The Midwest

I have contemplated the possibility of moving to where my folks live in North Dakota.  Right now I won't be doing so, for many reasons.  Last year, when I started to put together that there were a bazillion "Richards" living alongside one another, that the five year-old Richard was very different from the 8-, the 15-, the 23-, the 35- and even the 39-year old Richards, I entertained the notion of moving to NoDak.  Kathleen Norris has written a beautiful book called Dakota: A Spiritual Geography which I duly read.  I got myself a CD by Philip Aaberg called "High Plains" (I'm listening to "Montana Half-Light" as I type this!) and I viewed and reviewed Big Eden, all of which don't directly reflect where my folks live.
 
The Dakotas really should be divided East and West, rather than North/South.  The regions that are closer to the Mississippi have more in common with each other (Rapid City/Fargo/Grand Forks) than they do with the wasteland further west toward Montana.  Norris's book is really more about that part of the state.  My folks live in a town that splits the difference. 
 
As a gay fellow, the Midwest doth scare me sehr.  I want to believe that homophobia has little place there, but as I listened to the director's commentary about shooting Big Eden, when he talked about seeking out a church to shoot some of the church scenes and was repeatedly asked about his gay protag "Well, is he saved?", I recognized my fears as being legitimate.  They were reconfirmed in reading Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? as well.  For all I know, Mr. Right cuts a mean two-step in Jamestown or Rolla, but it seems a bit extreme for me to ditch New York City for points centrally unknown.  I'm contemplating a relocation to the Albany, New York area instead, but for the time being, I've also awakened to the beauty that exists in Manhattan. 
 
Yet, there is something in the 'Dwest that does draw me.  In reading about the history of Kansas, there were quite a few people who managed to combine their Xtianity with leftist politics.  There really was a radical notion of what it meant to be a citizen and a member of a community.  Wm. Jennings Bryan may have made a fool of himself over evolution, but he drove home quite a few points for the itinerant farmers and lowly workers at the turn of the century.  I guess the big problem I have with people who wear their faith on their lapels is more that they don't seem to have a sense of things being "both-and," insisting that they are "either-or."  It doesn't occur to them that being both secular and spiritual is perhaps the most satisfying and optimal way to go.
 
As I get older, I'm naturally drawn to things spiritual, but still needing to tease out the religious from that much larger stream.  When I hear someone describe themselves as "a spiritual person" I brace myself.  It's easy to talk spirituality, and I have been guilty of a just-talkin' poseur sort of faux-spirituality myself.  I still do it, actually.  Many of my interests in shamanism, divination practices, multi-dimensionality and the like right now feel like dilletantism for the time being. 
 
Robert Sardello and others talk of "weekend shamanism" for example, with great disdain.  I don't think of myself as a weekend-shaman sort of guy, but I do see that there is so much more to spirituality than meets the eye.  Especially when I come across blogs such as http://gayspirituality.typepad.com/blog/.  I log into this one every once in awhile, among others.  I am awakening to the notion that I need to turn my life into a never-ending prayer.  The problem is I feel like I'm asleep half the time, and furthermore that I'm encouraged to be a bystander in my own life by the somnolent people surrounding me.  I hope I don't sound judgmental when I say that, but it's damn hard to wake up most of the time.
 
I feel like a new energy is burbling up to the surface, and it's about time.  Still, I do work this overnight shift and on the weekends to boot.  It's been mildly busy here at work, but I still have some time to muse about what I'm writing here, rather than taking something from my koobeton and typing from my sometimes legible penmanship.  And posting these "diary entries" seems to help me to put things into perspective a bit.  Yesterday's "dreaming" post will probably undergo some revisions as I refine my vision and perhaps go to some Debtors' Anonymous Visions Meetings to address my fears as I wake up even more to the life I have about me.  Perhaps I will end up in NoDak, or Albany, or maybe I'll just find a way to bring a country-spiritual sensibility to this city-secular locale.  There is gay square-dancing in NYC, not to mention the Manhattan Mustangs' country-western galas 4 times a year.
 
Many things are possible...