Click here to watch an introductory video about the installation. Fabric panel by Stephanie Lewis Robertson  

The Events Informing The Work

The exhibition explores the experience of our spiritual community when Stephanie’s husband, Tom, suffered a stroke and was hospitalized for several weeks in the summer of 2009.

Immediately after Tom’s stroke the situation didn’t look especially promising. Within 24 hours Tom went from eating dinner at a restaurant with Stephanie to lying still in a medically induced coma in the Neurological Critical Care Unit at Methodist Hospital (Indianapolis).

Tom and Steph’s friends flocked to surround them with prayer and love and care. People sent Reiki, prayed, did energy work, sang in the waiting rooms and at his bedside, made prayer flags, cards, and posters which adorned his room. Close friends came and sat with Tom all hours of the day and night. It was scary, it was beautiful. It was intimate, it was overwhelming. Technology joined with spirituality as medical skill moved through healing energy.

Sitting in that hospital room alone with Tom every night, alarms going off over the hypnotic noises of pumps and the respirator, was, perhaps strangely, the most connected to the gentle loving truth of Spirit I have ever felt. I sat quietly, grounding excessive energy, taking notes about alarms and meds and Tom’s reactions for Steph to look over in the morning. I read books and researched strokes and brain function. The most helpful, hopeful and compelling of these books was My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor. Steph and I both devoured it within the first 48 hours of Tom’s admission. All the while I felt the presence of Spirit, in all Her forms, moving like waves over Tom. In that hospital room I became certain that peaceful, healing intention creates effects that are palpable and lingering. This was a time I will never forget.

Steph and I talked in the hospital about the possible lasting effects of this experience, how it might change our lives and the lives of the other people in our community. She felt that her next exhibition of work would be greatly informed by all we were now going through, whatever the outcome might be.

Tom recovered within a few short months, surprising his doctors and delighting all of us involved in his healing. His life is not the same, and he still struggles with fatigue and decision making, but he remains our friend Tom, the man we knew before, only with a different understanding of love. “Love,” said Tom in a sermon delivered at his church after his stroke, “is not quantitative. It’s not reciprocal, you don’t get back just what you give. It’s something else entirely.” Fabric panel by Stephanie Lewis Robertson  

The Inception of Our Collaboration

For quite some time Stephanie and I have talked about working together to create something that could engage an audience on more than one level. She is a master of visual expression, though music is also a very important part of her life. I love the fluidity of her fabric art, which to me has a movement not unlike the wave motion that carries sound. I was humbled that she thought to ask me to work with her on such an important project.

For this work we both started with something that came directly from Tom’s time in the hospital.

Stephanie was clearly fascinated by the images of Tom’s brain on the CT scans that hung on the wall in his NCCU room. These were pictures in black and white, big film negatives with a light box behind them, just like you’ve seen on all the hospital shows on TV. Stephanie was moved by the delicate beauty of these images, and I often saw her looking at them and showing them to other people. At one point she remarked to me that she thought these images would find a place in her next body of work. All of the fabric panels in this exhibition utilize the CT scan images.

I was likewise fascinated by the sounds of the NCCU, and asked for permission to bring in recording equipment to capture them for use later on, possibly in conjunction with the work Stephanie was considering. I found the respirator sound to be somewhat hypnotic, the harsh white noise of the O2 humidifier to be extremely agitating, and the alarms and pumps to be variously soothing or startling. All were evocative. Hospital administration was kind enough to grant my request to sample these noises, and I brought in my small field recorder one night and captured the various sounds of Tom’s room.

Stephanie and I communicated briefly about our intentions for the piece before work began, but mostly created each part on our own. It delights me that the fabric art and the sound work together so well, but that speaks to our similar outlook and shared intention. Both of us set out to illuminate how a seemingly terrible experience such as this could actually bring new understanding and insight about life, love and Spirit into the lives of an entire community.

Listen to Sharon Gamble interview Stephanie Lewis Robertson about the installation on WFYI’s “Art of the Matter” radio program. Here’s the podcast link. Steph’s interview begins at 33:30 in the program.

The Sound Design

When I contemplated how best to portray Tom’s healing, I thought about what the experience had been and what it had meant, not just to me, not just to Steph, but to our entire community. I knew the hospital sounds had to be involved. I knew I needed to represent the variety of spiritual traditions that came together as one expression in support of Tom. I wanted to invoke the confusion, the peace, the healing and the injury, all the sounds as well as the holy silence. I spoke with Steph and her vision seemed to be quite similar to mine. As a matter of fact, after hearing the soundscape for the first time, Stephanie remarked, “It sounds exactly like I expected.” To me, that meant I got it right.

I decided early that I must do this project in some type of surround sound, because it was the only way to represent the depth and expansiveness of the experience. The piece is done in 4 channel audio. As the speaking and singing move throughout the room, not only is the observer drawn to experience different placements of the fabric panels, but this movement also mirrors how I experienced the healing energy of Spirit in Tom’s room; there was a flow to it, a coming and going.

While Tom was in the coma he was often very agitated, and we discovered that keeping jarring visual stimuli to a minimum, and providing soothing sounds to drown out the loud alarms and machines in his room, helped calm him down. We never would have figured this out without the valuable information contained in Jill Bolte Taylor’s wonderful book! I can still see Tom, in a coma, lying on the hospital bed with his sunglasses on and iPod earbuds in his ears.

One of Tom’s favorite places is the ocean, so we played field recordings of the ocean on his iPod for hours and hours. The soundscape I created starts off with the machine sounds providing the “breath” of the piece, but in the middle these sounds are replaced gradually by ocean sounds, and then later the machine noise fades back in. My intention is to take the listener from an observer’s viewpoint into Tom’s own awareness and then back out again.

In one moment of insight it dawned on me that the best way to represent what had happened within the context of our entire community was to have the community come together again and sing and pray just as they had when Tom was in the hospital. As it turned out, people were more than willing to do so. We gathered at UUI on a Sunday afternoon and people spoke and sang as they had two years ago while I recorded it all. There was no direction given other than to speak, sing or pray as one felt compelled to do. Later in my studio as I sat down to hear these words, songs and sounds, it became clear immediately that they fit together beautifully. Just as we had all offered up our separate perspectives and abilities to channel Tom’s healing, we now came together to perfectly represent that time and illuminate the gifts brought into our lives.

When I began to assemble the recording it was one of those times when I felt all I needed to do was show up and sit down in my studio and “do the next thing.” The piece felt like it mixed itself. Remarkably that’s the same feeling I had while Tom was in the hospital. I kept saying, “There’s times when you just need to show up and do the next thing that needs to be done.”

Technical Information  

The soundscape ended up being a 25 minute piece in quad surround. It will play as a continuous loop in the room. The piece is designed to draw people from one area of room to another with speaking and singing coming from and moving through different areas. It was a thrill to work in a surround format for the first time. I can’t wait to do more work in multi-channel playback formats.

There is linear movement to the work, it has a beginning and an end, but it moves from one scene to another every few minutes, so it will also provide an interesting experience for someone who only spends 10 or 15 minutes in the exhibit.

After attempting to find a way to use an iPad or Android tablet to provide playback and finding no technology available for four track playback, I decided to use Sonar 6 on a HP netbook through a Native Instruments Audio Kontrol interface. The ultra-flat response Yamaha HS50M active monitors are perfect for this application. I made a custom cabinet for the playback rig out of an Itso cube I found at Target and modified to allow for airflow and provide hook ups for the security cables.

Credits
Hospital Sounds – Recorded live in Tom Robertson’s room at Methodist Hospital Neurological Critical Care Unit in July of 2009, Indianapolis, IN

Large Ensemble Singers – Susan Burt, Marg Herder, Cathy Holmes, Becky Kincaid, Lucy McKoskey, Kathlene Mcnaney, Marty Miles, Pam Mueller, Stephanie Lewis Robertson, Jenni White, Judy Wolf

Small Ensemble Singers – Pam Blevins Hinkle, Ruth Hinkle, Aletha Hinkle

Speakers – Pastor Steven Sinclair, Mary Brumleve, Casey O’Leary, Eric Hinkle, Pam Mueller, Kinzua LeSeur, Diana Ensign, Judy Wolf, Jenni White

Crying – Stephanie Lewis Robertson

Recorded, Mixed and Mastered by Marg Herder

  ]]> http://margherder.com/blog/?feed=rss2&p=43 1 http://margherder.com/blog/?p=42 http://margherder.com/blog/?p=42#comments Sat, 21 Aug 2010 23:58:57 +0000 marg http://margherder.com/blog/?p=42 The other day I had lunch with a woman whose mom is a resident of the nursing home where I work.  Laura is a kind and gentle gal.  Her mom has experienced a big decline recently and Laura’s taken FMLA from work to spend more time with her.  She’s been busy for a couple weeks helping, worrying, and trying to navigate all the tough stuff that happens when your mom is not doing so well.  We have been talking a lot, as this is all new to her.  Of course you only lose your own mom once, but I’ve witnessed the process quite a few times and I’ve tried to pay attention.  Laura and I have, over several years of infrequent conversations, established a good rapport.

At lunch we ended up talking about spirituality.  I found the words flowing freely from my mouth, and subsequently I was able to tease out an interesting realization from what transpired.  I’d like to try to explain it here.

In this day and age, with science ruling the philosophical landscape and so much sharing of ideas possible, I think it’s very easy to get confused about how to relate to Spirit, God, Goddess, Divinity, the Mystery, or All that Is (whatever one chooses to name It).

Science seems to point out some holes, some weaknesses, in most of the accepted religious constructs, including the one I grew up with, Christianity.  I would argue that, for some of us, popular religions do not explain the nature of our lives and facilitate our relationship to Spirit as well as they may have to generations past.

Due to the amazing interpersonal communication potential we now have, our breadth of experience moves us closer to a realization that all spiritual systems are in essence just different metaphors for everything that exists beyond our capacity for understanding.

Now I don’t know about you, but this whole thing proves to be a stumbling block to me at times.  I grow concerned thinking that my practice may be limiting my spiritual growth, or retarding my appreciation for and attempts at embracing All that Is.  Maybe I am keeping my foot on the brake.  Maybe I have wrapped up the Mystery in a metaphorical straight jacket.  Maybe I should be trying to approach the Divine without any restrictive constructions.

While I was talking to Laura and watching her closely as the words tumbled out of my mouth, I realized that she was without any meaningful relationship to All That Is.  She knew of the Mystery, I could tell, because her eyes welled up. But she was not in touch with All That Is.  The Divine to her was something as illusive as the fragrance of blossoms blown on the wind, something that certainly exists because it has been experienced, but something that in no way lends itself to relationship.

Personal spirituality is our own intimate relationship with All That Is. It doesn’t matter what you call the Divine, or how you practice.  What matters is your intention, and prolonged intentional interaction with the Mystery cannot help but create a deeply intimate relationship.

We, as beings mostly consigned to an existence of limited expression and limited ability to perceive, find it pretty much impossible to be in relationship with something formless.   We can have a direct and compelling relationship with each other, or with a house or a tree, or an artistic creation, but not with Mystery, something that is by definition formless.

I have come to believe that religious systems are simply constructs that give the formless form. They are knowable systems of thought and practice that metaphorically represent something that by definition is unknowable.  Probably this is what science is too…

We have to wrap the Mystery in a personally approachable construct, a limiting metaphor.  We have to give the formless form.  Within form the Divine becomes approachable.  Then and only then we can create a relationship with Spirit.

So lets get back to lunch with my friend.  Laura’s eyes told me that she had been walking through this life, knowing of All That Is, but unable to enter into relationship even though, especially now, she felt great longing to do so.  I could tell from the way she was burrowing deep into the sound of my words.

Laura’s education and personal experience led her to feel that every standard religious presentation, Islamic, Christian, Wiccan, Judaic, all had way too many divisive rules walling off what she fundamentally knew to be the limitless and expansive concept of real Divinity.

And I realized then and there that some of us have to roll our own.

Some of us have to wrap the Mystery up in metaphors we create ourselves.  Spirit is not something you can be in relationship with directly.  Christians, Jews, Witches, Muslims have all worked hard to create linguistic and practical systems which serve as sturdy metaphorical wrappers.  This works for a whole lot of people.  But for some of us, all we see are the holes in those wrappers, holes that prevent those systems from working for us.  When there are holes in the paper, the smoke won’t draw.

These days I’ve rolled up something that’s like a mix of Gnostic Christianity and Wiccan practice.  Might seem weird to you, but it works for me.

Discovering I can create my own wrapper (metaphorical framework) for All That Is has enabled me to engage and create a direct and intimate relationship with a formless, unknowable Mystery.

It was clear that nobody had ever told my friend Laura that she didn’t have to buy into one of the off-the-shelf wrappers, that she could discern and embrace her own, thus discovering the intimate spiritual relationship she so desired at this difficult point in her life.  I didn’t tell her this at lunch, because it took a little while for the concept to attract all the language I needed to express it.  But I’m looking forward to our next talk.  I’ll be interested to see, from the look in her eyes, if this might make sense enough to open her up.

I bet their heaven sounds really nice to them. Once they get there they don’t have to put up with all the people who think they’re wrong about everything. As a matter of fact, I think the whole idea is that everyone there is just like them. In their heaven they can finally get away from all those pesky Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Unitarian Universalists. And I can only imagine how much relief they feel to be rid of all the gays and lesbians.

I know there’s a lot I probably don’t understand, but the concept of heaven as presented to me by most Christians involves a form of existence and self-awareness similar to that which makes up our current experience. I just can’t think of any reason why the self-awareness that makes me “Marg” should survive the transformation of death. It sure seems to me that what I think of as “Marg” is a product of a certain story, a certain complicated neural pattern, and a certain physical presence. At the least death is a major dimensional shift, and if something of what I call “Marg” does endure that, I sincerely doubt that the packaging would be such as to lend itself to any kind of recognizable existence or similar self-awareness.

It would be just like human beings to think we are (at the core) some big huge immutable force that survives even the cessation of everything observable. It would be just like us.

Some people argue that a concept of heaven is necessary to get people to behave properly. I don’t buy it. On the contrary, I think behaving properly can only happen when there is no expectation of receiving special consideration because of your actions. Note that Jesus didn’t say treat other people well so they will treat you well. Jesus said to treat other people as you would have them treat you. There’s no certainty of reciprocity in that.

The concept of heaven has actually been used throughout history to convince people to behave in terribly destructive ways. For a current example take a look at the new breed of killers we have labeled terrorists. Promised eternal and lavish rewards in the paradise of the afterlife, they sacrifice themselves and kill other people in the process.

Since I’ve come around to this way of thinking, I’ve started being much happier with my life right here, right now. Right here has much more shimmer. Right now has much more depth. I’m hungry to experience all the beauty and diversity I can in this earthly existence. I am digging for all the love and truth telling available. I am motivated to express all the delicious and intriguing self-awareness this one little life has to offer. I am also almost inconsolably troubled by those people who insist this life is nothing but a sorry exercise in sin and suffering, a disappointing prelude to the better life awaiting them in heaven. So I’ve decided that they can keep their heaven. From what I’ve heard about it I don’t think there’s any way the pursuit of heaven can be any more fulfilling than what I’ve got going right here, right now.

I flew down to Texas to see a dear friend’s son get married.  My friend, Tom, and I go way back. He is one of those rock steady quiet guys.  You probably know one.  Doesn’t make a big fuss about being here, doesn’t make a big fuss about stuff going on, just walks through life solid.  I love Tom in a way I don’t love anyone else.  I’m pretty sure he loves me like that too.  We don’t make a lot of noise about it, we don’t call each other all the time, or email, or send birthday cards.  But every now and then we get to see each other, and we take right up where we left off.

Tom’s whole family was at the wedding.  Tom didn’t become such a good man in vacuum.  He had a great mom and dad, all about love and honor, and two older sisters who have always been willing to tell him the truth.  I haven’t seen any of them in 25 years.  And of course there were the kids.  I had only met Tom’s sons once, when they were very young, and never met his nieces and nephew.  Wonderful families create wonderful families.  I had the pleasure of sitting next to the two nieces and their husbands at dinner.  Adults I had never met, from a family I knew well.  It was comfortable and delightful.

I cried a lot the night of the wedding.  Cried at the joy of getting to see his family again.  Cried at the beauty of this family creating such wonderful children, now adults.  Cried about his sister, Mary Katherine, finally in school to become the minister she has always been.  Cried when his mom, a Christian woman, said about Lisa, without any hint of judgment, with only happiness in her voice, “We introduced ourselves to your partner.  She seems lovely.”  I cried because in that Texas room, far away from where I exist, surrounded by strangers and a few people who haven’t seen me in 25 years, love was lapping over me like waves.

Love transcends time and distance.  Love is invisible but warms you, fills you, changes you. Love is the only thing that can wash a foggy spirit clean.  That means love, by definition, is nothing less than a miracle.

Driving along a Texas highway the next day, headed toward the Gulf, Carrie Newcomer’s “Geodes” came on my iPod.  And I cried again.

…All these things that we call familiar,
Are just miracles clothed in the commonplace.

There was so much love in my life right then that I couldn’t hold it all, it just had to spill right out my eyes.  And I wanted to remember to tell you not to forget how huge, and how delicious, the miracle of love can be.

Let’s just suppose for a minute that God doesn’t hate gay and lesbian people.  Just for a minute.  Let’s just suppose that God made gay and lesbian people on purpose.  Let’s just suppose that God is pleased with this aspect of creation.  Let’s just suppose that God loves fags.  Let’s just suppose that God loves dykes.

So my question is, working from this supposition, what happens to all of the “Christians” who are busy persecuting us?  What happens to the people who say I am not worthy of being a minister of the Word?  What happens to the people who shun me, tell me I am damned, drive my people from Christ, teach my friends that the followers of Jesus are just a bunch of haters?

Maybe God would be, to put it mildly, disappointed.

See, it all looks pretty rosy to you now.  As you assume you know the dispostion of God toward my people.  If we gays and lesbians are suffused by Satan, if we are embracing evil, then in your rules, you are okay in forcing us away from you, in shutting the door in our faces, in denying us fellowship.

But you simply have to turn it around and think about it from the other side.  What if you are wrong and God loves homos?  What if you are tormenting people loved by The Creator?  What if your actions are really punitive, not protective? Who is doing evil?  Who is serving whom?  

How sure are you that I am an abomination? Sure enough to bet your eternity?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102005062

NPR summarizes, “The movement, called Quiverfull, is based on Psalm 127, which says, ‘Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth.  Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.’”

So the people in the movement have as many kids as they can.  No birth control, no worries about enough money to feed everybody.  It’s not like trying to have 8 kids at once, not like that.  It’s about having as many kids as happen to come along over several years.

I’m not going to touch the Bible verse.  Though you can imagine it might get me just a tad worked up, you know, talking about warriors and sons and how having a lot of sons makes you special.  But that’s just what you get when you only let “powerful” men write and re-write and interpret a body of work over a couple or three thousand years.  To me the whole thing says more about men than it does about any kind of truth.

Anyway, what I want to talk about is the attitudes expressed by Nancy Campbell, author of Be Fruitful and Multipy, and identified as a leader of this movement.  Because what she said on the air really stopped me in my tracks.  I just sat in my car feeling kinda sick.

Ms. Campbell says, “The womb is such a powerful weapon; it’s a weapon against the enemy.”

She goes on, “We look across the Islamic world and we see that they are outnumbering us in their family size, and they are in many places and many countries taking over those nations, without a jihad, just by multiplication.”

“The womb is such a powerful weapon…”  Let me say that again just so I’m sure you hear it.  ”The womb is such a powerful weapon…”

It’s one thing for testosterone junkies to think of everything as a battle, every other faith tradition as an enemy, and body parts as weapons. I am not surprised by that anymore. I’m hardly even annoyed by it.  Fifty years into this existence it’s pretty clear how things go with a lot of guys.

But I am always utterly disappointed when a woman starts spouting the same militaristic crap.   It makes me feel about the same as I do when I hear that the most recent suicide bombing was carried out by a woman.

Sick.

So here’s the rant.

The womb is not a weapon.  The womb is the sacred chalice of creation.  To even utter this statement, “The womb is such a powerful weapon,” a mother’s heart would have to be simply packed in fear.  Fear so thick as to make it impossible to love expansively and without judgement.  That a woman would take this core reason of her being, her ability to nurture and bring forth new life, and twist it into something militant, deeply saddens me.  I don’t understand how it could even feel true passing Ms. Campbell’s lips.

I’ve changed my mind on a lot of things over the years.  But I have not changed my mind about peaceful coexistence in this world.  I don’t see where Jesus was talking about taking over the world, by multiplication or any other means.   I certainly don’t see where He was talking about using the womb as a weapon.  Jesus was talking about living peacefully and loving other people expansively.   But you know, it’s always the people who view themselves as the most Christian of the Christians that don’t seem to get this.

I’ve always dreamed that someday each woman in the world would come to understand three things very clearly:

If hate is allowed to exist it will eventually direct itself at her children.
If war is tolerated it will eventually wound or kill one of her children.
If she herself has an enemy, her child will eventually become one to somebody else.

In my assessment of the way things are, each of us has the ability to project either peace and love into the world, or something else entirely.  

If Mrs. Campbell wants to project a “something else entirely” for her children I can’t stop her.  But I can hope that she will come to understand that there are still a few things around that should not be militarized.  A womb being one of them.

Personally, I think it’s a miracle that anyone even somewhat self employed can ever get their taxes to come out right, even working with a professional. Our tax code has become ridiculously difficult. But I’m getting away from my point.

On Saturday Night Live that weekend, head writer and Weekend Update performer Seth Meyers did another installment of his piece “Really!?! with Seth” in which he addresses this situation. He chides the president for apologizing reminding him, “The president before you broke the world.”

It seems to me that the world does seem somewhat broken. I think even many Republicans would have to admit, at least at this point in time, that it seems like a whole lot of things fell apart during Bush’s watch. President Bush was simply not very capable, and dangerously unwilling to listen to more capable people. This was evident before his first term was over.

I think Bush got reelected for a second term simply because he had Karl Rove working for him, and Karl Rove had politics figured out. Karl Rove orchestrated a perfect reelection campaign. He got emotional issues placed on state ballots that would draw lots of very conservative Republicans to the polls in key states. He was able to destroy the image of the Democratic challenger.

Karl Rove scared me, because I think he defined politics as a game. And to someone who has reduced politics to a game, winning becomes the only thing that matters. Bush was reelected, and continued along his misguided path. The world became more broken. Bush’s ineptitude had to be evident to someone working so closely with him. But Rove’s job was not to act responsibly, it was to simply win the game.

The current financial crisis can be examined in the same light. Granted I don’t fully understand what happened to get us into our current mess, I don’t think many economists totally understand it either. But to me, it seems that corporation CEOs, banks, financial managers, all reduced the responsibility of doing business to the game of making money. This is the danger of capitalism, that the people responsible for its motion and operation will begin to think of it as a game, and become focused solely on winning (making money).

Politics is not a game of winning or losing.  Politics is a mechanism concerned with encouraging social stability.  Business/capitalism is not a game of making money. It is a mechanism for ensuring the availablity of those goods and services necessary for the survival of a society.  We must be very careful with such societal mechanisms.  We must operate within these systems as if our very way of life was at stake, every single day.  Because, bottom line, it is. This is not a game.

I say hello to their dog who is wagging around my legs.

The cowboy-est one looks me up and down and says in a thick Indiana accent, “Where ya been out there?”

I say, “I’m off over on Terrell Ridge.”

He says, “You been to the lake?”

I say, “You mean the big one kinda behind the cemetary?”

He spits and says, “Yeah. There’s lots of little ones too.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I enjoy kicking around that ridge. It’s one of my favorite places on earth.”

He looks away, and then back at me. “You ever hear any cats? There’s big cats been up there. A buddy a mine saw the tracks last spring.” He goes on to describe how to tell a panther/lion track from a dog track from a bobcat track and how he’s been riding around these woods all his life and he’s seen tracks too.

Now it’s my turn to look him up and down. Is he just fucking with me because I’m a girl out there alone? I see the other two guys are wondering the same thing.

I say, “No, I’ve never heard one, or seen any tracks.”

He says, “I heard one once. Now that’s a sound that’ll make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.”

I say, “I do audio recordings while I’m out here. I would LOVE to get a recording of that, though I bet it would scare the crap outa me.”

His friends can’t take it any more. “Are you serious?” One of them asks him. “Big cats out here?”

“Dead serious,” He says still looking right at me. “A few years back a buddy a mine’s was hunting down here, and he camped just off the Sycamore Trail. His dog woke him up in the middle of the night just goin’ nuts. So he looks out and there’s this big cat just a starin’ down his dog. He jumped up and yelled real loud and the cat took off. He packed up his stuff right then and hightailed it out to his car. He still won’t stay here overnight.”

The older guys’ eyebrows go up. The cowboy-est is still just looking at me.

“Well shit,” I say. “Guess I better keep my dog in the tent.”

“You ever hear one, you’ll know. Nothin’ else sounds like that.”

“Maybe if I get a recording it’ll prove that there’s one around here.”

“Maybe,” he says, spitting again.

So I walk off with my water in my pack, quietly, listening for them to crack up as soon as they think I’m far enough away. But instead I just hear the older guys quizzin the younger one about the validity of the story, and him insisting that it’s all true.

Freakin great.

So besides my new fear of big cats in Hoosier National Forest, the only thing I’m really scared of out there is Bigfoot. I’ve been scared of Bigfoot ever since I first heard of Bigfoot. I had a coyote walk within 4 feet of me when I was out hiking quietly without a light one night. I was surprised, as was the animal, but not so much scared. But if it had been Bigfoot I would have shit and died right there. All I can say is I wish I never would have googled “Bigfoot and Hoosier National Forest” or “panther and Hoosier National Forest.”

That’s a nice thought. And maybe in fifty years all the gay people will be just like all the straight people. But for now, we are not.

Sure, we’ve got crazy gay people, we’ve got smart gay people, we’ve got codependent gay people, productive gay people, and kind gay people. You’ve got your crazy straight people, your smart straight people, your codependent straight people, your productive straight people and your kind straight people. We’ve got truck drivers, ministers, teachers, athletes, musicians, accountants, and salespeople. So do you. We have kids, we are kids, we put our pants on one leg at a time, and so do you. Sure, that’s true.

But that doesn’t mean we are the same as you.

We are not the same as you because close to half of you still think we are, by definition, sick and wrong. When I came out, when I realized I was a lesbian some 30 years ago, it was more like almost all of you thought we were sick and wrong. There’s still probably ten percent of you that think just because I am a lesbian I want to sleep with most every woman I see, or I at least intend to do something to make every child I encounter grow up to be gay. There’s a whole lot of people who think I suck. I won’t even get into all the people who not only think I’m “going to hell,” but have paused long enough to tell me that. And I just want to make sure you understand there’s quite a few straight people around that like to do physical harm to people like me.

This kind of thing changes you. The fact that so many people think we are sick and wrong, think we suck, think we are going to hell, and want to hurt us, makes us different than you. There’s no way around it.

I was talking to a man the other day. His daughter is gay. She’s about my age. She, from the sound of things, has had her struggles with self esteem issues. She’s been with several partners, like many of us, she’s been with people who have taken advantage of her kindness, like many of us, she is looked upon suspiciously by the religious brother with the “perfect” family, like many of us are. I don’t see how any gay people can escape having struggles with self esteem issues. I think taking care of her (perhaps less than deserving) partners is probably the subconscious way this gal attempts to convince herself that she is a worthy, kind and generous person. It’s the way she is trying to prove that she doesn’t suck nearly as bad as all those people think she does. It’s the way she copes with being hated and maligned so frequently.

So the next time you wonder why we can’t act like you, why we are so outspoken, or so flamboyant, or so angry, or so damn different, try to remember that we have been through things all our lives that you haven’t considered. Try to remember that, plain and simple, we are not like you.

We have a wooded back yard, with a fairly large deck just outside the back door.  Last summer we were plagued by tiny biting gnats apparently living under the deck.  It was such that we simply avoided spending time out there after July.  When we tried to eat dinner, or have a drink out at the table, we’d find little chigger like welts all over our legs about 24 hours later.  These gnats were relentless!  This was our first summer in the house, and we hope it’s not a yearly occurrence.

So anyway, when we decided to have her family over we knew that we would have to utilize the deck.  There simply isn’t room in the house for her large family to gather comfortably. We made plans for food, plans for seating, plans for activities, and then a few days before the event we decided we had to make plans for the gnats.  How could we in good conscience set her family loose on the deck to be devoured by our plague of biting gnats.   What hospitality!  Though I’m not all about entertaining, I know you are supposed to send your guests home with no more injuries than they had upon arrival.  I can just hear it, five years later at the Thanksgiving gathering, “I’m thankful that we are here and not at Marg and Lisa’s being devoured by the horrible gnats.”

So as Lisa was doing some final cleaning (probably dusting, I tend to make myself scarce when the swiffer comes out least I be drafted to participate in this, my least favorite task) I got in the car and headed to Lowe’s to buy something for the gnats.

Now you must understand that we are very tollerant of most insects.  Spiders and beetles and bugs of all sorts are gently relocated should they end up in our house, or if their webs threaten to entangle people walking through doorways.  Even the really big ones are carefully stalked, trapped (usually by Lisa, I have my limits) and moved.  But we don’t similarly embrace the mosquitos, fleas and biting gnats.  We are of the opinion that they are dangerous, and so we don’t lose any sleep over stopping them from doing harm, which unfortunatly usually involves killing them. 

At Lowe’s, I looked at one brightly colored plastic bottle after another. There was bug fogger, bug spray, bug dust, one type of bug killer after another.  I read the labels looking for something that would only kill the gnats, with as little collateral damage as possible.  But what I found was that everything I could buy to kill the gnats would also kill just about every living thing under the deck.  Even the insects that might be already be on our side of this conflict would be harmed. Seemed like the definition of overkill to me.

I left empty handed.  When Lisa asked why I didn’t buy anything I explained that I couldn’t stomach slaughtering every living thing under our deck just because a few of them were causing trouble.  Just couldn’t do it.  She said she understood and was glad I had made that decision.

So we ended up simply making a little request of the gnats that day. Asking them to please take the day off, you know, skip the family picnic. When people came over we offered them our “all natural” bug spray and explained the problem. In the end nobody even noticed the gnats.  Maybe they were on their best gnat behavior, maybe there were enough people on the deck wearing bug spray that the gnats decided it was better to stay away.

But both of Lisa and I were glad not to have been responsible for hurting thousands of innocent creatures. 

I wonder how Ehud Olmert feels.