Today is the ninth anniversary of the brain surgery that saved my life.

Oh man, already with the Christmas music. From now until Christmas, the same 22 songs, played over and over and over again.

And not even proper Christmas carols, which would get irritating with enough repetition but at least not quite so quickly. I like a lot of Christmas carols, they have some weight to them, some meaning. But stores don’t want to play a lot of music with specific religious associations — and very rightly so — so what they give us instead is winter novelties, trivial jolly crap like Jingle Bells and Santa Claus is Coming to Town and Frosty the Snowman and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, stuff that would be dumb but fun if you only had to put up with it one day a year but which is mind-numbing when for five or six weeks you hear it every time you venture out into public.

(This year I heard my first Christmas music the day after Halloween. I was taking the casual carpool into San Francisco and the driver had it on the radio. Argh! Trapped! I was never so grateful for light traffic and a quick trip across the bridge as I was that morning.)

Hating both crowds and Christmas music, I try to cut my shopping to a minimum in November and December. There are a couple of things I actually need to pick up from Target this weekend and I am dreading doing it and really wondering if I can do without them till after the New Year. Probably not. Ugh.

I went to a terrific Billy Club gathering way way back over Memorial Day weekend, one of the best I’ve been to, and I have been sitting on a two-thirds written blog entry about it for months. I am a bad, bad blogger. About time to finish it up.

This gathering was more focused than most of the Billy Club gatherings are. Gatherings are often organized loosely around a theme, but usually the whole schedule is not tightly structured around it. This one, though, was on the general theme of being HIV positive or negative — both personally and in terms of the divide in the gay community. This is the second year we’ve had such a gathering, and we get some grant money from two rural counties to help pay the costs for HIV-positive men from those counties who attend, so since there’s financial support for it, it’s likely to be the usual theme of the Memorial Day gathering as long as they keep helping to pay for it.

Not too surprisingly, then, some of the workshops were a bit didactic. But surprisingly many were not, and in fact I think overall it may have been the least mind-oriented and most body-oriented gathering in a long while, with more workshops in physical movement and physical play and the like than I think I’ve ever seen at one gathering.

All in all, I had a great time and thought it was terrific. Not directly because of the theme — in the late 1980s I fell in love with a man who was already dying of AIDS, and we became very close. It was a very hard relationship to describe in a few words: We were too close to be Just Good Friends and yet not really lovers or partners — we called ourselves “brothers” sometimes. He ended up living with me for six months near the end of his life. The two years that I knew him changed me profoundly. So I’ve already done a lot of my thinking and growing about these issues long ago, and any workshop whose goal is to get me to overcome my fear and/or prejudice against HIV-positive men is about 20 years too late. Been there, stopped doing that.

But even so, I think the somewhat serious theme had the indirect effect of making it a better gathering, or at least more to my taste. And because this was an added gathering to our usual schedule, we couldn’t have it in our usual location, which was already booked for that weekend, and so we held it at a retreat center in Willits.

Inevitably, there were some complaints about the food not being as good as we usually get (which to be honest it wasn’t — one of our members, a professional chef and caterer, usually cooks for us, and he’s amazing, but for this gathering the retreat center’s own staff did the cooking), and there were complaints as well about the place being right off a moderately busy road — not very secluded at all. All true. And a lot of our regulars did not show up, perhaps turned off by the theme or by the location.

On the other hand, a lot of members who don’t often come to gatherings were there, especially many from Mendocino and Santa Cruz counties, many of whom were there with their fees subsidize by some of the county funding. And it seemed to me that the unfamiliar location and the fact that regular gathering-goers were in the minority were precisely the reasons for the sense of vitality and alertness I felt in the air, a sharpness and livelier that I don’t often feel at Billy Club gatherings, which usually have a lazier feel to them. Each of us was making it up as we went along, nobody was on autopilot doing the same thing they always do with the same people they always do it with in the same way they have been doing it for ten or fifteen years, and there was much less of a social divide between newer and older members than there usually is. Also, a much more diverse mix of ages and skin colors and I am guessing socioeconomic class than I generally see at gatherings. All good. Very good.

Sometimes I think I wish that we could serve really basic dull food at all the Billy Club gatherings for a year, and drain the swimming pool and hot tub for a year while we’re at it, just to alienate all those regulars who come primarily for the creature comforts. We’d be left with the people who really care about our community and about spiritual self-exploration and so on.

Yeah, like that would go over swimmingly. Oh well. I can daydream …

The workshops at Poz/Neg, as I said, were very physical. A morning workshop on “contemplative dance” started with a half hour of meditation, followed by a half hour of slow physical warmup and a half hour of free-style dancing. I was a little embarrassed at the idea going into it — I like dancing but I tend to go for the structured sort, ballroom and folk dancing and that kind of thing — and I was surprised at how easily I got into it, and how solidly centered and grounded I felt at the end.

I got in several heart-to-heart talks over the weekend with people I either had never met before or only met once before at last year’s Poz/Neg. I think I like the heart-to-heart talks best of anything at the gatherings. I even spent a couple of hours one evening having a wonderful talk while lying back with an arm around a hunky guy who turned out to be a sex worker by profession. Yow. Sometimes I just have to stop and be amazed at how far I’ve come from my Orange County upbringing.

Today is the last day of a short trip I’ve been taking in the northern counties.

The drive north

Tuesday afternoon I took off in the cobalt blue Chevrolet Cobalt I’ve rented for the week, crossed the San Rafael Bridge, and headed north on Hwy 101. The drive as far as Cloverdale is familiar to me by now, because I’ve been going to Billy Club gatherings up in Mendocino and Lake counties for a few years, but this time when I got to Cloverdale I left 101 and headed northwest on Hwy 128, a route I can’t remember ever taking before, though I think it’s possible that Dave and I drove this route once going the other way.

It’s a beautiful road, passing through small towns and winding through redwood forests. After maybe 90 minutes you reach the coast and connect with State Route 1, which is apparently called the Shoreline Highway in this part of the state, but which I will probably go to my grave calling it the Pacific Coast Highway because that’s what Route 1 is called in Southern California where I grew up. Until just a few years ago I thought it was PCH all the way up and down the California coast, and now every single time I drive along it, no matter how many times it’s been, I realize I have forgotten this and I have to relearn it.

From the end of 128 I headed north along (oh, to hell with it) PCH. This part of the highway I recognized as a part that I’ve been along with Dave, which is why I’m thinking maybe we took 128 back, since we didn’t get much further north than this and I know I wouldn’t have wanted to go back down the same way we’d come up. This is a beautiful road, too, running along gorgeous rocky beaches and with view after view of big white waves crashing against the cliffs.

Fort Bragg

Eventually I made it to Fort Bragg, which is where I was staying Tuesday night with my friend Joe and his fiancée Jenny, who I hadn’t met before. Fort Bragg is a charming small town with some great beaches. The three of us spent a couple of hours before dinner at Glass Beach, so called because the location used to be the site of a garbage dump and as a result there are always lots of pieces of sea glass among the pebbles. (Sea glass is what you get when a glass bottle is tossed around by the sea. The broken pieces get worn smooth and look very like pebbles.)

Back at home, while dinner was simmering, Joe and Jenny and I talked, and I learned that she is a psychologist. My bachelor’s degree is in psychology so I could ask a few intelligent questions about her work and follow her answers.

After dinner we walked into the downtown area and stopped in a restaurant bar for a glass of wine and more talk, then home and to bed. The next morning Joe and Jenny had an appointment with a personal trainer but after their workout we met up for coffee at their favorite coffeehouse in Fort Bragg, then traveled down to Mendocino where Jenny owns a house to wander another beach and be awed by another spectacular stretch of rocky coastline.

Heartwood

From Fort Bragg I headed next to the Heartwood Institute, a massage school out in the middle of nowhere where I would be camping Wednesday and Thursday nights. Heartwood has been the site of Billy Club New Year’s gatherings for nearly two decades, and I’ve been to the last three — in fact, I was general coordinator for the one two winters ago. The Heartwood gatherings have been my favorites — with the Billy Club gatherings, there seems to be a connection between the temperature and the seriousness, with the July Fourth gatherings at the one end being the most like a boisterous weekend at a gay resort, and the New Year’s gatherings at the other end being the most focused on community, spiritual growth, quiet contemplation, and good stuff like that.

So even though I have only been to three gatherings at Heartwood, I have all sorts of strong memories and associations with the place. The gathering three years ago was my fourth gathering, but the one at which I really started to feel connected to this group; the gathering two years ago was the first gathering for which I acted as general coordinator myself; last winter’s gathering was magical for me, the one at which I was the happiest from beginning to end, and hated to tear myself away at the end.

Sadly, though, the place has been sold, and the new owners have new plans that don’t have room for us to take over the place between Christmas and New Year’s. So, since I’m not going to see the place again at a Billy gathering, I wanted to come back on my own and spend a few tranquil days here.

On Wednesday afternoon I got a late start out of Fort Bragg, but I thought it would be about two hours to get there, so leaving at three seemed a bit tight but ought to get me there about five. I just needed to register by six which is dinner hour there or I’d be wandering around looking for someone to let me sign in so I could have dinner.

I’d underestimated, though, how long it would take to get to the middle of nowhere. The trip from Fort Bragg to Leggett is another one of those beautiful winding roads passing through more redwoods and by more staggering views of rugged shores, and I was torn between wanting to appreciate the journey and knowing from my watch and my mileage that I was falling badly behind my planned schedule.

From Leggett, it’s mostly highway up to Garberville, and then east to Bell Springs Road, which winds its narrow way up into the hills. Then the last four miles to Heartwood are along dirt road, and at 5:45 pm I pulled into the parking lot for the Welcome Center.

Fortunately my friend Douglas, who runs the Welcome Center and store at Heartwood, was expecting me and stayed open later than usual, so I was able to sign in, get my meal ticket, and get to the dining room by maybe ten after. Douglas and I ate dinner on the deck in back of the main lodge, which looks out over a beautiful view of rolling mountains stretching as far away as you can see.

Wednesday night I didn’t sleep for very long, waking up in the darkness around 3:00 am and unable to get back to sleep. I read a little, meditated a little, but I was feeling too restless somehow to sleep any more.

Yesterday morning, Thursday, after tossing the coins for the Yi Jing and meditating on the results, I decided that between breakfast and lunch I would not try to accomplish anything, but just do pleasant, relaxing things and just try to stay present and alert to everything around me at all times. I took a steep hike for about an hour and a half, then sat on the deck in back of the main lodge and looked at the view.

After lunch I went to the temple for some more meditation, but I found myself unable to sink very deeply into it. I was still feeling too restless. After 20 minutes or so I decided to switch to a walking meditation and I got up and walked slowly around the temple room. On my third time around, I started looking more closely out the windows, and at the large ornamental rocks on the window ledges. When I got to the large window, I reached out and placed my hands on the large dark green rock there — a very beautiful rock, very rugged with irregular swirling markings but very smooth — and at once I started crying. The tears subsided a minute or two later, but I had the feeling I had just figured out what the restlessness was about — there was some grief inside me that wanted to come out and I was being clueless and unaware of it. I went back to sitting meditation, but every few minutes I would start crying again, just for maybe half a minute and then it would subside again for a while.

When I left the temple I felt a lot less restless, and I went back to my tent and napped for an hour.

I still haven’t figured out what my crying was about. Does it have to do with my memories of Heartwood? I’ve had some wonderful times at Heartwood, many right there in that temple, including a couple of spiritual epiphanies or breakthroughs here that remain vividly with me. I’ve also had some sad memories there. I remember with great fondness how during one of the rituals in the temple at the gathering three years ago, a longtime member named Stewart sat on the ledge of that same window, called all the Billy Club members who had joined in the past year to sit at his feet, and told us all the history of the organization as though he were telling a bedtime story to a flock of children. The sad part is that as a result of some terrible events around that time and the bitter acrimony that unfortunately resulted, Stewart decided to leave the Billy Club, and that was the last gathering he attended and the last time anyone told that history in that manner — I learned later that Stewart’s storytelling had been a part of the Heartwood rituals for a long time, and that turned out to be the last time for it. That saddens me a lot, and I can’t look at that window any more without remembering both the high spirits I felt sitting before Stewart and the sadness of that loss. I vividly remember, too, the sight of Jean crying quietly all during the final ritual that year — I remember exactly where she was sitting that day in the temple, and my heart went out to her — she too had been badly hurt by the same events.

For last year’s rituals at Heartwood, the coordinators had built a fanciful portal in the middle of the temple out of branches and ribbons and decorations. The final ritual included each of us walking through the portal to be greeted into the new year and then turning to greet the person behind us. This probably sounds lame in writing but it was very moving and powerful in the event. Maybe the tears had to do with the beauty of that memory.

Or maybe I was crying over things in my personal life — work or relationship or friendships, I don’t know. I can identify things I’m saddened or frustrated by in my life, but can’t say whether any of them is why the tears came. Maybe it’s the combination of all of these things coming together to make me feel vulnerable and melancholy and glad to be back at Heartwood all at once.

Thursday night I got a massage from my friend Douglas, then a dip in the hot tub and to bed. I woke up a couple of times in the night but all in all slept well.

It’s Friday afternoon now as I write this, and also my 49th birthday. We’ll be having lunch soon, and then I’ll go meditate in the temple one more time, tear down my campsite, and head home to have my birthday dinner with Dave.

I don’t in any way want to sound like I’m complaining, because it’s been a lot of fun, too, but it’s been a very busy ten weeks for me, what with my job as a technical editor which continues to be both very satisfying but also very challenging and sometimes tiring, and with a lot of weekend events, many requiring a lot of planning for — two Billy Club gatherings (including May Day, for which I was in charge of organizing the construction of the maypole and the rituals around it), two Body Electric workshops (which were both extraordinarily full weekends but also terrific), and Pride Weekend, which was not only a long busy weekend but for which I started making plans a couple of weeks in advance.

Each year, for the Saturday and Sunday that encompass the Pride Parade and the two-day mega street fair that is increasingly a bigger deal than the Parade itself, I am sort of an office manager for a hundred or so volunteer safety monitors. I and a several others work together to get them checked in and out as quickly as possible, provide coffee and a simple breakfast buffet (bagels and cream cheese, muffins, fruit), give them a place to stash their sweatshirts and backpacks while they’re working, and get them their identifying T-shirts and their handbooks and radios and bottles of water and bags of trail mix and whatever else they need to have with them on the route.

Fortunately I am a great one for taking notes, and last year went very smoothly, so I was able to read through my notes and simply plan to do 95% of it the same way we did it last year. For the most part, this year went even more smoothly — at least from my administrative point of view. Outside where the party was going on, there were an unusually high number of incidents requiring attending to, from a bloody fight between a couple of homeless men to a marcher who was assaulted while separated from the rest of her contingent because she was having an asthma attack to the usual dozen or so problems involving marchers with motor vehicles who affect not to have heard about the basic safety rules they agreed to follow when they signed up to march.

Of course I took notes again this year on what worked well and what didn’t, so I’ll have them to look back on next year. I still have the final report to finish up, but other than that, I’m done with the Parade for another year.

So this past weekend was the first relatively lazy weekend I’ve had in a while. It wasn’t even as lazy as all that, as Saturday afternoon was a meeting of some members of the Billy Club who are hammering out a proposal for a fresh mission statement and values statement. But Sunday I slept in, played some Civ IV, went to lunch with Dave and Terry, and walked back home from the café, stopping at Central Perk for a couple of hours to read and write. (I’ve been reading Walter Karp’s The Politics of War, about the politics leading up to the Spanish-American War and our entry into World War One.) Then off to do a small load of laundry, dinner with Dave, and bed.

I haven’t been blogging much this last month, mostly because I’ve been busy. Work has been busy, and then in the last six weeks I’ve been to two Billy Club gatherings (one of which, the May Day gathering, I was ritual coordinator for, which means organizing the construction of the maypole and the rituals around it) and two Body Electric workshops. As soon as I finished the second of the workshops, it was time to start planning for the SF Pride Parade, for which I help manage some behind-the-scenes operations, so that will keep me hopping through weekend after next.

Hopefully after that I will return to a better state of balance between having a life and having time to write about it.

Fairly productive weekend. I had two major projects to focus on and I made good progress on both.

The first (and I won’t get around to the second in this posting, so that will have to wait) is that I’m in charge of the rituals for the Billy Club’s upcoming May Day gathering. At most gatherings this is a matter of planning, preparing, and leading the opening and closing rituals that will get us into and bring us out of our time together. Something I like a lot about the Billy Club is that the ritual and other coordinators for each gathering have a lot of free rein to do things to their own liking, so that you get a lot of different people’s takes on it. Sometimes the rituals are short and simple, sometimes they are more elaborate; sometimes they are familiar, sometimes they are the result of somebody trying out something new or tying things into a particular theme that will run through the gathering.

(Some of the Gnostic Christians ran their congregations in a similar way, with the various roles in the service changing from week to week or even being decided by lot. Anybody might be called on to choose the scriptural passage to focus on or speak about what it means to him or her. I don’t know quite how to express why I feel so called to this sort of thing, but I’ve always thought that that was a seriously wonderful way to worship.)

Of course, even if you’re new to a job at a gathering, there are traditions to lean on. The rituals have some standard parts, some standard elements, and you can’t go too wrong if you stick with them. But you can also put those aside if you’re moved to try something different. The ritual coordinator generally has full freedom to arrange things to his liking, to use the traditional elements or create something unique to the occasion.

But at most gatherings, the ritual coordinator just has to worry about the opening ritual on the first night of the gathering and the closing ritual on the last night. At most gatherings, which is to say any gathering but the May Day gathering, the rituals do not involve getting a 25-foot pole to the gathering site, let alone attaching ribbons to it and sticking it firmly into the ground.

Making the maypole happen is a big fat logistical challenge on top of the rest of it. Again, there are traditions: Billys who have done it in the past pass on advice to those about to do it for the first time. I’m not completely new to it myself, as I was one of the overall gathering coordinators for last year’s May Day gathering, so I had lots of conversations with the maypole coordinator about what was going on, and I still have my notes from those meetings. (Yet more evidence that you should never delete your notes from past projects. You never know.)

Note, though, that I said last year’s “maypole coordinator” and not “ritual coordinator”. Last year we had both, a maypole coordinator in charge of the physical logistics of the maypole and a ritual coordinator in charge of planning the rituals. Last year I saw what a big job setting up the maypole was, and — having as I said a lot of free rein to do as I thought best — I decreed that the job of ritual coordinator would for that gathering be divided in two.

I sort of wish I had myself as general coordinator this year so I could do that again. When I said yes to the job this year, I was thinking I’d be able to break off parts of this and delegate them to people and recreate something of the organizational structure we had last year. That hasn’t happened as much as I’d like. On the other hand, I’m relying a lot on just repeating anything from last year that I thought worked, so there’s not as much fresh rethinking of things to be done as we did last year. We spent a lot of time last year thinking about the symbolism of the maypole and how it applied to our lives and our community, and finding ways to embody that in the rituals and in the weaving itself. I’m like, hey, we found the answers to our questions last year, and I’m happy with those answers, I don’t feel any need to look for new and different answers this year. Someone else who doesn’t like my answers can do the maypole next year and find different answers if he wants to.

The tree is arranged for, the color scheme has been settled (last year’s was all shades of blue and green, symbolizing the weaving together of heaven and earth or something like that; this year’s will be a bit wilder, using both pale and saturated versions of four colors), the ribbons have been ordered, and everything is moving forward. As a result I haven’t thought too much yet about what the actual content and order of the opening and closing rituals will be, but I’m planning to stick with tradition and not do too much original thought, so that should work out okay.

So over the weekend I went through all my notes up to this point, and made some checklists, and went shopping and bought some steel wire (for creating the ring around the tree to which the ribbons will be tied), some new pliers and a new wire cutter (inexpensive but not those bottom-of-the-line ones that look like they’ll bust under any real strain — this was an indulgence to some extent as I already had serviceable pliers, but my wire cutter is real old and gunky and anyway there’s nothing like a few bright new tools that feel good in the hand to make a project appear more achievable), and some cheap work gloves for the volunteers I am hoping to round up at the gathering to help me put it all together and get the maypole into the ground.

I think the physical stuff is now mostly taken care of and I can turn my attention now to the details of the rituals.