down to earth

I've spent a lot of time with my head in the clouds.

That's not to say that there aren't a lot of good ideas floating around up there. For example, I believe in bioregionalism as a political organizing principle. This is the notion that a polity should be organized around an ecosystem, taking into account that ecosystem's natural boundaries, its resource input needs and outflow capacity, and its ability to sustain human life over time. Bioregionalism is about binding human life to the land, acknowledging not only that we need to be in relationship with the earth in order to survive, but that the relationship between the earth and people in the arid west will be completely different, and will demand completely different governance, than the relationship between earth and people in the swampy south.

It's a beautiful idea, isn't it? Makes so much sense, doesn't it?

My dad and I have had different versions of the same argument for most of my young adult and adult life, about social issues like violence, racism, poverty, environmental destruction. The particulars are different, but our positions are basically fixed: he's talking about the free market, self-reliance and the law of the jungle, I'm talking about essential human proclivity towards sharing and caring. Usually these arguments end up with him fake-conceding; "I wish it could be true, Cait." The newspaper we pore over for long mornings, when I'm home to visit, invariably reflects that it's not.

But even as I trudged through law school, getting indoctrinated into the behind-the-curtain workings of this chaotic enterprise called civil society in America, I still rejected the idea that this is it, that this is the best we can do: this backward-scrambling system that seems to generate imbalance after imbalance, injustice after injustice. There's more to it, I knew, and so even though I was playing along, I wasn't really in the game. I was holding out for the rapture, you could say, the New Age rapture when everybody would finally heal the wounds in their hearts, love each other, and magically transform this whole mess. Back to the farm, or the ashram, or something.

That is, until recently. I've experienced kind of a triple-whammy catalyst for new thought in the last several months. A perfect storm, if you will, of awakening.

(1) Tearing down the wall. Remember when I told you, a few months ago, that it was time to step back and do some heart-healing? Well, I'm doing it. It's really happening, in an almost visible way. And it's pretty deep, and entirely new.

(2) Barack Obama's election. About 45 minutes after CNN called it, I was standing with thousands of people in Oakland's Convention Center, surrounded by some very dear friends. Our collective attention was aimed towards the huge TV screen, and Barbara Lee was trying to talk to us but kept getting interrupted because the anchor kept saying that Obama was about to give his acceptance speech. I don't remember when it finally happened, but it did, which is that I finally let myself cry.

And I sobbed, under the same blue-neon lights that illuminated the room when I took the bar exam there last February. I cried because I finally felt it: yes, we can. The witch is dead! After eight years of feeling like all of our efforts for peace and justice were going absolutely nowhere, while a power-addled moron made one destructive decision after another, all of a sudden I felt this lightness where there used to be a weight.

I hadn't even realized there was a presidential-sized weight sitting on my chest. But there was, and suddenly I recognized it because of its absence. Suddenly, the energy that all the peacemakers put out into the world wasn't going to be pulverized and blown back in our faces like so many shards of broken glass. Suddenly, there's an open channel that starts on the ground and goes all the way up to the top, and then flows on down again. Really? Really?

We whirled and hollered in the streets for a long time that night.

(3) Gay marriage. How do I even talk about this one? It was a suckerpunch, a body blow. It knocked the wind out of the community, and a lot of us started spitting ignorance and hatred as soon as we got our breath back. But the leadership is pulling itself back together, the people are calming each other down and speaking truth to power, and the fight goes on. The Cal Supremes are set to hear oral argument in March on the question of whether this proposition is a constitutional revision, meaning that it effects such sweeping change to the structure of government that it should only be ratified by the legislature, or a constitutional amendment, which means that it is among the class of decisions that may be constitutionally made by the voters.

As a privileged, able-bodied, urban California white woman, albeit of the Jewish faith, I have until now been wholly unfamiliar with the set of sensations which may be termed 'minority stress,' a set of sensations which too many people in our society have experienced and continue to experience each and every day. Just this week, a group of six Long Island teen boys were charged with the hate-motivated murder of an Ecuadorean man, in an episode of "beaner hopping." And today is Transgender Remembrance Day -- that's "remembrance," not "awareness" -- when we recall the lives that have been lost (43, in the past two years) of differently-gendered individuals who were raped, maimed, and killed for deviating from the norm. Ethnic violence in the Congo rages on, and the death toll climbs upward of 5 million. Not to mention garden-variety racism and sexism which pervade our cultural relations and which can turn deadly on a moment's notice. So many of us walk around scared, and scarred.

Me? I have always mourned this, in my head-in-the-clouds way. But in mourning I've tended to throw up my hands, resigning myself to sit and wait for the big, sonorous Crystal Vision that will unite us all.

As a queer woman, though, all of a sudden it has arrived in my body. Fear, rejection, self-rejection. How can this be? Don't they see that we are human, and that we just want to love? No, they don't see. The Goddess has not yet removed the veil from before their eyes; Barack Obama's ascendancy has not yet induced Buddha-like serenity in the hearts of the many. We're all still mucking around here together; the name of God is still used to justify hatred and separation; the book that says "Adam-and-Eve-not-Adam-and-Steve" still propels bullets out of guns and into bodies, bodies which love other bodies that feel just like home. Stares, taunts, silences. Denial of rights, denial of fellowship, denial of life in a split second.

All of that is in me now.

I used to think that as I moved through my own pain, my own wounding, I would find myself less and less engaged with this messy experiment called America. That I would become more involved in the esoteric, the personal, the ethereal. Not so, as it turns out. The more I wake up to the vibrant, quickening life-force inside of me, the more I realize that we really are all the same. We all want the same things, aspire towards the same goals -- safety, freedom, peace -- even if our means are wholly divergent.

The skinheads who threw a rock through the window of a ten-year-old boy in Billings, MT in 1993, because of the menorah on his windowsill, were trying to live out a vision of safety that was borne from ignorance, and fueled by hatred and violence. But 10,000 citizens in Billings called forth a higher vision, illuminating their own windows with paper menorahs printed by the local newspaper. 10,000 households followed a truer star, held a stronger common dream, one of love and mutuality. And that higher vision prevailed. Billings, which suffered for so long from KKK violence, has not experienced a single major hate crime since then.

Similarly, suddenly, my feet are here on the ground. My life is here, my fate bound up with the fates of the humans who surround me every day, the humans I will never meet, the creatures of the land and the sea. Truth is not esoteric, and it resides on a mountaintop only to the same extent it resides in a city storm drain. As long as we're all here together, the truth is that we've got to show up for it. We've -- I've -- got to live every day with full commitment to the possibility that some day, with enough sheer will and enough eyes-open faith, we can all be who we are, love who we love, and sleep soundly through the quiet night.

I'm in.

on hate and love

Can you hear that? Across the state, from south to north, they are cheering. Joyous tears stream down their faces, just like my own tears of "yes, we can" flowed on election night as I danced in the streets of downtown Oakland. They are the church-goers, the families of young men fighting in Iraq, the white people and the people of color, the concerned citizens of this state heaving sighs of relief because marriage has been codified as the province of the heterosexual.

They assure us that this amendment won't deprive anyone of any rights, but will simply affirm a longstanding definition. They say this is about love, not hate. But we know and feel otherwise. This constitutional amendment is a sharp blow to our hearts, our guts. It confirms our suspicions: all across our state and our nation, there are those who reject and fear homosexual relationships, who triumph in having defended the institution of marriage against incursion by an advancing army of sexual deviants.

And as the doors of this institution are slammed in our faces, as we hear the locks turning and the chains rattling, there is a profound sadness that arises -- a gaping and terrible vacuum where there was once energy, movement. Gays exist, they admit, but gayness must not be talked about, taught in our schools, seen in our churches, acknowledged as a protectable category by our government, or granted the same benefits and privileges as is heterosexuality with regard to state-issued marriage licenses. God says gayness is a sin, they say, and even if we can't really stop you from having all of that weird sex and perverse love, we can sure as hell make sure you're not receiving the same treatment as are we, the child-bearers, the keepers of what is sacred in our society.

This is a deeply painful message to receive. I grieve the receiving of this message as it enters my very body, this body of mine which aspires only to love and be loved. I don't feel any acceptance in their exclusion, as they claim; I feel only their fear, only their attempt at disciplining me out of my messy, dangerous desires. I feel only a sweeping of my heart under a heavy rug, so that it doesn't disturb a pretty picture.

What I want to say, though, as I move through my grief, is that it's this pretty picture with which we must contend. Any observer of nature knows that the world is a teeming, chaotic place, but a place which always manages to self-regulate in surprisingly elegant ways. And yet people, perhaps out of our fear, perhaps out of our quirky wisdom, continually attempt to impose order and organization on this wild web of interdependence. To erase the curves and draw thick lines instead. To dam the river and straighten out its banks. God wrote a book, it is said, which ought to be the instruction manual for the entire world. One book, one way, one paternalistic social structure for everyone, no matter how many people it sickens and kills from smallpox or heartbreak.

This is what we're up against. The book says that gay sex is transgressive, and that transgressors burn in hell. As such, I think we were fatally misguided in our attempt to conduct this ballot initiative fight solely according to reason and a civil rights framework. In the contest between secularly-granted rights and God's word, the believers won't be swayed by suggestions of discrimination under the law. This is about God's plan for the way all humans must live -- and rights either flow from God's word, they say, or aren't real.

And we're up against this with a massive handicap: internalized homophobia. After generations of shielding yourself against the violent screams of "you're not supposed to exist," can you muster the will to fight against God and his book? Can you even fight against such a deeply-held belief about love and its barbed-wire parameters, especially if your collective strength has been continuously, insidiously sapped? Can you rally your spirits to say, "here I am, and my existence is just as real and beautiful as yours," when you've been so "other"-ed, so alienated, so villainized?

It's a challenging task, and it's exactly the task we must undertake. In order for us to stand upon solid ground, to align ourselves with the inviolability of our constitutional right to equal treatment, we have to somehow meet this God-driven negation of our existence with a God-inspired knowing that we are here, that we do exist, and that homosexuality is neither a sin nor a lifestyle choice. There must be a shared moral vision of equality among us -- in addition to a shared legal vision -- in order for us to achieve that equality. We must have more to rely upon than our tender hearts and our political acuity and our spandex short-shorts that we wear once a year at the Pride parade. We must wholly love and believe in ourselves as individuals and as a group before we can convince other people to love and believe in us, especially people who are so angrily invested in God's decree against us. Whether we believe in God or not, we must be aware that there is love for us -- even us -- that is infinite and unconditional.

So please, begin within. Love yourself. Respect yourself. Hold fast to your inherent human dignity and equality, even as you feel the reverberations of this dizzying electoral slap in the face. Feel your innate belonging, and from that place, step forward to speak your truth.