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This morning I woke up filled with thoughts of work that were all tumbled and tossing. I got the dogs and headed out to the park for our walk and it had been raining, the skies were grey, and I was wearing a tee shirt – part of the unnaturalness of this winter in 2012 New Orleans. I looked up, pensive, and saw a break in the clouds and it formed an image that was strikingly the emblem of Wonder Woman.

I smiled.

In the park, I ran into a friend and neighbor, who I have been thinking about, and who I haven’t seen since last year. I was excited to see him and when he asked how the new business was going, I began chatting a million miles a minute. We had both been in the same funk, and I felt like I was on the other side and I was trying to describe it to him.

I was relaying a story about another friend and neighbor who had asked me something similar and how I had been trying to explain to her what I do and she said I need more corporate lingo in that elevator pitch and I told him I had stumbled across a woman who is doing exactly what my company is doing but she had the corporate lingo and it turned me off. He said that corporations like to have their world mirrored back at them, lingo and all. It makes them comfortable and gives validity to their universe. And I said that is why it gave me pause as to whether those types of large corporations would be the best clients. I had left that world of “bubble up” “circle back” and “transparent” behind.

But this isn’t the story. The story goes like this, I ran into a friend who I was happy to see, and after about ten minutes, my friend turned to me and said not in these exact words but close, “It’s funny I needed this time to walk alone and gather my thoughts and now here you are intruding into that because you’ve been talking a million miles a minute.”

He had just been telling me what I should have told my other friend who was coaxing me to make my delivery more corporate, and so since honesty was in abundance I told him that I was sorry, and that much in the way he had wanted a different experience with me than the one I was giving him, I too had expected a different experience.

I left him with a bumpersticker message – It will be okay. And he left me with one – people mirror what is inside of them.

Remember at the root of mystery is the metaphor of God* —

So do you want to make God laugh?

Make plans.

A friend told me his mother says this to him all the time.

*”God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It’s as simple as that.” Joseph Campbell

Listening to the Republican Response to Obama’s State of the Union and have to say, if anyone in that group could take Speech 101 they might not suffer so much from disrespect.

But now back to the President of the United States – he’s handsome, he’s articulate, he’s managing hope, he took his victory lap, his not so subtle jibes at the Tea Party and Romney and Congress and he still looks presidential and makes me proud.

The ca ca card placer in City Park has taken to political messages. Today placed on a fresh pile of dog ca ca was a card that said: Gingrich was here.

I was listening to Bill Moyers interview Louise Erdrich as I walked through City Park this morning with the dogs. As we crossed the always dangerous intersection of City Park and Carrollton, tourists from South Carolina joined behind me as I held my hand out to the oncoming traffic. One turned to me and said, “If not at a green light, then when would we cross?” Good question, I responded, then went back to listening to the interview.

I noticed as I was walking how the white geese huddled together, the black coots swam together, the cormorants perched together, the green-headed mallards congregated together on the Cajun Santa Claus still in the lagoon. It’s bird paradise right now in City Park, but more interesting is how birds of a feather flock together. And how appropriate was it that Erdrich was speaking about her fractured inner life being a Native American and a German, a writer and a mother, right at that moment.

Interestingly enough before she arrived at this conversation, I was thinking about my upbringing as a Spanish Jew and the language of Ladino because I had been listening to Tin speaking Croatian this morning and was smiling as I thought of what he told me the other day. I was tickling his naked body and saying, where did this little knee come from, where did this thigh come from, where did this shoulder come from and he said boldly, “CROATIA!”

And I thought about how he would grab from the cultures that Tatjana and I are bringing into his own cultural being and he would identify with parts of them much as I had identified as strongly with my father’s people because there is where I found as Erdrich calls it, my community and my peace and my language. Yet, at the same time, I had as strong a tie to my mother’s people and the country and landscape they were from. I see myself as one part cathead biscuits and gravy one part black beans and rice and one part kibbe.

But different from the fowl in the waters of City Park, I feel most at home in a mixed environment, with a Jew, a European, a Catholic, a Buddhist, black, brown, white, yellow and red skin, kinky hair, flaxen hair, curly hair, and still more types to come with languages running together like tributaries to the great unknown.

Tin and I had dinner last night sitting at the copper table in our latest LaLa edition, the Euro kitchen, and there we listened to Brazilian songs and spoke about how beautiful the language sounds and how musical it is at its core.

When I think of the worlds contained inside of me, I could burst forth like a cornucopia of rhythm, roots and riotous revelry – how grateful I am to be a gumbo gal.

Going along the same idea of these inane lists that keep popping up EVERYWHERE, I came across this one posted on the Waldorf School’s Facebook page and the final paragraph pretty much summed up the first few weeks of this year’s mental exercises for me:

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.

A friend of mine recently posted Rules Your Kids Did Not and Will Not Learn In School by Bill Gates on Facebook. Well actually several friends have posted it, but I responded to his because I didn’t like one word of it. It begins with Rule 1 – which says life is not fair, get used to it.

As a parent the thought of saying this to my child is absurd because a) I don’t feel that way, and b) I think it is wrong. Life is what it is and sometimes it is fair and sometimes not and sometimes it is overwhelmingly amazing and at times deeply boring in its rituals and ruts. But fair – that would not be in the vocabulary.

Rule 2 – The world doesn’t care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. Really? I don’t think so. Self-esteem is something that comes from within and there is a way to teach your child to have self-esteem by nurturing their natural rhythms and quirky directions they might choose to follow and letting them know that the world accommodates a myriad of people types. And accomplish is an overused word of the 80s to 00’s. What I hope my child accomplishes is to love and be loved.

Rule 3 – If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss. Really? I would tell my child that working for yourself is the most satisfying work you will do in this world, but since you want to be in a marching band – you have to learn teamwork and remember you are master of your domain, never anyone else. Especially a boss.

That is the first of the 11 rules on this faux chalkboard and I disagree with each one on here and could wax for hours about why and how wrong headed this entire list is, but suffice to say is I respectfully disagree.

Here’s a thought to take into this week – it’s Monday, you open your eyes, you are in a comfortable bed with relatively clean linens, you walk to the bathroom and the toilet is working properly, you brush your teeth with clean water, you head to the kitchen and begin your brew, you look out the window and maybe, depending on where you are, you see a bird in a tree. So begins Monday, not unlike many other Mondays of years past, but today is different. Today is very different.

I looked at this horoscope this morning and as much as this is formulaic, I still can’t believe how uncanny these are similar to my everyday topics.

January 22, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Asking a friend to be honest with you can be tricky. If you are looking for support and end up getting judged, don’t blame the friend. Blame yourself for talking to a preacher type of person instead of someone who knows that no one is perfect. There are plenty of people who are looking out for you, and you know who they are. Sure, their advice may hurt to hear sometimes, too, but they are truly trying to help you — not feel superior to you.

I was speaking to a friend and neighbor this morning about business and this person was cracking the whip on some of the ideas I was putting out there. She asked later, “Was I too direct?” NO WAY – I would prefer to have all of my communications this way.

I am writing on a iPad on loan from the vantage point of the terrace that is right off my office now our office/bedroom. And the terrace figures prominently in this post as it was the terrace that I insisted on when the LaLa was being conceived and it was the terrace that caused most of the consternation with the myriad carpenter/contractors who worked on the LaLa for so many reasons I cannot begin to name here. And it is the terrace that we have become fixated on these days as we were wondering about turning it into a living area instead because we seldom if ever use the terrace for its original intention.

A cursory conversation about what it might entail to do this conversion was enough to make me believe the answer to this “issue” is to begin to use the terrace more often and so I am out here feeling the warmish gulf breeze blowing on my skin and listening to the palm fronds rustling.

I am contemplating the succulents that are a nice shade of green and thinking the thing about succulents is they enjoy an arid environment but need sufficient water to live and it has been an ongoing battle to determine just how that can be reduced to a formula so that I don’t have to think about what they need but just be able to provide it.

I think I have a lazy mind and sometimes try so hard to find formulas or short cuts that I actually could just try to assume everyday I will need to reevaluate most everything and see what needs to be done from there rather than trying to find the end of all thinking.