While she’s at it….

Now that she’s been reminded of Sufi poet Hafiz, Walhydra figures she might as well share her favorite Hafiz poem, given here in Daniel Ladinsky's luminous version:

In a Tree House

Light
Will someday split you open,
Even if your life is now a cage,

For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient, fertile plain
You hold the title to.

Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy.

Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.

A life-giving radiance will come,
The Friend’s gratuity will come—

O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels in creation.

From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.

Behold the Beautiful Drunk Singing One
From the lunar vantage point of love.

He is conducting the affairs
Of the whole universe

While throwing wild parties
In a tree house—on a limb
In your heart.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be!

The cup's smile

Walhydra has been a devotee of the 14th century Sufi poet Hafiz i-Shirazi ever since a decade ago when she first stumbled onto Daniel Ladinsky's marvelous English versions in The Subject Tonight is Love: 60 Wild and Sweet Poems of Hafiz.

She can open to almost any of Hafiz's poems, and it's like getting a startlingly auspicious and uplifting card reading, an unlooked-for kiss from the Divine One, who is always described as the Friend or the Lover, always teasing the listener for feeling less worthy than the One knows her to be.

And always celebrating the blessedness of human incarnation—against all moralistic protests to the contrary.

Earlier on this Wednesday evening's shift at the library, struggling with burnout and depression, Walhydra was Googling at random for sites about "gay beauty" and hit upon just such a poem:

Ghazl No. 10 from the Divan of Hafiz

His mop of hair tangled, sweating, laughing and drunk,
Shirt torn, singing poems, flask in hand,
His eyes spoiling for a fight, his lips mouthing "Alas!"
Last night at midnight he came and sat by my pillow.
He bent his head to my ear and said, sadly,
"O, my ancient lover, are you sleeping?"

The seeker to whom they give such a cup at dawn
Is an infidel to love if he will not worship the wine.
O hermit, go and do not quibble with those who drink the dregs,
For on the eve of creation this was all they gave to us.
What he poured in our cup we drank,
Whether the mead of Heaven, or the wine of drunkenness.

The cup's smile and the wine boy's knotted curl
Have broken many vows of chastity, like that of Hafiz.

A variation on the interpretation of E.T. Gray, Jr., in
The Green Sea of Heaven, White Cloud Press, 1995.

What a sweet reminder, in the midst of Walhydra's spiritual stuckness, that there is delight hidden in all of the Divine One's work.

And so it is.

Blessèd Be!

Till death do us, etc.

Walhydra has never understood all the flap about same-sex marriage. Of course, this could be partly due to having been reincarnated as a gay male would-be writer.

“That has nothing to do with it!” she snaps. “As far as I’m concerned, the real problem is that most people have the ridiculous notion marriage is about sex!”

She glares briefly toward the left wing of her audience. “And that includes queer people. It’s ridiculous! Marriage isn’t about sex. It’s about kinship.”

Being a Virgo, Walhydra figures that in a reasonable world that pronouncement would settle the matter. Since she’s dealing with human beings, though, she knows that she’s going to have to explain.

“Look,” she says, feigning patience. “Anybody can have sex without getting married. They can even have on-going affairs, lifelong relationships—families, for Goddess’ sake!—without being married. But….”

Now she glares toward the right wing of her audience. “If they want their chosen kinship to be acknowledged and affirmed publicly, if they want their families to be honored and protected by the government, they HAVE TO GET MARRIED!”

Walhydra actually wants to stomp away at this point. It infuriates her that any society would even need “the arm of the state” in order to protect kinship.

“In a sane world,” she insists, “people would be glad to take a couple’s word for it when they said they intended to put up with all the hassles and grief of taking care of each other for years on end. People would rush to celebrate and support them, do everything possible to help them stay together.”

Walhydra sighs deeply. “Instead…, instead…. It just doesn’t make any sense!” She sits down abruptly and waves at everyone to go away.

Walhydra has had marriage on the mind for several weeks, every since her mother, Senior Witch, found a picture from the wedding of Walhydra’s younger brother back in 1986.

Walhydra immediately recognized the gorgeous bearded guy on the right as hubby Jim. She pretends not to know the guy on the left.

“That’s me,” says the would-be writer.

“No. You’re not that young,” Walhydra smirks.

“Neither are you.”

[Slight timeout while the referee intercedes.]

The wedding picture was taken just a year after Walhydra and Jim did the “for better or worse” bit themselves in a private, mostly unspoken ceremony for two.

That mutual promise, in turn, came shortly after Walhydra’s two plus years of grad school and addictions counselor job search—during which, ever the single-minded, studious Virgo, she had failed to notice Jim’s patient, persistent courtship.

Once settled in her first outpatient treatment job in Charleston, SC, Walhydra sat on the floor of a friend’s house one evening, watching, of all things, Somewhere in Time. At one moment, she leaned back against the legs of Jim, who was on the sofa, and thought, “Oh! This is the man I want to spend my life with. Why didn’t someone tell me?”

This brave, brilliant, gentle man with the warm hands, whose Leo body and soul radiate blessing energy!

[Note: Hubby Jim, a convinced scientist, teases that he doesn’t believe in tantric energy or astrology. “Or reincarnation,” he says. “At least, not in this lifetime.”]

Walhydra and Jim went to her brother’s wedding determined to remain discreetly closeted, so a not to draw attention away from the publicly happy couple. Her brother took them from friend to friend throughout the day, saying, “This is my brother, and this is my brother’s, um….”

He confessed later that he kept wanting to say, “…my brother’s loveranddoyouwanttomakesomethingofit?!” Instead, what happened was that “my Um” became a family in-joke term for same-sex spouse.

Toward the end of their visit, Walhydra and hubby went to say goodbye to both of her grandmas, with whom they had been carefully practicing their discretion.

Senior Witch’s mother hugged each of them and said sweetly to Walhydra, “Now, you come and visit me—and be sure to bring Jim!”

Walhydra glanced sideways at her hubby and raised an eyebrow.

A few years earlier, Walhydra had giggled when she received in the mail from her other grandma the pair of carefully embroidered pillowcases. For years, Grandma had periodically reminded Walhydra, “I make a set for each of the grandchildren, for when they get married.” Smiling at the colorful Pennsylvania Dutch stitch work, Walhydra assumed Grandma had finally figured it out for herself.

Walhydra’s stepmother told her later that, during a visit, Grandma had gone snooping to learn why Walhydra wasn’t married yet. When she somehow found out, her wry comment was, “Well, that’s what I get for snooping.”

That was all she ever said about it. Years later, Walhydra and Jim attended Grandma’s big, Ohio farm family reunion, sleeping in the guest bed of one of Walhydra’s aunts. A few years later, they both attended Grandma’s funeral.

So...nine years into their private marriage—on the Full Oak Moon Saturnalia of 1994, to be overly exact—Walhydra and Jim were publicly married under the care of their large Quaker Meeting.

Eschewing clergy and outward sacraments, Quaker couples traditionally “marry each other,” before God and in the presence of all their fellow Quakers, family and friends. They say to each other the vows they have written for themselves and sign a non-secular marriage certificate. Then, after a silent worship during which anyone can speak blessings or prayers, everyone else present also signs the document.

At Walhydra and Jim’s wedding, their Meeting’s historian spoke to explain the significance of what the gathered body was doing.

“In the mid-1600s,” he said, “only marriages performed by the Church of England were legally recognized. As dissenters from the C of E, Quakers decided that they needed to document and witness publicly the vows of their married couples, in order to protect the kinship rights of those couples. This is what we are doing now for these two men, whose marriage we all affirm but our government refuses to acknowledge.”

Twenty-some years into her marriage, Walhydra remembers that moment fondly.

She wonders how it can be in America that, because of the dominant ideology of churches other than hers, the secular government refuses to protect a loving kinship which she and Jim still sustain “for better or worse.”

She snuggles into Jim's calm strength after another long, challenging trip to care for Senior Witch—who considers Jim to be one of her sons—and frowns.

“Oh, well…,” she says softly.

Thy kingdom come….

Ever since she dropped out of seminary after discovering that she was not simply an orthodox Lutheran boy but also a Pagan and a Queer, Walhydra has puzzled over how to affirm the grace she knew as a Christian youth—and continues to know now.

One of her puzzlements has been how—if at all—to use any of the prayers, canticles, psalms and hymns she remembers and loves from way back in her...um... days of innocence.

As a natural-born linguist, Walhydra knows where words come from, how they operate and how they tend to be used, as well as how misleading they can be.

Sometimes she manages the mental gymnastics of translating between the old, beloved words and what she now believes. Sometimes, though, that just puts too much of a kink in her neck! She has to put the old words aside and prayer wordlessly.

"That's why I became a Quaker," she grouses. "So I wouldn't have to check my words with anyone to be sure I was saying the right ones in the right way."

Even so, Walhydra longs for both the poetry and the certainty of some of those old words.

Take the Lord's Prayer, for example.

Walhydra has been through the whole textual-critical, dig-up-the-original-Aramaic-of-Jesus exercise and found it quite enlightening…intellectually, at least. She loves the work of people like Sufi scholar Neil Douglas-Klotz and his Prayers of the Cosmos.

However, the child in her—an ancient, ancient child—resonates best to the words it learned in childhood. How to capture that resonance in the present while still being honest to the Truth of the present?

Walhydra thinks she found a clue while traveling last weekend to help her Mom, Senior Witch. On the road she listened again to someone she considers among the most powerful of bards: Tracy Chapman.

Chapman's work always touches something very deep. Whether it is a love song or an anthem, songs Walhydra heard over a decade ago can still conjure tears of joy or grief—or both.

So, as Chapman's rich voice sang "Heaven's Here on Earth" from the 1995 New Beginning album, Walhydra felt sobs of recognition welling in her chest.

You can look to the stars in search of the answers
Look for God and life on distant planets
Have your faith in the ever after
While each of us holds inside the map to the labyrinth
And heaven's here on earth

We are the spirit the collective conscience
We create the pain and the suffering and the beauty in this world

Heaven's here on earth
In our faith in humankind
In our respect for what is earthly
In our unfaltering belief in peace and love and understanding

I've seen and met angels wearing the disguise
Of ordinary people leading ordinary lives
Filled with love, compassion, forgiveness and sacrifice

Heaven's in our hearts
In our faith in humankind
In our respect for what is earthly
In our unfaltering belief in peace and love and understanding

Look around
Believe in what you see
The kingdom is at hand
The promised land is at your feet
We can and will become what we aspire to be

If Heaven's here on earth
If we have faith in humankind
And respect for what is earthly
And an unfaltering belief that truth is divinity
And heaven's here on earth

I've seen spirits
I've met angels
I've touched creations beautiful and wondrous
I've been places where I question all I think I know
But I believe, I believe, I believe this could be heaven
We are born inside the gates with the power to create life
And to take it away
The world is our temple
The world is our church
Heaven's here on earth

If we have faith in human kind
And respect for what is earthly
And an unfaltering belief
In peace and love and understanding
This could be heaven here on earth
Heaven's in our heart

© Tracy Chapman 1994

"That's it! That's it!" Walhydra thought. "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!"

It was so obvious!

Of course, it was also so Pagan. So focused on this world, this life.

But isn't that what "on earth as it is in heaven" means? That Mother-Father God created this world and is incarnate in this world—where She longs for us to live and rejoice and share grace along with Her?

Somehow, years ago, Walhydra realized that all of the so-called petitions in the Lord's Prayer made more sense—resonated with more divine power—if they were spoken as affirmations.

Not "Let thy kingdom come" but "Thy kingdom is here!"

So, Walhydra felt even more than the usual sob-in-the-throat thrill as she sang along:

Each of us holds inside the map to the labyrinth
and heaven's here on earth!

And so it is.

Blessèd Be!