A few years ago, I was lucky enough to meet up with Janet Hardy, author of “The Ethical Slut” and writer on sexuality and relationships, for a long afternoon of bookshopping, esoteric conversation and dinner, in London, and it remains one of the most interesting and inspiring conversations of my life.
We’d first met through our common experience of Kundalini awakening… and both of us have a commitment to helping others through this as the experience becomes more widespread in the west. That shared experience was part of the conversation, as we compared notes over the wyrdness that arose. Both of us had essentially rationalist mindsets, so accommodating the mystical took serious adjustment. But that wasn’t the most impressive thing about her.
What stayed with me was her commitment to families and communities of choice, born out of the experience of the AIDS epidemic and it’s impact on the LGB community in San Francisco and New York. How this impacted on people who were ostracised by their birth families, and how families of choice formed to give mutual support, and community expanded from an awareness of how isolated individuals were vulnerable to a whole range of pressures.
I’ve been a hermit for much of my life, although not through ostracism. Accepting my own wyrdness, as a mystic and scientist inhabiting the same person, has led me sometimes to ostracise myself. But in that life, I have become part of the families and communities of choice of others. Janet described me as being a Paterfamilias character to my gay women friends, and while it took me a while to accept that, I knew there was a degree of truth in it… so when I received a Happy Father’s Day message yesterday from a Bi woman friend, it was a surprise, but not a shock.
Lockdown has inspired me to cook and bake for friends in isolation. As we emerge from that, I’m finding that others are bringing me things that I didn’t expect, by way of return. It strikes me that the conversation with Janet was a precursor to my building my own community of choice, and binding it together with patisserie.
