The last time I wore cowboy boots I lived in Louisville, Kentucky where a lot of preachers thought they were cowboys. For a little while I fell under their sway and got me a really good looking pair of cowgirl boots because I’ve always been in touch with my feminine side.
“The boy is strange,” I heard someone say. “Ain’t he?”
Anyway while they looked good and I looked good in them I had a terrible time getting them on and off because of calves. As a runner my calves are pretty imposing.
So after about of hour of pull and tug, I walked them over to the dumpster and threw them away. My cowboy days were over. I still have the Cowboy hat though and like to dress Goddess up in it sometime. She has no problem with masculinity.
After that flip flops became my foot ware of choice. That’s not true. Bare feet are my first choice. Then flip flops but only if they’re required. In the winter time its tennis shoes. I have of hiking boots but I haven’t had them on since I was in Europe with Bill Berry (not the former drummer for R.E.M. but the other one).
But I can remember dropping them in dumpster. As soon as my hand let them go and they were still falling, I became someone else in an instant.
This morning while I was running beside a flat almost blue tinted ocean with the sun sprinkling diamonds on it and the sun was a bright yellow warm orb and the sweat came quickly because of the warmth, I remembered dropping those boots.
As always there is music surrounding me and these words were pulsating through my ears.
Something in you put a hold on my heart, hard to believe it now
Here is a place that will never be dark, I remember that place
That kind of touch, electricity of love, that certain kind of grace
That you love because you become someone else in an instant.
Looking back over my life there are those times when I’ve become someone other than who I was. I’ve been a lot of things. A southern child who discovered the Beatles one night listening to the radio in Port Wentworth, Georgia and learned that there is a world.
A timid college freshman, homesick and discovering the world for the first time turned into a student who loved to play and then loved to learn. So when college threw me out with a degree I kept going to school. Then it was Seminary and social work school and then I understood that I could learn by myself and I plowed the mines of books and music and art.
Then I became a father. Then a husband;
A minister; then a single parent and then a husband again;
An author;
Then a recognized President & CEO managing compassion;
The parent of grown children …friends with the people who used wives … a beach bum on Sabbatical.
Who knows what’s next?
Each of these things happened in an instant.
And there is this touch, this kind of electricity, this certain kind of grace … that you love because you become else in an instant.
And it’s good.
There are a lot of people who talk saying they want to be someone other than who they are right not. They no longer care for what they do, who they’re with, how they feel, how they relate to others or how they relate to themselves.
They can see who or what they want to become but lack the gumption to walk to the edge of the cliff, close their eyes smile and jump… believing with ever thing in them that it would be …better.
Looking back over my life, and remembering dropping those boots (which is akin to jumping off a cliff) it’s all gotten better.
Sure there were hard times. Painful times! But it still got better. I got better.
So there are a lot people that I would ask to give themselves permission to become who they are … now. Because if you don’t nobody else will.
Say you will.
