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I don’t know why I love Christmas music like I do, but it only takes the afternoon of Thanksgiving to get me to put the playlist on. Right now, I’m watching the water reflecting on the bayou that is moving steadily away from Lake Ponchartrain. Elvis Presley is singing Silent Night, Irma Thomas just finished Holy Night.

Sadness – these songs seem tinged in sadness.

Our house is crowded with menorahs on the counter, nuts in the African blood bowl that a friend gave me as a wedding present many years ago, there is the photo of Sam, my first Corgi, sitting on Santa’s lap with a Santa outfit on (I remember Santa’s wife running to her car saying she had just the right outfit for him), the Wedgewood Christmas tree that a friend bought me years ago with tiny porcelain ornaments and little bitty lights, there are blue lights flickering in the garden, and the shamash on the menorah flickering in the window.

Tin realizes something is happening. He snooped in a bag on the dresser and found the train tracks and railcars that haven’t been wrapped yet. All he asks is when Hanukkah is coming? When can we light the menorahs? So he can get his presents. He’s Hanukkah obsessed.

Kathleen Battle is singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing – her voice is ethereal and fragile almost to the point of breaking. She sounds like an angel. The light is being carried down the bayou on the water, the sadness comes and vanishes when each song ends, dreidels are in the red rubber bowl and now mariachis are singing Se Va Diciembre and the singer almost sounds like he’s crying.

November 30th is three years since my mother died. December 7th is three years since I met Tin. Tomorrow Loca goes to the country to live with the cousins.

Yet I’m happy and gay, with an overlay of sad and low, and all of these feelings run like a current as fast as the bayou moves just beyond these windows. The Chipmunks are singing All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth – which is an odd song for a chipmunk to be singing.

We loaded up the truck and headed to Franklinton this morning to spend the day with family giving thanks and to visit my mom’s grave and change her flowers to winter peonies from the faded sunflowers that have been there since Mother’s Day. Part of me was born from that land – the summers spent at my grandmother’s digging through the hay in the barn, washing horses with Prell shampoo, picking watermelons out of the patch and eating them on the side porch along with ice shavings from the huge freezer.

I miss my grandmother, my mother, and the little girl who still remembers the smell of those puppies born in the barn, the grass freshly mowed, and my grandmother’s feather bed.

Thankfully, my aunt and her family have recreated that same vision down to her green thumb for my son, Tin. My cousin Brian has Dr. Doolittle’s farm with a goat name Julio, a donkey name Jenny, a horse name Skip, and bulls, sheep and cows galore. And the best news yet – one more animal is being added to the mix – Loca! Yes, that’s right he wants Loca. A match made in heaven.

After we family’d, feast’d, and finished, we headed over to my mom’s grave and did our tradition – we played Love is My Religion, changed her flowers, and sprinkled a little beer on her grave. Tin ran out the gate and wouldn’t let us out till we gave him the password. We tried all the different ones we could imagine and he said, “Dog.”

My mom told me the sign she would send me was dog – unspecified – just dog – and Tin has an uncanny ability to channel her. Dog is the password. Dog was the word of the day.

The trip back across the lake was like floating home on an ocean of love and joy. A good time was had by all.

Many many years ago, my brother gave me a necklace with tiny ivory elephants on it. I used to wear it a lot and then because of the connotation of ivory and elephants I tucked it away and haven’t worn it. Yesterday, after a session with my life coach, I pulled it out to wear as a talisman. The elephant lives in the now, it’s strong, it is content, it is a being that lives only for the present.

An elephant does not worry about being captured and taken to a circus. It does not worry about poachers. It does not worry about losing its young. An elephant acts in the now – if faced with capture it will fight to the death. If it loses its young it will grieve like any mother. But it does not worry about those things.

So in order to assume the powers of my spirit animal, I have my talisman, my tiny ivory elephants that are circling my neck – hoping these are the tusks of already dead animals and not those killed for their white gold.

Be strong. Be like an elephant. Live in the now.

I took a much needed road trip and headed to Hotlanta to see my friend(s) and my brother’s family. It was an unique occasion to have two of my closest friends in the same city, along with Madonna, who was the reason for the trip and turned out to be an after thought. Madonna was Madonna on steroids – she kicked up her tour from the Sticky & Sweet tour that we saw in Houston not too many years ago. The Confessions concert tour remains our favorite as we knew all the songs and liked them. However, just watching the spectacle of her show was like taking acid and going to a light show – insane.

And then there was time with friends – one from high school and one from the last decade – and both important in my life in a myriad of ways. We covered all topics from death to living to reincarnation and also one unfortunate fact – they both live so far away from me that it takes “trips” to see them.

I drove there and drove back in record time – 467 miles in under seven hours each way. And time on the road was well spent – from listening to Bill Moyers describe the institutionalized crime that the Republican Party has become to Ram Das talking about the quiet mind.

I returned home enlightened in more ways than one. And grateful in many ways for the love that guides me along this journey and always waits for me to come home.

I took this in the gas station because I wanted to document that yes, I wore my new Madonna tee home:

I was speaking to an African American woman this morning about her daughter who is trying to get pregnant. This woman has always been a big fan of Tin’s from afar and she commended me on raising him to understand that he is black and that’s his identity. I told her that his being in my life has actually opened my eyes to the African American community that I always assumed I was close to but was not. Tin has enlarged my world in a very enlightening and wonderful way. Last night, in Atlanta when we walked into a club that was 95% filled with the African American pulchritude of this city, I felt not necessarily as if I was one of them, but more that I am a part of them. I am hoping that in launching the blog (we’re working on it) I will be able to enlarge the conversation and in turn, enlarge the world for me and my child.

November 18, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
You have been intrigued by someone from a different culture for quite a while now, and today will give you a wonderful opportunity to get to know them better. You can charm them in a way that no one else can. Conversations often make the best education, so settle in for a long chat with this person. You will have a lot of questions for them, but they are likely to have just as many questions for you. Learning how different people live their lives can help improve how you live yours.

I arrived in Atlanta in blazing trail time and got here just long enough to circle 285 enough times to make me so very happy I live in a city where I never have to get on the freeway if I don’t want to. Good lord! The first thing I noticed when I crossed the Georgia border were the trees, multicolored, multi species, wonderful beautiful trees. Then I noticed the freeway.

Then I went to have an Indian feast with my brother’s family – which has expanded so much – they were barely recognizable. My nephew is this big ox of a man, my other nephew is going to start law school and he has a child Tin’s age and all of the girls rock – because we are all marathoners – my niece and two niece-in-laws all completed theirs this year.

Last stop, I came back to my friend’s (from high school) house and we stayed up till past midnight (as we are want to do) to catch up on everything that has happened since the last time.

I woke this morning to this feeling that Tin was going to get up any minute and then suddenly, hearing the train going by missed him, and rolled over and went back to sleep.

Ahhhhh.

I’m leaving this morning on a much needed road trip – there will be family, friends and Madonna in the midst. I’m leaving the LaLa and my loved ones here along with a guest from Spain to watch over things and keep the home fires burning bright.

Last night, I went to the Steiner Study Group to talk about Rudolf Steiner’s Education as a Force for Social Change. We covered his first two lectures that expounded on the foundation of the first Waldorf School in Stuttgart in Southern Germany.

Steiner believed each human possess an innate sense of truth – I’ll leave with this:

Verse for America
~ Rudolf Steiner

May our feeling penetrate
to the center of our hearts,
and seek in love to unite with those
who share our goals;
and with spirit beings who, full of grace,
look down upon on our earnest,
heartfelt striving,
strengthening us from realms of light
and illuminating our love.

Someone suggested I meet some of my peers – women over 50 who have young children. And another suggested I find a support group for those who have Hashimoto’s. Another suggested that auto-immune diseases are going around the neighborhood and perhaps there is more than just a coincidence.

The truth is that it would be hard to find someone like me, a 53 year old with a 3 year old, who has Hashimoto’s Disease and no hair, who is building a new career, well several of them.

I have only one answer – road trip! – alone on the road is where I’ll speak to my peers – the ones whose voices are heard in the car when miles separate you from where you are coming from and where you are going, the thousand and one voices that clamor for attention with the ordinary routine of life, the ones that are silenced by the rhythm of the road.

Yoga Sutra 2.39
Aparigraha Sthairye Janmakathamta Sambodhah

“When you are not looking for something that is outside of yourself, you can transcend time. You’re not afraid of the future. The past, present, and future is the same. If you see yourself as a victim of something in your past, you are attached to your past story. Let go of it and begin to transform, becoming steadfast in yourself.”– Anand

Aparigraha means greed or hoarding. So my mom’s ring I can’t find that was so special to me about her, the book I can’t find that I lent someone and am not sure if they returned it, the author that I liked and was jealous of just yesterday, last night – all of this is at the root of greed because it is focused on something outside of yourself that is keeping you from being who you are. Instead of comparing myself to another author, I need to focus on where I am today and accept that growth and change are far greater than perfection, than that one thing I must accomplish or attain to make me whole.

Namaste

I love this word of the day which means warm friendliness; comfortableness; coziness.

and this

THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The sense of wishing to be known only for what one really is is like putting on an old, easy, comfortable garment. You are no longer afraid of anybody or anything. You say to yourself, ‘Here I am — just so ugly, dull, poor, beautiful, rich, interesting, amusing, ridiculous — take me or leave me.’ And how absolutely beautiful it is to be doing only what lies within your own capabilities and is part of your own nature. It is like a great burden rolled off a [wo]man’s back when [s]he comes to want to appear nothing that [s]he is not, to take out of life only what is truly his [her] own. -David Grayson, journalist and author (1870-1946)