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There has been something dead inside of me that I only became aware of after I buried it. In the Jewish religion, we bury our dead in 24 hours so that we can start the grieving process believed to be only possible after burial. I’ve found lately that sometimes these literal interpretations of religion don’t serve me. My mother was near dead for six months in the hospital, and I had to begin my grieving process long before her burial. When I had to schedule an appointment a week out to put Arlene, my faithful friend and dog, to rest, I began grieving exactly one hour after the phone call.

I’ve come to know something about myself and I don’t know quite why I possess this quality but when I fall in love I fall in love instantly, at first sight, and hard. When I am ending something, it takes a painfully long time for me to reconcile the ending, but when it happens, I emerge stronger, lighter, reborn.

I’m inclined to believe I am destined for great work on this earth, and that is the dream I will follow today.

A while back someone sent me a card that said

Real Women Don’t Have Hot Flashes They Have Power Surges

and so begins Monday.

Okay so Sunday is Family Day too! Pancakes in the morning and pool in the afternoon.

The great thing about this pool is that it cost very little to install! Requires no maintenance! And it fits a bunch of people and feels terrific on a hot, summer’s day.

Yesterday was a terrific summer’s day. I romped in the Couturie Forest with a friend who I have not been able to catch up with for a long time. I went to the Farmer’s Market and finally got my knives sharpened and got some delicious summer squash, Creole tomatoes, gulf shrimp and peaches! I came home and we all got in the larger than life family pool that I blew up with the air mattress pump and we hung out there with Crepe Myrtle blossoms drifting by and landing in the water. We had a lunch of seabream almondine, brown couscous and flash fried spinach.

Then T and T2 went to take a nap.

And I set about working on a few projects of mine that have been on the shelf for a while, mainly books for Tin about Tin.

Then when T woke we watched a little of Treme as we are going back and watching it having finally relented. Then when T2 woke up, we walked to the park and played and the breeze was blowing lifting the summer heat curtain for a brief period of time. There were a lot of folks fishing on the bridge as we went by, but they were only catching small fry, nothing worthy of a fish story.

We returned and made a delicious supper of summer squash, Creole tomatoes and Louisiana Gulf shrimp and fresh pesto from the basil that was already bolting to flower, and penne pasta. Several books later and T2 back in bed, we finished the 8th episode of Treme and I guess you could say, we’re sort of hooked. It lacks the plot tension of the Wire and it carries with it the water weight of sadness from the Federal Flood but seeing how this was the Mardi Gras episode, I suddenly had this great desire to wake up on Mardi Gras morning, put on a new costume, and go outside to enjoy the greatest party in the world right here in New Orleans – the City that Indeed Care DID NOT Forget.

So you know how they say beauty is in the eyes of the beholder? And well, it is. This morning I went with a friend and our dogs to the Couturie Forest in City Park, which I’ve been hearing about for a while now. Yes, I was expecting a forest, but the sad fact is that most of the forest was denuded by the Federal Flood and the subsequent clean up that took away all the felled trees, which opened up space for invasive species to take hold and thrive.

As we were romping here and there around the forest, I thought about the trails out of my front door in Marin County and it’s like – whoosh – the beauty there is awesome, here, well, we are trying to make a forest grow back and eventually it will be there for a nature respite, in the meantime a lot of work lies ahead and let’s pray it doesn’t storm.

When the Tennessee Williams Festival was happening, it felt so good to be reimmersed once again in literature – oh yeah, remember that old chestnut. A long time ago when I was figuring out my life I figured it would revolve around literature and art and whatnot, instead somewhere about 16 years ago, I started working in the financial industry where well read authors were those who wrote books called Blink, The 7 Habit of Highly Effective People, and Get Rich Click! and some of my colleagues hung photographs of Ronald Reagan by their desks.

Yesterday, we had a night out and went to see Woody Allen’s new movie, Midnight in Paris, and just for a moment we were treated to the dreamlike quality of Paris in the same bulletproof way Allen has of capturing the dreamlike quality of New York – it makes you want to be there and no where else. The movie was so delightful that we both left in a good mood and happily took ourselves out for sushi.

The phases of the moon go from new to full, and the phases of an adult go from idealistic to realistic to holistic. The idealistic stage is when everything is in your own brain (of course that’s because its all you know) and then you become realistic because there are bills to pay, work to be done, a world to explore, and then later, you become holistic because you realize that everything in the world is inextricably intertwined with everything else so that a lesson learned today might manifest itself in a deed done tomorrow and that once you have gotten your head out of the clouds and grounded your feet on the floor then you start to notice that there are a lot of people around you who are looking to you to do something.

At the start of the journey you are like a sponge absorbing everything and then you reach plateaus, and suddenly you find all of the input has not disappeared into the ether, it actually gets reawakened, rekindled and repurposed into something else. Such an amazing thing this crazy life. And what would it be without fancy and imagination as Woody Allen so graciously reminds us in this dream he shared with us.

Lately, it seems that I am constantly weighing what to leave in and what to leave out. At the core of who I am these days is a mother, a partner, and a family:

But I’m also a friend too and sometimes when you have become isolated from your friends because of work and your family, it’s nice to know they can pick up the ball and reach out and touch you.

I woke yesterday morning to four missives:

1. You’re the best! just wanted to say hi… (Skype from another country)

2. You are fabulous – something good will come along. (email from out of state)

3. Hi hottie – just checking in (over AIM from NY)

4. I am here for you, you just say the word (in neighborhood)

Right now, I am about to embark on the first day of the next phase of my life, called for lack of a better title Plan B, the support that I have received from my friends and colleagues has been an enormous outpouring of love. An old source of mine wants to back me as I emerge from my cocoon as a trend maven, my accountant of many years wants to back me in a vacation rental business, a dear friend and neighbor wants to start a recruiting agency together, so many options, it’s dizzying.

The good news is that the universe is opening and a change is gonna come.

The summer is heating up and the days of 80 degrees are long gone, hello 90’s, hello humidity, hello no rain. And hello Mr. Tin coming at you with the cool sounds of New Orleans, where we are all guardians of the groove.

I’ve always been a hat person – love them and love to wear them. But wait, there’s more, I love wigs too. I love to change my hair and often. So my neighbor stopped me yesterday and said, “I didn’t recognize you, you change your hair so often it shows that you are comfortable about who you are.” I said, really? Well do tell.

I searched for the right hat for Tin, who keeps taking off his sun hats and I think I found the hat that is made for him – he is a hat person too – I can tell, because the moment he put on this hat, he was transformed and since I know intimately how that feels, I felt a special kinship with him as he sported his hat around the house.

A friend stopped by yesterday and said that she is going into business – the business of having a more tempered lifestyle, one where work doesn’t overshadow every other facet of her life. Yeah, well me too, is all I could think. Only, it’s barely 10am and I’ve been out of breath since I bolted out of bed.

No time for meditation, no time for contemplation, and certainly no time for relaxation.

What goes on?