Ousting the Ampersand: All I Needed to Know about Moving from Monogamy to Polyamory I Learned in Kindergarten [short essay]

A common misconception about polyamory is that it’s all about sex. That it’s one constant orgy or swinger’s party. I am not the person to hold up as proof against this misconception. After I finally came out as Poly, I tried to clarify our new situation to my husband, with whom I combined DNA twice (we have two kids), and about whom I’m not allowed to talk in front of certain friends saddled with lesser men as mates. I remember—with no small amount of shame—screaming at him that I’d fuck who I wanted, where I wanted, when I wanted. He’s the type who doesn’t ever, ever cry or even come close to crying, but there he was, on the verge of tears, and begging me to go slower.

This wonderful man has earned the right to be with me, dubious right that it seems to be, and to be loved and respected. I have never had to get up with either of our two children in the night unless he’s out of town. When I was breastfeeding, he brought the little poop machines to me and took them away again so I could stay mostly asleep. He’s seen me through debilitating anxiety and insomnia episodes. He’s accepted me, warts and all, even my obsession with picking his zits.

Don’t even get me started on his phantasmagoric kissing prowess and steady sensuality.

All bets were suddenly off, though, and my ninja-kissing, feminist, baby-wrangling husband was told if he needed to end things with us, I would understand, but that I could no longer deny who I am and have always been.

Being poly is the latest celebrity sex trend. Polyamorous or rumored-to-be-poly celebrity couples have made headlines, including Will Smith & Jada Pinkett, Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie, and even Dolly Parton & her reclusive hubby Carl Dean. I am reminded of Amanda Palmer’s song, “Ampersand,” as I type out those couples’ names: “And I’m not gonna live my life on one side of an ampersand/And even if I went with you, I’m not the girl you think I am.”

There at the top of the stairs, yelling at my husband, I wasn’t just acting out like a teenager rebelling against a repressive father, I was conducting surgery, without permission or anesthesia, gouging the ampersand from my life and my baby daddy’s heart.

But I swear I was poly long before that, and long before it was cool. And long before I was in a position to hurt anyone because of it.

I still remember Bridget’s soft, long braids and Veronica’s fierce black bob, and how we’d brush each other’s hair on the playground, tell each other “I love you,” and imagine our wedding. We had no idea we were supposed to marry men, or that three people aren’t usually put on top of a wedding cake. Mrs. Tilson, our kindergarten teacher—that bitch!—discovered us playing doctor under our coats at naptime. I guess no one told us we weren’t supposed to consummate our pretend wedding on school property, either. So that was the end of that. [Bridget! Veronica! If you’re out there, call me! Our love will never die!] Thereafter, I ascribed to the normal grade-school monogamy rituals, including writing Todd Doane’s name over and over in 4th grade on my Trapper Keeper until he was nice enough to give me his football jersey and sit awkwardly with me on the bleachers at games.

After a few failed attempts at being “open” with some of my long-term partners, which failed mostly due to my jealousy and a desire to have freedom but not give it, I decided it just wasn’t the life for me. I was what’s known as a serial monogamist. Every relationship ended in me cheating on my partner. This is often cited as a problem with monogamy, the nonconsensual nature of the non-monogamy that is still so frequently—if secretly—practiced.

My relationship with aforementioned, much shit-upon baby daddy had been my most faithful one yet. 8 years together, no cheating (well, some slippery boundaries… hey, I’m still me), and previous to the moment of my radical departure from what some would call my sanity, we’re totally domestically blissed out. [Did I mention he runs marathons? And cooks?] I was totally into threesomes, though, as a self-described rampantly bisexual woman. I guess I prove that negative stereotype of the bi woman, too: no one can choose just one!

It took me a few years, but I finally talked my sensuous, but not-really-kinky man into a threesome. It was super successful (no drama!), so I broached the topic of being fully open. This time, I respected my mate so much (as well should I, right?) that I did the unthinkable. I offered true equity. He was free to get it in as much as I was. That said, I was fairly certain I was a lesbian. Like, “Hey, my penis box is checked. Lemme find some pussy to play with.” I even joined Tinder to make this a reality, and I checked the “women only” box. I spent a couple months swiping left and right.

Imagine all our surprise when, on a trip to France, I met what poly folks call a game-changer. And this game changer had (has!) a penis. I’m not sure how much that penis had to do with my baby daddy’s extreme reaction. More likely, it was the way I introduced the boyfriend’s existence into our lives. All bets off, all gates thrust open, and I quickly became the poster child for the complaint about polyamory: “It’s all about sex! You’re greedy!”

I have more sex than anyone has a right to, it’s true. Making the beast with two backs (or three backs!) so often has had the unintentional benefit of helping me finally lose the 2nd-baby weight. My constant-sex weight loss plan has had some unintentional detriments, too. One of my escapades became the rock bottom from which I’ve begun to re-build my wrecked life.

I met her online. She moved to my city, and we met up in animal-print onesies for brunch. We went back to her apartment and immediately proceeded to take off our adult pajamas in a scene much surpassing most hetero males’ fantasy of what girls do during sleepovers.

It being a week before Thanksgiving, and her being new in town, I thought the sensible thing to do was invite my one-day stand to our big friends and family potluck. Where my husband, boyfriend, and two kids would all be.

When she arrived, her first action was to grab my ass in front of god and everyone. Keep in mind this woman is around 6 feet tall, a stripper, and a dominatrix. Which is hot. But she’s also a self-admitted alcoholic, which is, you know, not. The rest of the party was basically her drinking and trying to stuff me like I was the turkey. My invite had said, “Thanksgiving Potluck: Twice the Leftovers, Thrice the Cuddles.” It seems she’d read it, “Thanksgiving Gangbang: Twice the Whiskey, Thrice the Drama.” To deal with my anxiety over her aggressive presence, I thought the sensible thing to do would be to get stoned. Really, really stoned. Stoned beyond the ability to function. Certainly stoned beyond an ability to effectively fend off this she-beast bent on deflowering me.

I found my boyfriend and begged him to defend my honor. Ok, I actually just begged him to hide me until I could sober up enough to deal with the interloper.

Meanwhile, she’s got my husband cornered and is yelling at him that we’re “doing Poly wrong” (no shit, Sherlock!) and that he shouldn’t keep me from her. I decided enough was enough, and I went to confront her. I came in on her telling him he should let me do whatever I wanted to do whenever I wanted to do it. Something in me snapped hearing my own words from my teenage rebellion moment on the staircase repeated back to me. I finally found my voice. My voice told her who the fuck did she think she was? What kind of party did she think this was? I’m not a 7-11! Get out!

I am grateful to her whiskey-soaked overcompensating presence in my life that night. I’ll tell you why. After she left, I shakily told my husband and boyfriend that they were enough for me. That I was only going to date them for a while. They shared a smile common to those who’ve bonded through defeat of a common enemy. They high-fived. Hell, if I’d known this would help them connect, I’d have invited some psycho domme home much, much sooner!

Since then, I’ve been trying to be a good girl, or a better one at least. I’m trying to get this right after my initial eggs-to-the-wall plunge. I’ve been doing my reading. Poly on Purpose, Opening Up, More Than Two, and, of course, The Ethical Slut. I’ve been doing my apologizing. Please Forgive Me, I Didn’t Mean It, I’ll Try Harder, and, of course, You Deserve Better Than Me. I’ve been setting some boundaries. “We Can Discuss My Intentions Before I Act on Them.” “I Can Go Slower Sometimes When You Need Me To.” “I can totally keep myself from fucking my boyfriend loudly for hours in the house while you’re also home.”

Sometimes, it’s best to be discreet. Which is something I could have used knowing in kindergarten when that bitch Mrs. Tilson ruined the purest experience of love I’ve ever had. Before she screwed it all up, I really did learn a lot of what I needed to know in kindergarten. I was never suspicious of what Veronica and Bridget did when I wasn’t around. Maybe they were making cootie catchers with some other kids at recess, but it didn’t matter. I knew how to be present in each moment, and not predict the future in scary ways. I didn’t wonder whether them banging out erasers after school with Mandy was going to lead to me being replaced in our naptime shenanigans. [Seriously, Bridget and Veronica: I miss you! Call me!]

I’m trying to get back there. I’m trying to be who I am in each moment, and offer the love and respect my two lovers deserve. It’s a balancing act, and we’re nowhere near anything like a role model for Poly love. And that’s the hard thing about all this: there just isn’t a role model to follow. I have no idea what I’m doing, no matter how many smart Poly texts I read. So I guess this is where I have to keep writing. Writing into my new life, moment by moment, line by line.

Forced Rhymes: An Ode to Fist-Fucking [what the subtitle said]

Forced Rhymes: An Ode to Fist-Fucking

On the concrete we made soft as a bed,
your fingers feathering and my clutching
rips your shirt. Sorry I’m not, but I said
I was sorry. The sound like your touching

unmaking me each stitch by stitch by stitch.
Your fingers in time, my frayed jerking hips.
I tell you that I could tell we would fit
From the first kiss you stole with flagrant lips.

And I hate to rhyme, and that last one sucked,
Forced punctuation, the high makes me blunt.
You and your sugar fist, with which you fucked
up so many faces, and now my cunt.

Call & Response: A Conversation [a sexy poem]

Call & Response: A Conversation

She:
My mouth
Shape it in your mind
Like an audio jack
The place where you make so much music come out of me
Put it in your veins.
Mainline me.

He:
My cock
Make it with your mouth
Like a taut drum
The place where you make me beat such rhythms
Put it on your ear drums
Hear me.

She:
My eyes
Take them in your hands
Like an electric leash
The place where I am so open
glistening cornea coming clean
Put them in your pockets.
Quell me.

He:
My hands
Read them with your eyes
Like a map in a novel of
The places we’ll go together, our
Rising action, climaxes, the falling.
Put them in your plot holes. Use them to
Write me.

She:
My back
Trace it with your breath
Like a medicine walk
The bridge where you travel
The undulating vertebrate snake of my spine
Put it on your dinner table.
Dig in.

He:
My breath
Stop it with your inner thigh
Like a breathalyzer
The curvy road of your hips
Catching exhaling stutters
Collect me like a gutter.
Let me in.

meeting the moment [journal-type musings]

Even though I've deepened my yoga practice in the last year, and now practice multiple times weekly, if not daily (yet), I am no expert. Many things about yoga still strike me as odd, obscure, or downright offputting. For instance, the fact that I can't find a yoga shirt that doesn't ride up my mom belly in forward fold; the Sanskrit names for the poses, even the ones I've done thousands of times; and the reference to one side of my body as "masculine," and the other as "feminine."

One yoga pose in particular has always held the same importance for me as the peppermint that restaurants put on the plastic credit card tray. [Who eats that thing?] It's the "holding your hands at your heart, palms touching" one. [No, I don't know what it's called in Sanskrit.] Well, lo and behold, I finally understand it, and funnily enough, my dead cat explained it to me.

She's been coming around a lot lately. Not in a Sixth Sense for cats "I see dead felines" sort of way, but not entirely unlike that, either. I keep getting this impossibly tangible sensation of her hair on my palm.

The only part of her recovered from the coyotes was a tuft of her magnificent rusty-colored fur. I couldn't be counted on to brush it daily, but I took her like clockwork to the vet for a lion cut. I wanted to keep that fur from multiplying in the corners and under the beds. After she was gone, of course, I forbid sweeping the house. I missed the scraps of kitty litter getting stuck to my feet, even as I used to curse them. Eventually, my non-sentimental partner did sweep, did remove her litter box, and her food bag. I felt betrayed.

For a while, when I felt her ghost fur in my hands, I would go get the morbid little tuft in its plastic bag in my sacred box (next to my mother's wedding ring, an empty bottle of her perfume, a wooden spool that belonged to my grandmother, etc. and etc. and etc.) I thought about how I never let my cat sleep with me (she might have woken me!), and how she eventually stopped trying, even when I changed my mind. I thought about all the ways I hide from the present moment, thinking of the future or fearing it. Clinging to the past.

I thought of the whole "power of now" cliche. And it started to make more sense. If my cat's death was going to teach me anything, it would be something to do with this.

A dear friend and I have decided to get a friend tattoo. Since we rejected our partners' suggestion to get their names, but cut in half, like an ink version of the old friendship necklaces, we are left wanting a suitable alternative. In conversation recently, we focused on some central lessons we were both getting out of our yoga class, trying to visualize them. One lesson I'd begun to think of as "meeting the moment."

As we were talking about how this concept could be worked into our tattoo, I started using my hands to explain it. I gave the example of a friend she and I were both in the process of "dumping." No regularly chatty patty, this man. Logorrhea, thy name is... well, his name. He overdetermines the moment with constant verbal streaming. He was abused so severely as a child that he likely will never be able to trust others enough to allow them equal space. Listening requires a high degree of vulnerability. When you listen, you're taking something into you, perhaps even letting it change you thereby. As I was discussing him, I pushed one hand against the other and steamrollered past it.

Then, I talked about how some people hide from the moment, and I withdrew that hand, and held it away from its mate. Then I said, "but this is meeting the moment." I put my hands together, with just the right amount of pressure.

I realized I was doing that throwaway yoga pose! Except it was no throwaway pose! I always wanted to stand in a way that stretched my wrists, or with my arms up so I could work on my tight shoulders. The pose was so passive. Or something. And--hello yoga retard!--so absolutely profound!

Often, when we do this pose in yoga, we're singing a Sanskrit chant that means, in part, "My body is a temple." You've heard that phrase before. So have I. I always thought it meant "Eat well; make good decisions; you only get one body; blah blah blah." But it means something more like, "The body is a sanctuary. It's the interface between the self and the divine." [It's hard for me to use that word, "divine." That's another part of yoga I'm still working on, its discussion of a higher power.] My body is the vehicle through which I experience everything; it's the meeting place. How fully I am living in my body determines whether I meet the moment (or don't).

It's a constant struggle for me, to embrace life's loose ends. I strive to meet the moment, the ways my hands meet, just at that point of perfect surface tension, just at that point of sensual awareness.

Leaving my car the other day, I had this brilliant flash of total acceptance. I saw Titus's toys and aborted art projects strewn about my car, and I started laughing, not upset at having a messy car, but ecstatic to have a healthy son, to have that "detritus of Titus," the little littered proofs of his existence. Recently, I stopped taking Trazadone to facilitate sleep. I still use earplugs, and often have to sleep alone, but I'm making my way to being a former insomniac, to becoming a person who doesn't need to sequester herself.

My dreams have come back. Last night, the dream was the moon through a window, and a 2-D representation of the goddess of Spring. She morphed into a neon green and electric flowing 3-D depiction, one that Android Jones would be proud to call his own. I woke up briefly, feeling blessed by that subconsciously generated art. I didn't freak out, "Oh god, will I ever get back to sleep?!" I enjoyed the residual image, and I let its visual lullaby lead me to Lethe.

If Bast (my cat) had been there, I might have looked down and remembered she was named for the goddess of fertility, and maybe she would have been laying next to my "feminine side," and maybe I would have thanked her for giving me the dream.

the believing game [yoga-inspired musings]

Perhaps my most heart-felt blog to date has been this one about my yoga experience. After steadily increasing my yoga practice over the last year, I became a member of Karma studio this month. I see this monetary commitment as a real step forward in putting my money where my heart and health are.

I think it's also a way of putting my family's heart and health first. Titus and I have our every-Saturday-morning practice, which we've been doing for 2 years now! Yoga is becoming so central to his life that this past weekend, he created a yoga-themed game. He took a piece of art he'd made, and converted it into "Yoga Game," which has the slogan (that he wrote out), "Go guys! Play the game!" It consists of grass, flower, rain, wind, and cloud poses. He had us roll dice, and do whatever pose we landed on. We played this game for over an hour, and it was as much fun as anything I've ever done.

In my own yoga practice last weekend, I attended a 3-hour Sankalpa yoga class in Boulder with my ridiculously fit and incessantly inspiring friend, Heather. The stereotype of the hardcore Boulder-ite athlete hit home as I watched half the class do headstand poses I hadn't known existed. When folks did the Dolphin headstand one-armed, I knew I was outclassed. I did manage to get into Bridge pose for the first time in years, with the help of the Anusara-based teacher's specific positioning instructions. I (think I) finally understand what "inner underarm" and "top of the arm bones" mean.

The most useful part of the class for me was the meditation in the beginning. He asked us to think about "what does your heart want?" My initial reaction: "vague! lame! My heart's an internal organ, you hippie!" My secondary reaction: "well, I'm not going to sit here obsessing over my relationship or my cat dying, that's for sure."

Of course, as I sat and attempted to clear my mind for pure thoughts my teacher would be proud of, I started obsessing over just those things. I realized if I wanted to break the chain of confusing, insecure, and sad thoughts, I'd have to be in the moment, and ask myself the damn question, "What does my heart want?", after all. Grr. Damn hippie yoga instructor. Fine.

Images came to me, not words. I saw Titus making a face at me, a pretend angry face, and felt myself making it back. He'd done this to show me I was being pointlessly irritable and to re-engage me. I saw myself in the halls with a student who'd had a particularly growth-filled experience in my class and who'd researched Carl Jung's "nigredo" as a way of looking at her recent "dark night of the soul." Various other images flooded my mind. After enjoying them, I realized they were all of one type: moments of expressive connection, contributing to mutual health.

That is what my heart wants. That's at the core of Stina. Expressive connection, contributing to mutual health.

Great. The little school girl that I still am inside, proud to have a right answer, wrote that under Question #1 in my internal test book.

Right on cue with my small enlightenment, the teacher asked his next question. "How can Yoga help you achieve this?" Ooh, "pick me! pick me!" Immediately, I thought: flexibility! Wait, this isn't a fill-in-the-blank quiz. It's short answer, so I thought further than that.

I thought about what flexibility really is. It's the ability to relax into discomfort, to let go of what's not serving me, of tightness and rigidity I don't need. It's been cited as more important for health than strength (and as necessary for good sex), and I think it is a kind of strength, the strength of the willow tree.

If we truly want to connect with someone through acts of expression, we have to be flexible. We won't get much (aside from conflict at best and inauthentic experiences at worst) if we come to an act of co-creation with only our own agenda, unwilling to waver from it in truly collaborative fashion. Anyone who's ever been part of a play or a huge building project knows this.

I thought of how I could have remained stiff when Titus made that face at me, but instead, I relaxed, returned the face. I stuck to my guns about whatever boundary he'd been testing, but I kept my mothering strength. I was able to give him (and myself) the reassurance he needed to know I still loved him; we were still connected.

It's not easy to do this. How much of ourselves can we let go and still be ourselves? How can we be sure we'll get what we want? Well, Yoga can help us re-see that question. It can help us get what we need, which rarely has anything to do with certainty. Yoga can help us achieve a balance of flexibility and strength that makes our insecure questions less scary.

So of course, at this point, just when I'm on top of the world with all my right answers, and the easiness of this whole meditation thing--pshaw!--back in come thoughts of the problematic areas of my relationship and the dead cat.

Crap.

Return to the question. What does my heart want?

Return to the answer. Expressive connection resulting in mutual health.

So, why do I mourn my kitty, Bast? Surely not for her own sake. She is no longer in pain. But for my own sake, I mourn her. I mourn the end of connection, the end of her effect on my blood pressure, the end of my making her purr.

Given this, is my sometime unease in my human relationship really rooted in our lack of a verbalized public statement of long-term intentions (marriage)?

No.

I fear lack of connection in the NOW, which is making me care overmuch about the future. The symbol of commitment has become more important than the commitment itself. This compensatory measure is common to us humans. You see it when a parent with a troubled household obsesses over putting "perfect" pictures of their children in frames on the walls. You see it when a man stresses his masculinity to prove he still has it. We put up the facade to hide what's not working underneath.

At this point, I could have turned to thoughts like, "Whaaa! Why don't we have more authentic, mutually expressive connection? What's missing? What am I/is he doing wrong?"

Thankfully, yogic meditation had granted me that spacious mindset that makes this sort of finger pointing seem as pointless as it is.

Return to the question. "How can yoga help me achieve this? How can I allow for more connection in the now?"

Return to the answer. I can relax into the uncomfortable areas. Instead of thinking about what I want, and how I want love to be manifested, I can listen to my partner's non-verbal expressions of love.* He has often asked me to "read his actions." What if I tried actually doing this, even though it's out of my comfort zone? What if I tried to see him for what he is, truly observe him, versus some vision of what I think he should be? What do I stand to gain? [See Peter Elbow's "The Believing Game" for more thoughts on this way of question asking.] If my partner also engages the process of loving in this way, if we both pay attention to what the other one needs vs. just expressing and projecting our own needs, what do we both have to gain?

A) Mutual expression resulting in connection and increased health for both parties
B) Happiness
C) Nookie [SFW, I swear!]
D) All of the above.

Ooh, pick me! I know the answer!!! D! It's D!!! [And hopefully lots of C!]

*If you haven't heard of the Love Languages, I recommend them to you. I am grateful that my partner's dominant love language is physical affection, as is mine, such that when things get tough, we return to the nuzzle and the cuddle, the hand hold and the kiss.

open letter to a 4th grade dancer in the borrowed leotard [letter to former self]

I see you've chosen to dance for your 4th grade 4-H talent competition. You have recorded a song called "Miss Red" off the radio, and you have danced your heart out to it every night for weeks. You don't know much about professional dancers, but you have noticed they tend to wear leotards on TV, so you borrow one from a friend. It was part of her Halloween costume last year. She dressed as a devil. So, in your red borrowed leotard, you take the stage, which is really just a place in the cafeteria where they moved the tables over.

Afterward, you'll wish no one had been watching you dance like no one's watching. You'll cry for a half hour in the back bathroom stall after Jason Mullinax and his entourage of meanies ask you for your autograph sarcastically, as you turn as red in the face as the borrowed leotard. You won't realize until adulthood that part of the problem, but only the smallest part, was playing an R & B song to a country and rock crowd.

In this moment, though, you're following your bliss, and you are totally immersed in the dance. When it is taken from you, you spend years getting back to it.

Last week, you made a new friend at a dance event you attend weekly, where everyone dances their hearts out. No one is worried about how they dance on TV. No Jason Mullinaxes wait in the wings to humiliate you. You do see a few men who could have been him, though, who seem to have changed their mind about this dancing business, but don't yet know how. You always make a point of going over to them, drawing them out, bringing them in.

Because another thing you have realized in adulthood is that you weren't really the awkward one back then.

You ask your new friend if you can borrow her outfit for your first ever belly dance performance the next week. She is glad to loan it to you. You spend last night at this event practicing your upcoming routine in this borrowed blue homemade beauty of an outfit. The belly dancers in the room draw you in, make you feel supported.

This morning, on the way to perform, you're nervous and out of sorts. You can't put your finger on the reason. You love to dance, why should you be so irritable? That old R & B song, "Miss Red" comes on the radio. You instantly realize that you still fear Jason Mullinax and his entourage of meanies. You don't fear them in any real, embodied form, but you've internalized his voice mocking you, and you still use it against yourself. The infectious beats of this classic song cause you to car-dance the voice away, and you resolve to write this letter to your 4th-grade self.

I want you to know that I was watching you dance, girl. And even if no one else in that middle school cafeteria would agree, I LOVED IT!

Buddha Speaks to Bad Mom [yoga-inspired musings]

December 4 – Wonder. How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

My answer: YOGA!

In fact, I just went to yoga with my son for the first time this morning! He's been watching me stretch at home and mimicking me, so I thought it was time. I found this wonderful studio near my house called Karma Yoga, and so we went.

At the end of my class, I heard Titus (in the other room) say "I'm hungry!" I suddenly felt anxious, tightly drawn, like I should hurry up and get out of my dead-corpse pose and back to the real "business" of my day.

But because I'd had such a good teacher, who'd helped me relax so fully, I was in a patient place. I could have reactions but also observe them, and I realized that my reaction was strangely based in some sense that Titus was making an accusation. "Why haven't you fed me?! Why didn't you bring me a snack?" i.e., Why are you a bad mommy. I laughed outloud, shirking my misreading of what was just his honest expression of a feeling. I realized i was projecting my own fears that I might mess things up, not provide for him adequately, etc.

How beautiful that he has a working body with which to FEEL hunger! How beautiful that i have every ability to meet his needs! I felt such relaxation, such joy, and I was able to see him more clearly for what he is: a willful but sweet little boy who isn't afraid to express himself.

Laying there on my mat, I thought of my mother. i remembered how I usually spend this moment blaming her for my fear of criticism, thinking of how critical she was. Instead of having that feeling, though, I had compassion for her. I thought about why she might've been so critical. If I could so massively misread my son, what was she hearing instead of hearing me?

How often do we only hear others through our own projected fears? What a wonderful thing to see through the veil sometime!

As we stood in the vestibule, putting our shoes back on, Titus asked me, "Who's that?" pointing at a statue of Buddha. The statue had a water effect, and a little light burbling in the center of a water effect, at Buddha's heart. I said, without thinking, "that's Jesus's friend, Buddha, like in the song, 'Oh Jesus, I love you, and I love Buddha, too.'" You see, my son has been attending a Christian daycare, and as a wayward agnostic who laughs along when the more diligent atheists mention the "flying spaghetti monster," I have my concerns about his learning concepts I cannot agree with: only one path to God, only one face of God, judgement of others. The song "Oh, Jesus I love you, and I love Buddha, too" is such a beautiful expression of faith. Because it honors all paths, I've been drawn to it and sing it with Titus often, even though I supposedly lack this thing called faith. Why then, do I talk freely about "walking my path"? Isn't that a matter of faith?

Reflecting on the lyics of that song, there in karma yoga's vestibule, the veil lifted further. More projection was revealed. My fears for my son have nothing to do with genuine concern for his well-being. I don't need to fear for him in this way. My fears have more to do with my own past experience in churches that talked about hellfire and brimstone as often as the compassion and glory of letting go, letting God. The churches, and some of the believers I encountered in my own childhood, had hate for (fear of) difference, and used religion as a way to wield power through judgement (fear of loss of control, rooted in the economic legacy of my family and region).

It became clearer to me than ever that Jesus has nothing to do with THOSE projected fears, either! Jesus and Buddha really ARE friends! They both can serve as signposts on all of our ways. The song doesn't say, "BUT I love Buddha, too." That fact seems so much more significant to me now than it had before. Choosing to say "and," instead of "but" shows that there's no judgement there, no argument against Christianity. Just an addition. The possibility of connection, not contradiction.

My southern Baptist mother's dying wish had been that I be saved. She had the preacher actually do an "altar call" at her funeral, which is quite unusual. I don't know what "saved" is if not the attempt to see through the veil, this embracing of others for what they really are and loving them, loving ourselves.

Funny thing, veils, when one is lifted, others may also lift. I realized over the period of the next few moments that this was all my southern Baptist mother ever wanted for me: this sense of joyful letting go, this release. I'll never know how often, if ever, she got it, but at least now I know what she was reaching for. During the last few years of her life, her faith deepened, she became calmer, less critical. I have a new respect for her journey, and less concern for the specific name she used for the signposts along her way.

I feel that I carry her with me as I walk, as I run, as I work and play. I like to envision her in Jesus's arms, quite literally now, without "enlightened" agnostic irony. I am grateful for her bringing me here, into this numinous world, this realm where my mind and body cup my spirit, like that little burbling light at the heart of the Buddha statue. And now, when I sing that song with Titus, I can mean the first few words, not just appreciate his intelligent vocabulary. I want to tell my mother, wherever she is, that I have indeed been saved, by ecstatically dancing, by meditating, by always trying to lift the veils.

Last thought on the matter: on the radio later this same day, I heard a Christian Republican senator from South Carolina being interviewed on NPR. He is outgoing, of course, due to all this Tea Party crap, due to his more nuanced understanding and gentle sophistication. I heard the compassion and wisdom in the man's voice. He has always been out of step with his fellow Republicans on the climate change issue. He said that his God told him to be a steward of the Earth, and that he thought we ought to do so. He compared God's people to children. Every time they learn something new, we cheer for them. Their first steps, sentences, etc. He thinks God feels this way about us, happy for our growth, wanting us to use our tools and minds to peek into the divinity of creation. He wouldn't have given us science if he didn't want us to use it, he said.

Another way we try to lift the veil, to see through our own ignorance. Just like religion, science can be misused. But why focus on the misuses? Let's play the believing game and see where we can all go, together, walking our path, holding each other up as we go. I've got you if you've got me.

Oh Jesus, I love You

And I love Buddha too
Ramakrishna, Guru Dev
Tao Te Ching and Mohammed

Why do some people say
That there is just one way
To love You, God, and come to You?
We are all a part of You

You are un-nameable
You are unknowable
All we have is metaphor
That's what time and space are for

Is the universe Your thought?
You are and You are not
You are many, You are one
Ever ending, just begun

Alright, alright, alright
I love You and Buddha too