Innocence Lost: Innocence Regained
by Jules Remedios Faye

Conversation with others is for me one of the great pleasures in life. I am inspired and changed by heart-felt conversations. To exchange ideas and share experiences is as necessary to me as breathing. But to take counsel with myself is also required. I am renewed by periods of reflection, silence and solitude. Communion with others and communion with self has been what nourishes and sustains my life. To commune, to make common, to talk together, to build and break-bread together is what community means to me. I have spent a good deal of my life in pursuit of this kind of camaraderie, friendship, belonging and love.

Yet in this search for my place in the world, I’ve found that each community I’ve stepped into has been both inclusive and exclusive. Some people are welcome. Others are not. Some aspects of myself are welcome. Others are not. So my search for belonging has been a long and difficult path. It has led me from family, into various counter-cultures, sub-cultures, queer culture, and for the last decade into the literary and bookmaking worlds. In all of these communities I’ve found ways to connect. I’ve made life-long friends. But some parts of myself have never quite fit. Recently, I’ve come into a spiritual community. Here, I’ve found a quality of acceptance and kindness, both in the community and in my own heart, that I had not known existed. From the beginning, the search to discover where I belonged in the world and the longing to commune with others of my kind has been inseparable from deeper questions around discovering who and what I am, and what I am capable of becoming. I’ve been exploring these questions for as long as I can remember.

As a child I did not know whether I was a girl or a boy. The lives that women in my extended family and neighborhood lived did not match my own rebellious, adventurous nature. Women were supposed to sit nicely at family picnics and talk about who was having a baby while the children and men played frisbee, climbed trees and caught pollywogs in the creek. Women were supposed to change diapers and act like ladies and be concerned about their hair-dos and fingernail polish and kitchen curtains while men were driving fast cars and fighting wars and hitchhiking through Mexico. If that was what it meant to be a woman then I was clearly not a woman. I wanted to lose one of my fingers in a work accident like my uncles and grandfather. I wanted the danger and the tragedy and the heroism that seemed only available to men.

At the same time, I loved to play “dress up.” I would pin my great grandmother’s rhinestone costume jewelry all over my t-shirt and drape her bedraggled fox fur around my shoulders. I would heap layers of colorful pop-beads around my neck, cover my fingers in bubble-gum-dispenser magic decoder rings and teeter around the neighborhood in sparkly plastic high-heels. Clearly, I was also not a man.

By the time I left home at the age of 17, I was more certain of what I was not, than of what I was. I was more certain of what I lacked than of what I had to offer. My jeans-jacket was covered with patches that celebrated sex and drugs and rock and roll. Protest and anger colored our music and shaped our lives. Humor and innocence were thin. We’d seen our cultural heroes commit suicide with drug over-doses. We’d seen our political heroes get shot to death or imprisoned for life. Photos in Life Magazine of Buddhist monks who’d doused themselves with gasoline and lit themselves on fire to protest the Vietnam War, were burned into our minds forever. Fear and conspiracy theories and violence were our everyday milk and toast. We knew the revolution would not come. Many of my friends committed themselves to a futureless life in a futureless world of drug-induced oblivion. For me, the decade following the Summer of Love was marked by a decided absence of love.

I was already drawn to those who were vilified, exiled and outlawed. I moved to San Francisco and headed into communities of people who united around what they stood against. I hung out with ex-peace corps volunteers, draft dodgers, socialists, anti-nuclear activists, anarchists, feminists, union organizers and young dykes. Our common ground was resistance. We knew what we hated in common but we did not know what we wanted to build. We had impassioned debates over what we were willing to die for. But we did not know how to ask ourselves what we were willing to live for.

I quickly began to discover that communities of like-minded people exclude others who threaten their views. The labor movement despised feminists. The feminists fought with the socialists. The socialists spat at the environmentalists. And none of them wanted anything to do with queers. No matter how radical a community seemed to be, too many of my friends were not welcome. Similarly, too many of my own dreams or longings were excluded as well. So my search for belonging expanded. I sought out multiple over-lapping communities and sub-cultures in an effort to create a community large enough to embrace my growing diversity of friends, and in an effort to search for a larger more expansive sense of self.

Meanwhile, questions of my own gender identity continued. I was attracted to girlish boys and more often to boyish girls. In my early 20s I came out as a lesbian and dove head first into the San Francisco gay bar scene. The women I met there were every color, every shape, every age. I met law-school students, social workers, adult children of holocaust survivors, ex-nuns, authors, cab drivers and women who’d served in the military. I met addicts, ex-cons, women who worked in the sex industry and dykes who lived in the streets. This was by far the most dynamic and diverse community I’d ever known. It was not the ideology of shared resistance that drew us together. What we had in common was that we played pool, we drank too much and we slept with other women. Here, gender and gender roles were openly questioned and explored. I began to learn about gay history from dykes who’d come out in the ‘50s. For the first time I felt I was part of an international community with a rich history and unique culture.

Eventually I quit drinking. At the same time, the girl of my dreams left me. I moved to Seattle to recuperate and was still seeking a larger experience of love when I met a brilliant, volatile transgendered lesbian writer. We fell in love. She encouraged me to take my own writing more seriously and I began submitting short stories to small zines and anthologies. Through her I became involved in the local community of science fiction, fantasy and horror writers and fans. Spurred by our shared passion for literature and books, we opened a used bookshop in the university district and I set up a small letterpress studio in our apartment and began to make books. This introduced me to the local community of booksellers, book collectors, and book artists. Again I felt I was in the midst of several overlapping international communities made up of literary writers, bookshop owners, printers and publishers. Each of these communities had a long history and a unique and powerful cultural impact.

Making books became a new form of love. It provided me with the opportunity to collaborate with many creative thinkers and artists. The technical skills and expertise I developed provided me with a small measure of recognition by others in the field. Through my work as a bookmaker I was able to combine many previously disconnected interests and passions into a single form. I’d found a meaningful livelihood. I had a colorful collection of straight and gay friends. I felt that I’d found my place in the world.

Some years later, while working on a book project with a gentleman bookmaker, he and I unexpectedly fell in love. I discovered a whole new capacity for love – how to love another, how to be loved. And I discovered love can be found in surprising places. This quality of love was not dependent on my own gender or the gender of my sweetheart, yet questions around sexuality and sexual preference were once again stirred up. I could no longer consider myself part of the gay community. Yet I did not feel entirely straight either. I still felt the same towards dykes as I ever had. But I was in love with this individual who happened to be male. That was twelve years ago and we are still in love. I’ve never liked the term bi-sexual so I left my sexuality unlabeled and came to define myself by my work.

However, although bookmaking fulfills many interests, I increasingly began to long for larger parameters. Bookmaking was perhaps not the all-and-everything vocation I had originally felt it to be. It is an obscure field. There is little diversity within the book arts community. Most book artists are university educated white professionals. And the labor-intensive nature of the work makes the cost of the books high so the books themselves are accessible only to a narrow range of rare books and art collectors. And ultimately, I have not found that making books speaks to all the parts of myself that want to be expressed. So once again, I am looking for a larger community as well as a larger sense of what I’m capable of being and doing in this life.

Then, five years ago I discovered the Buddhist community. This is the first community I’ve known that shares a strong sense of spiritual meaningfulness. Here, although there is a certain sense of like-mindedness, we are encouraged to bring our practice into every part of our daily lives. Right action, right speech and right thought are fundamental tenets. This speaks to the deep understanding that every deed, every word, every thought we express affects those around us in ways we cannot always know. We are all part of an interdependent world-community where excluding is a luxury we can no longer afford. Cultivating compassion for others, for oneself and for all sentient beings allows us to transform obsession with self into service to others. Developing this kind of love places me in the lap of humanity. Community becomes less about seeking others who agree with or validate my views or identity, and more about how to respond to, respect and work with everyone I meet in any situation. Now I am learning to recognize the divine spark in everyone - even in those I find disagreeable or threatening.

In the past few years, I’ve had the great good fortune to participate in a few silent meditation retreats. These nine-day retreats are held in Noble Silence. There is no chitchat between meditation sessions, in the halls or during meals. We focus hour upon hour, day after day, on our practice. I have found this to be a profoundly moving, enriching and purifying experience. Silence frees us from the social constraints of our own personalities. And thus it frees us to become mindful of everything within us and to open our hearts to everything around us. I have found that many of us experience a deep communion with our fellow practitioners throughout the nine days. We are able to create a strong sense of community through non-judging warmth and acceptance without ever conversing with one another.

Since I have begun practicing, sometimes I long for monastic life. Part of that longing is a wish to be relieved of these questions around gender and sexuality through living a celibate life. Part of it is a wish to be relieved of the responsibility to participate in the perplexing, painful everyday world. But a good part of it is a sense of wanting to be in the midst of a community of devoted practitioners; to spend everyday in mindful devotion to prayer, peace, compassion and awakening awareness; to live a life of spiritual commitment amidst others on the same path. The potential energy, encouragement and support that kind of community creates could introduce a depth of practice that is difficult in a layperson’s all too busy, demanding, distracting worldly life. The inevitable conflicts that arise between members of such a community could be a rich challenge to bring one’s practice to bear in the moment. I imagine this kind of life could push me beyond my own self-imposed limits. But a friend gently reminds me that I need not cloister myself behind walls. The whole world can become my monastery. Everyday actions can be my practice. Each step I take can be a holy pilgrimage that brings me closer to the privilege and sacredness of being alive.

This complex, diverse, sometimes violently tragic, sometimes breath-takingly beautiful world of ours is, in my mind, a great ship. No matter what color, what shape our bodies or minds or hearts are in, we are all riding this big ship together. If I want to see peace in the world I must begin by making peace with my own heart. When internal conflict between the sometimes painful, sometimes extraordinary parts of my life arises, I’m learning to turn to three things. I manage to call forward some inner courage. I often ask another in the community for assistance. And I count my blessings by offering prayers of gratitude to something I call Divine Grace.

I continue to ask, am I a girl or a boy? I still feel the loss of leaving the gay community, though I have many gay friends. And though my love for my husband remains a sustaining source of sweetness and comfort, I continue to feel like an outsider in the straight world. But I have come to understand that being an outsider can be a great gift. The view from outside allows much greater depth and breadth than I might otherwise be able to see. And it gives me compassion for other outsiders. Perhaps I am both male and female. Perhaps I am both human and divine. Perhaps we all are. Most of us are more than we believe. As I increasingly find myself to be a critical and necessary part of humanity, so I find everyone else is too.

By moving through all these communities, I have learned through suffering and surviving it, through witnessing the suffering of others, and through falling in love. But this is not a naïve Pollyanna love. I am talking about a humble love of self. I am talking about a gentle, heart-felt compassion for others. And I am talking about the transforming experience of coming to love something bigger than self. Love is not a concept. It is an action.

I began my adult life crippled by a profound loss of innocence. I did not dare believe in love, lest my heart would be irreparably broken. Beneath every cynical mind is a sorrowful tender heart. Through learning to love I have found that cynicism can be healed and innocence regained. Love is the healing agent.

Buddhists speak of compassion and wisdom as the two wings to liberation. We cannot soar with love alone. We need skillful guidance grounded in wisdom in order to know how to use love wisely and well. Unquestionably we live in an era of unspeakable violence, hatred and fear. I still see communities of activists and whole nations of people impassioned by fear, by vengeance and by what they want to tear down rather than by what they want to build up. Yet, at the same time, communities of people are coming together all over the globe to form peace tribunals, to build reconciliation panels, to bear witness, to heal, to transform. It is said that pure Buddha nature is within every one of us. How we bring compassion and wisdom into our lives, how we awaken and cultivate this kind of love in our communities and in the world is what I am here to explore. It is what I’m willing to live for.

Jules Remedios Faye is a student at Fairhaven College .