I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

You ever have those days when you realize that you absolutely do not have it all figured out?

I always feel like I am supposed to know where I am going in my life.... and then I run smack into some brick wall in my mindscape where I realize I haven't got a clue.

Why do I continue to succumb to the temptation to peg people neatly into holes, and thereby deny all the real (and probably dangerous) experiences they would offer me? There am I, teacup in hand, all comfortable in my one-dimensional relationships....only to find that somehow those relationships are crossing lines when I wasn't looking....

Like when you fall out of love with your lover and fall in love with your friend.

And your friend is the same sex as you.

:-0

Before you dash off some long commentary condemning gay marriage – let me say that was an example, not the exact situation that is happening to me now. But you see I mean. Sometimes those little situations that you had all neatly packaged up and labeled in permanent ink don't want to stay in their safe zones, do they? Sometimes you open yourself, and people you thought you really understood show you some side of themselves that doesn't often see the light of day.

And it blows your mind.

When they make themselves vulnerable to me like that, it opens me to....things...and I can't seem to navigate the old relationship safely any longer. It seems like the mere act of being open takes the relationship in an entirely new direction, and one where at least a few social morals could get seriously run over....


....but my mind says er, no, that's not how it's supposed to be. Get back where I had you, please. It was all safe then, and I knew how to act.

But what if my moral constructs, or whatever that stuff is that we put in place to Keep Others in a Safe Zone in Our Lives (is that a new department in Homeland Security?), are the precise thing keeping me from having the experiences that really are life?

I mean, suppose for a moment, that life isn’t that big consumer dream we are bombarded with daily. Suppose it isn’t some uber long reality TV show from hell. Suppose it’s really about the visceral, gut wrenching experiences that strip us of our comfort zones, rearrange our insides, and render us utterly and indelibly human?

You know, when people spout off about gay marriage, and this or that, I wonder if they have ever had to deal with that ineffable force that is love - that force that makes you do things you'd otherwise never consider?

Have people with strict moral structures in place on the subject of relationship really made themselves bare to that force that is life?

I should think that even one exposure to that raw power would render some of those opinions completely fatuous.

And isn't it funny how we have all these ways of conversing and interacting in polite society so that we'll be sure never to really hear one another? Never share ourselves with another so deeply that we'll be forever changed by the experience? Never open fully to the real beauty of another's soul, because, well, that is not what friends do in polite situations. It's too much for me Sharon. Can you PLEASE turn the channel to something mindless? Hey! I think Paris' dog's reality TV show is starting!

Sometimes, I don't understand life as it’s presented – go get an education, make money, have kids, plan your coffin nails out now, blah blah blah.

But the lived experience...well, that is something else, entirely, isn’t it?