excerpts
"It is a brand-new day for relating - to my father, to my lovers, to myself. I'm learning to love the men in my life in a place beyond sex and romantic interests, with a genuine closeness that touches the strong and tender beating heart I once knew. I've decided to love as an act of surrender, not a declaration of war, fighting for my protection and survival. I know now to look for those men disarmed of their own volition, willing to let me touch their soft places and I am willing to let them touch mine, with an understanding of how fragile we all really are. I move closer to a man who can raise his hand in protest to an unjust world and bring it to rest gently on my waist.
I'm one of a collective of people coming home from the same war trying to cross burned bridges with worn-out shoes; we're tired but we have no given up. We're marching forward to a new way of being with and for each other, offering gentleness and attention, exchanging bravado for emotional bravery. Taking responsibility for our individual pasts and sorting through which needs are our own to meet, and which we can expect to be met by others. Willing to offer each other our fidelity not because we're supposed to but because we respect the time it takes to make love in this inundated world. We're creating a space to collectively acknowledge that there has been a war going on and we are committed to the work of rebuilding.
I'm getting a glimspe of the new dream, different from the one-armed man trudging down the street. I'm imagining a world without battle-scarred soldiers of life who have to be maimed or die in order to become heroic, a world without men who have to wage war to prove their point. This world is full of men who are heroic becasue they have the courage to nurture their families with a gentle confident strength, to teach children, their own and others, how to be humane, how to live in harmony with those considered different, how to practice spirituality in a world that overvalues the material. Heroic because they know the task of transformation is difficult but they take action anyway because they know it must be done."
from 'loving a one-armed man' by tajamika paxton. a short story amongst many others in the book: what makes a man.
jacq | 9:57:00 AM
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