Every year on the eve of St. John’s Day, a voodoo priestess and her followers gather on the Magnolia Bridge over Bayou St. John to offer blessings for the crops. It used to be Marie Laveaux, the Voodoo Queen of New Orleans, now it’s Sallie Ann Glassman, the Voodoo Priestess of New Orleans. Michael Domenici, WWOZ host of the New Orleans show took some cool photographs this year.
I thought of this poem today when we were having a dharma talk after meditation. My question is why does it seem natural to seek permanence when truly we live in an impermanent world? The desire to fix things in a time continuum is a survival technique, but it might also be what is helping us to die – wars are fought over people trying to keep possession of a thought, creed, or place that might have already changed.
So if we are in a world created by our own thoughts – why not let your inner voice tell jokes, why not believe in magic, why not help yourself to a keen fantasy life that will feed your dreams and string you along from one breathtaking moment to the next?
Things to Think
Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time, or that it’s
Been decided that if you lie down no one will die.
Robert Bly
After meditation this morning at the small Zen center down the street, we talked about the Genjo Koan again and of course, read it aloud again in the odd soto zen way of reading – a rush of words. What stood out – this time, “Do not suppose that what you realize becomes your knowledge and is grasped by your consciousness. Although actualized immediately, the inconceivable may not be distinctly apparent. Its appearance is beyond your knowledge.”
That is what I have been so hung up on for so long is the knowing – I’ve just been trying to figure it out, I mean what is it? Where is it? Is this it? And then along comes this meditation that leads me into buddhism then zen then soto zen and now I’m hearing you can’t know everything, and maybe this is it, maybe it isn’t, maybe that’s okay, and not.
“As myriad things are without an abiding self, there is no delusion, no realization, no buddha, no sentient being, no birth and death.
And all this time I took to heart what Jeff Bridges said, “The dude abides.” He does not, it turns out, because the dude is without an abiding self. Just like me. And you.
On March 12 my hair started falling out and on March 14th my stylist told me I had alopecia and it looked to him like alopecia areata by the circular bald spots developing on my head. It turned out to be alopecia universalis, which means all the hair on my body fell out. After dermatologist and primary care, and lots of blood work later, I wound up at an endocrinologist who informed me that I also have Hashimoto’s Disease, which is a common form of hypothyroidism among women my age. Stacking auto immune deficiencies, the Hashimoto’s is treatable, the alopecia is supposed to rectify itself (or not).
If you have any of these issues – fatigue, weight gain, puffy face, hair loss – go to an endocrinologist – don’t waste your time on a primary care physician or a dermatologist. They know how to evaluate your entire being to get you on the road to recovery.
And on the road I am, the road to Spain that falls mainly in my lane. This is no lie, when I was married to my second husband, I got on a plane to Spain married to Gayne and sat down next to a guy name Zane. Is that wild? I thought it was and it gave me a bad omen. My marriage lasted five months.
Now I’m going to Spain under very different circumstances, with my family and with all my beautiful baldness.
The best thing about alopecia universalis is no shaving, no waxing, no worries. I’d like it to stay that way from the nose hair down – I really miss my hair, my eyelashes, my eyebrows. The rest the universe can keep.
My energy is what I missed the most – I don’t like being a slug and slug I was. Going to my exercise classes and thinking, how are these people doing this, where do they get the energy – especially because I used to be the one that hopped around like the energizer bunny. Now I just looked them as if they were alien creatures. But now my Synthroid has gone from .025 to .050 to .075 and I am feeling instantly chipperer, if not downright like my self.
So the zombie apocalypse has ended and off we go to Europe to take the healing waters of the nice and chilly Atlantic.
Since Tin started at Waldorf, I’ve been reading more and more about anthroposophy and Rudolf Steiner. Steiner was all over the map – writing about the need for a nourished earth to provide us with nourishing food – biodynamics; the need to move our bodies – eurythmy; the spirit body or etheric body and on and on.
I’ve met Waldorf and Steiner at a most opportune time in my life – I need to simplify. And so I’m immersing myself deeper in zen, in Steiner, and in Waldorf and learning how rhythm and routine are essential to the healthy mind, body and soul.
So last night, when I had planned a playdate for Tin with friends who have been asking about him, I thought, this will be a nice way to end the week, and then … well and then as it always happens around the LaLa, the windows out to the bayou have a tendency to invite those wandering souls in.
So it was that others came, one bringing papaya tree saplings to plant in the side yard – the victim of termites that ate the Queen palm [btw: now no longer a victim, but a lush forest of angel’s trumpets, ginger, yesterday today & tomorrow, along with bright pink hydrangeas]. Someone came in with melon and prosciutto, and then blueberries with blue cheese on crackers another had, then there was pizza ordered, and salad made with pumpkin seed oil and pumpkin seeds, and there were toys and people and music and conversation and the LaLa became the place where it was all going down.
And it did. At the end of the night, when I was cleaning the table and Tatjana was picking up pieces of cracker from the floor, she said, “Yeah right, a simple playdate, harumph.”
You say harumph and I say Ta Da!
Depends on how you look at it.
I had lunch with a friend on Friday at Canal Street Bistro, a lovely cafe that has recently opened and serves very yummy food. The guy, Miguel, had opened a taqueria in Kenner and it was a little hole in the wall that soon became a victim of its own success and so right before the Federal Flood Miguel saw an opportunity to move uptown and open the motherlode of all taquerias – downstairs served casual fare and up fine dining – the restaurant was enormous, almost cavernous, but the food was beyond the pale delicious and then came Katrina and well that was all she wrote.
Now Miguel has resurfaced close to me, how lucky for the neighborhood. And if you are looking at what to make of success or failure, use him as a cautionary tale – his success came from his hole in the wall, his downfall was going from being a mouse to being an elephant overnight along with one helluva of a hurricane. I do think despite the storm, the restaurant was too big too succeed.
No matter, I sat with my friend at lunch having fried tofu and black beans with tasty peppers and lettuce and whatnot and we caught up. She is my friend, her daughter is my friend, and maybe when the daughter’s daughter grows up she’ll be my friend as well. My friend is over 70, sort of hard to believe, and she told me that she had learned in life that sometimes you just have to find something and stick with it because its the bouncing around that will drive you mad.
Coincidentally, she had told me on my divorce from my third husband, “the next time, just resolve yourself to stay” and so I have. It’s easy to go, but it does in the end, drive you mad. That is a fact.
I realized yesterday or rather it was pointed out to me that all of my “new life” talk wasn’t actually in practice. My nurse friend in the park said the reason that woman couldn’t get a vein and stabbed me so many times is she didn’t know what she was doing because she had not found perfect practice. “Perfect practice,” she said, it’s what my teacher used to tell us but I never knew what it meant. “It means doing your best work.”
She could have saved me from nearly passing out. That aside it was determined that I still don’t have enough meds in me so we upped the dose yet again and will revisit my levels when I return from abroad. Abroad? That’s right, we are leaving in days – and whoa be unto us because there is much to be done between then and now.
Which brings me to my own practice. Yesterday, I got caught up in a lot of other people’s needs – one wanted me to come do this, one wanted me to go do that, and I found myself feeling tugged and stressed because of it. My partner – T – said forget all of that just lie down and relax. And of course, I looked at her like she was an alien. And she is. Alien to me who seems to have super issues with saying no – it’s her favorite word.
Today, my dear friend told me that “No” is an answer too. Really? I said aloud. NO NO NO NO NO NO NO.
Yesterday, another friend watched me trying to text, trying to listen, trying to greet, trying to get peaches (they were already gone) from the green market, and trying and trying and she said, “Why are you doing this? Only do what makes you happy.”
Really? I said aloud.
So the deadline has come and gone and I made it in by the skin of my teeth. The preparation to leave the country for two months is underway. The meds have been upped. All of this is headed in the direction it should be, but if I don’t learn to say no between now and tomorrow what’s it all for?
I have dropped OM for OOMM the last two weeks – out of my mind – the idea that we are leaving here for two months in under a week is beyond the pale.
I have so many lists, I now have redundant lists, and things that are not on the lists, and all sorts of jumbled up jumble of stuff that keeps rumbling and I’m now mumbling.
OOMM.
I met my park friends this morning while walking the dogs; it’s been a while because I’ve been walking later than usual but now am getting back to my early rise with the help of the higher dose of meds. I learned the black swan died – agh – I just ached when my friend told me. But the park has replaced Mr. Smooth with two young black swans and there they all were – the four of them – the two whites elders and the two black leaner ones. Oh joy times four. My lucky number.
My friend had split with her partner of 24 years – she cried, I cried. There in the park while another stopped and hugged me and whispered, “Cancer?” and was reassured when I said no and as our local politician lost her cell phone and came by calling herself with her other phone. And then I went back to my friend with the tears. She said her partner was never happy, and so we spoke about what happiness means while we watched the four swans gliding on the lagoon.
She said happiness is living by the Four Agreements:
1) be impeccable in your word
2) don’t take it personally
3) don’t make assumptions
4) always do your best
My friend was given the gift of good parenting and she came to know herself much sooner in her life than I did in mine. I had parenting to overcome as well as embrace. I hope to parent differently and yet the same. It’s the paradox of living.
I have my own four agreements posted on my desk:
1) notice the good
2) listen to the positive voice
3) open your heart
4) accept what is
On the way home, I had a moment of grief over the black swan who passed. He had always done his best.