Don't Fence Me In

Wednesday, March 19 ~ Albuquerque, New Mexico

Oh, give me land, lots of land under starry skies above,
Don't fence me in...
~ Cole Porter

My e-mail program pings and I glance at my inbox. It's a message from Samantha, a woman on this new social network I was invited to join: ShoutLife.com.

Always happy to meet new people and eager to find new promotional outlets for my work and my books, I had accepted the invitation after a cursory glance at the web site. Within minutes, I was deluged by welcoming notes.

This morning's note from Samantha, however, stands out. After telling me how intrigued she is by my books, she wonders: "Are you a Christian?"

ShoutLife, you see, is a largely Christian social network, a detail I hadn't noticed when signing on.

I have no problem with that. My books -- and the ways I live my life -- are profoundly spiritual, and there's nothing about either that should offend anyone with a spiritual bent, Christian or otherwise.

But Samantha's question gives me pause, and it takes 24 hours before I know how to reply. In the end, I tell her that I try to avoid attaching labels to myself and that, rather than answer her question with a simple "yes" or "no," I would prefer that she check out my web site and blog and decide for herself whether my words and life resonate with her.

And then I let it go.

A day passes. I'm playing Life with my eight-year-old daughter, who's visiting here for her March break. About 10 minutes into the game, I land on the big red stop sign that tells me to get married.

"Let's see," I say to Guinevere. "I could get a husband or a wife. Which should I get?" She looks at me funny, but doesn't answer.

When I land on the same square again soon after, I ask the question again. This time, in that matter-of-fact tone that only kids have, she asks, "Are you gay?"

"You know," I say after I regain my composure, "it doesn't have to be an either/or sort of thing." I then offer up the eight-year-old gay/straight version of my Christian/non-Christian note to Samantha.

"Anyone can love anyone," I say, "and it's okay. It's okay for a man to fall in love with a woman and for that same man to later fall in love with a man. The other way is fine, too."

Guinevere is more interested in her game of Life than my game of life, so I let the matter drop.

Yet I find it interesting that within 24 hours, two people have tried to categorize and classify my spirituality and my sexuality -- two of the cornerstones of many an awakened life.

Our human minds love to organize things -- and people.

We've all got a built-in version of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat, filing our experiences into recognizable folders that make it easier to know how to respond.

Our Sorting Hat is far more sophisticated than J.K. Rowling's, though, for it must take billions of stimuli and organize them into many more than four categories.

It's a powerful neural mechanism that has been a necessary survival tool throughout human history.

Yet it's a mechanism that now lags behind the demands of the lives we are evolving into. It's as though we're trying to import data into a computer program that was never set up to recognize, let alone organize that data.

It's as though we're trying to "catch a cloud and pin it down," as Oscar Hammerstein wrote of Maria in The Sound of Music, or capture a rainbow in a jar.

We are the Marias of the 21st century, the rainbows whose infinite qualities and potential can no longer be summed up by a single word, can no longer be stuffed into a convenient file folder.

I don't know about you, but I can no longer live within the restriction and constriction of easy labels. I can no longer slot myself into some file folder marked gay or straight, Christian or Jewish, black or white, Republican or Democrat.

For me, it's about being human and about being open to discovering the infinite breadth of all that that could potentially encompass.

As I've written here before (Free to Love, Free to Be), I spent the first 20 years of my adult life describing myself as a gay man.

As I evolved spiritually, though, I began to feel that I could no longer limit myself to what I thought I wanted but, rather, had to open myself up to a more expansive view of myself, my potential and my life.

Within five years of that realization, I was (to my surprise) married to an amazing woman and the was father of a radiant child.

Was I still gay? Not exactly. Was I straight? Not really. Was I bisexual? Not entirely.

Today, three and half years after my marriage ended, the same questions arise.

Am I gay? Not exactly. Am I straight? Not really. Am I bisexual? Not entirely.

On MySpace, my profile is deliberately vague on the orientation question. Yet I have enough gay friends there that I'm inevitably asked the same question my daughter asked me: "Are you gay?"

In a world still defined by rigid categories, I never quite know how to answer. Yes, I'm physically attracted to men. And, yes, I know that that by itself means little. My next intimate relationship could as easily be with a woman as with a man. It doesn't and can't matter.

It's funny. I was a gay activist in the '70s and '80s, fighting hard for the right to be be unashamedly gay in a world that was still pretty iffy about homosexuality.

Today, though no longer fighting, I'm equally passionate -- this time about the right to be unashamedly infinite in a world that would limit me with labels.

Labels, categories and classifications keep us in tight boxes, bind us in rigid straitjackets, prevent us from stepping beyond what, in The MoonQuest, I call The End of the Known World -- that place of magic, miracles, wonder and discovery. That scary place filled with promise. That place where we begin to touch the infinite, the divine, the numinous. That place where everything is possible. That place where we touch the hand of God...and realize the hand we're touching is our own.


Photo: Calling in the Buffalo, Custer State Park, Black Hills of South Dakota (c)2008 Mark David Gerson.