Finding the Fire Within

This has been a watershed year in so many ways. As hard as it is to believe, here we stand on the threshold of Autumn and the final season of 2013. As most of you know, I have dealt with losing my old job & having to find a new one, apartment/landlord drama from A to Z which has necessitated a move and finding a new place to live, the suicide of Thomas (a close friend and mentor of mine since my earliest days in New York), and most recently a difficult transition into the new job (which includes misbehaving coworkers and other issues I won't get into here).

And yet here I am. Still standing.

More than just still standing, actually: I'm stronger, I'm wiser, I've grown in ways I can't even yet comprehend.
I was talking to my friend Andrea about some of this, and she really hit the nail on the head and summed it up so succinctly and perfectly (I hope she won't mind that I'm quoting her here): "These things are sent to test us...but I do believe in a sort of stoic way that there is a surmountable challenge in all these people situations. It's never the work that is challenging, it's always the people. Find strength within."

And it is precisely tapping into that inner fire that has sustained me and kept me charging ahead through all of this. I have returned home from some hellish days at work and the first thing I did was drop to the floor and plunge deep into my inner depths through the wonderful and transformative vehicle that is meditation. In this space I discover and rediscover a fire that cannot be tamed, a creativity that cannot be quenched, a cascading source of passion that cannot be dammed up. This is my undiluted essence, or what in the Western Mystery Tradition would be referred to as the Divine Spark or Higher Self.

Thomas used to tell me, "You have a VERY strong inner core. You just need to keep returning there."

My Coming Out Story, Part 1: Setting the Stage

I’ve struggled with getting my coming out story down on paper. Although I’m a lifelong writer, the words just seem elusive and fleeting. How do you condense volumes’ worth of material – a lifetime, really – into an accessible format that people can read, grasp and understand? Now more than ever though, I feel stirred to action and motivated to at least attempt to get my story out there. Not because my story is any more important than anyone else’s; but because if there is the slightest chance that it could provide inspiration, insight, or just let a young LGBT person who’s struggling know that someone else has been there, then I had damn well better get the thing written.

I grew up in a religious conservative Southern Appalachian family from Chattanooga, TN. My father was a structural/civil engineer (later in his career he would attempt to start his own firm and strike out on his own as a builder/developer; when the housing crisis hit, he used his political connections to take a position in state government). My mother worked in the offices of TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) and also had a stint as an educator before leaving her career to homeschool us.

Keeping up appearances was very important to my family. As viewed from the outside, we gave every indication of being an affluent, gracious Southern family with polite, charismatic parents and adoring children that placed “traditional Christian values” above everything else. Inside our own walls, we were a dysfunctional, abusive, unhappy group of people that sometimes barely felt related to each other, let alone having relationships built on love or trust.

From the earliest age it quickly became apparent that I was a creative, artistic and bookish type radically different than my sports-jock younger brothers. I also quickly learned that this basically demoted my place in the pecking order to my parents’ least-favorite son who was overlooked and ignored at best and at worst used as an object of wrath to heap frustration and abuse onto. My father and I never had a good relationship from the beginning. He would pass directly over me and focus his time and attention on my next brother John, who was growing up to be just like my dad and enjoyed war, guns, GI Joes and building model tanks, trucks and cars.

My relationship with my mother was much more complex and nuanced, but included the same elements of abuse and violent behavior, which combined with her depression, unstable moods, mental illness and abuse of prescription medications, made for a pretty wicked soup sometimes. Since I couldn’t trust, rely on or go to either parent with my problems growing up, I turned intrinsically to escapism and my wild, creative imagination to fill the void. I lost myself in reading anything and everything that I loved: Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales, a wonderful series of books from the 1920s with gorgeous illustrations called My Book House, the World Book Encyclopedia (I pored over the article on New York City from cover to cover and back again so many times that I wore down the pages), the Hardy Boys series, The Ghost of Windy Hill, the Frog & Toad books, Sherlock Holmes, the Chronicles of Narnia, and anything with an element of mystery, fantasy or beauty that captured my imagination.

I also wrote and drew prolifically. I hammered out my first short book by the age of 8 on my 1930s Remington typewriter (the keys punched holes through the paper wherever there were "o"s), illustrating it and having it bound to give out as a Christmas present that year. My brothers did sometimes collaborate with me on projects and we would work as a team to create and sketch characters, come up with detailed story lines and dialogue and then finally act out and record the stories on cassette tape, complete with music and sound effects. We called this “production company” of ours “Nice Studios”. Some of my best memories come from summer afternoons acting out Nice Studio stories with John and Josh and laughing harder than I’ve ever laughed before at the delivery of a punchline or how our voice sounded when we slowed down the tape while recording (to make monster-sounding voices) or sped it up (to make shrill chipmunk-sounding voices).

As I got older and entered my preteens and teens, I discovered a passion for clothes, textiles and fashion, partly out of necessity (it often fell to me to make sure the kids had something decent to wear when they got up in the morning, and they needed someone to match their outfits and help them look presentable) and partly out of a maturation of my artistic sense and abilities. I realized that for me, fashion was a perfect, more “grown up” adaptation and translation of my artist’s fire. And the further I got into my teens, the more I just knew, somewhere in a deep, settled place inside, that this was what I had to do for my career. I also knew that this career choice in and of itself would put me at odds with my parents. I didn’t care.

Thomas, 2 months On

Hard as it is to believe, it's been a little over 2 months now since losing my longtime friend and mentor Thomas Johnstone to suicide. Life goes on with its daily routines, problems, work, noise and business and I find myself as usual swept up in the rhythm of the city that runs just like a giant clock. Just when I thought things were more or less back to normal, the pain found a chink in my armor, crept up behind me and demanded to either be dealt with or suffocate me.

Yesterday I found myself in a position of having some forced free time because I had to let some maintenance workers in to perform repairs on the apartment-from-hell (an entire saga of its own which we won't even touch here). After said repairs I desperately needed to get out of apartment-from-hell and clear my head, so I decided to go to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (Grand Army Plaza).

As I approached the plaza and the Prospect Arch came into view, it dawned on me what a long time it had been since I last went to the library...but in years past, I was in and out of this beautiful and historic library all the time, and it was one of Thomas' and my regular meeting places. No sooner had these thoughts surfaced when it dawned on me, suddenly and all at once: the last time I was in this library, I *was* with him.

I couldn't take it anymore. In the middle of Grand Army Plaza, I broke down and cried. And cried some more. It was as if the floodgates broke and everything that I have been trying so hard to hide behind a resolute, stoic facade just washed away. For a few seconds I really felt as though I could not breathe as the awesome weight of the massive changes and emotional watershed that 2013 has wreaked on my life just crashed over me.

By the end of this year, nothing in my life will look like what it started out as in the beginning of the year: a new job, a new apartment, new friends, and the list goes on and on. Someone recently said that immediately preceding all great changes in life is chaos. It took a while for that to sink in, but I now fully believe it to be true. It's undeniable that many good, necessary and positive changes in my life have converged on 2013 as the year to come to fruition. And in the midst of choosing to focus on and celebrate the good, it becomes easy to relegate all the pain and heartache to the shadows, to sweep what we don't like under the rug in hopes that out of sight really is out of mind. But I've found out the hard way that a more balanced approach is often required. Ignoring our demons can really come back to bite us. Maintaining a frenetic schedule and hoping that the pain will get lost or at least numbed in all the business may work for a while, but sooner or later we have to pay the piper.

So I look for and crave balance. Ways to honor and not forget my friend's legacy even when I'm caught up in the daily blur of New York life. Ways to remember and cherish the good memories and allow myself a little breathing space to reflect and grieve if I need to. In the end, I think he would be proud of me - where I am in my life now, how I'm handling very adult situations and challenges and even how I've handled his passing. And sometimes I even get the sense that he's still walking quietly beside me.

Remembering Thomas

“We can value ourselves better if we remember that we are more than our bodies and that the body is a gift – a perishable gift with an expiry date. We have very little time to experience life in it. Human life spans are tiny in the context of the time spans of the universe around us, so let us enjoy the gift and honor the Goddess by caring for it both inwardly and outwardly, but without being fixated by it.”

- Vivianne Crowley


In the aftermath of my friend and mentor Thomas Johnstone's passing, those of us who knew and cared about him have been left searching for answers. We knew him as a person stronger than the steel of any of his hometown's skyscrapers. Thomas was a quintessential native New Yorker; he had a heart of gold underneath all that steel. 

The truth is that we may never fully know all the factors that lead Thomas to take his own life last week. And I have come to believe that while the story of his last days and what was going through his mind at the time is important, what is of greater and lasting significance will always be the way he lived his life and the rich legacy that he instilled in my life and others. 

Thomas was born in Brooklyn in 1952 into a family of West Indian descent. It was in this Brooklyn of the '50s and '60s - bustling with Haitian, Jamaican, West Indian and other Island nation immigrants - that Thomas came of age and discovered his sexuality, learning what it was to be both African-American and gay, its joys and its problems. At an early age, he became aware of injustice stemming from deeply-rooted racial divisions and discrimination based on sexual orientation, and he worked tirelessly as a community organizer and political activist as a young person, living and marching on the forefront as history was made at Stonewall and other key moments in gay-liberation history throughout the '60s and '70s.

Thomas also deeply loved classical music, the ballet and the opera, and for many years worked at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. It was over this love of the arts and our appreciation of our shared LGBT history that we bonded. We spent countless hot summer afternoons and evenings at his apartment on Linden (at the time, he lived less than a block away from my apartment) hanging out, watching classic operas, talking liberal politics, history, arts, culture, what life was like back in the Stonewall era. Thomas was also a philosopher, mystic and magician, and he opened my mind more than any college professor I've ever had to new ways of thinking and being in the world. He had a great gift with words. I am honored to say Thomas was the teacher that flung open the doors for my study & pursuit of occult knowledge, magick and the Western Mystery Tradition.

At that time, I was a very wounded, lost and searching 19-year-old freshly arrived in the big city, struggling to make the transition into early adulthood, adjust to life in New York City and deal with my family's outright, total & final rejection of me and my homosexuality after a harrowing and disastrous coming-out. We shared stories and commiserated over family rejection, our violent, abusive and imbalanced mothers, and distant or nonexistent fathers. Somewhere in the sharing of our stories, seeds of healing germinated and I began the long journey toward picking myself back up, rebuilding my life and healing myself.

My life is forever and ever changed for having known you, Thomas. Your legacy lives on in me. I can't stand that I never had a chance to say a last goodbye. There are no words to describe how grateful I am for you and the countless gifts you bestowed on my life - some of which I'm sure I don't even recognize yet and will appreciate later in life. You are missed here, but your legacy and spirit live on in me, in the city we both loved and called home, and in anyone who was fortunate enough to have known you. You were a titan and an icon in this community, whether or not you even knew that yourself. Your passing is the end of an era. Until we meet again ~

Flatbush Riots

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” 
― Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.


Try as I might, I can't do anything but relive the riots of last night over and over again in my mind. I had gone to the neighborhood Walgreens down the block from my house to get ice cream and a few groceries. I ended up getting caught in the middle of the riots that are sweeping the neighborhood.

This past weekend, 16-year-old Kimani Gray was shot 7 times in the back and killed by NYPD officers. According to eyewitness reports, which contradict the NYPD's official story, Kimani was going about his business in the neighborhood and was unarmed when he was targeted and shot multiple times in the back by a group of uniformed police. Every night since this deplorable act of police brutality, there have been riots in Flatbush.

Security had to lock us inside the store and bolt the doors to keep the protesters out. The group came up to the doors and windows and started smashing against the glass. For a very tense half hour, I bunkered down with other customers inside the store as the riots raged outside. We stayed as far away from the windows as possible for fear someone would lob something through the plate-glass windows.

While inadvertently getting caught in the middle of all that was a traumatic experience for me, I am more concerned with the root causes and pain that are leading masses of people in my community to uprising and rioting. African-American, Caribbean-American and really all other ethnic groups that reside in Flatbush (myself included) have a definite right to be angry with City Hall, Mayor Bloomberg and the NYPD for the way that our neighborhood has been put on NYC's back burner and left to plunge into poverty, crime and all kinds of other urban decay.

The NYPD's brute-force intimidation tactics, sweeping mass arrests, attempts to squelch the right of the people to assemble and demonstrate, and utter lack of accountability MUST end. The Police Department is reaping the bitter fruits that it has sown by perpetrating a culture of guilty until proven innocent, dishonesty, intrusion, violation of privacy, rough-handling and arresting any dissension, and the list goes on and on. I would be the first to add my voice to those who recognize the very real and pressing needs for reform and complete overhaul of the NYPD's mode of operating.

However, I will reiterate once again that violence is never the solution. We must find a constructive outlet for our grievances. My heart goes out to the family and friends of Kimani Gray. In reality though, these riots are about much more than Kimani's story alone. People are NOT happy with the way things are going in Flatbush (or the rest of New York for that matter), and the past few nights have just been the boiling over of years of buildup. City Hall needs to wake up and start listening.

Mother

At the bathroom sink I see you
Dabbing your eyes in the mirror
Running mascara
Mess in the wastebasket
You don't know I am watching you

Vacant look in your eyes
You twist the cap off the bottle
Maybe the pills will fill the emptiness this time

Makeup, curling iron, eyeliner pencils, hairclips
Strewn all over the counter
You still don't know I see you
Back into your bedroom
Sink your head into your hands
Perched on the edge of the bed

There's no more fighting now
No more shouting now
Daddy's gone away for good this time
11 years old, I have to become the man of the house
I don't miss him or his violent rage
But I'm not sure what's going to happen now that he's gone

I know where the gun under the bed is
I know there are bullets in the chamber
Daddy showed it to me before he left
I know Mom knows where it is too
Every day the fear, the image
Races through my brain
That maybe she might use it

The little boy that is me
Watches quietly
As the unpredictable force of nature
My mother
For once is not angry
For once is not loud
For once is not hurting me
But when she is alone
When all else is stripped away
All that is left is her despair

And the little boy that is me
Knows even then
That to hurt me so much
She must hurt a lot too.

Welcome

"Like magick, writing is a craft: it takes intention and skill, and we do it with our own hands, fueled by the power and vitality that drives our souls...For me, these two worlds have become almost inseparable. What is writing, after all, if not magick? A scribe picks up a pen (or sets fingers to a keyboard) and transmits intangible thoughts, ideas, and perceptions into symbols on a page. Something ethereal seeps from the imagination into the plane of reality, where it takes on a life of its own. Once formed, letters and words are heavy with substance and purport and intention, not only in literal terms but in their human history; the very act of writing forges new links in an ancient chain. Humans have used the tools of their times - mud tablets, quills, fountain pens, laptops - to engage in the task of creating symbols that move readers to emotion and inspiration, even to dreams."

- Susan Pesznecker, "Crafting Magick With Pen and Ink"

Hello friends, and welcome to Sorcery of the Pen, a blog in which I will explore my personal practices of writing and witchcraft in depth. Join us as we traverse and push the boundaries of liminal space, time and consciousness, and explore the vast, uncharted landscape of the soul. I am entering into this project with the firm, set intention that this blog will act as a tool to radically transform my life (and you, the reader, if that is what you desire), break down barriers, and explode the limits of what I ever dreamed was possible. I believe in miracles, because my life up to this point has been a steady procession of miraculous and often utterly inexplicable events. What do you wish to see happen most in your life? What are your hopes, dreams and most dearly-kept desires? Buckle up - I have a feeling this just might be a wild ride.

~ Daniel