How to Glow in the Dark
At 17, I contracted Mono and was in bed for a month.
When my queer boyfriend came to visit, along with my history and math textbooks, he pressed a cheap plastic, glow-in-the-dark Rosary into my hands, a remnant of his Catholic schoolboy years.
Years during which he learned the sinfulness of being queer.
He knew I'd love it: a wonderful addition to my thrift store collection of rosaries harvested from the cold fingers of dead old women.
Following Madonna's lead, I wore them as necklaces, enjoying the desanctification while simultaneously feeding my need for spirit, for meaning.
I hung it over a rung on my wrought iron bed, and it glowed gently through the long nights I couldn't sleep, dwelling in diseased darkness.
It was a comfort.
I learned to say the Our Mother prayer along the beads.
Something about items that glow in the dark is beloved.
Back then, if I had thought of it at all, I would have said things glow in the dark to capture a child's interest.
Many things have magical phosphorescence: plastic dinosaur bone kits, super balls from the gumball machine, skeleton pajamas, and stick-on stars for over a kid's bed.
My friend Steve wore a GITD bone around his neck throughout college, and he would never give it to me, no matter how many times I asked.
Years later, I realize why a rosary, a serious tool of prayer and practice, would be made to glow in the dark.
One reason is practical: so you can find it easily amidst your dresser junk during the long dark night of the soul.
But the second reason is more pertinent: so there is some light somewhere.
A line from a favorite Bukowski poem:
There is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
At 17, I wasn't afraid of dying from the Mono.
But I was supremely terrified of dying from the big-hair band acid wash jean conservative monoculture of suburban Ohio.
That rosary glowed in the night: there was a light somewhere.
Later, an Indigenous teacher would ask me: In whose light do you walk?
I walk in the light of poetry, joyfulness, irreverence, reverence, and the Holy Mystery.
I walk in the ineffable light of not knowing.
I walk in the light of magick.
I raised my kids in San Francisco.
To grow up in the city is to grow up surrounded by homelessness on every corner.
We traveled through the Tenderloin every day on the way to school, a neighborhood imbued with trauma and poverty.
You learn to avoid stepping in human feces.
You learn to skirt bicycle theft and ring your steps around tent cities.
You become accustomed to junkies shooting up and sometimes od'ing.
I told my kids they must be careful to not demonize the symptoms of capitalism.
The people they see are among the most vulnerable and deserve compassion and protection.
But it's hard to be compassionate when a homeless person spits on your friend and calls them a racial slur.
When a methhead threatens you, or when you are twelve and your wallet gets pickpocketed on the bus.
It's hard to stay open-hearted to the dispossessed when sometimes they seem like the walking dead, trying to eat you in the dark of the night.
How do you walk in the light of compassion when horror and violence surround you?
You must learn to glow in the dark.
Intuition is what I think of when considering glowing in the dark.
To have the capacity to turn my attention to what is happening inside so that I may light my own path with my flaming.
So that my glimmerskuld lights the forest path as I creep through the dark, surrounded by shadowy things that rustle and snicker and hiss.
My truth burns away the fear and trauma that keeps me disconnected and separate.
You glow in the dark by lighting up from the inside.