Waking up, slowly, groggily. White hazy skies, plush cotton with jagged, industrial parts cutting off the space and marking the incursion of cityscape. Roofs, windows, edges, guardrails. Blue colors the billowing brightness. Fire escape stairs sleek and angled.
Who am I as I awaken to this cityscape? Who am I becoming as I make the decisions of this morning? What’s amiss and what’s aright in my energy, my posture? Slack-jawed, drooling, sleepy face. Pouring brown coffee into my mouth to enliven me. Vague awareness of the appointments of the day. Calm touch of my foot to Martin’s as we sit across from each other on the sofa, each coming to, each in his world, a screen we each hold now holding our attention and focus.
My long held habit of starting the day with both spiritual practice and news consumption hasn’t felt fit for purpose for some time, yet I don’t stop myself from reading about the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, the K-shaped economy boosting the wealthiest and pounding the poor and middle class, the Justice Department flouting Congress’s requirement to release the Epstein files.
What place does flourishing have in such a world?! Will I listlessly list through life today? Drifting on the driftwood of hours, floating through the course of the day and night. Wondering what direction, what trajectory to intend. How to propel myself, how to steer? I feel silly and naïve for imagining that I can make a difference in the world.
Culture-shifter, change-maker? That has been my high dream. Now the aspiration has less ambition and concreteness. Can I just be a point of light in the midst of the great darkness that seems to be winning the cosmic battle these days?
Parts of me seem lost, despondent, while other parts of me hold and observe this as a mere phenomenon. Fascinated, compassionate, curious, the larger version of me holds the lost one, and makes various small experiments to see what elicits energy, aliveness. I hope this disoriented despondence will pass, like a weather system moving across the land, yet a more prudent and practical knower within me sees that I must take action to blow this weather away.
When demons rise from our shadows
With such dramatic changes accelerating around us, uncertainty imbues life today. We feel rightfully unsure about the flow of money, the rule of law, the resilience of the ecosystem. The rise of AI and its integration into our work raise questions not only about keeping our job, but about the value of hard-won experience and expertise, and even the evolving nature of human life. As the complexity of life reaches a point verging on chaos, flourishing feels more out of reach than ever. What to do? How to be?
Fear can take over and trigger habitual defensive patterns, for some withdrawal, others escape, and others cynicism. We’re tempted to see the world through a simplistic story of the powerful bad guys gaining ground while the masses of regular people are left in the lurch. We might cope by narrowing our focus to just this task in front of me, or just my own self-interest, or just making it through the week.
For LGBTQ+ adults, there can be additional sources of anxiety. The darkness of these times infiltrates thoughts and feelings, dredging up memories of past hurts and attacks, losses and griefs. What if they invalidate my marriage? What if they start policing my gender expression? What if they take away my right to have children? For trans folks in the US, such questions are not merely hypothetical. The urgent need to find safety supercedes all else.
My own shadowy demons have been arising in cahoots with the looming shadows that appear dominant these days. To some degree, my demons also reflect experiences widespread among queer and gay people.
- At times, I feel insignificant, like what I do, what I am, doesn’t matter. While there might well be meaningful things in the world, I myself am meaningless.
- At times, I feel powerless, as if I can’t make any difference anywhere. Trapped in a box I can never escape.
- At times, I feel pessimistic, as if the world is inevitably declining from what was better to an ever worse future. No hope, no possibilities. “Dreams? Ha!” Nothing more than chimeric fantasies, delusions running counter to reality.
Reflecting on what I have built in Flourishing Gays these last seven years and what’s happening in the world today, my gay heart aches and wails. Travesties mount and hard-won progress towards greater human dignity seems to be reversing course. Grieving these sufferings and losses might honor crestfallen hopes, but restores no inner resources. Can I focus elsewhere?
Where else to look?
Practicing deeper presence, celebrating more profound joy, and cultivating wisdom in the midst of all else offer three deeply human ways forward towards flourishing, even today.
PRESENCE
By cultivating presence, I mean slowing down, stepping back, disconnecting from distractions, and turning attention not just to the mind but to the body, where our unconscious lives. Lately I’ve found access to profound presence while pulling up weeds and putting down mulch in the garden. Jogging, without music or podcast in my ears, putting gentle attention to my breathing, my feet on the ground, and the passing cityscape brings me to heightened presence. Sitting out in the night, listening to the crickets and critters whirr and buzz and rustle, as the breeze cools the grass and calms the sweating trees, I be with, I let be, I relish.
JOY
By cultivating joy, I mean a practice of intentionally looking for and attending to occasions of delight and celebration in the midst of any day, whether normal or extraordinary. Heeding Marsha P. Johnson’s adage of making joy our resistance, I notice that flitting robin or songbird whose name I don’t know twittering and shuddering as its life path crosses my own. I lean into a deep stretch touching my toes and let my hamstrings release. I savor an avocado toast with just the right balance of lemon and salt. I snuggle and hold Martin as we fall asleep and reflect on just how wonderful it is to share life with him.
WISDOM
Unlike presence and joy, wisdom cannot be practiced, but only invited to enter into us and among us. Queer wisdom comes when and if queer folks give themselves what’s needed to heal from the specific flavors of suffering, loss, and grief affecting our bodies, our psyches, and our souls. Queer wisdom is not a practice I can describe or promote. Allow me instead to evoke its aroma through story:
Reflecting on the last year, I see in my own life an experience of inviting queer wisdom through settling into the house in the Hudson Valley that Martin and I took as ours last summer. We’ve been unpacking both literal and psychic baggage there for months.
What is it for two men in midlife who love each other deeply to make a home together? This is not a situation my upbringing prepared me for! Scenes of Betty Crocker – her big red cookbook, casseroles, and modern conveniences of dishwashers and food processors – flash through my mind. I seek a place for myself in these scenes. Could I be dolled up in a poodle dress with a bob and a beard, with Colgate white twinkling teeth presenting an apple pie fresh out the oven? What a queer homemaker I am!
Sorting through boxes kept in storage since my parents both died over a dozen years ago, unreasonably early in their sixties, I read love letters from my mother’s teenage pen to Dad and earnest young adult letters between them as they worked on the challenges of their young married life. I gaze at the tortured drawings he made much later, when mental illness overtook him completely and he was left stranded in his own lonely world of pain. The dreams they had for themselves and sharing life together fell apart far more quickly than they would ever have hoped.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in the baby carriage…That’s how the song went that we sang as kids. That’s how my mom and dad’s life went, before their marriage fell apart and my dad’s sanity disintegrated into a demented alternative reality.
Martin and I are making up our own way of creating a life together. Chosen family for each other, we bring our creativity and experimentation to every step along the way.
What’s our nursery rhyme? Maybe: First comes Grindr, then comes shacking up, then comes (maybe) the surrogate with a baby from our sperm?
We are still singing our song and riffing as we do. Looking back at my parents’ travails in a new way from the vantage of an easy chair in my queer home, another round of healing and integration and peace has arrived. And yes, I sense that some wisdom has also been arriving in its own time, a transcendent breath bringing relief and clarity like a refreshing breeze on a stuffy summer night.
I’m learning that queer wisdom follows no convention. Its uncanny knowings bind love with embodied truths to uncover new ways of human being
Doubling down on human capacities that can’t be automated
Presence, joy, and wisdom are not spiritual luxuries or decadent decorations for a perfect life. Nor are they cushy pursuits to balance the real work at the office. When teams are scattered and leaders are depleted, the cultivation of presence, joy, and wisdom isn’t soft — it’s the competitive advantage nearly nobody thinks to seek. To enable us to lead organizations, to deepen our loving relationships, and to live lives of meaning and fulfillment, we need these all too scarce, yet vitally valuable resources of presence, joy, and wisdom.
What’s more – though this is worth a longer treatment – queer people by necessity have had advanced training in cultivating presence, joy, and wisdom, whose significance for human being and human flourishing only grows as AI takes on more of the cognitive load of production.
In this month when we commemorate the Stonewall Uprising – the start of the Pride movement to claim queer presence and to insist on queer joy – I am thus writing to evoke the Spirit of queer wisdom, that she might circulate among us.
I’ve been away from the writer’s desk more than usual this past year, but the quest of Flourishing Gays continues – as does your journey. Whether ally or LGBTQ+, you’ve been mustering your resources to handle all the past year has put on you. After seven years of working with LGBTQ individuals and organizations, I’m approaching this work today with a sharpened focus — and if you or someone you know is ready to explore what presence, joy, and wisdom can look like in practice, I’d love to talk. Even better, consider your own moments of queer presence, joy, or wisdom and let me know: What’s your avocado toast or mulching or flitting robin? When have you felt the breath of queer wisdom swirl around or within you?