If someone walked up to me and straight-out asked me if I am an activist, I wouldn’t hesitate to answer. “No.”I know activists, some quite well, and the ways I contribute to the social good look nothing like the passionate protesters of wrong that they are. I mean, c’mon, really, I know some of the original members of ACT UP. I know people who lived through the AIDS crisis in San Francisco in the 80s. Those people, they’re real activists. And if that’s the strict definition, then I’m definitely out. I’m not likely ever going to march in the streets, shrieking “Fairies, Faggots, and Dykes! Oh, my!” I was, however, Patience on the float for the opera premiere of Patience & Sarah in a long-ago New York City Pride Parade. But ... then I started to think a little more, dig a little deeper, go a little further into my own history, and you know what? I think I might be an activist, after all.
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You might know this, or you might not, but every day I post a spiritual haiku to Instagram. Here is yesterday’s: The health of the world/depends upon the health of each/one. How could it not?/ Today is United Nations World Health Day—say a prayer for the health of everyone in the world—no exceptions! Uncanny. I wrote it weeks ago. That’s how it goes for intuitives sometimes. All the more reason, then, when I read Amanda Hess’ “Health Is in Danger. Wellness Wants to Fill the Void” in The New York Times, I thought it was, quite frankly, grotesque.
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There is, in old-time metaphysical circles, an analog technology—if you’ll forgive the oxymoron—known once upon a time as Denial and Affirmation. It’s a simple but slippery concept, especially now that denial has become part of our standard recovery lexicon in the West. Denial, as they say in AA, is not a river in Egypt. Nor is that what the founders of Christian Science, Unity, Religious Science, Science of Mind, or Divine Science meant. They meant to deny the appearance of something in favor of using one’s will to choose something better.
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