The beginning

Hello Friends,

I guess you could call this my first attempt at a newsletter. I promise it will be short. If you'd prefer not to receive these periodic pieces from me just let me know. The format is undefined for the moment as I feel my way into this.

I'd like to start with a piece of prose that appeals to me.

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre -
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We can only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

From "Little Gidding" by T.S. Elliot

Also wanted to share this from The Bhagavada-Gita.
It reminds me of the work that I am doing with addiction right now.

Bhagavad-Gita: 3:37

Arjuna said: O descendant of Vrsni, by what is one impelled to sinful acts, even unwillingly, as if engaged by force?

Krishna said: It is lust only, Arjuna, which is born of contact with the material mode of passion and later transformed into wrath, and which is the all-devouring sinful enemy of this world.

In the discussion that follows this passage in the "Bhagavada-Gita As it Is," the author tells us that what Krishna is saying is that as we become separated from the source, that we then have a natural longing for that source again. We long for that connection again, but because of the limitations of physical reality the pure connection we desire becomes somewhat perverted into lust. Is this the process of addiction? Gerald May calls addiction "the sacred disease of the modern world." Is this the intolerable shirt of flame?

Is it only through the going through that we become who we are?

"life's not a song
life isn't bliss
life is just this
it's living"

--Spike, from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer"

Thanks for reading!

Hayden

Articles I'm thinking of working on

Ok we’re Gay and Spiritual, what now?

A look at the Theories of Gay Spirituality

Is Sexual Orientation the right moniker for what we feel? (Is it who I want to Fuck or who I want to love? Or both?) – Relationship Orientation