Going to San Francisco is always a trip back into time for me. I grew up in San Jose; San Francisco was a train ride away and a world of difference from the suburbs where I grew up.

When I was young, my mom would take me there for a day to shop at the Jessica McClintock outlet. When I was a teenager, I would take the train into the City, which my mom would have killed me for if she knew that's what I was doing.

I never honestly did too much more than wander the Embarcadero and Market Street, and many of those long afternoons are lost in the misty haze that is my memory of that time in my life. I wish I'd been a bit more of an explorer, but the closest I really got was actually locating the downtown library, which is about three blocks off the beaten path.

It was really a waste of some good getting-in-trouble potential. Alas, I was a cautious child, always playing it safe because I had enough trouble with my father already without adding misbehavior to the mix.

I didn't do a lot of picture-taking, writing or drawing while I was on vacation. What i did do was spend a lot of time looking, thinking, and feeling. Feasting on the odd mix of newness and familiarity I found in the city.

SF is one of my favorite places in the world. I'd like to live there for a few years, if the cost of living there is ever reasonable. The smell of the wharves wandering through downtown, the fabulous public transit, the sense that it is a real city (something Seattle for all its pretension is lacking in)...all of this is a heady mixture. When I am there I am like a big cat. I want to prowl around and preen in the sun.

I was thinking, in San Francisco, formerly one of the hedonistic hot spots of the world, about service.

I have had the luxury of knowing since I was young that there was Someone watching out for me. No so much that I didn't need to watch my own step and take care of myself, but an assurance that there was at least someone rooting for me that I couldn't see. It was a calm assurance that didn't change with Sunday school, sitting through sermons, and the classes that my parents made me take. We struck a bargain: I would go through the classes, and at the end of the classes I could make the decision whether or not to join the church my parents belonged to.

I went through the classes. I may be the only person to have ever gone through those classes and said "no, thanks" at the end.

I already knew who my loyalties belonged with, who I belonged to, and it wasn't my parents' God.

I rarely talk about this, because it's been an established fact in my life for so long. I belong to the aspect of diety that concerns itself with love and lust; whether you call her Venus or Aphrodite, Isis or Yana, Tlazolteotl or Freya. I, myself, usually call her Pearl, or Dawn, depending on what form she elects when she speaks to me.

I belong to her, and thus I am in her service.

She asks things of me I would rather not give, and things I do give joyfully; she has pushed me into situations I then had to fix on my own and nudged me into some of the best times of my life.

There are times I've walled her off, pushed her away from me. Mostly, it's been when my heart is torn. I've told her to go hang, to go find someone else to bother. But she keeps coming around. And eventually I accept her service again.

The first thing I learned when I began to actually speak with her is that she has her own agenda and her own reasons for doing things that I am never going to understand. The second thing I learned is that people who actually rely on divine help get themselves killed on a regular basis. Help might come or might not; our needs don't compel deity. Diety is shaped by millenia of human thought and still unquestionably its own thing. I cast her in the mold that I am familiar with, the shapes that my limited mind can comprehend.

But what does service actually mean? I am of an ascetic bent. Had I been a Catholic, I probably would have wanted to be a nun. So what does my service mean to me?

This, at this point, I'm not entirely sure of. I know it means celebrating at least the quarters, if not the cross-quarters. Ritual is soothing to my soul in ways that nothing else is.

It also means keeping an open mind--and most difficult for me--an open heart. Accepting love as I find it, in whatever form it may come. There is room for my own discretion, of course, and a mandate to keep myself out of serious trouble (people becoming obsessed with me is just Not Good), but I cannot dismiss love when I find it. I don't have to return it, but neither can I laugh at it.

And I work on my own ability to love; I find myself remarkably deficient at it many days. I have a high standard that I never quite measure up to, partially because, if I were being truly rational about this, I am the very last person who really ought to belong to a diety that has anything to do with relationships between humans. I'd be perfectly happy on a planet with nobody else on it--what am I doing in service to love and lust?

Don't ask me. The service chose me, not the other way around.

But I do my best. I try to remain open, pay attention to the feelings that tell me when i'm around someone who's attracted to me, attempt to love wisely and with open arms. I don't always succeed. But I try.

And in the trying is the heart of the service.



note for the record: this is all my own take on stuff. It's my view of Truth. I realize that it's not anything like a usual view, but that's all right; this is why I live in a place where freedom of religion is protected at least by the letter of the law.

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