CHOOSE LIFE!
SO MUCH BETTER
THAN THE ALTERNATIVE.

Olá meus amigos e bem-vindo de volta! É sempre um prazer passar algum tempo convosco! // Hello my friends and welcome back! It is always a pleasure to spend some time with you! Today I wanted to share some thoughts I have been mulling and ruminating recently. I have been focused me on how to choose life rather than its alternative. How is that for vague and muddled? Let me try to clarify.

By the way, this is, I hope, a short(er) post. I know what your are thinking. “Promises, promises. We heard that before.” Yes, my verbosity disability has not yet become fully manageable. So I can never be sure of my brevity capacity. That was my attempt at humor. Hahaha.

FLIRTING WITH LIFE

Exactly one month ago to the day today, I read a heartfelt paean to the poet Frank O’Hara. I happened on this tribute in The New York Times Magazine. It got me thinking about the conscious, intentional act to choose life.

I had not been particularly familiar with O’Hara’s work. But then I thought that I should have been. He was a gay man living in New York City who found his faith in the church of humanity. He found each and every encounter awe-filled, sacred, revelatory and even divine. Maybe even especially divine. I wanted to get know to know this man. I wanted to have a strong cup of black coffee and to chat with him. Perhaps even flirt a bit.

I have since read some of O’Hara’s poetry. And, yes, I have totally and irresistibly fallen for his absolute joy in life. Equally, I am enamored of the observation that O’Hara “flirted with life”. But I don’t think he just flirted. He seduced life. He bedded life in wild romps of red-hot sex.

Life for a gay man (or lesbian woman) in the 50s and 60s was far from easy. Far from safe even. So much so that many gay men resisted or shied from life. Some teetered into death. Take Roy Cohn, another gay man of the same era and same city, for instance. Cohn was the ardent foot soldier of McCarthyism, tutor to Trump and holy icon for Giuliani. He preferred tearing down rather than building up. Cohn hid rather than came out. He died along with many other of the earliest victims of AIDS. Most of these simply and merely wanted to give love and be loved. Something that larger society denied them.

TO CHOOSE LIFE

O’Hara was the bridegroom taking life in his arms. Not letting go. Cohn was the prosecutor falsifying the evidence, trumping up charges and tossing life into prison. Throwing the key away. O’Hara created art and poetry. He made love and created enduring friendships. He was funny and filled rooms with wit and laughter. Cohn destroyed lives. He locked his love and his lovers in a closet. He filled rooms with fear and terror. They created radically different worlds from the similar materials of their lives.

I have written on related aspects of this theme many times before. Choices are placed before me often, always, daily. The choices are always raw and starkly simple. “Set before you today is life and death. Choose life.” To choose life means not necessarily doing the easy and the painless. No, quite the contrary. Choosing life means doing the hard work, both for yourself and then for others. More esotericism. What the heck does that mean?

We humans are complex beings. And, thinking of myself, I don’t mean that flatteringly. I carry baggage far longer than I need. Mostly I do so because I never stop to unpack and to discard all stuff I no longer need for the journey. Let me explain with an example.

To say the least, my childhood was complicated. In some respects it was not even much of a childhood. I and my siblings grew up (too) fast among chaos, anger and fear. Seemingly, none of us were ever far from harm. The “seemingly” in that last sentence is important. It is the difference between a child’s perceptions and those of an adult.

A New Life

As a child I managed to cope in order to survive, and then ultimately to thrive. The mechanisms I employed ended up being both grace and burden as an adult. Albeit more of the latter than the former. Then, eventually, the burden clearly began to outweigh the grace. I had hard work to do in order to unpack and leave behind the burdens. That is, to take their lessons but discard their defenses. In the end there would be more room for good stuff to grow. Or perhaps I mean to say, different stuff to grow.

By way of example, I offer a lesson from nature. Nature as observed here in Santa Luzia. Pomegranates start as tiny, hard red balls. These then burst into gorgeous velvety vermillion flowers in which gold is buried just inside. The flower dies away. The gold is stowed within a mini-me pomegranate. The fruit matures. All the bits, I observed, that once served a purpose, but now longer do, well, they merely drop away.

So I must do the same. Then there might be a new beginning. An older way of being in the world becoming a new way of living.

Yes, Choose Life

On a very hot day. On a long walk into and back from Tavira. Altogether six miles with lunch and gelato squeezed in between. We took a respite on a bench. The wetlands of the Ria Formosa spread in front of us. And so seated and shaded I wondered at the phragmites, the very tall (ten to fifteen foot) marsh grasses.

Everything surrounding was dried and turning to dust. They retained a bit of green, a bit of life. They swayed with the barely perceptible breeze. The afternoon sky — deep blue of course — was lightly brushed by a peachy hue closest to the horizon. Midway up the dome of the sky, a hazier, lighter blue gave way to dark blue. There was a clear dividing line in between.

A white heron, bleached whiter in the scorching sun, emerged far beyond the phragmites. It reached the in-between line and leveled off. Then it continued out of view. An omen perhaps? Certainly another lesson.

Choosing life is like flying within the in-between. Above the parched dryness of carried hurts and pains, the embodied disappointments and failures. Seeing these, feeling these, knowing these. But leaving them behind. Still, with a lifetime of hard work ahead, for flying is hard work, there is always “not quite yet”. Neither above in the deep blue. Nor below in the haze. In between but soaring nonetheless.

Some Special Notes

Frank O’Hara died young, at about 40, in 1966. It was a car accident. He was on Fire Island with a group of friends. Their car had broken down. He had gotten out of their jeep to seek help. He was hit by another jeep and died of his injuries the next day. I cannot help but think who we might be as a community and a country if his light had glowed among us for as long and as intensely as Cohn’s. That thought inspires to keep O’Hara’s light of life, love and laughter ablaze… through my life.

My next post will be August 25th. As I mentioned previously I need to find more time — as I say here — for my requisite work in order to choose life. Plus, to be honest, I have got a lot of fun things intruding too. Tomorrow eleven members of my family arrive here in Portugal. We are spending a week together in Santa Luzia. They will enjoy all the things I enjoy about life here. The natural beauty. The incredibly friendly people. The superb food. The ceaseless sunshine and cool breezes. And, oh yes, the fabulous desserts.

Then in July we are joining friends in Sicily for a week of rest and reacquaintance. Really looking forward to that. Then in September we are returning to the States for two weeks. Woo hoo! It will be great to hook up with good friends and celebrate lifelong friendships. Then on our way back we will stopover in Paris for a week. We will be back home here in Santa Luzia at the beginning of October.

Divirtam-se! Até à próxima! // Enjoy yourselves! See you soon!