I need to find time to write.

I’ve got words chasing me. Catching up to me. Taking me over. They swirl through my brain, slam me down on the ground. They make me stop walking, dreaming, eating, talking. I scrawl them down in my journal, on scraps of paper, write them on my hand, pray for a few more seconds at the red light so I can get them out before traffic starts moving again, repeat them over and over in my head to try and make them stick.

I’ve got them catalogued all through my overwhelmed mind and body. I’ve got some recorded in my head, there’s that one funny little story I’m storing on the tip of my right pinky finger, a whole bunch of poems living in a tight uncomfortable ball right in the center of my gut, and some beautiful inspiration that wants to dance outward from my heart into my limbs until my arms spread like wings and my feet dance in joy.

I have a sense of how I want to shape them, what I want them to become. I can feel them as they are meant to be when they finally get patched together into some recognizable whole. I can see that white screen filling itself with neat font as my fingers clickety-click along the keyboard, see the pages of my plain black fabric journal filling with the loops and swirls my handwriting takes when I get lost in the flow of pen on paper. I yearn for that sense of contended emptiness that only comes when the words are released, recorded, given a home and purpose and an existence of their own.

I panic when they start to slip away. When I lose their essence in the rush from here to there and this to that. Those words make sense out of the craziness, they knit together the fragments. All these words, they are me, they are my story, they are my world. Where can I put them so that they’ll keep till there is time to gently nurture them to life? How can I keep them relevant while the days and weeks and months keep rushing by? What becomes of the story when the words cease to be? Is a life unrecorded different than what it would have been if it had been written?

It’s the writing that feeds me more than anything, and yet it is the writing that is the first thing to get set aside in favour of editing photos and caring for children and doing school work and washing dishes and surfing blogs and brushing teeth and living life. But if the writing of life gets lost in the living of life, well then I fear that all that living means less, exists less, is simply less. Anne Morrow Lindberg said ‘I must write it out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living’.

I know there is not a writer out there who does not know that feeling of being taken over by the words, that although they are of you, they are also sometimes MORE than you, deeper than you, bigger than you, beyond you. To ignore all these words that want so desperately to become, it feels disrespectful, careless. I feel a responsibility to those words, a sense of mutual ownership that is deserving of my attention and time without any expectation other than that I will honour those words as best as I can.

I need to find time to write.

“And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
And a new one just begun….”

When the unraveling begins, and the world is spinning so fast you can’t tell up from down or right from wrong, there’s just no way to predict where you’ll end up when the vortex finally ceases.

When you’re deep in it, it’s impossibly to see beyond the immediacy of the moment, there is nothing beyond NOW. You know, of course, that there will be collateral damage, but even the most somber imaginings don’t have the power to pull you from the necessity of just taking one more breath, one more step, of getting through just one more day.

Step on a butterfly and change the future. Of course. If even the smallest of actions can alter the course of a lifetime, what of those that fracture a family? And what if you are the one who faced the truth, spoke the words, made the choice?

What then?

And so this is Christmas. Today I will say goodbye to my girls and send them back to the house that never had a chance to become my home. When I kiss them goodbye I’ll know that I won’t be the one to help them put out cookies and milk for Santa. I won’t be there to remind them to include a carrot for the poor overworked reindeer. I won’t tuck them into bed, and kiss them on the nose and recite from memory the familiar words of ‘The Night Before Christmas’.

I wont be with them in the morning, awake far earlier than I deem acceptable because my excited children can’t bear to wait another minute. I won’t see them open the presents I bought to fill their stockings, or see their reactions when they tear into their gift from Santa. I won’t hear their squeals of excitement or witness that gleam of magic in their eyes.

This is my eighth Christmas as a mother, and it will be my first without my children by my side. A part of me cannot bear to imagine tonight and tomorrow morning, and another part of me cannot help but play it through my head over and over again.

Last night at midnight I found myself on the floor of my bedroom closet, door closed so that the sounds of my heartache would not be heard by anyone else in the small two-bedroom apartment we now call home. Hot tears slid down my cheeks and emotions shook my body, crying not just for tonight and tomorrow, but for all the countless moments of our lives that we will not be together. Crying for the reality that my girls will forever be moving between two places, instead of resting securely in one. Crying for him because of all that he has lost in the wake of my truth. Crying because the costs are so much higher than anyone could possibly have imagined. Self pity, grief, and endless, all-consuming guilt – it’s a vicious combination.

But all that has to be put aside right now, because right now they are with me – bubbling with anticipation, ready to bake holiday goodies, decorate the tree, wrap last minute gifts. In the dark of my closet in the middle of the night it was time to let my tears flow and succumb to the shadows, but now it is time to lift my head and open my eyes to countless blessings, to hold my girls close and to bring them as much joy and gratitude and peace as possible in the hours that they are here. To open my heart and knock down walls between love past, love present, and love future and to let all of those pieces mingle and flow.

And so this is Christmas….and it won’t ever be the same again. But within the changes, within the loss, within the grief – perhaps there is beauty to be found, gifts of a different kind, wholeness hiding amidst the broken pieces. All I can do is hope.

I suppose some of you feel as if I dropped a bomb on you, then began repeatedly whacking you on the head with a 2x4, while simultaneously doing the can-can wearing nothing but a g-string - what with my abrupt and unceremonious coming out and immediate segue into gay rights activism. I apologize – the timing was such that things got a lot bigger than me very quickly.

It’s WAY bigger than me, but I’ve got a year-long backlog of wanting to talk to you all about this. You, the people I’ve grown to know over the past eight years through this modern village that is the blogosphere. People who have become real to me, who have inspired me to continually push harder, dig deeper, expose more - because I have learned that at the heart of it all we are all seeking connection. For more than a year the timing was not right to share, and so there is so much that has been stifled, shut down, turned off as I waited to be ready.

And now here we are, my public coming out coinciding with a national rollercoaster - unprecedented levels of election fever, great triumph with Obama’s election and heartbreaking loss as voters in four states decided that gay rights were not human rights, that MY rights were not human rights.

I believed, long before I even contemplated the fact that I would one day belong to this community, that equality can know no exception. Now I feel this at my very core. To walk down the street and know that more than 50% of the people that surround me every day believe that I am less than, not deserving of, immoral, disgusting, deviant, unworthy…unless you have experienced this, there is no way for me to fully communicate to you the reality.

And so there is no way for me to remain silent. To do so would be to deny myself, my humanity, my inherent value and equality and purpose. To do so would be to stifle myself once more – and there is no way I am going to do that.

I want you all to watch this. Regardless of whatever you agree or disagree, if you voted yes or no or didn’t vote at all. Watch this and feel it, with your mind and heart and soul open to what is being said.

I am writing you now with a plea. I already asked you to get loud, to speak out, to add your voice to the millions across the nation who are demanding equality. I’m going to ask you again. This battle will not be won by the gay community alone; in order to move forward we need allies across all communities, all races, all faiths, all orientations, all age groups. We need people who will stand with us, who will shout with us, who will demand with us. We need people like Keith, like Kate, like Patti, like Stacy, like Denise. We need people like you, and we need you NOW – we need you to attend a rally, to make some signs, to write letters, to volunteer, to blog, to start a dialogue with your friends, your neighbors, your church.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
~Martin Luther King Jr

There is a nationwide protest planned for this Saturday, November 15th at 10:30am PST. Here in Phoenix it will be held at Phoenix City Hall at 11:20am. If you live in the local area, please consider attending. Bring your family, bring your friends, bring your dog, but make sure you bring your beliefs in equality and justice and hope.

If you are not local – please visit the website at http://www.jointheimpact.com and find a local event here (events are being held in more than 80 cities in all 50 states, and even in some international locations)

I hope to see you there.

I promise you not a moment will be lost as long as I have heart & voice to speak & we will walk again together with a thousand others & a thousand more & on & on until there is no one among us who does not know the truth: there is no future without love.
~storypeople

This week we simultaneously celebrate victory and mourn defeat. Around the country queer and queer-allied communities cheered as votes were tallied and the US elected a man who once gave this quote:

“Too often, the issue of GLBT rights is exploited by those seeking to divide us. But at its core, this issue is about who we are as Americans. I look forward to working with HRC to end discrimination against GLBT Americans and to ensure that all of our citizens are treated with dignity and respect.”

But while we were lifted by our inclusion in Obama’s acceptance speech and by the potential for change created by a LGBTQ friendly White House, here in Arizona (and in California, Arkansas and Florida) we watched as propositions that sought to limit or remove our rights, status, and equality were ahead from the beginning and remained that way through the night.

How do you process so much joy and so much disappointment at the same time?

I can tell you how I’m going to do it. I’m working today, working hard, on transforming all those emotions - conflicting, heightened, and very real – into hope. A powerful, mind-blowing, consciousness-changing kind of HOPE. We’ve got to move now, before apathy and defeat set into the community. Now, while people are still buoyed by the tides of change that are set to sweep this country. Now, while the emotions are still fresh in our hearts.

Harvey Milk said:

“…know that there’s hope for a better world, there’s hope for a better tomorrow. Without hope not only gays, but the Blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s…without hope the us’s give up. I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living….you, and you, and you; you’ve gotta give them hope.”

For the past few days I have talked and listened and read and watched as the LGBTQ community across the country express – sometimes utterly unexpected – feelings of sorrow and grief and rage and betrayal at the losses we experienced on Tuesday. There is no doubt; we are feeling this at our very core. There were four states where our equality was on the line, and we lost in every single one. There is no way to avoid the repercussions of those losses. I know that personally I feel very different now than I did prior to election day, the knowledge that the majority of the citizens of this state consider me less than, not worthy of equal rights is a bitter pill to swallow. But it’s dangerous to wallow in those feelings, because they can so quickly turn to hopelessness – and that is the one thing we cannot afford.

Civil rights battles are not won quickly, or easily - they are won over time and with great effort and sacrifice. They are won with a million tiny, infinitesimal shifts far more often than they are won with great seismic changes. The ultimate success of this movement does not hinge on one election, or one act of discrimination, or a single protest. Just as the battle for racial equality did not begin or end with Rosa Parks, the Gay Rights movement that began with Stonewall does not end with Tuesday’s election results. We don’t slink off in defeat now, with our tails between our legs, letting the Christian-right dance with glee on the 18,000+ marriage certificates of same-sex couples in California.

Not a chance.

As Matt Coles, ACLU Director of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Project says:

“If you run up an unbroken string of victories in any battle for civil rights, that simply means you waited too long to get to work. Change that matters is never smooth or easy.”

The writing IS on the wall. This IS going to happen. Our community IS going to succeed. But it’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s not going to happen if we don’t lay ourselves on the line and work with everything we have to achieve it. True, we don’t have a Harvey Milk figurehead to rally around, there’s no one person to pin our dreams to – the way the nation did with Obama during this campaign. But this only means we have to take it that much further. We have to rally around each other, we have to create that movement, that wave, that sea change that we so desperately need.

As President Elect Obama himself said – in his masterful speech on race last March:

>“What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part–through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk–to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.”

Make no mistake, the gap that Obama spoke of - between the promise of our ideals and the reality of our time - widened this week. There is not point in glossing over the truth – we took a huge step backward in the path to equality, and our hearts and spirits took a beating along the way. But because we were pushed backwards, it is more important than ever to be sure that we are not knocked off the track, that we keep pushing forward, that queer and queer-allied people across the nation stand up, dust off, link arms and keep on walking, and writing, and talking and demanding change.

As Milk famously said “Hope is Never Silent”.

So let’s get loud folks. Let’s get real hopeful and real loud. Everything depends on it.

I cannot think of better words to begin today than today’s story from storypeople:

legacy:
I promise you not a moment will be lost as long as I have heart & voice to speak & we will walk again together with a thousand others & a thousand more & on & on until there is no one among us who does not know the truth: there is no future without love.

No matter what happens today, there is no future without love - so all that any of us can do is love with everything we’ve got.

Starting now.

Please tell me you’ve registered. Please tell me you’ll be at the polls tomorrow, or that you’ve already voted by early ballot. Without being overdramatic, I am begging and pleading you to make your vote count tomorrow.

This race is not over yet - and as we near the final hours and the polls show the race tightening, I feel my hope and my fear building at the same time. This cannot be a repeat of the last two elections, too much has changed, too much has been lost, too much is at stake.

This country, my adopted homeland, needs change - not just as Obama’s buzzword - but at the very core. It’s not just the results of this election - although I believe they matter more than I possibly have words to express. We need change at the root of our values and our outlook and our sense of responsibility and ownership of the issues that plague humanity, that divide and separate, that threaten and tear apart.

I believe that I live in a country that wants to come together more than it wants to tear itself apart. I believe I live in a country that, in its heart and soul, respects and accepts and wants to welcome everyone as equal. I believe I live in a country where change is possible and where the actions of one person can change history. And I don’t just mean Barack Obama. I mean YOU.

YES. WE. CAN.