A life observed

2230. 34,000 ft.

Here I am again, another flight. Another adventure.

Fifteen years older and emboldened by the life that has the tendencies these days to flash before my eyes. almost like the postscript to a really good letter. This decade and a half tends to jumble itself in my consciousness and has woken me up to the real meaning of love.

I have made my peace at the fact my life has always been one of observation. Sitting in the corner behind a wall of self blown glass, I seem to forever to be looking in on these magical, wondrous creatures around me; each story etched onto my mind like the novelty dog tags that hang around my neck with travel insurance information, I have always seen the entirety of these stories happening around me.

Sometimes I still find myself hiding in my own parallel universe where pain is only a reminder of my very existence. There are times I wish the noise would quiet itself, but that would never be any fun, now would it? A high silver pitched wall of noise forever processing in the background has become a companion on this journey.

So here I sit. Full of words, but not able to see them clearly yet. My other companion fast asleep in the window after successfully inviting sleep in. My own luck to have him is only surpassed by his luck to find solace in sleep at will.

I've never been able to call the sandman like that, even at my most exhausted. Too much going on around me and never enough time to capture it all in any meaningful way. Well at least meaningful to me. The smells of hard work punctuating every dry breath on this plane, I find myself begging for sleep. But it's in these times that sleep can never come.

Like Christmas Eve in Post hearing the Grandfather Clock tick tock past two, I find the adrenals unrelenting in their ability to drive another sleepless flight.

When this journey began on a stoned rainy Friday back in March I knew this would happen. Foreshadows lurking behind every memory it was only wishful thinking to convince myself that I would be anything but on full alert. Every training walk was heralded by a sleepless night before, every conversation about this trip driving my circadian rhythm into an over excited drum beat that can only be described as the call of Mother Africa welcoming me to her bosom.

So today, right before leaving, I rolled an incredibly potent joint and went onto my terrace to ask London for her blessing. In my advancing years the fear of the unknown has started to make me doubt myself and fill my universe with confusing fear. Where was that bright eyed boy who sold his car and moved across the great waters to find his story? Has the life I have had the pleasure of living somehow dulled the love of exploration that drive me into the arms of my destiny?

And without missing a beat, she released a flock of winged creatures into the vista in front of me. As the music built and the buzz worked its way to my heart, she blew wind- strong London wind- onto my back. And with this wind the cloud gave way and her blessing was most definitely on me. I turned to look inside my home and saw a dear friend from the time when life was young and my husband both merrily working away on the science of life and living. No- that young boy with old dreams is still very much alive here today and this particular slice of life only furtherreminded me of who and what I am.

Lucky.

Happy.

Loved.

So who knows if I will get to sleep tonight? There is a strong possibility that I will just sit here staring at the world around me, trying to capture each minute as best I can. And for the first time, in a long time, I can't wait to see what happens.

But this time around, life might just end up observing me and I hope that I can keep this happiness forever.

Off to somewhere it takes 12 hours on a train

Off to climb Ben Nevis. For the first time shit started feeling real. Like really real.

SO yeah

WE just booked a trip to climb Ben Nevis.

Aaaaaaand the acclimatisation machine arrived this morning.

Shit just got real. Not sure what to say about this yet, but I know the words will come soon.

Taken by surprise

its been a while. 

i know it has actually been more than a while. one of those periods in my life where i know i should be creating. understanding the need to do something, the brutal call of my own wilderness singing in discordant controlled harmony. but as with everyone else in this world, i too am extremely lazy. sometimes. 

the number of moments where i was walking in the golden sun of my adopted home, music perfectly synced in that way you think you must have an etherial sound man watching you from your own personal gods, have been so manny that i care not to think about it. always wishing i had spent the luxury at the smythson's counter in liberty and started keeping my thoughts on paper.

once, twice, three times too many. even just this week, i was there with my sister in law. showing off my home like a cat bringing in a dead bird to see. i've never pretended anything but greatness for this city i have chosen to make my home. i profess the electricity which dances on the olfactory vistas of self that still draws me deeper into her.

my gal london.

 

we have been through so much together. fifteen fucking thanksgivings. three grownfolk relationships. one half marriage and an actual one to boot. when i first got here i never thought i would be singing these silent songs of pride to myself. my quest for ever burning skies finally standing up to collect its toll is something i never have worried about. letting my song sing its way through love, pain, anger, and happiness has sculpted my mind into hearing its own truth. helping me tell myself my own secrets in a way that makes my heart colour itself with that song.

playing it all at maximum volume, i sometimes wonder if people think this is all a bit solipsistic, but that is their own choice. time marching on has made me realise that i can not do anything about someone else's voice until i can hear my own. and that is hard when you have the scree of a very active mind constantly barraging every aspect of your life. the noise gets boring sometimes. but silence will do nothing other than make me disappear.

i guess that is what made me decide to start writing again. similar in its genesis to the climb, this immovable yet immeasurable force makes me face my own truth. that mirror to self that i put up, hoping that night will one day give way to morning. but waiting for another day is useless without hope. 

my hope.

the force which has led me through all of my life. growing up gay in west texas shows you that in order to change the world, you have to hold onto hope. never to go your separate way from it. hoping it gets better. hoping to find someone like me. how lucky i am to have not only found others like me, but to have found the other half to my whole. 

so as the night music softly dilutes the remaining adrenaline left over from 15 years of making my home here, i can say that when i look back on tonight, i can say the first part of my journey is finally at an end. i have found true family here in every aspect of my life. i have found places in this world of mine to not only call home, but the people in it all have become as individually distinct and special to me in a way that only those in your home can be. i will never understand the luck of the draw that brought me here to this place, but i will also never take it for granted.

thank you. 

all of you. now let's go climb a mountain.

happy thanksgiving, y'all. 

The Ice Storm

i find that there have been times in my life that i found myself blinded by an onslaught of creative energy filling every dimly lit corridor of myself. times that i could feel the pulse of the universe coursing through the work i was experiencing of which would remind me  how very small we are all in the grand scheme of things. that magic intercession of artist and audience that for some odd reason makes me cry whenever i am able to catch it. more importantly, there have been times i have been part of such work and i find myself smack dab in the middle of another one right now.

twelve years ago almost to the day i was in a small town in connecticut with a group of young artists undertaking the staging  of angels in america: millennium approaches in less than three weeks. i had spent the previous four months with these people learning about the business we all so desperately thought we wanted to be a part of. i remember the ridiculous 7.30 in the morning warmups with instructors lovingly known as the bone crusher and the human pretzel. seeing as we had started this journey in january, it was fucking cold most of the time, new england cold. some might say new england cold isn't all that bad. only those who have lived through this type of cold know about the saber-toothed wind that could and would cut through as many layers of thick clothing you could encase yourself in.  and every morning we would have to trudge across a farm to begin our day even before the sun had.

and so the days continued. we found time only to feed, fuck, and fight. well some of us did. there was an us of us that wouldn't or couldn't join in to that side of the experience. and there was an us of the us that through the majority of it all, just didn't feel at home. like something was amiss. like this wasn't us at all.

somehow, though, the magic of four months in an intensive artistic bunker drew us together at the end. after months of bullying, dick waving, and art destroying we somehow pulled it all together. we found deep meaning in our lives as artists through the work we were doing, white became black, them became us.

we did it.

doing it left an indelible stain on all of our hearts. so permanent that whenever i speak to someone from that time, we talk about it animatedly over cocktails in new york, or through facebook relationships that you know will never amount to facetime. this work touched usl so deeply that it still informs the work we do now. a truly magic time.

here i am 12 years and some change later and i find myself working with someone from back then. both of us on our own journey to find some meaning to this world. trying to find our places in this never ending story where we all do fear the nothing. and somehow, our paths have crossed again. in a metaphysical miracle of living we find our work begging for the collaboration only artists can truly understand. with our imaginations in syncopatic harmony for this brief moment in time we find ourselves finishing each others sentences as if we had been planning for this over the previous twelve years. the further we go into this, the more we find indeed we have somehow been planning this. in an odd way, everything that has happened since those cold mornings in new england has directed the story we are trying to tell now.

i guess that is one of the magic qualities about art. how art can transcend painting, the theatre, and  the studio. we all have an art of our own that can bring our own version of beauty into what we do. for cllr husband, he tries to create a more beautiful and fair world for our community. for others, it is raising the children who will inherit that future and teaching them to love, care for, and respect the gifts given to them from the past. on a daily basis, i see artists everywhere- all connected by a genuine desire to make things better, to make the world make more sense. at positive east, i see a whole building of people all united in their desire to not just make tomorrow better, but the here and now better for my brothers and sisters who are finding it hard to see the beauty in the world.

now, i am gorging myself on the artistic energy the universe has put here with gusto and i find my friend Tand collaborator is reigniting a spark that i thought lost long ago. she is reminding me to stop and smell the roses, to listen to the silence, to breathe. to remember that what i am doing makes complete sense, our mountains seeming just that much smaller now by realizing that art is living and living is art.

the great work begins.

My $64,000 question

there are many things i would change about myself. i've never liked my nose. the new salt and peppery hair is one too many spices in my ideal recipe. unassisted 20/20 vision is a wet dream always two steps ahead of me through consequences of both my own and not my own choosing. but these are all tangential to the $64,000 question i am sometimes asked by friends on the beginning of their own journeys. it is the question that seems to have the most obvious answer. 

thinking back to those young shoebox sized days in peckham, i can still feel the first ever scare. before the now of then even. i had a mark on my arm that froze every atom in my being- cooling the air around me. after all, i hadn't protected even the most precious of encounters so this was surely the kiss of death i had always known was coming. since back up in the mountains, reading usa today precociously. it is the same feeling i had at 7 finding out about this killer disease that older people like me got and then always died of. fresh alpine blue wind coming in from mom's window while next to me isaac cried himself to sleep after leaving ouray. frozen ice cream tummy and a head like i sneezed too hard. that feeling still accessible, but the cognitive dissonance resolving fear into action. i wanted to know more.

even growing up in texas, the long reach of the waves were so deep as to break up time in all our shared histories. big cities first, reaching out amoebalike to  smaller hubs and then into the capillaries of even the smallest of  towns. if you grew up in the 80's, at some point you found one of the wave's crashing onto your perfectly manicured front gardens and somehow affecting you. for my family, it was a painter and his lover. friends of my mother's and men whom i distinctly remember my first spark of community with. knowing who i was started with the courage of these brave men who in an instant were gone. taken by what i read about on the mountain. if it got them, i knew it would get me. and i was scared. so i learned more. 

i remember calling james from the bathroom in peckham. he had just started working on dover street. his first grownup job doing what he so wanted and most definitely was suited to do. i remember having trouble dialling his number as my head was so light and my fingers heavy. his first grownup job getting his first grown up problem. i remember him talking me down off my perilous edge of fear and calming me. he was always good at that. and he was right. it was a bruise. i had nothing to worry about. crises averted. life saved. but the metallic shock taste still lingered for days when i thought about it. little did i know that it was only an omen of much worse things to befall that one roomed world of ours.

you would think that after all of this knowledge of destiny and fear that the first thing on my list to change would be being HIV positive. and for a while, i suppose you would have been right. but only from before it actually happened. oddly enough, when it did happen it didn't really do what i thought it was going to do. instead of taking me over that ledge of self limiting terror i felt 11,340 feet in the cold colorado air it grounded me with such gentle force as to change me forever in ways i have yet to fathom.

sure, i have this visitor in my body who wants to eventually take it over. and if i let it, well that is not a good situation for either of us. but it doesn't know its own power, it is only doing what it is meant to do. doing what its purpose in this intricate stained glass reality we call now is to be. difference was, i knew things about it that it did not. i was taught well by the Talkmitts, Covingtons, and even Boardmans of this world. i was prepared in a way that not many people are lucky enough to experience after nursing james back from that sweat drenched night. believe it or not, it finally made sense to me. that fear i felt when michael and austin died was actually a gift. it drew me to learn about the monster. when james spoke my name for the first time after being intubated for months gave me the hope to learn even more about the disease. 

and now, almost ten years later i find myself on a new journey of self knowledge. it gives me the strength to tell my story to anyone who is willing to listen to it. after all i have been through, how could i ever wish my hiv away?  it has given me so much purpose in life that i would never have known without it. i am not saying that i wouldn't have had another version of this life even without hiv, but i am saying that he can stay happily living in fiction. and maybe one day, i'll visit him. but for now, i know that my immunological condition is just another fact of life like the damn hayfever currently KICKING my ass in this muggy london sprummer. there is nothing i can do about it other than respect it, live with it, and try to do some good together with it. 

it is my debt to all of the Michael and Austins of this world. every night when i take my medication i say a silent word of thanks for all of the brave men and women who went before me. i honour their sacrifice to research. i acknowledge the horrific terror they faced knowing that a gruesome and painful death awaited them. i cast hope to the moon that my children will not ever have to know this world firsthand. 

it is also what fuels this whole journey. it is what brings me such humility and gratitude when even more friends agree to take on the challenge to raise funds for the catalyst of personal discovery i am on. the Michaels and Austins of this world igniting the spark of service in hearts across the globe makes my relationship with my hiv an amazing thing and one i would never give back.

so next time someone asks you if there is anything about you would like to change, pause for thought. maybe that salt is making you look distinguished. maybe your grandkids will love your nose just like you loved your grandpa's. take pause to look around you and try to find the good in where you are, because sometimes you really have to look hard for it. but if you should fall off that ledge and find love for yourself hopefully you can then go out and try to do something to make the world more beautiful. 

seriously, all we can do is try. 

Big Weekend, Big Realisation

it was one of those london moments you sometimes are lucky enough to find yourself having on the bus last night. cllr husband and i were off to the southwark playhouse to watch yet another prequel to the story of us when that almost out of body thing happened and i looked over at my husband and teared up. we were discussing the upcoming weekend's frivolities filled with super secret guest lists and muddy boots clinging to our mud stained cuffs for at least 10 of the next 48 hours. which stage would be when with who and why. words falling out of our mouths with the ease of familiarity and fact. we were just passing the big conference centre when hackney turns to tower hamlets (at least in my mind, if not actually geographically) where the 2012 training centre has been standing for so long i've quit paying it mind when i suddenly found myself watching this comfortable exchange between two people and thought, "wow. this is weird". here i was, in the middle of one of the world's megacities, discussing things my 14 year old self never would have thought within the realm of my possibles.

and so it is starting to seem with this climb up the mountain. i am not taking it for granted, nor am i really looking forward to getting the training up and going on the serious side. but this impossible possible is now becoming a reality. more and more people are donating money. people from across the globe who i have never met before are joining in this journey by reading these words and sending such beautiful messages of support that no artist could capture their power even having an eternity to try. as more and more people join this village it takes the challenge ahead and puts it into a better perspective in so many different ways. each word instils a confidence that seems to cause this mountain to shrink in her immensity. each kind gesture will give us the strength to climb just that bit further. in fact, i spent today doing my first physical work for this journey here at home climbing and descending a single flight of boring stairs for as long as i possibly could. and when i thought it was time to stop, my phone buzzed with the first donation from a stranger. from someone who i have never met face to face. and i then climbed some more. and then more.

and i will continue to climb, not just for the wonderful group of people who are supporting us, but also for my beautiful london. this fairytale life i find myself living is the product of many different systems exerting pressures and influences on my reality. so many that i have found it wise for my own sanity to not try and quantify them all. but one of those guiding hands i take solace in knowing well is buried deep within the DNA of this city: ordered chaos. of course only a oxymoronic force filled with yin and yang would be something i find as comforting and calming as a mother's love but that is just how i roll, i guess. the impossible possible effusing itself through my life in a way that i can only just comprehend if i take time to stop and smell the roses. to remember what rarified air one breathes in this congested city polluted with the dreams and passions of tomorrow.

and for her and all she has done for me, i will climb.