Saturday, July 27, 2013

LOVE

Love one another, but make not a bond of Love. Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each of you be alone, As the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Stand together yet not too near together. For the pillars of the temple stand apart, And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

The words of Khalil Gibran, the 20th century artist, writer and poet, frames love in poetic verse, and it dances through the soul. Love is the energy of life and the impetus for being. We are filled with it yet we always seek it. We run from it, but it always finds us. We hide it, but it always frees itself. Love is the bark on a tree; the rose next to a thorn, and the calf that drinks its mother's milk. Love is all there is when there is no fear.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

More Of A Genius

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. All things swim and glitter. Our life is not so much threatened as our perception. Ghost-like we glide through nature, that she was so sparing of her fire and so liberal of her earth, that it appears to us that we lack the affirmative principle, and though we have health and reason, yet we have no super-fluity of spirit for new creation? We have enough to live and bring the year about, but not an ounce to impart or to invest. All that our Genius were a little more of a Genius.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1838 essay, Experience churns the mighty mixture of unconscious thoughts within us and we discover a taste for the unknown, the undiscovered and the untamed portion of the self. Our life is never threatened, but our perception of it dangles on the precipice of our distorted beliefs. Life is a series of endless experiences that cross the boundaries of our objective knowing and bury themselves in the shroud of death.

We invest and impart tangible things in physical life and those things melt away in the creativity of death. We wallow in that creativity and blossom within the super-fluity of our eternal life. We are the genius than creates more of a genius. We are the genius that frolics and lingers through all lifetimes.

Saturday, July 6, 2013

The Universal Beauty Of Socially Correct Politics

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those thoughts in his 1844 essay, The Over-soul. Emerson, the Unitarian minister and leader of the Transcendentalist movement of the 19th century, is a well-known figure in American History. Emerson had and expressed bisexual tendencies while he attended Harvard, but he didn’t act on them. Emerson was not the only famous man or woman to express, but keep secret, a same-sex love. George Washington and Alexander Hamilton; Abraham Lincoln and Joshua Speed; Susan B. Anthony, Florence Nightingale, Amelia Earhart, Eleanor Roosevelt and Emily Dickinson have been credited with some sort homosexual or lesbian activity during their lifetimes. But their sexual preferences were wrapped in silence because of the laws and beliefs of the times.

The list of famous gay American’s would fill a chapter in our book of history. Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rudolph Valentino, Charles Laughton, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Janis Joplin and Joan Jett are just a few names in that chapter. Each one has contributed a particle or a part to the foundation of America History. We praise their accomplishments, and our lives have been enriched by their creativity. Most of them would have enjoyed the freedom of self-expression and same-gender marriage, but none of them received that freedom.

The history of Egypt, Greece, Italy, France and Britain is filled with contribution from gay citizens. All of them contributed to the political whole in some way, and the whole thrived because of them. King Richard the lion-hearted, Philip II, Beethoven and Shakespeare are on their country’s gay list. Donatello, Michelangelo and Leonardo Di Vinci also made their nation’s list. The opportunity to partake in an open marriage was accepted in some of those countries. Individual contributions to the political and social whole were enhanced because of that acceptance.

The recent ruling by the Supreme Court changes the nature of freedom for gay couples in America. These individuals may be able to live as a whole within the diversity that exists in our political machine without castration. They may be able to express the deep power that exists within this new freedom, and bring a touch of unity to the divisions, parts and particles that condemn the freedom to choose a specific partner.

When we look back, we see our history covered in sexual secrecy and matrimonial entrapment. The Supreme Court ruling brings that secrecy and entrapment to the forefront of our thoughts. Our social and political beliefs are changing. We are beginning to appreciate and accept personal unity within political diversity. We are writing a new history. A history filled with the universal beauty of socially correct politics.