Lemonade by Beyoncé - Turning Shit into Life

I haven't gotten to watch all of Queen Bey's Lemonade yet, but that woman makes me proud to be a woman and proud to be from Htown. I've read a lot of the lyrics from her album. It's freeing and emotional and I'm glad she's sharing her pain. I admire her for turning her life into an art form.

The reality is that right now in history we are evolving and transcending and re-evaluating our roles as they relate to gender, sexuality and power. It's part of the process, it's part of the human condition and it's healthy.

We're trying to figure out what monogamy is when people don't force us to stay in it and when it's no longer about land or title. We're figure out where to draw our own boundaries and how to love without control.

I myself have had a few romantic upheavals in my time. Those of you that know me know that well enough. I think a lot about the concepts of loyalty and unconditional love that my grandfather taught me. Yet, his was a different time, his wife never worked. So how do I take his concepts as a Marine and one of the best men I've ever known and apply that to me, a feminine on the exterior, masculine on the interior woman in a world that doesn't have the same values or methods as someone I know to be "good?"

In school I just read the Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera and these ideals have been coming up more prominently and rapidly in my mind as of late, especially as Jason and I discuss our growing commitment to one another. If the relationship we have is a rooting plant, like all plants and great trees, it grew out of shit and detritus into something complex and alive.

I'm watching my artistic heroes die and the boot heel of the American economy press harder on our backs and I'm thinking more and more about perspectives and what it means to be a living creature on this little ball of blue and green that we're killing softly.

There's a prominent kitsch that our lives have been shrink wrapped in and sold wholesale. I reject that fate. I do by best to rage against it each and every day. Some days I do this more quietly than others. Some days I do it solemnly, others with a laugh and disbelieving shake of my head. I wonder how this can be life while not even really knowing what the hell life is.

When I see a mainstream artist like Beyoncé do something like Lemonade or David Bowie wish us farewell in the end I feel privileged to watch their struggle through art. I honor the fact Beyoncé shared her pain and her own turmoil with us. She let us watch her grow right up through the topsoil of decaying matter and passed on lifeforms. It makes me reflect on my own life and the powerful potential in finding an unapologetic way of being yourself. I become aware of the limitless authority in finding a way to love that self with a broken, dimensional beauty that no physical exterior could ever tell.