A Prayer Beyond Binaries

By Lindasusan Ulrich

I call myself bisexual because I acknowledge that I have in myself the potential to be attracted – romantically and/or sexually – to people of more than one sex and/or gender, not necessarily at the same time, not necessarily in the same way, and not necessarily to the same degree. –Robyn Ochs

For those who choose “and” in a world that insists on “or”

For those who struggle against invisibility

Even when it means sprinkling your own head with ashes

For those who will not accept dismissal and diminishment of your pain

Instead naming it with precision as callous disregard

For those who bring your whole self to the work of liberation

Whether or not it fits conveniently into checkboxes

Or someone else’s definition

For those who relentlessly widen the circle for others

Including those who would shut you out

This is a prayer praising your beautiful spirit and your courage

This is a prayer honoring your fierceness and your heartache

You’ve carried the trauma for generations

Still too frequently on your own

But we’re building something new –

Something that can only be shaped in the liminal spaces

Where imagination cannot be fenced in

This is a prayer giving thanks for language broken open

Because the only duality you still hold on to

Is to love and to love some more

There’s a reason the collective noun for bisexuals is blessing

May this day of celebration seep joy into your bones

May this day of acknowledgment reflect back to you your worth

May this day of action illuminate your gifts

May this day, and every day, remind you that you are loved beyond all bounds

Simply because you exist.

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The tools and strategies of healing are so innate, so much a part of a common human birthright, that we believers in technology pay very little attention to them. But they have lost none of their power.

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In my own worst seasons I’ve come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. Read more →

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It seems that the older I get, the more I understand the way mortality shapes our perception and our willingness to be fully in this world. It’s not something I used to think about directly—too scary—but now I often find myself reading the obituaries, musing on what I would want my own to say: What are the things that will sum up my life? What will stand out? I know this sounds a little morbid, but as Mother Theresa has said: “Each of us is merely a small instrument; all of us, after accomplishing our mission, will disappear.” I wonder what small things people will remember: my dinner parties on the deck? My love for my dog? My weird obsession with cooking magazines? Will they remember my writing, my teaching, or will they remember a particular morning with coffee, a conversation that delved deeper than expected?

We can’t really know. All we can do is keep learning, until the very end, how to live an authentic life. How to be really here. And we can look to others as teachers in this lesson.

My next-door neighbor, Winton Manley, is just such a teacher for me: He’s ninety-eight years old and still drives his own car. I see him in the afternoons, backing out of the driveway, swerving a little wildly sometimes, but he always makes it safely into the street, then putters away in his white Oldsmobile to wherever it is he needs to go. He takes care of things. He takes care of his wife, Dorothy, who is ninety-four and has such bad arthritis now that she can’t move without her walker. “I have to persuade her to get up,” Winton says to me sometimes, when he walks over to admire my petunias or my pansies. “There are good days and there are bad days.”

I remember so clearly a day last summer, when I saw the two of them sitting out on their new deck in the sun. (Winton had it built because Dorothy can’t get out into her garden anymore; here she can admire her pots of geraniums.) The light glinted off their white, white hair. They were just sitting and smiling, not saying a word, and when I finally waved to announce my presence, Dorothy gazed at me as if I were just the most blessed creature on the planet. Her face looked translucent with love, with her expectation that I was exactly what the doctor ordered.

“A beautiful day!” she exclaimed, in a voice that’s grown so wavery in the years I’ve lived next door. I echoed her, speaking as loudly as I could: “Yes, a beautiful day!” And because I was on my way to my own back patio to do who knows what—some reading, some weeding—and because it would have been exhausting to keep talking in that loud, hearty voice, I just waved again and continued on, leaving them sitting there, nodding, enjoying their beautiful day.

And I know that sometime soon, their daughter or grandson will come to my door and tell me that one or both of them has “passed.” And I know I’ll gasp and say, “I’m sorry,” because I am: sorry not only for their passing, and for a daughter’s grief, a grandson’s pain, but truly sorry for all my moments of inattention, my reluctance to keep talking a few minutes longer, my unwillingness to walk the few steps necessary to chat. I’ll remember all the cucumbers and green beans Winton left on my doorstep—bags of them, more than a single woman could ever eat—and I’ll wish, so heartily, that I’d had even a sliver of such abundance to return.

There’s a poem I love by Miguel de Unamuno called “Throw Yourself Like Seed.” In it he exclaims, “Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field….”

When I consider my life as one defining moment after another, I see that I am most fully alive when I “throw myself like seed,” not holding back. I ask myself: What am I holding in reserve? Why? So I take this as my lesson, allowing Winton and Dorothy to be my unexpected teachers: As much as we can, we must never pass up the opportunity to connect, to be fully with each other and with the world, to make each day beautiful for the time we have.
From The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World by Brenda Miller and Holly J. Hughes. Published by Skinner House in 2012, this book is available from the UUA bookstore  or 617-723-4805.

There is an interactive website for The Pen and the Bell at www.penandbell.com.

By Brenda Miller

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For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past
the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

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