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For me, God is not our father who art in heaven, no more than a hoary bearded dude on a stone throne, or a guy on a cross. God is Everywhere and Everything and Everyone All Mixed Up Together. Got it? Okay, so tell me how you are an atheist – not believing in God – not believing in yourself and all that is swirling around you? Truly puzzling.

Now take today. I had a direct talk with God – the Universe – my Ancestors – call it whatever you want but if I make up some other name other than God it sounds ridiculous – so let’s just say it loud and say it proud – I talked to God today and guess what happened – something happened. It was a direct response to my question.

Then as Tin was going to bed, I got a call to go look at a house that was just listed and I jumped in the car with him in his PJs and me quasi dressed and we looked at it from the outside, we made an offer, and we waited, and it was turned down. Not a flinch. When it’s meant to be, it will be. Nothing is needed. Nothing is wanted.

Today, I am grateful.

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

— e.e. cummings

1. No shaving
2. No waxing
3. No haircuts
4. No need to color your grey
5. No bad hair days
6. No errant black hairs to pluck
7. No eyebrows to pluck
8. No mascara to take off at night
9. No need to find ways to stand out in a crowd
10. No reason to not be yourself.

“It’s very hard to stop doing things you’re used to doing. You almost have to dismantle yourself and scatter it all around and then put a blindfold on and put it back together so that you avoid old habits.”

Tom Waits

So I’ve been enjoying myself lately and it shows. With a dead thyroid every pound becomes a mega pound. So I decided to take a four day break from now until Jazz Fest to eat raw and detox. Today is day #2 and I feel like an ax murderer.

I went to the Green Market and bought tons of kale and berries and lettuce and all things that are raw and raw and rawer. And I made this fabulous raw kale salad:

And I bought lots of other things for green smoothies. Now that it’s getting warmer, bananas ripen in a second, so we can freeze and have them as a ready source for the yummy green smoothies that will now become a breakfast staple around here.

I’m a little behind everyone in New Orleans who just went through 40 days of lent, which for most means no alcohol or no something – like bread or chocolate. So stay away from me while I get myself aligned to a more health conscious state of being – less wine, more exercise, and lots of green stuff.

Plus an ax.

I was ensconced with my computer all morning and by noon was ready to bolt, so I did. I walked towards the bayou and right at the banks was a great blue heron taking flight across the water. It was a show stopper. I just said to myself, this is where my heart belongs – this bird just told me.

Then I strolled the banks of the bayou and headed down to see friends. He’s been through hell and back, on a path of destruction that was taking down his relationship, his job, and even his front steps. But he’s on the mend. And we talked about what that felt like.

Good. Follow your heart and there you’ll find happiness. I appropriated that fortune for myself.

God is speaking to me through my horoscopes on Yahoo – this is really interesting:

April 22, 2013
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Growth is a good thing, but you should take a break from pushing yourself right now. Today will not be best spent challenging yourself or starting any difficult (if revelatory) conversations. Settle in to a routine right now, and find comfort in doing the same things in familiar patterns. There is something to be said for predictability … plus, if things never got boring, shaking them up again would not feel nearly as wonderful. Let the dust settle on your newly renovated life.

Tin has to bring a poem in his pocket to school this week and so I picked this one for him:

Mother to Son
BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

[photo by Pableaux Johnson]

A friend came by today to walk with me over to the Earth Day celebration down on the bayou. A friend I rarely see but think of often. We moseyed around and looked at all the booths, trying on funky hats, getting an ice cold Bud Light and Woody’s fish tacos and then sitting on the cool grass by the bayou and enjoying the perfect spring weather.

It’s interesting to me how easy it is to connect with some people even while they are not in your daily life – moments sitting on the grass together talking about this and that seemed eternal, no beginnings, no ends, lots of in-betweens already filled in by the miles each of you have traversed.

It’s these compact friends – ones that don’t require a lot of time and space – who bring a lot of warmth and connection into my life that makes me grateful today.

* * * *

On my way home from meditation, I greeted a man coming out of his front door. I said, “Hi there, beautiful day.” And he responded, “Yes it is cause I’m blessed by the best.”

After meditation this morning at Midcity Zen Center, we continued with the study of Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. We read a section on bowing and how through bowing you are stripping away any sense of self-centeredness you possess. I said that I had been a little distracted by all the bowing when I had gone to the one and only service there. Having been brought up Jewish and having so many rituals that accompanied that religion, entering into another set of rituals turns me off because I don’t want to add onto what I already have, but rather shed more.

I said and I feel that it’s hard to be Jewish in the modern world. Here I am a woman who left my religion behind when a minyan did not include me as the tenth person (as if I am not a person because I am not a man) [a minyan is ten men which is needed to recite the Kaddish, prayer for the dead, aloud]. I walked out on Judaism and only came back to it to fast and meditate on Yom Kippur, to clean my house and eat matzo on Passover and contemplate what it means to be a slave, to light the menorah for Hanukkah and to put my mezuzahs up on my doorways. That’s what my modern Jewry consists of.

What else could it consist of – when I hear someone say “God the Father” I cringe because the divine is greater than the image of a hoary bearded man on a throne of stone. God is, someone said today, everything that is all wrapped up together.

If Rudolph Steiner spoke about our education system stuck in the Greco-Roman time warp, then what of Judaism that has dietary laws that don’t form the basis of modern thinking except for humanistic practice, and the baloney of your mother having to be Jewish, which is nonsense, as Judaism is a religion people – not an ethnicity – for god’s sake.

So I can’t grasp what being a modern Jew would be like because having been raised Orthodox and having seen the Conservative movement and then the Reform movement offer so little in terms of change, only a shedding of practices and thinking such as, “Well at the Reform synagogue we don’t define whether there is heaven or not” – where is the shape shifting needed for Judaism to seamlessly exist in the modern world? – I don’t know how it should or could evolve, I just feel I have evolved passed it.

And in looking at my own spirituality, I probably have more in common with the Hari Krishna’s down the street who chant God is Love then I do with most other practices.

I went not once, but four times to the Fortier Park Festival yesterday. It’s a block from my home in a triangle park that Bob McGuire (aka the Mayor of the neighborhood) brought back from the depression of the 2005 Federal Storm by using $2000 his company donated — he gave $500 to his son’s school and took the $1,500 and turned it into $15,000 by throwing the first annual Fortier Park Festival that now is so strong Allen Toussaint and Walter “Wolfman” Washington play the fest as if it were the Superdome.

I went to the Festival with Tin first, but he’s been feeling peaked and so the music was “too loud” and the crowd was “too much” and he had a frown and grunt for everyone who greeted him with “My how you have grown.” Oh, to be 4 and say it like it is: “Go away!”

Tatjana came to pick him up and so I went back to the Fest alone and ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen in a while and I have been wanting to address a situation that he and I were witness to with another friend – let’s just call it a very racist moment. I was finally able to have my say on what happened that afternoon, which I seemed more bothered by than him, but we both at least had the same reaction. Circle closed.

I then met someone looking for a lot to develop – land that is – black gold – and since that is the topic of every conversation I seem to be having we bonded instantly on real estate matters, but it was later walking towards the bayou to show him the LaLa when I saw the prayer flags someone recently put up on the Magnolia Bridge and I remembered that my prayer flags are on their way to go up in anticipation of the Dalai Lama coming in May, that I saw behind the facade of a man wanting to succeed in life and saw the man in the throes of finding life.

Dalai Lama posted this after the Boston Tragedy:
All living beings have experience of pleasure and pain, and we are among them. What makes human beings different is that we have a powerful intelligence and a much greater ability to achieve happiness and avoid suffering. Real happiness and friendship come not from money or even knowledge, but from warm-heartedness. Once we recognise this we will be more inclined to cultivate it.

My new friend shared his photo from Nepal, with the prayer flags strewn across the mountaintops with the prayers carried in the wind. We are not here on earth to make more money, we’re here to connect to the divine in all beings. Mary Oliver’s question came to my mind and kept resurfacing -“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

Later, coming home yet again from the Fortier Festival, a neighbor walked me home and at some point, with the music from the festival still in the background, he stopped and said, “Don’t we live in the greatest place in the world?” Yes, I said. Yes, we do. Then he told me the story of how he had saved for two years to go to Belize with his late wife and she wanted to come home after a week to see her daughter play baseball and he refused to leave. So he remained behind, with $50 to get home on, and someone suggested he take the $5 ferry instead of the more costly flight and so he did; he showed up at two in the morning, and the boat was delayed, by the time it set sail at five in the morning, he found himself on the deck surrounded by Mayan Indians, all of them sound asleep. He turned over and woke to the sun bursting forth from the water with such magnificence that he was struck by the enormity of it and of his life. He said to me, “$5.”

This morning, on my way to meditate, I passed all the prayer flags in people’s yards and I felt my friend was right, we live in the greatest place in the world and our prayers are flying in the wind, and we are breath by breath connecting soul to soul with others like ourselves who are transitioning from knuckle dragging (as my friend described the racism we had both witnessed) to enlightenment.

The Summer Day

Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?