Last night I went with some friends to see the Pedrito Martinez Group at Tipitinas – the band was fantastic! Tight and this guy Pedrito is so awesome but the rest of the band is fabulous too – the woman on the keyboards – lord today! – fabulous.
My friend was riding around with me today and said that she is enjoying Thus Spoke Zarathustra and she was reading me passages as we drove around the city.
I told her my favorite line is this one:
“I’m not upset that you lied to me, I’m upset that from now on I can’t believe you.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
I bought a day pass to the Tennessee Williams Festival yesterday and I must say as conferences go, this one never disappoints. I saw four panels – ranging from New Orleans in the 1920s: Bohemia, Baby Dolls and Storyville, The Art of the Debut, Writers on their First Books, Creole Women and Free People of Color. I felt as if I had sat down and read 20 books after it was over. I learned more, or should I say I unlearned more yesterday than a lifetime could have offered. The history written of our city, of our culture, of our people have all been lies, the new history being written today is quite a complicated, richly textured, grey zone of humanity. God bless this city.
From Ayana Mathis telling the story of how one reader left her a card that read, “NEVER BE DISCOURAGED” and how these small acts and moments of beauty are what sustain us, to Creole actually being a feminine noun whose etymology of create go hand and hand with the fact that Creole happens when cultures intersect, tragically, and someone has to clean up the mess – women – who go on to tell the story and weave the culture into the fabric of a people. Creole as Sydney Bechet says about the long song, that he always feels a song comes up behind him out of nowhere and flows through and heads on with no beginning and no end – a fluidity that culture here knows everything about how to appropriate, sustain, contort, blend, create and preserve and destroy again a culture.
My favorite line from Mona Lisa Saloy was the response to what does it mean to be a Creole, “Being Creole means to live gloriously, to strive for excellence to keep the culture sacred.” It was not all benevolence, the functional passing of most Creoles is a reality that became more critical with the one drop law. But I love you once, I love you twice, I love you red beans and rice is going to be my jump rope song from here on out.
The last panel summed it up succinctly – everything that has been written about New Orleans in the 19th century is wrong but like Leonard Pitts said, “Americans have been very poor keepers of their history and even poorer at African American history.” Pitt is a fiction writer seeking emotional truth – a worthy goal in my mind.
Thank you Tennessee Williams for leaving us a living legacy.
or rather he never left.
Yes, it’s that time of year again when the Tennessee Williams Fest is happening and there is a lot going on. Tomorrow’s roster is chock a block full of interesting sessions and I will be there to be inspired – from Babydolls to Creole Women to Free People of Color, I plan to spend my day away from the usual and steeped in the interesting.
I met an incredible woman today who is working on a quilt for mothers of sons who died from gang violence and hope we can have a collaboration in the future as our goals align.
I hung two loads of laundry out in the backyard – so satisfying to take down the sun-warmed clothes and fold them into the wicker basket.
I’m still counting my few little hairs that sprouted, waiting for the others to join them in joy.
I saw E this morning and I was able to finally articulate what I think the perfect partner is – this has been a question that I’ve been unable to answer over the eight years I have dipped in and out of therapy – the perfect partner could speak their truth without fear.
I grew emotional when I discussed my home; it is no wonder I clung to the LaLa as I did, my vision of home, THE home. And now my vision is still about home, but in a much more pragmatic way. I did learn something there. Home is something I crave as I was the child of a gypsy, and home is something I’ll make no matter where I am.
I’m clear about my life’s work and I have the tools in front of me to make my vision a reality. Everyone is rooting for me on this one.
Today was a good day, a day when what seemed impossible before seems probable now.
The violets in the mountains have broken the rocks.
~ Tennessee Williams
Yesterday was not a good day and let me tell you why, because I woke up cranky and that means that all of that bonhomie I’ve been espousing lately had all vanished when my eyes opened to greet the day. I conjured up a good many things that I could blame for it – not wanting to do what I had to do that day, having to resort to Option D on a project I was undertaking, not being able to leave behind all of the baggage that keeps trying to jump in my car that I keep trying to throw to the curb, and a general sense that I was off.
I called to my ancestors.
They did not respond.
I lit candles
The flames were low.
I spoke to my life coach
It was my last (already paid for) session.
I took two walks
Exercise reminded me of how I haven’t been exercising.
I went to yoga
My body paid me back for not going for two months.
Just like Bad Kitty in Tin’s book who grapples with the guest, loitered, and zeroed the zinnias I was in a Battle Royale with my selves. But in Nick Bruel’s children’s book even Bad Kitty gets to redeem herself.
So today I have started out on my path to redemption and sometimes for me to get back on, it takes a little dynamite up my butt. So I:
Talked to a long-time source
Reminded me we share a lot in common plus that our relationship is based on more than my subject matter.
Solved a problem on my blog http://transracialparenting.com
I was spending too much time trying to figure it out myself so I called on experts.
Watched a great TEDX video
Helped me find the feisty redhead in me even if I am bald right now.
I lit my own flame
Instead of lighting a candle, I reminded myself I’m the GIRL ON FIRE.
And so, sometimes you have to kick your own ass, with one hand tied behind your back, to get over a bad day, but the good news is that redemption is always there waiting for you.
Today was my last session with my life coach and here is my shout out to Danielle who helped me wrangle through the toughest year of my life and come out on the other side feeling passionate, confident, and brave and more like Rachel than I have ever been before.
Yay!
This past Saturday was a year that I have been going to Danielle’s Zumba class and all I can say is thank god.
Zumba has gotten me through losing my hair, selling my house, rearranging my life so completely different, and has propped me up until I got to today when my hair started growing back again.
If I hadn’t been able to dance my way through this year, I seriously think I would have walked off the planet.
Thanks Danielle and all you lovely Zumba sisters who have cradle me through this enormously transitional and pivotal year!
Today a friend looked at me very closely – we were looking at my wrinkles actually – because she owns Jake Aesthetics and is doing a peel on my face (results to be revealed very soon) – and she saw hair growing along the side of my head.
Hair!
She saw it!
I feel it!
Give me a head with hair, long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there, hair, shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there, momma, everywhere, daddy, daddyHair, flow it, show it
Long as God can grow, my hair
A friend told me about this book, Lean In, and wondered why it took her to tell me when it’s all over the wires – but I have to say in the little I’ve read about the book since she brought it to my attention I can only think that this book is a waste of the trees that were cut down to make it.
And I will just sum up my reasons by this one fortune cookie that I happened to get when I first arrived in San Francisco in 1990, and had I been attuned to my own nature enough to heed its warning, it might not have taken me this long to reach enlightenment:
A Woman Who Tries To Equal Man Lacks Ambition
‘Nuf said.
“The Invitation”
– Oriah Mountain Dreamer
It doesn’t interest me
what you do for a living.
I want to know
what you ache for
and if you dare to dream
of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me
how old you are.
I want to know
if you will risk
looking like a fool
for love
for your dream
for the adventure of being alive.
It doesn’t interest me
what planets are
squaring your moon…
I want to know
if you have touched
the centre of your own sorrow
if you have been opened
by life’s betrayals
or have become shrivelled and closed
from fear of further pain.
I want to know
if you can sit with pain
mine or your own
without moving to hide it
or fade it
or fix it.
I want to know
if you can be with joy
mine or your own
if you can dance with wildness
and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes
without cautioning us
to be careful
to be realistic
to remember the limitations
of being human.
It doesn’t interest me
if the story you are telling me
is true.
I want to know if you can
disappoint another
to be true to yourself.
If you can bear
the accusation of betrayal
and not betray your own soul.
If you can be faithless
and therefore trustworthy.
I want to know if you can see Beauty
even when it is not pretty
every day.
And if you can source your own life
from its presence.
I want to know
if you can live with failure
yours and mine
and still stand at the edge of the lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon,
“Yes.”
It doesn’t interest me
to know where you live
or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up
after the night of grief and despair
weary and bruised to the bone
and do what needs to be done
to feed the children.
It doesn’t interest me
who you know
or how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand
in the centre of the fire
with me
and not shrink back.
It doesn’t interest me
where or what or with whom
you have studied.
I want to know
what sustains you
from the inside
when all else falls away.
I want to know
if you can be alone
with yourself
and if you truly like
the company you keep
in the empty moments.