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Let’s play the yes, and game. You know how it goes, instead of saying no, but which is what most of us say to any possibility of anything in our life, we say yes, and. I started playing this game a few weeks ago, and suddenly everything changes. And everyone changed. It’s as if the minute I started looking at the world differently, the world was different.

I’m telling you – you can change your life – because I think most people are telling you, you can’t. They’re wrong. Trust me on this. You Can Change Your Life. And there is a hundred percent chance that in changing your life, you will change other people’s lives, and this is all a good thing.

Trust me.

There is a story of a young, but earnest Zen student who approached his teacher, and asked the Master, “If I work very hard and diligently, how long will it take for me to find Zen? The Master thought about this, then replied, “Ten years … .” The student then said, “But what if I work very, very hard and really apply myself to learn fast — How long then?” Replied the Master, “Well, twenty years.” “But, if I really, really work at it, how long then?” asked the student. “Thirty years,” replied the Master. “But, I do not understand,” said the disappointed student. “At each time that I say I will work harder, you say it will take me longer. Why do you say that?” Replied the Master, “When you have one eye on the goal, you only have one eye on the path.”

I’m still watching In Treatment, even though tonight, finishing one disc, I felt like throwing the whole thing out the window. How to tell when you are done watching other people’s problems – when you get sick of them. I watched the first episode with the woman who gets pregnant but never wanted to be a single mother (um, thanks); I watched the cancer patient whose hair is about to all fall out (the woman at Tin’s swimming who showed up bald like me a few weeks ago has her hair growing back – I realize I’m not supposed to be jealous because she has/d cancer and she could die, but can I help it if I can’t help staring at her new growth, with envy?); I watched the young boy who is living through the break up of his parents and overeating (that’s what kids do) (as I sit there eating a bag of rice crackers for dinner and drinking left over white wine); I watch the corporate executive who loses his job and tries to kill himself (to the bone); and then I watch the therapist go to therapy himself and try to reconcile the father he lost with the father he has become (as I sit in my living room with my son sleeping at his other house).

An ex told me that divorce is the best kept secret because you get to have time off from your kids. That was reiterated to me recently by a well intentioned person who told me to enjoy the time I have apart from Tin. I’d not going to reply to either one of these for fear of what I might say.

What makes life work like this – in clichés – damaged people inflicting more damage upon more damage. I spoke with someone about her family … split by geography triple times till you have sliced the family so thin it is a razor that makes them all bleed. I spoke to a woman whose father caused them to go into the witness protection program only then they had to escape again and went into hiding on their own. Imagine the lives of these children, these people – the hunted then the haunted.

Or how about the life of this child: a father with a questionable medical license who commits insurance fraud often enough to support a gypsy lifestyle so that the kid(s) is raised in hotels in other countries, always on the run. A father who swears he is going to get in the car and take off anytime there is a heated argument (read: there is always a heated argument). A mother who recreates the house the same way with each move so that it appears nothing has changed as she hides her vodka in bottles of bleach under the sink.

This child – watching other people’s lives on TV as a grown up – lives that always seem to reflect back on being this child.

Don’t run from your karma, she says not in jest, ha, how could I? There is no place to hide.

he sang as if he knew me
In all my darkness fair
and then he looked right through me
as if i wasn’t there
and he kept on singing
singing clear and strong
Strumming my pain with his fingers
Singing my life with his words
killing me softy with his song
killing me softly with his song
telling my whole life
with his words
killing me softly with his song

I met an interesting woman at the conference this weekend, her name is Lynn Jericho. She was doing a workshop on Anthroposophy, Rudolph Steiner’s philosophy that I still find is so steeped in esoteric vocabulary that it’s difficult for me to plunge the depths of Steiner. So I was looking forward to the session to learn more about this man’s writings and teachings.

It was a fascinating session both from staring into the blue, blue eyes of the guy sitting next to me for one minute that seemed eternal to hearing Lynn invite us into a world of non-judgment. She welcomed us into the session saying that it was going to be about Knowing Thyself. Well, I thought, I couldn’t have come to a better place, since that seems to be what I’m seeking.

The big take away from Lynn’s talk was “don’t run from your karma” – and so I’ve returned to New Orleans and am here, arms wide open, mind rested, ready for my karma.

I just returned from Chapel Hill where I was attending a regional conference of Waldorf Schools, and while I went there to present on what we are doing here in New Orleans with marketing and outreach, I came away with a lot of food for thought. Waldorf is a departure from the traditional notion of education where a teacher speaks to the child’s mind, only. The Waldorf education is about teaching to the child’s mind through feeling. But it’s not a touchy feely education as some people think when they hear about an art’s based education. As a matter of fact, the early childhood pedagogy is about helping the child separate feeling from willing as that is the natural development in a nursery and kindergarden age child.

There are statistics that are cropping up everywhere now on why Waldorf works – some say that Rudolph Steiner was ahead of his time, but I say it’s more that we are very late for ours. One of the speakers at the conference, Jack Petrash, author of Understand Waldorf, Teaching from the Inside Out, quoted many books that align with Waldorf thinking. In 1995, Daniel Goleman published a book called Emotional Intelligence claiming foremost among his ideas that schools should teach emotional literacy along with regular academic subjects. In 2005, Daniel Pink wrote A WHOLE NEW MIND: WHY RIGHT-BRAINERS WILL RULE THE FUTURE and claimed that there are six ways to educate young people: Play, Art, Storytelling, Empathy, Symphonic Thinking (seeing the motif that runs through the whole of things), and finding meaning. In one word, Waldorf.

Petrash also quoted Thomas Friedman who told students in a lecture that their education had primarily developed the left-side of their brains and that if they wanted to be prepared for the future they needed to develop the right side of their brains as well. He told them to think art, to think green, to think connectedness.

I was thinking about the angst that has come from the new, new economy that I find myself in these days and how difficult it is to come up with the tuition to send Tin to Waldorf and let’s not even talk about the fact that I’m not putting money away for college. I thought about this as I was in a conversation with another mother who was saying she wanted to do this and that to make sure when she died her son had this and that – I told her, she couldn’t know what her son would want in his life so she would be better served to focus on now and not then.

I mulled over the advice I was doling out as I thought that the best education Tin could have is to develop whole brain activity that Waldorf teaches, for him to understand what it is to be a human being and to know himself. Who knows if colleges will be where children Tin’s age want to be when they get older – the world is expanding in ways we cannot even imagine and while we cling to old ways of doing things – we might be missing some clues to the big picture.

I firmly believe that my abilities as a writer, as a creative person, are what will help me narrate my life. I came to these skills over decades. If Tin could start with these skills instead, he would be in a much better place than me earlier on and isn’t that what we all wish for our child – that they do better than us?

Today is the first day of the rest of my life, or so said my friend when she dropped me off from Zumba last night. I’m going to be presenting tomorrow at a conference for Waldorf educators and next weekend will be at a conference about undoing racism. I woke this morning and was overwhelmed with gratitude that I was able to get off the golden cow teat and get on the path that my life was meant to be on. It was nice riding the wave of cash flow for a while, but just like smoking, after the first few packs all it was doing was making me unhealthy.

I was a nomad who wound up in San Francisco right after the 1989 earthquake – a follower of natural disasters – I stayed there until I returned home just in time for the 2005 Federal Flood. I’m an adventure seeker. And so here in my natural vibration, I have once again found my calling, calling me back to the fold. In San Francisco, I went on my journey to be a writer, to be something akin to the Madonna of Fiction Writers, and I changed course so many times, I lost sight of myself. But through the school of Hard, but Fort Knocks, I came back to me.

Whew, honey it’s been a rough ride, but once you’ve ridden a bull, it’s hard to wean off of that fear of being thrown to the ground and stomped. But do it you must, my good Yoda followers.

In the summer of 2011, a pivotal time in my life, a long-time source and then life-coach told me to write a book about my experience – he said that I was more compelling than Faith Popcorn, that I had more to say about marketing a company than Andrea Kates, but this idea went into a bucket full of holes. My bucket’s got a hole in it, my bucket’s got a hole in it, I would sing to myself.

And now, my subject matter – from Rudolph Steiner’s Philosophy of Freedom, to my new blog’s dive into race and parenting, my work is pointing towards meaning while my body / mind / spirit are all converging under a great bright star.

Am I grateful that I no longer suck at the teat of the golden calf – damn straight I am. Now get out of my way as I rock it in the free world.

I was reading a little bit from my Power of Now book this morning and thinking about how the premise is that thinking really gets in the way and sort of screws up the experience. Because the mind is like a steel trap keeping all the hurts and failures and misdeeds in there like a continual loop of doom playing in the background. No matter how you want to experience something for true, for new, for real, you’re blocked by all the impressions that have come before that might lead you to believe this can only turn out bad.

But I want to make a leap of innocence here to a place where let’s just say you meet me and I meet you and there is no history between us, there is no baggage weighing us down, and here we stand naked and open, and all we have is the belief that everything is going to turn out okay and that whatever happens next is exactly what is supposed to happen no matter how things seem to appear.

And that is how I’ve been operating lately, so that despite the fact that things have radically changed in my life, I find myself less resistant to change, I find myself less fearful that I’m living out some karmic acid trip that I want to wake up from, I find myself less worried that this is all going to hell in a handbasket with just one wrong move. Because it’s not. It’s all going to be okay in the end, and if it’s not, it’s not the end. Right?

So now, there is the deep breathing and meditation that transports my mornings into a moment of bliss. There is the knowledge that everything that is coming my way is FABULOUS and if it is not, doesn’t matter. There is the living in this one moment where I put my son in bed and kiss his cheek and he tells me, “No, no kisses Mommy.” And I kiss him anyway.

See I’m living and every day I’m unwritten, and I get to fill in the narrative like Eudora Welty spoke about, and I am writing a provocative and colorful tale of a woman in the south who sees black eyed susans where others see weeds, and who faces fear with humility and courage, and who lives to tell about it. It’s all just like you said it should be.

“You have not failed! So get that thought out of your head right away! Yes, you might not have succeeded at what you long to achieve yet, but this does not mean you’ve failed. Get back to that vision with renewed faith and dedication. Your ancestors will never give you a vision, without giving you the tools to see it through. Get back in that fight.”

– James Weeks/Across The King’s River

I’ve been contemplating money and the pains we go to earn it, so that we can spend some of it, and then we all (most of us) feel that we never have enough of it and I started thinking about what “it” is because I’m reading a book to Tin that is what people do for work. Money buys things like homes, clothes, and cars – more money buys bigger homes and more clothes and more expensive cars.

I read today about a guy who went and lived in a cave and decided he would not do anything that had anything to do with money – now that’s roughing it.

But how you earn your money and how much you decide you need to be happy are areas of life where a lot of people get twisted up in other people’s direction and example.

“Intentional living means what you do
is one with what you are.
Clarity of purpose, an open heart,
and a lively mind gives us the power
to direct our destinies.
To live by choice and not by chance,
this is what it is to live an intentional life.”

Stuart Avery Gold

I know this morning there was no doubt in my mind that my life is moving in the direction it should be. Again, doors are opening, people are walking in – simultaneously – doors are closing, people are walking out. This is no coincidence. No coincidence at all.

My meditation this morning:

Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching translated by Stephen Mitchell
#20

Stop thinking, and end your problems.
What difference between yes and no?
What difference between success and failure?
Must you value what others value,
avoid what others avoid?
How ridiculous!

Other people are excited,
as though they were at a parade.
I alone don’t care,
I alone am expressionless,
like an infant before it can smile.

Other people have what they need;
I alone possess nothing.
I alone drift about,
like someone without a home.
I am like an idiot, my mind is so empty.

Other people are bright;
I alone am dark.
Other people are sharper;
I alone am dull.
Other people have a purpose;
I alone don’t know.
I drift like a wave on the ocean,
I blow as aimless as the wind.

I am different from ordinary people.
I drink from the Great Mother’s breasts.