Archive for December, 2012

The Spanish guests

Monday, December 31st, 2012

We have friends visiting us from Spain, a mother and her son, and they’ve come at probably not the best time because of all of the changes in process in my life but they are part of the process and so what better time to come and distract us all from the matters at hand. After all, if they had come later, they’d have missed the LaLa and if they had come early, they’d need to be caught up on all of what is going down.

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We went to see George Clinton and Parliament at Tipitina’s Saturday night, we went to Buffa’s for burgers at 2am, we’ve eaten too many times, we’ve had beignets at Morning Call in City Park, we’ve walked around the bayou, we’ve talked, we’re now preparing for the parties for New Year’s Eve and my last New Year’s in the LaLa.

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The Spanish guest will leave with an impression of New Orleans that despite all the shadows that make us cower, there is an outward message that life is for the living and you have to keep on dancing till the music stops.

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We become what we behold

Monday, December 31st, 2012

I’ve been driving around looking at houses and areas that I could move to when the LaLa is sold. I started this process with an open mind, not necessarily an open heart. My first knee jerk reaction was to live elsewhere than the bayou because I didn’t know if I could emotionally pass my house every day and see my lost dream.

Last night, we saw a limo pull up and a bunch of people get out and start taking photos in front of the house. We walked outside to see what was up and it turned out to be guests who had gotten married here in October. Their dream was to get married at her father’s house on the river but when Hurricane Isaac put a crimp in that dream, they looked for an alternative, and now their history is imprinted on the LaLa. Like mine.

I keep trying to reconfigure my mind around letting go of these old dreams, but honestly when I go see other neighborhoods like Marigny and ByWater, I can’t visualize living there. When I look at houses and streets and views, I keep thinking of what my neighbor told me – health and serenity cannot be traded in for a view. And yet I know so well that having gotten up every morning for the last seven years and looked outside at the water and the pelicans soaring by and the people who have graced my porch, I say with confidence that I have sacrificed my health for this dream for the very last time.

2013 is going to be a year of transition, as I move into the next chapter of my life. A chapter yet unwritten, but laden with backstory, and I would like to enter the story gracefully and with eyes wide open.

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More will be revealed

Monday, December 31st, 2012

December 31, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Try to keep matters of the heart on the up-and-up right now. Being brutally honest is tough sometimes, but it is much more valuable than softening the truth with little white lies. Too often, those little white lies will backfire on you. The more honest you can be, the more you can expect others to be straight with you — so get ready to hear the truth yourself, and be tolerant of people who tell it like it is. There is something new that you don’t know about yet. It will be revealed today.

The Cold Moon

Friday, December 28th, 2012

Tonight’s the last full moon of 2012 and it’s called the Cold Moon, appropriately so. It’s not cold yet, but it’s going to get cold, dropping twenty degrees in the next few hours.

Cold Moon

Each month I show you the same face,
and you call me a different name.

Now you call me Cold Moon,
but I am always cold.

You call me Long Night Moon,
but my nights are always long,

bright on one side, dark the other.
I am the same, always, and you

make of me what you desire. Magical,
monstrous, indifferent, muse.

I pull at your blood, and you
deny me. We yearn for one

another, stone of my stone, fire
of my fire, night of my night.

~unknown

The winter of our discontent

Friday, December 28th, 2012

The purpose of disturbances in our life is to break us from our complacency, to give us a sense of really needing to dive deeper into the constant current of truth that is steady and peaceful.

The sale sign went up on the house two days ago and the people began a’comin to see what the LaLa is all about. Most agree it will sell quick. And then what?

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More will be revealed as my friend is want to say, even to me who cannot see the future, but I’m not afraid to step off the precipice like I was in my dream that I had in Spain two summers ago where the swaying bridge I was on ended in turbulent waters.

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Happy 77th Mom

Friday, December 28th, 2012

Mom&Dad

Your spirit lives in all of us even though we miss you.

Developing rather testing intelligence

Wednesday, December 26th, 2012

We went to Tin’s godparents for Christmas dinner and afterwards, while Tin and Evan noodled around on the piano, we talked about the different forms of intelligence. A friend was talking about how intelligence arrives in myriad ways and there really is no test per se to quantify it. There is aesthetic intelligence as well as musical intelligence as well as … .

If you gaged the people in New Orleans solely on their musical intelligence, you would find that we are a city of geniuses. That our ability to transcend the superficial level of our reality is cloaked in magic and wonder.

Just watching Tin’s intelligence manifest through rhythm is like watching a cat focusing on a bird on the ground. Every part of his core is engaged in that moment, that expression.

I sometimes wonder if paying for school is the best idea for him and for the community at large and then I see what Waldorf is offering him – the chance to grow into him – rather than a cog in this vast machine – this makes me grateful to Rudolph Steiner and his disciples to offer my son the chance to develop his intelligence rather than acquire someone else’s.

First things first

Tuesday, December 25th, 2012

Merry Christmas!

Next, just want to say that the sky is grey black in New Orleans with tornado warnings, but this morning we were on the bayou, where that photo was taken and we have spent the last 24 hours celebrating our traditions – Christmas Eve with German friends and goose, Christmas day with Mexican friends and pozole, and we aren’t done yet, we still have Christmas dinner to go. Whoosh.

In the midst of all of this, the world is spinning around, and I’m trying to bear in mind what’s important – not losing mine.

So on this day, that feels like a new day, I want to wish you happiness and joy, together, and for always.

love, Rachel

Excitement fills the air

Monday, December 24th, 2012

I got up before dawn and walked Heidi to go look at that lot on the bayou. I have plans you know. Plans to continue onward and upward. Plans not to get stuck in anyone else’s dreams and anyone else’s vision of how my life should flow.

It’s Christmas eve and we have our traditional German goose dinner to look forward to as well as Christmas with godparents and then friends arrive from far flung places to help us usher in the New Year – not to mention a little help from Parliament.

Make my funk the R funk, I wants to get funked up.

The Bard of the Bayou Holiday Poem

Sunday, December 23rd, 2012

Are We There Yet?

‘Twas the night before Christmas in Bayou St. John
And not a creature was stirring, not egret or swan;
Not nutria, gator, or unclaimed canoe;
Not the Councilmembers or Mayor Landrieu
In the midst of whose loftiest dreams butted Head;
Not Letten or masked right-hand Mann who was read
Her rights, or a stone’s throw from these fallen fellas
Ray Nagin who’d taken for granite Fradella;
Not the exiled head coach of the Saints (this year’s Martyrs)
Or the newly hatched Pelican nest of young starters;
Not the greatly diminished Times-Picayune staff
Now that news fit to print had been whittled in half.
All slept without cares in the Town Care Ignored
As the Christmas Eve stars twinkled down on our shore.

Then, Ma on her mini-Pad, I on the maxi-,
Log off for a long winter’s nap, when a taxi
With TAX in bold letters across the marquee
Careens ‘round the cliff ere it grazes a tree.
“Cut the wheel to the right,” yells their ruddy-faced leader.
“Make the rich ones pitch in,” cries a voice by the meter.
“Do ya wanna get fiscal?” one asks near the rear
But though this body talks, clearly no body hears.
When a school bus and ambulance try to get past,
A long Cadillac coupe that is driving too fast
Heads them off and in passing emits a sad “woof”
Which we trace to a kennel strapped onto the roof.
But the instant Mitt stalls, Jindal speeds towards the Hill,
His taillights reflecting a trail of road kill.
Then a model-T party proclaims a girl’s power
To send sperm a-packing if she is deflowered
Or welcome the gift that will spring from her loins—
But their karma backfires on these backward old boys.
Though a small fender-bender dents Hillary’s beam
It’s a bump in the journey to twenty-sixteen

And the Stateswoman seems not the least bit nonplussed
That McCain, in a road-rage, throws Rice ‘neath a bus.
He is straddling a fence that won’t stop immigration.
All around, unknown forces are driving inflation.
Then abreast of this pile-up on Bayou St. John
Comes a tour bus, a Gray-line with fifty shades drawn,
And Petraeus, resigned to this mess he’s All In
Next to Broadwell, not Brody, who’s texting the twin.
Mile High Manning, en route from his new Denver home,
Deconstructs “He who lay with a man shall be stoned.”
In a ditch sits Lance Armstrong with flats he can’t fix.
The poor Dutchess of Cambridge is feeling carsick.
Honey Boo Boo chomps down on some more pixie stix.
And Goodell toots his horn as Drew throws a pick-six.
If the Mayans are right, they have passed the last ramp
Thanks to charting their course using Apple’s new map
Which has led to this cliff, where they bicker and preen.
“Can we make it,” I groan, “to two thousand thirteen?”

“Yes, We Can!” comes a voice,” Yes, We Can fix this business
If we reach across consoles and Keep Chris in Christmas!
—Both the Christies and Kringles,” Obama explains.
“For we’re in the same sleigh!” and he retakes the reins.
Then he turns on the blinker to take a new route
Bringing all who will come, and together they shout:
“Away, Isaac and Sandy! Up, up, levee systems!
Away, away, partisans! Up, those who listen!
Up, marriage for everyone, not just for some!
And, for God’s sake—away! Away, deadly guns!”
Then a sign from the heavens appears o’er our shore:
Charlton Heston, on high, gives the nod to Mike Moore.
And we know we’ll be fine if the course that we chart
Leaves nobody behind and stays true to the heart.

~Happy Holidays from Stephany!
© S. Lyman
New Orleans, 23 December 2012