Doors closing

It is a time of change. I have just finished my final weekend teaching on the Priest/ess of Danu training course here in Budapest. I have been doing this for three years, helping a very wonderful woman, Kriszta Veres, develop a group of women and men devoted to the indigenous goddesses of the Carpathian Basin and the River Danube which runs through it. It has been highly rewarding - watching as people grow in their knowledge and experience of Goddess- finding their innate power and learning how to express it. It has been, literally, a labour of love.

But now it is time to move on. For six years, first in Glastonbury/Avalon and now in Budapest, I have been co-teaching - following to a certain degree the visions of others. I have also, to be frank, had certain reservations and fears concerning my suitability as a heterosexual man to be teaching people who would be predominantly female. I was worried about many things - not least the issue of power. I feared that I would be replicating the old story of men talking and women having to listen. I feared my own desire - that I would misuse this power - sexually and emotionally. There have been all too many precedents for this, including from myself. So I sat in a secondary sort of role - supporting but not really leading - deferring often to my co-teacher. I do not regret this. It has taught me a lot. It has been a very good apprenticeship.

However, over the past year or so, I have felt an ever-strengthening call to teach according to the vision and the call I have received from Inanna. To address directly those issues of power and desire and use them to explore how sexuality can develop in a spirituality centred on the Goddess. I am aware of my own desire and am no longer ashamed of it and am no longer frightened that I will allow it to dominate how I interact with students. I know that there are dangers - I have been burnt before - but also know that this is the work I am called to do. I am called to confront the old morality, based as it is upon power and property right, and explore a new morality based on the simple premise of the equality of all human beings and their right to decide what they do with their bodies.

I do not know what form this morality will take. I do not believe that it can be captured in any collection of words- engraved in stone or otherwise. I doubt, in fact, that I will be able to live by it - conditioned as I am by the Abrahamic nightmare from which we are only now emerging. But that does not matter. I am now approaching my third 21st birthday and facing the real possibility that sexual misconduct may well become physically problematic in the foreseeable future (which I hope is long delayed). I am, in any case, entering the final phase of my life. The changes that need to happen will probably take far longer than I can realistically expect to live.

The work, however, must begin now. I believe that the perversion of the beauty and power of sexuality we now call morality lies at the very base of the problems of our civilisation. If we are to have any hope of survival then there is no time to lose. Freedom and autonomy are the rewards ahead. Subjection and slavery are the reality now - however they are currently dressed in democratic clothes.

So doors close. I cannot go back. I must go forward and trust that other doors will open.

scripts, scripts, scripts

The last few weeks have been very difficult. It had been building up for a long time. Someone i love very much was getting married in the UK and I really wanted to be there. My life choice, however, has resulted in my living here and surviving on an income far below the poverty level in Britain. I am not complaining about this. After three years of preparation things here are opening up for me and I know why I came.

This opening up - to my regret- came too late for the wedding. The very successful workshop that I ran in August gave me just enough to cover outstanding utility bills. No more. But a beginning. The workshop was wonderful - I cannot express how I felt when the participants fed back their experiences. And, for me, it was a confirmation that I am on the right path and that doors are opening. Inanna is guiding me.

When, however, my elation started to subside and I looked at the financial impossibility of my flying to Britain I began to move into a state of despair. And, more importantly, shame. I was ashamed that I was poor. I became aware that, no matter how much I may have intellectually and, perhaps, spiritually accepted my path that I was still ashamed of my failure to be a success in the only way that my parents knew. Financially. The old script was activated and completely overwhelmed me. I used my old tactics of evasion and denial, hoping against hope that some sort of intervention would come that would enable me to attend. And then a family member offered to pay my fare. I felt great. I would be able to go! I then started planning my trip. Unfortunately, I had ignored one important issue. Where would I sleep? I thought it was a minor problem but it turned out that there was no room for me.

I was hurt. I was angry. But most of all I was bitterly disappointed. Crushed. My pride then kicked in. I did not want to trumpet my, to British eyes, extreme poverty. I did not want to sleep in a bus station without enough to buy a cup of tea. Neither did I want to say "Hey, you know, I will arrive with nothing in my pocket. Can you help me out? Lend me the money for a place for the nights? Spare change?"

As I say, pride. One of the seven deadly sins, I am told by the ever-proud and arrogant who preach from gilded thrones in the cathedrals of self-indulgence. Maybe so. Maybe it is deadly. I must confess that I felt it so. My heart yearned to be somewhere but my pride prevented me from asking for the degree of help I needed.

So I decided not to try further. And immediately my mood changed. Relief took the place of desperation and helplessness. Deep sorrow remained. But I felt better. That is the only way to describe it. I accepted myself and my own fallibility - my own incompetence in some areas of life. I stopped tormenting myself with the scripts of old. I accepted that I could not go

On my facebook page I wrote of this feeling of relief. That was unwise. It was misinterpreted as an expression of relief that I was not going. That is not what I meant, but that is the way it was taken. A very abusive email came immediately to me from someone and I replied equally angrily. For which I wish to make no apology. I expressed an anger rooted deep in the past that I had suppressed for over three decades. And it was an anger that would have been better expressed at the time. Whatever the rights and wrongs from an outside objective viewpoint, I felt that I had been injured by this person and had suppressed that feeling - through fear that it might lead to further injury. In two sentences I said what I had then feared to say. I felt, and still feel, cleansed. Purged of past scripts. Free of a bully, within and without.

I wondered for a long time why all this was happening. I was very angry at Inanna for putting me in this situation - for leading me here and leaving me adrift. I was also very angry at myself. And this is perhaps at the root of it all. For most of my life I have avoided confrontation with what I believe to be wrong, I have taken the line of least resistance. I have been, in short, a coward. In the process, I have hurt those who loved me and those whom I loved. I have not stood and said "This is me - and I will not compromise myself to fit an image of how I (or you) think I should be". This was the realisation that came to me with a terrifying clarity not so long ago. I have only recently begun to be authentic.

And at the age of 62, this is rather late. It is only in recent years that I have become aware of how much shame has ruled me. Shame about my sexuality - my very being - my right to walk on this planet, free and joyful. So, painful as it has been, for me and, perhaps, others, I am glad that I have been given this insight. As I start to be a teacher - whatever that might mean - it is vital that I am made aware of my own fallibility. My own deep hurts and wounds. My own sources of rage. I knew when Inanna called me that She was not calling me to an easy primrose path but one that would force me to confront those things I most feared about myself.

And now, I have felt the fear of pressing "PUBLISH POST". I fear your judgement. But I will do it just the same.

Budapest Pride 2009

Yesterday, I went on my second Gay Pride Parade in Budapest. Whereas last year this was an experience which I found very strong. For almost the entire walk we were pelted with eggs, tomatoes and a few stones from those to whom the whole thing was an affront to what they believed was the nature of being "Hungarian". I was physically frightened for much of the time, knowing that, had the protesters succeeded in bypassing the very tight cordon of riot police then serious injury was a real possibility. This did not happen - although there were running fights between right wing crazies and police, tear gas, and a few petrol bombs at places outside the line of the march. Most shattering of all for me, however, was the sheer irrational hatred of those who protested. I could not comprehend their motivation - for how could the expression of love between human beings possibly be a threat to them? But clearly it was.

This year, however, passed without such incidents. Last year, only the direct route of the march was cordoned off but this year the cordon was extended to city blocks. In fact, much of the centre of Pest was a no-go zone for anyone apart from police. Metro lines were closed and dedicated trains provided to transport the people on the parade. Nowhere we went were there any protesters to be seen or heard - apart from a few token ones at the beginning of the march. These latter were, perhaps, allowed in order to give the ex-prime minister Gyurcsany a chance for a good photo-op as he strode up to them, smiling, stood for a while accepting their abuse and then disappeared as fast as he had come, surrounded by a bevy of bodyguards. (I may be overly-cynical here but I think not. During his time in office Gyurcsany took full advantage of the threat of rising neo-nazism in order to maintain his own authority.)

Well, the parade took place in empty streets - the only witnesses being the police, press and television, and a few waiters and other employees whose fashionable places of business had been temporarily closed.

Terrifying as the last event had been for me there was, at least, a sense of reality to it. This year simply felt very strange. It was like walking through a ghost city, guarded by faceless and silent phantoms in riot gear. After the parade finished we entered the major metro station in Pest past lines of these phantoms and boarded the train to the place where we could disperse safely and merge into the general population. Anti -climax does not fully express what I felt. It was eerie - like being in a zombie movie of some sort.



However, the fact is that the authorities were in a dilemma. They had to guarantee the safety of the participants. But what it meant, in practice, was that in order to protect the freedom of assembly of a comparative few they had to curtail the freedom of movement of a substantially greater number of others. They were under, furthermore, international scrutiny - many embassies of major countries, including the US, having pledged support for the parade. My worry about all this, and it was expressed by others, is that the net result could present the rabid right with a major propaganda opportunity. Discontent here has led to the electoral success in the EU elections for a far-right party dedicated to restoring their particular vision of Hungarian identity. On the other hand, to have disallowed the parade would have given a green light to the bullies and bigots.

Others felt the parade to have been a complete success. The fact that it happened at all being the main thing. Those people whose sexuality is unacceptable to a vocal and violent minority have asserted their right to full and equal citizenship and had this right defended, at great financial cost, by the state of which they are citizens. That, however strange and slightly unsettling the parade was to me, is the most important fact.


Photos from Ukgaynews.org where a further report can be read