in the affirmative, inviting him to join me as I knew that he, too, had been working outside in the winter elements.

So there we were, sitting in the sauna, drinking beer and shooting the breeze. Two naked men just talking. He worked for a company that supplied equipment to diamond drilling outfits, (mineral core sampling), and I happened to be newly interested in changing jobs in that direction because the pay was tremendous. The conversation eventually landed on gasoline fueled portable water pumps. Diamond drilling requires a large amount of water delivered at pressure to the drill bit far below ground. Until recently these pumps had all been pull start. There you’d be, out in the middle of nowhere, thirty below in a howling wind, and you warmed yourself up by pulling that damn cord till your arm fell off. The swearing helped, too. Jake told me that finally there were pumps of that size which were battery start. A little six volt motorcycle battery and a small starter motor and no more pulling that stupid cord. I filed this information away and followed the conversation to humorous tales about some of the same people we knew.

Three days later another friend of mine, whom I shall call Sam, was talking to me about the water pump at a Buddhist retreat facility we were both familiar with. Someone had forgotten to drain it after pumping water and it had frozen, cracking the pump and ruining it. This had happened before and we were both shaking our heads at such stupidity. Sam said that a new pump was on the way and I asked if it would be one of the new battery start models. He replied that no pumps of that size had battery start. I countered that there were such pumps. This went back and forth for a bit and then I said that I had been in the sauna the other day with Jake and he had told me about it. I started to ramble on about the motorcycle battery and the starter motor, ……. and then I looked at Sam’s face. He was so scared that my first thought was that a bear was coming down the driveway behind me. I spun around in shock, …. but there was no bear. Turning back to Sam I asked what was the matter. His face was still horror stricken. He asked very hesitantly if I had really been in the sauna with Jake and I said yes, I had, and started to ramble on about the pumps again. Then he blurted out the words I shall never forget. “JAKE IS GAY !!!” In a fraction of a second I had three distinct thoughts. One, “Holy shit! I was in the sauna with a gay man!” Two, “So frigging what! Jake is the most normal person I know.” Three, “Damn! I wish I hadn’t had that first thought!” Sam has probably been suspicious of my sexuality ever since but I stopped caring about such stuff long ago. What I do care about now, and cared frantically about then, was how to not be prejudiced against someone because they were gay.

I wrestled with this new found realization that I was “homophobic”, a word only recently coming into public use. Try as I might, I could not seem to shake my unreasonable and uncontrollable fear of male homosexuality, and that’s what any phobia is, an unreasonable and uncontrollable fear. I mediated on this and prayed on this. I wracked my feelings with guilt. I entered into conversations about hitherto foreign issues of alternative sexuality, and read till my eyes stung. Another three years went by and I had still not been able to shake my fear, though I no longer felt the same sickening aversion towards male homosexuals. I was now living on a little island in my own cabin with this funny old cat and a huge half broken television. One fine summer day I came home from work, switched on the TV just for some background noise, and began to get the cat’s supper. I wasn’t really paying attention to the program being aired, but as I spooned cat-food into the bowl I heard enough. It was apparently a program about North American native culture before the Europeans arrived. The narrator said something like, “Before the arrival of the white man about ninety percent of native culture believed that there were not two genders of humans, but four. There were masculine males, feminine females, feminine males, and masculine females. These additional two genders were not feared or ridiculed, but revered, as they were thought to be closer to the spirit world and often took up the positions as artists, healers, and mystics.” That was like a thunderclap of realization to me and I dropped the bowl of cat-food onto my poor cat’s head, sending her yowling outside in alarm. I fumbled to clean up the mess and went looking for my pet, soothing her and immediately opening a new can of food which I spooned into another bowl. The program on the old TV had moved on to other topics and the picture had begun to waver, as it often did, but those words rang in my mind like a blessed epiphany. I got it. I finally got it, that illusive phantom I had been fighting to see, and then I thought to myself, no, there are not four genders of humans, there are as many genders as there are people on the planet at any given time and we are all changing constantly. Nothing is static. Everything is fluid and morphing and swimming and vibrating along through time. Emotional string theory.

My chains of homophobia had fallen away, no longer having anything to cling to. I felt free and happy and wanted to sing and fly and laugh. And I no longer cared one whit about sexuality, mine or anybody else’s. I am a believer in reincarnation, (rebirth would be a better term), and I have in recent years augmented my few natural glimpses of lives past with more detailed memories of people I was by working with a past life regression guide. “Same wave, different water”, is the analogy I like the best. I am not who I was before. I was other people then, but I can sometimes remember being them, and there are similarities between those people and myself now. And yes, in some of those lives I was a woman and in one of those lives I was attracted to people of the same gender. I actually think now that there is no such thing as a human being who is one hundred percent male or one hundred percent female, and thus, there is no such thing as a human being who is one hundred percent straight or one hundred percent gay. We are all, to some degree, dual gender and bi-sexual. Most folks are more towards one end or the other of the gender spectrum, with the minority occupying the middle ground. Same for the spectrum of sexuality, but no one is all the way to the far end of either spectrum and no one stays in exactly the same place. There is physical evidence to support this. Just look at yourself in the mirror and just remember yourself in the past or think of someone you know who is much older than you. Think of who you have been attracted to and how they have changed. Reflect on what turns you on now, what used to turn you on but no longer does, and what you think you might like to experiment with in the future. We can try as hard as we like, but we change and change and change some more. This is our nature and that of the world around us which we are part of.

So back to homophobia and it’s growing uncoolness. The President of the United States in his recent inaugural address spoke very clearly in support of equality among all people including “our gay brothers and sisters”. Everyone who has a phobia of any kind deals with it in their own way and hopefully realizes success sooner rather than later. Equality is, after all, a work in progress, as it is no more static than the people who yearn for it, either for themselves or for others, and being stuck is very uncomfortable, isn’t it? We’ve all experienced being stuck in our views in one way or another and felt better when we came unstuck. Homophobia may be on the way out, but a new sexuality based phobia is on the rise. Homophobia-phobia, or the unreasonable and uncontrollable fear of homophobic people. It is often said that homophobic people are nothing more than self loathing closet homosexuals. Sorry, I do not agree. Homophobia, like any other phobia, is learned. It may be learned subconsciously as it was in my case from my pals, or it may actually be taught by parents or a church. It is said that people are born gay or straight and don’t become that way. Well, maybe some of the time but I think this is too general a statement to be accurate. It is said that we are attracted to partners which remind us of our parents. OK, in some cases, but as a blanket description of who we seek to be with in life? Childishly simple. We are creatures in motion and we are never the same way for even two distinct seconds. Recognizing how we change can make it easier to see how we try not to change and fail. Homophobic people are people, too, and as such need to be treated with respect, patience, compassion and all the other positive things we feel gays deserve, and those who practice different spiritual methods, and those of different skin color, etc. If we group all people together who are experiencing homophobia and look down on them we are doing exactly the same thing as they do when they look down on those who are attracted to the same gender. And really, there won’t be true equality in this world until the words “gay” and “homophobic” are no longer used. Sure, we need to use certain terms to get through the process that leads to equality, but equality itself, pure equality, will have no need of such terms. 

Water will naturally seek to level itself off and become placid without one wave or ripple. We are like water, and like it or not, we cannot help but seek the same thing. It’s just our nature.