Have you ever seen the rain?

Love is a scary thing and I guess we have to hide from it sometimes.  Sometimes I go to great lengths to avoid the exact thing that I want more than anything.  I am crazy, I know.

I fall in love far too frequently and the dangers of this sordid act of abundant love has finally manifest as violence.  As I told one of the Koreans at The Ranch, the one who told me I have "kind eyes", "I have a lot of love to give; maybe too much."

Just as water flows into our body through the mouth and out as urine, just as we receive stimuli and express ourselves, so it is that the more love we allow in the more love we have to share.  I am not deluded in my experience of a universe full of love.  This is what I naturally encounter and despite the conclusions of my ego I am not unique in this experience.

I do choose openness and I do not understand why someone would choose to include me in their game of opening themselves up and then guarding the door.  Sometimes it's too scary to become close to someone via intimacy and honesty, so obsessive confrontational attention is employed.  In this world the physical fight is the act of making love that all such intense relationships must eventually reach as a breaking of the tension, as a climax and release.

Sadly, in my world there is a fear of the fight and a revulsion of physical pain.  Otherwise perhaps I would have chosen to fulfill the destiny of my union with the self-proclaimed Alpha Male who has captured my mind more in my hate for him than in the love that preceded it.

And now that I have conveniently distanced myself from his violence and aura of hatred in some guise of self-preservation I find myself missing him more than anyone in that brief family of cherry-picking and joy-riding.

Did his love suddenly become hate or are the two not so different after all?  Is his behaviour any more strange than my responding to his "love" with "love" and my responding to his "hate" with "hate"?  I do know that the +/- designations we apply to things are arbitrary.

So many times I wanted to touch him and did not.  I never told him about my homosexual nature because I knew he would not relate to this word as I used to.  He sensed it all, of course, it was never invisible.

He finally manifest this apparently mutual desire to touch one another and establish our connection firmly in the physical world; he manifest in the way that he could; he manifest in a way I never would have; he manifest what we both desired and what I could not and I rejected his as he would have rejected my physical advances.

It never occurred to me until now that the hate might be love and that what I am running away from is perhaps not as honourable or justified as I thought.  My emotions are the best guide I have in this world but it's not until they  have passed that they make any sense to me.  It's not until I have made unalterable decisions, such as the decision to reject and escape his "inappropriate" attention, that I am able to reconsider the complexity of the situation and my morally neutral part in it.

I also realise that this beautiful linguistic realisation could not have been shared in the context of emotional repression both twins are in the habit of perpetuating.

I am a stronger man as a result of his love and a wiser man as a result of his hate.  I can only hope that my loving presence briefly in his life enriched his person, that my hate was the response he wanted to his violence and that he remembers me fondly.  Hopefully when I see him again my ego won't dictate my response and maybe I'll even get a hug from him and his brother.

If I am sorry for anything it is that I did not fight him.  Perhaps he would not have beaten me to within an inch of my life as he is likely physically capable.  Perhaps he would instead have drawn the line where we are evenly matched and our anger could have been channeled into passion.

Perhaps it is not so anomalous that in between the two times he physically attacked me he told me, "Your smile is a sign of true happiness and it brings happiness to everyone around you."  Or that as the rain poured, amidst the craziness and the flooding and the maggots of The Ranch, he pulled me aside to sing,
  I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?
  I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain
  comin' down on a sunny day?

The sacred fire

The fire is sacred and all us humans are responsible for it.  Some feel the need to protect the fire with rules, others prefer anarchy and the acknowledgment of an inherent respect.  But the humans know.  After food circle they gather in the warmth around the fire.  They stare into its flickering flames and don't even notice how silent their usually chattering minds have become.  They stare in silence or share intense conversations or dance joyfully with drums and didgeridoos.  The humans love their fire.

When the humans sense the coming of heavy rain, via meteorological reports, they take immediate action.  A dozen young men shed their clothes, carefully placing them beneath shelter and run naked together up the hill where the trees are free to grow.  They find the heaviest and most solid fallen logs and haul them onto collective shoulders.  They drag dead trees down the hill, damaging more regrowth than they would ever admit to.  As the rain starts to fall on their naked sweating scratched skin and the dry earth they throw more and more wood onto the fire and watch it spread outwards and upwards.  They watch the heat-filled pile of hot coals build into quite an intense mound and quickly ignite any new log that is thrown upon them.  As the rain grows heavier the fire crackles and hisses and the water quickly evaporates but the fire is strong and resilient.

The humans gather in the heavy pouring rain around the fire.  They shed their superfluous clothes despite the cold of the rain.  They dance and they drum with more ecstasy than usual.  They feel a hysterical powerful energy surge through their bodies from the earth or from the fire or from the rain they are trampling into mud beneath their feet.  They turn their heads up the sky and scream and howl at the thick wet clouds.  Their joy has expanded beyond any usually conceivable bounds and can only really be described as an intense exhilaration about life itself.  How wonderful and beautiful it is to be alive and experience this world with such immediacy and unrestrained physicality.  They are connected but they are so completely contained within their own bodies.  They stare at each other with an unacknowledged and complete acceptance and they stare at the fire without a single thought.

The rain gathers in puddles around the fire pit and a single human runs for a spade.  He steps closer to the fire than is natural to remove the soaking soil and create a trench for the water to gather in.  Despite the cold rain the fire scorches his flesh and so he slaps handfuls of mud onto his thighs and his stomach and his arms and his face.  The mud hardens and his skin is protected but still burned red in the gaps between the mud.  More mud and more rain and more heat and the exhaustion and weight of the dirt bring his body something transcendent of joy.

Kids play in the mud, piles of soil gather around the fire and naked bodies cover themselves in the ashy mud.  The trench is dug and the water gathers and draws away from the precious sacred crazy fire.  When the humans are not dancing in primitive manic natural ecstasy they stand cold on one side hot on the other, drying and wetting their bodies simultaneously in the elemental dichotomy of the moment.

The sweaty invigorated trench-digger runs down to the river to wash away his exhaustion and is followed by another beautiful young man with a vigorous healthy body.  They throw themselves into the cold moving water and scrub each others' flesh with sand, scraping the greasy mud from each others' pores and experiencing the firmness of each others' muscles and the softness of the mud-cleaned skin.  They dip in again to wash away the sand and emerge with an invigoration, immediacy and profound cleanliness that feels like birth.

Convenience and control

And today I sit inside in the rain in the early morning remembering little of my dream in which I watched it raining inside.  Why does it not rain inside?  What are we trying to protect ourselves from?  Every day is the same inside.  I have complete control over the environment, so I am able to stabilise, micromanage, confidently predict the outcome of every day.  It's convenient.  I know what to expect.  Because only the right people are allowed inside I know exactly who will be in my life each day, no intrusion by unwanted strangers who may challenge or disturb me in some way; who may move me to do something out of my plans, something unexpected.  If I want to surprise myself or move out of my comfort zone, I of course need to plan it first; otherwise I won't be ready and then who knows what could happen.  It is very important to me that this all stays nice and calm and that I am not challenged by anything that is too real for television.  Television is a good companion because I know that everything on it stays safely below a certain level and I need not worry about being surprised by it.  If I want something else I am free at any moment to walk out into the unknown, into the rain even; though why would anyone walk out into the rain, they would only get wet, and noone wants to get wet.  I want to stay in here where it is dry and I have internet access and television and all my food preserved in the fridge and the freezer.  I live in the 21st century and so have everything I need to survive.  I have convenience and I have control, what more is there?  What more is there?