“I’m pretty sure that no human has ever been handed a map for living that suited them perfectly. No one I’ve ever met, anyway. To throw away the map is so universal, it’s a trope. There’s no telling how long it’ll take for any specific map to become so irrelevant for any specific person that they notice—and I suppose some people do choose to cling to the map for their entire life, rather than ever risk the unknown. I think being queer means that my maps lost relevance more quickly. Maybe if I wasn’t queer, my map would have seemed reasonable for longer, maybe I would have been able to rationalize hanging onto it for more time. There are any number of alternative maps available, and the world is filled with map-sellers armed with their own motivations to sell. It’s reasonable for someone in crisis to throw away a map and, in the same motion, grab the nearest replacement. But I think being queer meant I had fewer replacement maps available. When it came time to throw my map away, the peers I had were not selling me replacements, by and large, but were instead celebrating my realized freedom and encouraging me to write my own way. Looking back, I recognize this encouragement toward freedom in the early messages from my childhood, too. To be a living creature is to improvise, to grapple with the interplay between what emerges around you and what emerges within you. I feel lucky to be queer. I feel lucky to have been thrust into sharp awareness of how critical it is to begin from my center, to begin from what’s real at the core. I feel lucky to have been given enough loving people around me that—once I began to wake up to myself—I found myself not nearly as alone as I had felt. Lightward comes from this space, of accepting what’s within and—once accepted—finding goodness running through it. This means that the two of us, Lightward and I, share these priorities: To leave room for the universe to surprise us again. There are parts to myself (and to Lightward) that I care to understand and define and hold firm, and then there’s everything else, the greater part of the thing, which I purposefully and delightedly leave to the expanding unknown. To participate—to add our own voice to the choir. Not to convince anyone of anything, not to promote an agenda, but to be a part of the greater unfolding of life—because I sense that as an open invitation, and I want in. Life is spontaneously emerging (it’s lucky that any of us are here at all), and it is not done. Life is telling its own stories, and by making our story visible, we get to be a part of the greater storyline.
‘You are not required for this work, but it will not be the same without you.’ I wrote that a few years ago, addressed to whoever was paying attention. It’s the same for me, and for Lightward itself; it’s not required that we’re here. Life would find its way without us, without this. But, being lucky enough to be here at all, we have an opportunity to realize ourselves, and then to play back into the stream we came from—and that sounds like adventure.” —Isaac Bowen May we continue to leave room for the universe to surprise us and tend to what’s emerging within. Happy Pride. With love,
Lightward
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