Our Crown of Thorns

I write this from a place of frustration. I write from inside the belly of a dilemma. I write this because today I see how a man I love really wants to be touched by me, and yet doesn't dare be touched by anyone. He wears a crown of thorns to keep himself untouchable with Christ-like beauty and meekness. He's not a hard-hearted person, nor a cruel man. He's extremely gentle and kind, and he cries out for love. Yet he won't let himself be loved.

I write this because I wonder if we all aren't wearing our own Crown of Thorns. When we most want to be loved by someone, do we play games instead to keep ourselves removed and untouchable? In the end do we all really distrust the very love gods we most ardently need?

In my tarot cards is a naked soul called Cian. He is only naked within disguise. He is a Prince in the world, a person of great temporal status. Inside he is gentle and compassionate and burns with a passionate need to abet the weak and to succor the abused. In the disguise of a beggar woman, called Molly Keen, the great Prince Cian goes secretly into the kingdom he can't politically change, and he helps people one by one. In secret disguise he creates revolutionary movements that seek to break the foundations of his own worldly dynasty. Cian was the card that came up in my house of love over and over in readings I'd give to myself, and soon a man very much like Cian came into my life. So we'll call this man Cian.

Cian is extremely unremarkable from external appearances. Most people think he's little more than a dumb farm-boy red-neck. He does nothing to challenge the impression. He is, in vocation, a farm boy. He belongs to a family of virulent Republican gun enthusiasts. His father is the president of a local gun club. His mother is the club secretary. Cian lives still with his family on the farm. He is a flawless shot, and every hunting season it takes him all of ten minutes to get his annual kill. I tell this, for there's a reason why the real Cian, a gay man with quiet powers of divination, lives inside the disguise of dutiful, gun-toting son.

Cian came into my life when my band Psychedelic Irish was at its height of social excitement. We band members lived communally in an old derelict farmhouse barely heated with wood stoves, barely having water via a garden hose hooked up to the pressure tank. The toilet only flushed if we poured buckets of water into it, and it worked only to flush human sewage down to the cellar where it welled up from a broken sewer pipe. The electricity was always tentative, especially when the amps where all plugged in and the music was rocking. The bare light bulbs flickered and grew dim.

It was the most popular house in all the county. All the other bands came there to play music at all hours. Teenagers caught between high school and factory jobs congregated endlessly around the music scene clinging to those sparse fleeting moments of poor-white-trash youth. The revolution lived for a day, before the factory doors opened to receive their impotent souls.

Cian came into this scene, awkward and rustic, and no one paid him the least bit attention at all except for Psychedelic Irish's infamous song-writer and lead singer.

That would be me, the lead singer. Cian came into my life just at the time I had experienced a shamanic voyage I called my Tallic Revolution. In it I realized that it was time for me to be completely open and public about my gay sexuality, and I started out singing and writing rainbow energy with incredible joy and liberation. But it all suddenly stopped. Cian and I had become lovers, and Cian was extremely deep in the closet for some extremely obvious reasons. Suddenly I was faced with the realization that even if I had freedoms in life to be whatever I truly was, I had to honor Cian's lack of freedom. So I became discreet, again, against my desires. Many of the songs I wrote that spring were never heard by any audience.

Cian had magic instincts. He's a diviner. He's the one that stubbornly brought me to Mystic Grove Healing Sanctuary, and basically he left me here like a stray cat. Actually, he energetically turned me over to the very magical Mystic Mama here, and with that meeting I moved to the Grove bringing my cow, chickens and dog. Cian gave me courage to plunge into this new life. He was the one that picked out exactly where the hearth should be for our future cabin. He dowsed the exact place where I should dig the well. He located the spot where a western gate should open into the cottage gardens. He understood things about land-sentience that I understood to be true. I trusted him deeply, and still do.

But it all ended suddenly with the Summer Solstice. It was our last night to be lovers. When he went home the next morning, it was the last time I saw him for months. I believe what had happened was simply that our love was noticed and openly discussed by less careful members of the Mystic Grove community, and Cian perceived that town gossip fell awful close to ears on the family farm. He decided to prove (to himself perhaps) that he was completely straight. He ended up dating a woman who was in jail. As long as she was incarcerated it was a vital romance. They wrote letters and he even got through the security drill to visit her briefly a few times. She assisted a boyfriend in an armed robbery and having got caught, I think suddenly she fell deeply infatuated with anyone or anything that could make her life feel squeaky-clean white and apple-pie pure again. Cian was all of that on his hayseed exterior. And he was also a very gentle and nurturing soul. He was her life line, and she was his disguise. Everything was fine until she was released from jail and confined to house arrest. I have never heard one word of what happened, but I don't need to be told.

I have known Cian's sexual body in all the senses, biblical and literal. My sexual body is that of the somasin. I'm very full of masculine energy. I am equally full of feminine energy. I know exactly which half of my sexual body was essential to Cain's sexual needs. I knew that as much as his heart wants him to be straight, his body simply couldn't manifest that desire. I don't need to be told why Cian mysteriously stopped seeing his friend.

As to me, after the solstice I did go into mourning, but I didn't show. Instead I worked like a demon. The Matriarchal house at Mystic Grove burnt down in the spring and we all were working eight hours each day to rebuild it. In addition to that I milked my cow and broke new ground to plant crops. In July however, the planting done, I found time to plant a rose hedge around the fire pit that marked the spot where our hearth would go. I did so as a healing ritual. I planted the first rose bush under the July full moon planted the last under the August full moon. I also raised a sacred bile, carved upon it was my prayer for a life partner who could replace the dream I had built around Cian. I knew I had to let go of Cian, so I opened my prayers out to the four directions. From the earth I heard a strange message that he will be a black horse coming through the western gate.

All I could do was work like a horse and open my soul and heart like a flower and replace courage with hope. I slept alone every night in a tipi, going to be with the dark falling, rising up with the first stream of morning light to work all day long. That was my summer.

In September Cian showed up suddenly and admired everything I had built and planted. It was very good to see him. I had to let go of him as a lover, but it didn't mean that I couldn't still love him as a friend. It turned out he should up on the very day that Psychedelic Irish was having a long awaited revival concert. Just after he left to go milk the family cows, I rushed about to get ready for the concert and just before I departed with guitar case we all saw a double rainbow incredibly clear fill the sky. From the Matriarchal house it appeared to land directly on the rose hedge circle I had built around the fire pit.

Cian came back into my life, but I tried to be cautious in how to accept him. I wanted to accept him in a way that was best for him. Three time--very meaningful and important times--we reconnected as lovers. Each time seemed so sacred when it happened, but after each time Cian was convulsed with shame such that I had to make the conscious choice myself not to allow lovemaking to happen. My own sacredness was being violated with all that shame.
The winter came, and I've been living like a refugee in the Matriarchal house. I've lost the healing connection I had all summer long of living constantly in sun, air and on earth. I hardly saw Cian at all in the month of December and even the occasional message left me realizing that even if I hold a place of deep friendship for him in my heart, that still leaves an even more sacred part of my secret garden standing empty and cold. I lost courage and hope both, and losing that I lost my physical strength. Trudging through the snow I'd walk to the site of the cabin I had so ardently dreamed of in the summer. All just snow and dormant stalks of rose bushes. I felt too exhausted to even imagine taking a shovel to break sods for a foundation. I felt I had no foundation.

And I kept getting weaker and weaker. Colds came too frequently and dampened my animal vitality too much. The last cold felt more like advanced tuberculosis. I had to very seriously examine why it was that spirit and body have become so estranged, and of course it was obvious. The solution wasn't so obvious, but I finally crawled out of my own death-like sickness of spirit to realize that I had to leave Mystic Grove for the present at least. I originally came here in an undeclared partnership, and the life I set out to build here was the life of two gay men sharing the earth. Having such a partnership, I had no fear at all of the profound isolation that is an unimpeachable fact of rural life--especially for gay pagans.

I knew that I had to live my life in the present tense, and that what my sickness was teaching me was that I had to claim my own power through actions and choices based on my life as it presently manifested itself. From that stance I saw that my life was like an open wound gushing out vital energy. I had to make choices that would allow me to close that wound and heal. So I decided to leave rural isolation and the entropy of communalized existence to build myself an autonomous life in Ithaca, NY. The decision made I started applying for jobs. This happened yesterday.

Last night Cian came most unexpectedly. He's been working grueling 12 hour swing shifts in a factory and never allowed to sleep regular hours he feels continually exhausted and dead. He had just come off a 12 hour day shift and would normally have gone into catatonic non-space in his bedroom. He came here and already knew that I was thinking of giving away my milk cow and leaving the grove. He expressed it a gentle and jesting sort of way, so that it could be merely interpreted as a joke, but I know him better than that. He came to protest the lost of the cow and of the abandonment of the cottage. He even ventured so much as to joke that if I would just stay and build the house he'd move right in and start milking the cow. Of course such a confession immediately required humors disarming, and he said that then I could go ahead a move to Ithaca.
Well, we all suddenly mourn something we don't think much about when suddenly we realize we're about to lose it. I refused to be emotionally swayed by jokes, and I refused to give credence to all the subtext that obviously lingered between humorous lines.

I'm still very exhausted from the latest spirit-body disconnect (though mending rapidly) so as the evening wore on, I fell asleep on the floor. Mystic Mama stayed awake to talk with Cian as well as with another friend, Levity. Levity has been devoted most of his life to studying a form of magic I don't rightly understand, though I've discussed it for thousands of hours with him over the last six years. Levity and Mystic Mama were talking about a "lay line" of some sort, an energy channel that exists practically inside the Matriarchal house. Cian was typically quiet, but his long, slender and incredibly feminine feet were cold, so he slipped them under my belly to warm his flesh with mine. I woke to a half-slumbering but strangely aware place. I was thinking that just the little act of showing desire--the desire of using me to warm his feet--somehow meant more to me then and there than any of the amazing and glorious acts of Sacred Eros that have dignified my life in the past. The moment felt incredibly precious and intimate, and I was grateful that my body had heat to give to a man that I still loved so dearly, dearly enough to let him go and find my own life elsewhere.

And yet it felt so sad and frustrating. I realized something. Cian was wanting me to touch him, but I wasn't going to because I put a block between us. I had to because of his shame reactions to the times before when I opened up more courageously to his timid and subtle requests. I just felt like it was sad, because it always seems that no matter how much we try to love and try to open up, we're really alone, always alone. I don't even know how I should love Cian. From my own heart of desire I would give him everything physical and intimate, but I shut that down, because I really thought he needed me to love him a platonic friend. But at that moment, that "purer" form of friendship was revealed to me as ego-protecting cowardice and fear of rejection, and a willingness to let the Great Isolation win out always in the name of charity. Lord Eros is a messy god, but he's the greatest enemy of all to the Prison of Mirrors wherein each of us with our pure and untarnished souls gaze upon our own cowardice (masquerading as virtue and purity). Lord Eros doesn't let us be pure or whole that pure image of ourselves. He smashes mirrors and gives us a wild-haired glimpse of life outside our own egotistical invention of the universe.

So I realized, that the pure platonic me is just afraid to touch Cian's thorny crown. Isn't funny, when I first lost him, I planted a big crown of thorny roses around our sacred spot? I never connected that until now. It's not just my fault though. I can't be his crutch. I can't be his sexual volition. He has to own his own desires. My only crime was to remain in stasis hoping he was share in the dangers when Lord Eros commanded us to be courageous (and messy).

I have to live Seamus life as it is, in the present tense, not as I dream it might become. I'll keep my heart open to dreams, but when it's time to grab shovels and build foundations? Only the present tense is real. I find myself telling this story, for I simply laid there and warmed Cian's feet with my belly. That much he had the courage to ask for, that much I give. I won't bloody my hands on his crown of thorns. He has chosen to wear it, and I know him to be, deep inside, a soul wise enough to understand his own choices. They may be very good ones.
If I feel that I want to lift thorny crowns from anyone's brow, maybe I should stop and wonder if I haven't one on my own head.

And I write this, for maybe someone out there might be wishing there was someone to warm their feet, but they don't ask.

My closet pagan friend and I share a strange history. Decades before we met, we were both members of an obscure super-fundamentalist Christian cult. We may have even seen each other in the multitudes of a cult tabernacle in Big Sandy, Texas back in the early 1970s, never knowing that years later in another region of the planet, in a whole other universe, we'd actually meet as healers and pagans.

We had different experiences of that cult. Vera was baptised into it and married within it. She accepted its teachings and rituals as an adult. I was brought in at age 13 by my parents who converted. I was there as a teenager, mostly obedient at first, but slowly growing more rebellious in mind, spirit and even (heaven forbid!) in appearance. By age 19 I had a beard and hair long enough to touch my collar (much shorter than Christ's hair probably was). A minister in Texas said that I could not come back to services until I cut my hair, and I guess that's why I didn't cut my hair for decades after. I was never baptised, and in my heart I only came near to accepting the teachings of that cult, but didn't quite cross the line.

 I think its fair to say that Vera is a sexual healer. She's passionate about helping people recover feeling within their own body. She came to this for she herself knew only erotic death all her life, and especially all her marriage within the church and beyond it. She was divorced and in her 40s before she even knew that women were able to experience orgasm. She believes that this profound disconnect between her body and her spirit started before she entered into the sexual legislation of the church, but there's no doubt that as she became a hand-maiden sort of biblical patriarchal wife serving only the most primitive procreative urges of not her husband, but of his emotionally detached penis, this alienation from her erotic soul was profoundly intensified.

 She asked me how I fared in the church as an adolescent teenager. Well, I knew exactly what that church expected of me in terms of sexual conduct. I kid you not, they fully expected that from age 13 until age 26 I should have no sexual experience at all, no orgasm, no exploration of my body, no masturbation, no "fornication" (pre-marital sex). I was suppose to fight my sexual nature during its most powerful age and devote myself to material security so that I could afford a wife (ideally about 19 years old). The two of us virgins were to marry in the church and remain together for life devoting our entire sexual awakening exclusively to a codified connubial conduct which forbid female-pleasuring techniques like cunnilingus.

I knew that this was expected of me, and I made attempts not to masturbate, but my body had a wild erotic spirit in it that simply refused to let me be repressed. The more I abstained from masturbate the wilder my spirit got. It led me to explore all of my body. In trying to not to touch my genitals I experiences my legs, my arms, my anus, all these other places where erotic energy flowed. Inevitably in some super intense way of trying to avoid masturbation I generally ended up masturbating in some extravagant and intensely erotic way. The spirit was not to be leashed, and I actually realized at some point that I had better surrender to the fact of masturbation as a way to have a halfway modest adolscence.

Today I realized that it was that Sacred Eanthar. He-and-she was in me all my life. It was this same erotic spirit that woke up full of protest that one day I convinced myself I should seek baptism. I remember it well. I was descending a set of stairs to approach a minister to ask for baptism. The pagan spirit in me starting saying, turn-back! turn-back! and then started shouting it. He made sure I felt his protest. I felt as if I were descending into cold, deep arctic water growing more and more dense pushing with more and more pressure. Finally, my spirit friend took control of my body (he was always good at that during those times I tried NOT to masturbate). He spun me clean around and made me walk right out of the church. It was such a vigorous commandeering of my body, I actually took heart. I felt that maybe an angel or some sort didn't want me to be baptized just yet. That it was this Christian god's plan that I wait for some other time in his scheme of things.  This was a comfort, for in my heart I only submitted to the attempt at baptism out of a feeling of compulsion.

 I am much more clear in my mind these days exactly who and what my "angel" was. He's my sacred eanathar, and he may also be called Eros. He's the pagan angel that gave me shocking red hair at my birth. My hair quickly cooled in color, but his heat was always in my blood. That Church couldn't kill my reverence for Lord Eros the way it killed Vera's. The sacred eanathar simply wouldn't hear of it, simply wouldn't tolerate it.

These days, I have a different more accepting sort of relationship with my Sacred Eanathar. I know that its because of him that I am gay. I never even dreamed I was gay back in Yahweh's desert. In coming to accept my sexuality, I begin to see that the Eanathar gives me certain gifts, and lately he's been pushing me to use them. Of all my vocations in life, I am foremost a writer, and today I was realizing that my Eanathar was my muse. He made my attempts to write an extremely erotic exploration of self and of soul. These days I'm serializing a novel about my erotic escape from the fundamentalist cult. It's about my inner healing life, too. If you are interested it's available on myspace at Seamus zipcode 18801.

On 19 September I had a very strange experience. At first I had strange thoughts that I was experiencing some premonition of an earthquake. . . as if deep subterranean gases  had been released by seismic activity to give me bodily disorientation. I felt a wierd vertigo with some mild nausea. Mostly I had a disturbed equilibrium with a very strong sensation that the level plane of earth was no longer set at 0 degrees but at about 27 degrees. What should have been level then seemed tilted.

I felt I needed to lay upon the earth. I went to the most comforting place in my entire world. I went to my garden and lay on the sods just below my "bile". It was womb-like comforting to  spread by body against the earth and surrender to this strange convulsion of gravity. I went into a trance that apparently lasted about 45 minutes. During the trance I watched a goddess image form in waves of energy that rose from the four branches at the top of the bile. When I came out of the trance I was watching the red-tailed hawk circling slowly directly over the bile. For some reason his tail feathers glowed so bright that I watched tongues of flame fly off his body.

Then I was completely clear in mind and body. I was returned quite gently to the earthly plane, which now felt perfectly level. I was to quickly learn, however, that I had been very much changed. The earthquake never happened. Instead I suffered a Birth-quake. I was transformed in a very visceral way. At first I only noticed sensual quickenings. Colors were brighter, bird-speech a little more clear. Then I noticed that I was sensing certain odors. I smelled things like tobacco smoke, or Jasmine perfume, orange peels, ship tar. I'd smell these odors way out in the field where I would be working. There would be nothing within hundreds of yards that could possibly be causing these odors. I began to associate the odors with certain "personalities" who seemed to visit me with some undecipherable pattern.

Several weeks later, I was making butter in the house, when suddenly some force clutched at my biological heart. It very literally felt as if someone was snatching at that organ as a lifeline. The clutching came in successions. There were three distinct moments when I could have told myself that I was having a heart-attack. I didn't register this thought because something inside me said, "Someone needs you. You don't have to help. You can stop this at any time." I felt that it was Earth speaking to me, and I wanted to trust the Mother at any cost, so I didn't stop the use of my body for someone's need.

I then felt a very real burning in my throat as if something harsh was being forced into me. After a while I went through a highly anxious state of mind. It was followed by a dreamy, peaceful state, the surrendering state. But the surrendering state wasn't perfect. It was flawed by an unfulfilled desire, a soul-based need to fulfill some family obligation. I felt the depth of that desire even though it wasn't mine, and instinctively surrendered something in me that felt like a rope of energy.

The whole thing last two hours. After it, I was extremely depressed in spirits and exhausted in body. I got very sick. I lost my voice and couldn't sing. For weeks afterward I had no physical energy. Since I'm a farmer I am quite a work horse normally. I still had to carry on work for there was wood to cut and split, animals to care for, a ditch that had to be dug before frost. I remember how frightened and helpless I felt picking up a splitting maul or shovel and feeling as if I no longer had force to work these implements. I felt as if I had lost my strong peasant man's body and now had someone else's body.

During that time of weakness, I found out that a woman living about 1 mile away had overdosed on beer and sleeping pills. At the moment I felt the cardial cluctchings, she went into cardiac arrest. They used defbrilators on her three times. They shoved a tube into her throat to pump out her stomach. She had been dead at some point but they brought her back. After two hours they were able to stabilize her condition enough to life-flight her to a hospital. She survived.

In time I recovered my masculine strength. I got back to work and prepared for the winter as best as I could, but I'm now aware that something not-man, not-woman has been awakened in me. I know her as my somasin.

I share this story with gay pagans, because all my life I've been trying to understand my sexuality. I have a very masculine body and persona. I hadn't seen any physical reason why I shouldn't form sexual relationships with women, but all my life my emotional body kept me from doing just so. It's been a long, long growing process, and there's not space to talk about it now, but I've come to realize that my "emotional body" requires me to form my most important relationship with a man. I have come to think, since the Birth-quake, that the somasin always within me has been forming my sexual body in this way. But to be honest I have a very hard time understanding her. I suppose I don't need to, even now as she's claiming my energies and my body for some intense sort of healing work.

I guess I want to open up a conversation with people who understand their healing guides with more experience. I want to converse with people who understand as well how their spiritual calling has called them to gay sexuality. I think that most people by nature are bisexual but most find it important to embrace one expression or the other, and yet I've had intimate friendship with men who have always clearly known themselves to be gay. They never felt that there was a choice in the matter. I would almost say that I've always had choice, but every time I tried the conventional choice, I ended up with spiritual/emotional asphyxiation. I don't think my somasin really gives me a choice unless it's to simply deny her in my soul. I don't at all like that choice.

I thank Pythia and all my new friends for welcoming me into Covenspace, and I thank you for allowing me a chance to introduce myself.

I am pagan in the original rural sense of the world. I reverence Mother Earth with such conviction that I have spent the last decade trying to be married to her. My marriage is in the form of being a homesteader. I have been seeking to build a lifestyle in which I receive as much of my food and shelter from the Mother Earth herself. I milk a cow, make butter and cheese, raise chickens, and plant a very large garden. In the center of my garden (my sacred Tullach) I yearly raise a "bile" a sacred May pole. I mention this for my reverence to Mother Earth doesn't merely feed my body but also my soul.

Of late, I have become aware that there is a "somasin" in my soul. A somasin is a third-gendered gethammic (sacred sex) healer.  I am still trying to understand why the somasin has chosen to be manifest in me, and as I embrace her, I more comfortably embrace my gay sexuality. I also find myself coming into contact with a great many healers of late. Oddly, I've been asked to be their healers. I've lately had very powerful bodily experiences of souls seeking some sort of healing as well. This is all very new to me, and I partly come to covenspace to meet more experienced healers who may help me understand my transformation.

I indicate that I'm on a Celtic Recon path. I'm not precisely sure of that term, but it is true that my Irish ancestrial memories deeply inform my spiritual growth. However, my ancestors moved to a new continent generations ago, and I myself feel my soul-journey moves forward not backward. I embrace a form of Celtic culture and worship that I call Genaism.  I believe the path I follow leads me to my true home in some new Celtic world.