Random Notes about Pilgrimages and Queer people

Toby Johnson, editor of White Crane, says this about his journey:

"...Being gay calls for being a wanderer, seeking an idealized life beyond the difficulties, for we are cast out from the conventional roles of householder and paterfamilias, called to discover our own special path. The journey is to wholeness and virtue, to fullness of experience, and to being a source of love and joy in a world so often bereft of love and joy these days.

Being a pilgrim or wanderer means accepting the insecurity of life, being open to change. It's the opposite of being a householder obsessed with stability and safety--and self-reliance. Being a wanderer puts you at the mercy of the seasons and vissicitudes of human history. It means sometimes relying on the kindness of strangers and being a stranger and a hero yourself, on a quest, doing good deeds and showing kindness along the way. Being a wanderer means placing your faith in something bigger than yourself and your own powers. Being a spiritual wanderer means responding to signs--'karmic resonances'--to reveal the path you should be following. Maybe it means believing in luck, synchronicity--and magic."

He says this and more here.

Michel Foucault, French Philosopher, in "Friendship as a Way of Life" notes:

"A way of life can yeild a culture and an ethics. To be 'gay' is not identify with the phychological traits and the visible masks of the homosexual, but to try to develop a way of life."

David Nimmons, author of The Soul Beneath the Skin, on the dangers of seeking:

"When your cultural job is experimenting with the extraordinary, it is an occupational risk that sometimes your experiments blow up on you...Second, less dramatically, the pursuit of bliss can bring illusion."

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John Brennan © 2003