Free to Love, Free to Be

Wednesday, September 6, 2006 ~ Santa Fe, New Mexico

I'm sitting at the downtown Borders one dialog away from completing a preliminary draft of the screenplay adaptation of my novel The MoonQuest when my healer friend Patricia walks into the cafe.

Let me explain something about Patricia. When I was first given her name nearly two years ago, it was with the warning that she was nearly impossible to reach. I reached her on my first try.

I've never reached her by phone again, but I always run into her in unlikely places at pivotal moments in my life.

Today, as it turns out, is one of those.

Whatever the fate of The MoonQuest, each time I read it or work on it, I receive a powerful activation. So it's no coincidence that Patricia should turn up in this moment of completion.

We chat about my divorce and she remarks that I'm the freest she's ever seen me of the residue of my marriage and of my relationship with my ex-wife.

"It's time to open to a new relationship," she says.

"I don't know," I say. Certainly, when I walked into Borders a few hours ago, a relationship was the last thing on my mind or in my conscious desiring.

"You of all people," she insists, "can't let fear stop you."

We chat some more and I share with her a story I shared with many of you in an August 2004 newsletter (Who Do You Think You Are?) -- that for the first 20 years of my adult life, I lived as a gay man.

In the few years before I met my wife, I stopped identifying myself as gay -- or straight. Rather, I began to open to the ultimate truth of myself as a sexual being who could not and would not be categorized.

Today, nearly two years after the end of my marriage, I haven't changed my view.

We come into this life with many roles and missions. One of mine, I have long felt, is to be a bridge between the strict gender/orientation labels of the past and the unclassifiable energies of the future.

When I told my gay friends eight years ago that I was getting married, to a woman, I explained that I hadn't fallen in love with a body and set of genitals. I had fallen in love with a wonderful spirit who just happened to occupy a female physique. From that place of love and passion, gender and orientation were irrelevant and anything was possible.

The result was the most profound, intimate and powerful relationship of my life.

The next one, Patricia tells me, will be even more amazing.

When I leave Borders a short while later, I feel as though a pall has lifted from me. I feel lighter, freer.

If walked into Borders still closed to the idea of relationship, I walk out willing, open and ready...and with a strong sense of my next partner's gender.

But whether it's a man or woman doesn't matter...can't matter. If it's a man, it doesn't mean I'm gay any more than it being a woman says I'm straight.

What I am and must remain on this journey into oneness, is the fullest expression of all my potentials, sexual and otherwise. What I am and must continue to realize is freedom from all definitions, expectations and classifications -- mine and others' -- as I open to the love that I am and the love that is open, ready and available to me...and to all of us

Art by Mark David Gerson: Soul Mates (Red Canyon, Utah) -- Soaring independently from a shared base, this pair of hoodoos (pinnacled rock formations) represents what is, for me, the true nature of the soul mate relationship: common grounding that frees each partner to reach for the stars.