The Empty Path

The gentle reader may have noticed that Walhydra has been on a vacation of sorts since her last post.

That's because her amanuensis has been busy trying to figure out how to create another blog...and how to boil down all the things he wanted to say into an initial post.

For several months he's been reading the blogs of other Quakers and Pagans...and Pagan Quakers...and Quaker Pagans...and Nontheists...and so on, all part of an interesting cyber-conversation about religious group identity compared and contrasted with religious group membership.

There were so many good posts and comments, triggering so many deep responses on his part, that he was bogged down in the outlines-of-outlines-of-outlines stage of composing, well on his way to a dissertation—or at least an honors thesis.

After a week or so of watching him stumble through this increasingly intellectual exercise, Walhydra reminded him of what a dear friend of hers said recently:

God wants witnesses, not lawyers, so testify, don't argue.

"Just tell them what you know at the moment, not what you think would be clever to say...if you could figure out how to."

Walhydra can be a ruthless English teacher when she has to.

In any event, that gave the gay, fifty-something, etc., the impetus to finish a first post and go public with The Empty Path.

Walhydra is not at all pleased with the comment on the Profile page: "Walhydra came into being as a storytelling device."

"The nerve!" she snorts. "And after all I've done for him!"

But she understands that mere humans—especially writers, who are the merest—have to have their fantasies about being the real center of the universe. Walhydra knows who actually is, so she deigns to ignore the slight.

In any event, she sort of agrees with the About page, which explains—or pretends to—the blog's subtitle, "Nonaligned faith and practice in the present."

She just thinks this boy is way too serious.

For now, she's content to close with the Stephen Jay Gould epigram from the blog sidebar:

Our mind works largely by metaphor and comparison, not always (or even often) by relentless logic. When we are caught in conceptual traps, the best exit is often a change in metaphor—not because the new guideline will be truer to nature...but because we need a shift to more fruitful perspectives, and metaphor is often the best agent for conceptual transition.

—Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History
New York, NY:W.W. Norton & Co., 1991, p.264

And so it is.

Blessèd Be.

Bless the Sunday New York Times

Walhydra is not usually one to read the Styles section of the Sunday New York Times—except out of curiosity.

Being a scrupulous Virgo, she makes every effort not to appear to care whether people think she is stylish, well-groomed or whatever...even though she tends to trim her moustache using a micrometer.

However, this morning, after the traditional 7 AM Sunday-champagne-on-the-porch with Joe and Nancy, the neighborhood houseparents across the street, Walhydra was moved to cook a Real Breakfast for herself and still snoring hubby Jim.

[Note: Being a Leo, JimJim, like any true cat, tries to sleep for at least 18 hours a day.]

Real Breakfast means driving to Publix—beware the champagne euphoria, please—to get the Times, free-range eggs, portabello mushrooms, butter, capers, majoram, fresh mangoes and blackberries, brewing fresh coffee (French press, of course), and whipping up omelettes and fruit on the side for her honey.

Yum!

Walhydra's reward for this was that hubby Jim actually read a whole, marvelous article for her, Cindy Chupack's Modern Love column, "An Ancient Coda to My 21st-Century Divorce."

[Cindy Chupack is the author of The Between Boyfriends Book. This essay is adapted from the anthology Girls Who Like Boys Who Like Boys, to be published this month by Dutton.]

Being a writer, Walhydra wants to respect the intellectual property rights of Ms. Chupack (and the Times), so she won't repost the whole piece here. Nonetheless, she has to show you some bits that made the Sunday-breakfast-at-home-with-my-gay-hubby morning even more of a delight.

I WAS finally getting married. That’s what I kept telling people. I didn’t say I was finally getting married “again,” because bringing up a first marriage during the planning of a second is a major buzz kill for everyone involved....

And I didn’t want to hang that cloud over my fiancé, Ian, because this was his first wedding (another term I didn’t like, because it implied he may have a second). So we tried not to talk about first or second anythings until our meeting with the rabbi.

Ian called our rabbi “the hot rabbi” because she was young and hip and, well, hot. I didn’t mind his calling her hot. In fact, I found it reassuring, because it was yet another indication that Ian was not gay. Above all, I wanted to avoid publicly declaring my love for someone only to have him later realize he’s gay. Again.

Yes, O.K., so that’s what happened the first time, and that’s what I told the hot rabbi when she asked if either of us had been married before.

She blinked, and nodded — appropriately unfazed. Then she asked, “Was he Jewish?”

This seemed like a moot point to me, but I told her yes, he was....

Among the most remarkable things about [my new hubby Ian] was that after hearing my story, he remained straight.

During the divorce process I was toying with stand-up comedy, and my friend and fellow comic Rob had been endlessly fascinated by my story, asking: “What were the signs? How did he tell you?”

A year later, Rob came out, forcing me to see, in retrospect, that for him the hero of my story was my husband.

At a Hollywood party, I told my story to a cute guy I thought was flirting with me only to learn that he already was married. To a man. He explained that he had never even dated men until he met his husband while traveling abroad.

Then I told that story to my friend who was the host of the party, and he confessed that he was bisexual, which he said was often difficult for potential partners to comprehend. For example, he asked, how would I feel about dating him?

When I realized his question was not rhetorical, I blushed and declined.

Then I told that story to a male friend I knew to be straight, and he also confessed he was thinking of dating men, but after coming out to his stunned parents and trying a couple of gay relationships, he decided he was more interested in women, and he’s now married to a woman who had previously considered herself a lesbian.

My feeling, at this point, when everyone’s sexuality seemed to be in flux, was simply: Pick a side! I’m fine with it all! Just declare a major!

Ms. Chupack proceeds to tell the story of catching up with her ex...because the "hot rabbi" said she ought to get a get, a Jewish divorce decree, so that her potential children by her new hubby would not be considered illegitimate.

The rest of the story is a beautiful affirmation of gay marriage by this bright straight woman, but Walhydra will leave the gentle reader to view it at length. She'll just give you one more short selection:

It’s not often a girl has the chance to have lunch with the man she thought she would have children with and the man he had them with, but the truth is, they were a pretty perfect family without me.

I had met my ex-husband’s partner at a Christmas party years earlier and liked him immediately. He was handsome, smart, kind and funny, and whether it was accurate or not, I found it flattering to imagine that he was the male version of me.

Now they’d adopted two beautiful boys. As I watched my ex-husband juggle juice boxes and crayons and children’s menus, he smiled and warned: “Get ready.”

As a bonus, Walhydra herself stumbled onto this other piece in the same Styles section: Bob Morris' The Age of Dissonance article, "Global Yawning." Here's the first part of it:

I was running errands the other day when a pleasant young woman with a clipboard tried to stop me. “Do you have a moment for the environment, sir?” she asked.

“No,” I barked as I evaded her, “I don’t!”

I felt guilty, but also vindicated. I mean, of course I have a moment for the environment. Saying you’re not for the environment right now is like saying you’re not for education, children, world peace, Africa or a cure for cancer. These days you would have to be a fool or a lobbyist to dismiss global warming and natural resource issues.

But is it possible that all this marketing is cheapening the cause?

Must every hotel, restaurant, shampoo, detergent and beverage that is environmentally responsible talk so much about it? Yuban “sustainable development” coffee. Paul Mitchell “protecting our planet for generations to come.” Levi’s Eco jeans.

How much green-standing can we stand? It’s enough hot air to melt Antarctica.

In no time, an inconvenient truth has become an obnoxious one.

But from what I can see, there’s as much selling as thinking going on.

Read it.

And enjoy the day.

Blessèd Be.

More grace

Being Walhydra all the time is just too much work. At least that's how she's been feeling lately.

"Can't I please be someone else?" she asks.

Sorry, Dear," Goddess says. "I put in just the mix of ingredients I intended you to have for this incarnation. You're still trying too hard. Why don't you just go out for a little walk?"

"That won't do any good," Walhydra sulks.

"Probably not, in your case. But it's a nice day. Now run along."

This morning and yesterday morning were two variants on a frustrating theme which has been playing itself out for months now.

On Tuesday she awoke promptly at 5 AM—the alarm was set for 6 and she's been tending to sleep in till 7—and she knew she might as well get up. Monkey mind was already chanting the litany of work- and Senior Witch-related responsibilities which burden her days and nights.

Tuesday the tai chi, meditation and prayer did well their job of centering Walhydra into a healing awareness of the Divine Presence.

This morning, on the other hand, the alarm went off at 5...wah!...because she had set the clock wrong. She reset it for 7, woke again at 6, shut off the alarm, hid under the covers till 7:15—and finally couldn't stand it that the litany was still running.

Wash face, dress, walk out the door.

Walk the cool morning neighborhood. Squirrels, cats, birds, blossoms. Things which usually bring Walhydra back into the Sacred Present.

Not today.

But by the time she has returned home, hubby Jim is up, in his bathrobe, getting his breakfast.

As the gentle reader as surely figured out by now, Walhydra comes from a family of talkers. Being a preacher's kid, her first expectation is always that problems can be solved—if at all—by talking them out.

But Walhydra is sooooo tired of talking about all this, and it isn't working anyway.

So she just looks up sadly from the chair she's slumped into and says, "There's this deep down despair...I just keep getting stuck in the mornings with all the details...."

Hubby Jim walks over without hesitation to stand beside Walhydra. He hugs her head gently to his belly, and says, "I love you."

*sigh*

A few silent moments of this.

Then Walhydra stands for a hug. Warm, long, full-body, as Jim always readily gives them.

She gets a catch in the throat and it names itself: "Mom."

It's not about all the details. It's still about the loss.

After a while, Jim leaves for work.

Walhydra sits on the back stoop with breakfast, watching squirrels, cats, birds, blossoms. It's so quiet and reassuring. Such a welcoming Present.

What is grace? This morning it is—as often—this amazing hubby of hers who knows to hug instead of talking.

Walhydra asks Goddess when she can make an end of recycling the same challenges of loss and responsibility.

Goddess grins.

"To paraphrase Charlton Heston: ' When you're finished.' "

She stirs the breeze a bit.

"But meanwhile, Dear," she whispers, "ask for more hugs."

Blessèd Be.