Elements

I sometimes like to look at my own life's development in terms of the elements. When I was growing in the womb, I was like the amniotic fluid in which I resided. I was unconscious, flexible, fluid, malleable. After being born, my body gradually hardened and stiffened. From rubbery newborn, I became a dynamic and aggressive toddler.

Growing from baby to child to adolescent is a hardening process, a process of individuation and forming of more rigid boundaries. More like stone plow than water, as a young adult, I learned to fend off rejections and other assaults on my self image. I plowed a path into a work life. I honed the blade of my plow against the rocks of prejudice, materialism, class and ignorance.

It was familiar and easy to continue to harden as I approached middle age. A certain amount of financial stability made me less dependent on social supports and networks. I had a fixed idea of where my life would go as a plow in the secure, walled field of my life.

The AIDS epidemic represented a boulder far stronger than my plow. It shattered that hardened me. The resulting congregate person, pieced together initially from the old hardened me, fumbled along for a short while. No straight furrows through the intense, changing morass of the epidemic could be plowed. So, I dissolved into it, became part of the soil of the epidemic itself.

By working within the devouring beast, which was decimating my community and my own life, I gradually learned that being more like water than stone worked better for me. Working my way back to the fluidity of my pre-conscious, amniotic self has been a form of liberation. Rebirthing, perhaps.

My practice is leading me gradually to that end point at which I will concretely become like water, like air...simply water vapor, dust and dissipated electromagnetic energy. I believe that approaching that end point, awake and alive, without struggling with the elemental realities of being is perhaps the height of what is means to be human. I also believe that any person who does this will inevitably become a mindful and compassionate creature.