We can be deceived, so easily it seems, by this dynamic of love as an action word. It is of course true. And yet, many times I have come to appropriate that which I discover I love. Acquisition is not necessarily protection. To take something or someone as one’s own is not always nurturing. Maybe I am not fully developed in this arena, for sure, yet it seems the truest and purest love I have experienced (both receiving and giving) has the room freedom gives. So love liberates. Love teaches. Love alleviates and softens even the most bitter experiences (like grieving). It also demands from me a certain clarity. It is sometimes work. To really see through the fog of struggling with my own conflicting interests and selfishness to find the right path. For my own self interest is often in opposition to the welfare of that which I profess to love. Love can compel sacrifice. And, for sure, it can be like a picnic on a beach in summer. Perfect in its simplicity and with an ease and comfort which overwhelms all pain and stress, worry. That is love we bask in. And I cherish those times as much as anyone. And I know it is not simply this. It is not always easy.

Paying attention. I am often in a default position of watchman: looking for threats coming from the distance. This is unfortunate, as an artist of sorts, I also, too, can scan my surroundings for something or someone of beauty. What helps is a thirst for beauty, a desire to find it. A resistance to the downward spiral that I can sometimes get trapped in that only sees how messed up the world is, and the abundance of gatherable evidence that this is so. And yet not ignore the evil, the warped intensity of our current situation, to hold both. And upon finding the beauty, if I can, point to it, so others might see it.

I have acquired a decent amount of courage over the years, we all do, circumstances demand it. Gratefulness seems to have had a measured effect on the one crippling fear that rears its ugly head from time to time: the fear of what other people think. It’s toxic. And as a creative, it can be disheartening. Gratitude, when applied in these situations, is the perfect antidote. Not because it’s a psychic sleight of hand, as much as it re-grounds me in the fact that what other people think is none of my business. Gratitude for having been equipped, gifted, the wherewithal to ‘know’ right from wrong. It motivates me to get on with the matter at hand: to be the best version of myself I can muster. Not so that it will impress anyone, not even God, as much as it is a reflection of gratitude for knowing that being alive simply means being true, plumb. Without massive internal conflicts and unresolved imbalances. All measured with the internal instruments that truly guide us.

The ancestors in my bloodline have two radically opposed drivers that, in me, blended, have evened out: powerful men on my maternal line, very powerful women on my paternal side. Being male, this has tempered my masculinity. For this I am grateful. But there is also a monastic lineage that, bastardized as it is perhaps, has provided an ability to, in a heartbeat, recollect myself: almost like stopping time, the past and future don’t influence the present as much as usual, and I am able to really see. I am not saying this kind of thing is restricted to monastics, as much as that the years I have spent living in that life have gifted me this, I guess I would call it, skill. The masculine side is heroic, brave, passionate and a bit over eager. The feminine is organized, finds partnerships and collaborators and is creative. Oh and I inherited a great deal of wealth, only to walk away from it. It was the accelerant that could have, no, would have blown my life to smithereens.

In 1981 I was 25 years old, and as a gay man living in Manhattan and very sexually active, I was in the maelstrom of what became known as the AIDS epidemic. At that time we had no name for it. I lost 22 close friends that year. Many more in the coming decade.

Later, when HIV was identified and testing became available, several friends of mine got tested, proved positive, and then descended into anxiety and stress, as there really wasn’t a treatment yet. However, in 1987, with the help of a physician, I made plans to get tested as now there were regimes in place. Before getting tested I made a plan for the worst case, knowing that there was not an insignificant possibility that I would be paralyzed by a positive result.

In those days the test was best taken anonymously as there were still controversies around insurance and so there was a two week delay between taking the test and finding the result.

About a week and a half into the two week period, I had made a decision about all the ways I was going to change my life. Giving up my stressful business, finding quality in each hour, being true to my heart. Minor things like that.

On the day of my appointment to get the results, walking from the transit stop to the clinic in a cold drizzle on a gray depressing day, suddenly I was struck by a question, seemingly not from me, but from God: “why wouldn’t you do those things, make these changes if your result is negative?”

That is a memory I am forever grateful for. I was negative. And walking out of the clinic, standing on the sidewalk, afternoon traffic streaming by, a new life lay ahead.

This is tricky for me. I can decide to care for someone as a response to a feeling of not having purpose in my life. Seek some suitable object for my attention and then they become a kind of project. This is, in my experience, not enriching at all. There is an inauthentic quality that tends to dissipate my lived experience and ‘they’ become a ‘burden’. Now I appreciate how caring can be far removed energetically. Nurses in ICU, lifeguards on a beach, Ski patrol on a mountain…or in my case customers to whom I am providing hospitality, all care with relative anonymity, the lack of any real expectation from them as individuals in return for my care…is somehow important. Also, the enrichment is unrelated to my having to perform any actual direct aid…just standing watch is an act of caring. This is the ‘caring that enriches my life. But hey, I’m damaged.

I am able to spend time in the Everglades and the Keys. These fragile and intertwined ecosystems teach me many things. I am aware of the way these natural systems are able to recalibrate and find balance even after devastating disruptions. Even our current climate which seems at first to be withering the reefs and the brackish bays. Don’t get me wrong, there is damage, there is upheaval. And yet the overwhelming evidence suggests that one way or another life will out. Much may be lost in the process.

I would love to say in my writing, but that wouldn’t be quite true, as the most frequent way I express creativity is in my imaginary life. I walk around most of the time adding things, imaginary things, to embellish my day. Some of them totally made up, but mostly I get triggered to remember something. A place reminds me of somewhere and I imagine I am there…like the place I am is a movie set portraying the other place. Sounds crazy. Likely it is true that I am a bit mad. The thing is, this is a kind of creative drill, so that when something happens in real life, a challenging situation that demands a response, this part of my mind goes into hyperdrive, and it is from here that my response and creative solution will come.

While it is not an embarrassment of riches I have not gone hungry, ever, nor been without a roof over my head, or people that cared about me relatively available if needed. I am poor enough to have a sense of going without just enough to make it possible for me to therefore appreciate what I do have and to alleviate any anxiety that lack of material wealth has a connection to abundance of what really matters: the ability to be true to oneself, free of internal contradictions and the crippling fear that accompanies it that someone will find out, some rather too many good and perhaps lost causes for which to die on a hill for. And my health.

I have had the very good fortune of finding a profession that allows me to practice hospitality as a spiritual practice. When I am doing my job well, I am hospitality embodied: opening one’s life to allow others to use and take what they need, especially if what they need is something I will miss. For in that moment hospitality is truly born, when I experience that this handing over is not a diminishment at all. That in so doing my life is immeasurably richer. So in this way I am using my blessings by making them available to others and we are all the richer for it.

I am home for a brief stay between trips and was looking for something in a box. As I sometimes do, I found a small container in which I must have thrown a bunch of stuff from a bedside table or my desk before moving some years ago…it was sitting on my desk this morning and after reading this question I was pondering my reflection and looked inside it. It was like a time capsule of minutiae including a crumpled piece of paper with this written on one side of it:
“Don’t try to figure this out. Love’s work is absurd, but trying to find meaning will hide it more. Silence.”

And on the other side:

“In every moment there’s dying and coming back around”

It is my handwriting but the provenance of the quote is unknown to me at the moment.