Let Our Pride of Love Save Us, Please

I am a voracious reader. Books, stories, tales. They really matter to me. Genre and type do not.

I even love reading the cereal box and highway signs on road trips (just ask my wife, she loves it).

Debating whether I was first a writer or reader is too much like the great chicken and egg debate—just pointless mental masturbation; but I believe I was first a reader inspired to write.

At first I didn’t care what I wrote.

Anything was fine so long as I was telling a story that gets at the heart of what it means to be human: an endless journey of growth, punctuated by amazing adventures in learning.

I actually didn’t care about fame or visibility of any kind, but especially as a lesbian.

In my little heart of hearts, I don’t want who I am to matter to potential readers as much as I want the story I am telling to matter to readers.

But then I realized something very important, for myself as a reader, and in my profession as a writer . . . something I already knew from my work in Industrial-Organizational Psychology, but just failed to translate to other domains of my life . . . stories matter the most to us when we identify and empathize with the people involved.

For some readers, like me, that probably means identifying with the characters; but for other readers, maybe many other readers, that could mean identifying with the author.

While this doesn’t have to happen on any demographic level, including sexuality, it does have to happen on a genuine level. Even if I don’t necessarily view my sexuality as all that important to my personal identity or career, society does. The world does. And that great external force of perception means my sexuality shapes my experience on a genuinely visible level.


As such, my lesbian voice as an author and in the representation of my characters, is much more than a matter of my pride. Visibly living that pride is the only way I can create a story genuine and artful enough to inspire empathy and spread compassion.

Being visibly proud of my sexuality and telling stories involving characters like me may help others connect to my stories and find what they need. I have so many LGBTQ friends who need evidence that someone accepts them, that someone is proud to know them.

Some of my friends were disowned by their embarrassed families and left homeless as teenagers. Some gave their lives with honor to serve their country and were buried without their still-embarrassed -family at their gravesides. Some were passed over for promotions because their organizations were embarrassed by their identity, and one was shot because she looked a little too butch.

I now realize that when I claim with pride my LGBTQ status, when I use my lesbian identity to proudly create art, I actively help put an end to these horrors. I change the salient story to one of a happy lesbian author, writing about LGBTQ characters who grow beyond hate to find health and happiness.

I hope you will join me in being proud of your identities and above all, in being proud of our ability to accept and love many identities. I hope you will help me change our salient stories.

Please, be proud enough to share who you are, because someone else out there (a reader, another writer, a musician, a mother, a sister) needs to know you too, if we are all ever going to discover how love saves the world.

Rehearsing our first dance for our Texas wedding, proudly supported by friends and family. Credit to AzulOx Photography.

Yea, Verily

The world is going to hell in a hand-basket,
Rolling like a stone with no moss toward the crack-ass of doom.
Because of those lily-livered, over-educated, snowflake liberals?
Because of those myopic, misanthropic, red-neck conservatives?
Because of all the apathetic insufficiently engaged ditzes in-between?
Maybe.
But more likely,
We'll wipe out the human race,
Yea, verily and pass the peons please,
Because of our self-fulfilling prophecy,
Of a world whirling toward gloom.
Yea, verily and pass the pity please,
Because we are convinced,
the problem is too big, spread and deep,
For one person to make a difference
And that making a difference means
Convincing others to see things
From our point of view.
Yea, verily and pass the prejudice please,
Because we don't realize,
Making a difference should mean
Understanding others well enough
To make them secure enough
To find the rare courage required
To do their own internal reflection
Without caving to cognitive bias,
Or debasing in debates over what is fact.
Or I could change course,
Yea, verily and pass the peace please,
I may be any one
of my brothers and sisters
only keepers.
So Yea, verily,
I will own my responsibility
To ask,
"How are you today
And why?"

The Human Recipe

Directions:
1. First, start with the First Law of Thermodynamics since energy is conserved and can neither be created nor destroyed. Mix one part light, one part heat from common sources of decay (e.g. earth, dung, clay, ancestors' ashes, masticated chloroplasts, etc.)
2. Begin kneading the soul, the essence or embodiment of organized energy until photon pair production coalesces into a visible matter and cells begin to shape.
3. Infuse resulting Mitochondrial structures within cells to convert the energy from food into a form that cells can use because there is going to be a lot of replicating. Wait until replication results in egg and sperm cell.
4. Preheat and line a willing womb before gently folding together egg and sperm cells.
5. Embed the fertilized egg into lining of the prepared womb and gestate for approximately 37 to 42 weeks or until aura is golden fresh.
6. Plate Being upon arrival and nurture neural development to keep warm.
7. Finally, garnish with love for a lifetime and serve with a side of entropy to induce recycling.
*Note: Recipe yields ten-fold the expected servings of hubris and hope.

Golden light casts a deep human shadow.

The Slow Road Home

Mother's Day weekend. The traffic on Interstate 10 between Seguin and Houston was snarled. Bullishly stop and go and puke provoking. I realized there was probably little to to lose in taking the longer meandering old Highway 90 route home--maybe I could see something besides the angry red break-lights of dozens of Ford F-150s and bored passengers boring away at smartphone screens.

A few turns later and there was an expanse of open black-top divided by two golden lines stretching onward under towering green Oaks, Cedar Elms, and Caddo Pecan trees. In the gaps between foliage, the Colorado River glinted silver and gold in the afternoon sunlight. I rolled down my window and the wind rushed in full of the smell of earth and river, resounding with the lazy chirps of crickets and the lonely hum of my tires on the road.

I could feel the size of the smile on my tired face becoming nearly painful. Taking another chance, I turned on the AM radio rather than the XM satellite and from some station near the end of the dial came Woody Herman's swinging 1945 hit, "The Good Earth."

Nostalgia hit like a hammer. 

On just this kind of day in October of 1945, my grandparents took a similar drive along another part of the Colorado River from Bartlett to the county courthouse in Llano, Texas on State Highway 29. 

My grandpa used to tell me that story. He was 36 years old, a divorcee in 1945. His first spouse had wandered away somewhere between the Great Depression and World War II just like my grandma's. They were lucky to find one another, and driving to the Justice of the Peace that day to be married felt like freedom to him. His 1937 Chevy with the mohair interior didn't have a radio and maxed out around 85 horsepower. 

No air-conditioning or heating. 

Their windows would have been rolled down too.

They've both been dead for over a dozen years now, and yet, there they were riding along with me in the sunshine on the slow road home--laughing and contradicting one another. 

"The drive was long. Cars went slower then and the roads were smaller. There was no honey-moon." Grandma shaking her head.

Grandpa looking skeptical. "Yes, there was. There was the drive home. Don't you remember stopping to see the damn and Inks Lake?"

"If I did, then I don't now." Grandma's eyes full of mirth as she fixes him a loving glance.

I'm so glad I took the slow road home. I have missed them.

Parts of the old Spanish trail that eventually turned into one of the first transcontinental highways (Highway 90) and then Interstate 10 are still visible in their 1921 era glory.

My grandfather as young man on the road.

My grandmother, sometimes a reluctant traveler.

My grandparents' 25th wedding anniversary.

A Poem about Real Regrets

Not what I failed to achieve, but...
The dappled light in golden shine,
Sweet bird calls wavering on
The hot Spring breathe of Balsam Pine,
The laughter of children ringing
Cool spells casting under ancient oaks,
I missed.

Not what I failed to accomplish, but...
The thousands of silver coin fish,
Shiny scales glinting madly in
The Summer twilight's cooler wish,
Bright joys exploring open water,
I missed.

Not what I failed to fix, but...
The mottled leaves smelling of Earth,
Crunching under feet fixed on path,
And smoking sultry on home's hearth,
The brewing tea and steeping fall,
I missed.

Not what I failed to find, but...
The whole days getting lost,
Giving time and chance to Love,
Happy despite Winter's cost,
Curled beside warmer forms,
I missed.

These regrets are
The real guilt 
complex.

#BeMightyWrite and explore.