Dangermond.org

These photos were taken within seconds of each other:

The Dalai Lama is here in New Orleans – what better timing – after 19 people were shot at a second line parade on Mother’s Day. Our prayer flags have been flapping in the wind for weeks now and there is a buzz in the air, a hope that his presence here will bring healing.

A financial journalist said when the Dalai Lama visits good tidings follow in terms of the marketplace. We need more than currency – we need an awakening. The other day on someone else’s Facebook post a man said that he thinks heterosexuals are superior to homosexuals and I did not ignite, I just called it what it is – heterosexism. There’s a word for that kind of knuckle dragging thinking.

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking – the monks are creating a mandala with beautifully dyed sand that they will dump bit by bit into the Mississippi river when they are done. Prayer flags are up all over the city – the cloths bear prayers of peace, loving-kindness and forgiveness and when the wind blows, the prayers are carried on the wind. Most people leave their prayer flags up until there’s nothing left of them.

There’s so much excitement in that same wind. My new house is exciting me. The Dalai Lama’s visit is exciting me. My work on racism is exciting me (and depressing me too – depending on the moment). Life is exciting me.

Today I ran into the same person four times and he said he should play the lotto. The Dalai Lama brings healing and good fortune where he visits.

Break open the special box of fairy dust – we are ready for magic to happen.

I was in the park on Monday and a woman approached me because she had had cancer and thought I had too. She showed me her photos of herself bald and I thought to myself while she was scrolling through her iPhone photos that she looked a lot better bald.

Today, I woke at 5am and meditated and then had my coffee before reading through a number of emails that were left open to follow up on. I began the outline of a House to do list, a Work to do list, a Project to do list, and then I went to Pilates. I’ve signed up for a six-week refresher course and have realized that three years away from it, my core has gone soft as a jellyfish.

The Tuesday green market is nearby, so I stopped for mustard greens, kale, strawberries, and fish and ran into a friend which turned into a coffee. This woman has always been my equal – she’s been married as many times and been a hard driving ambitious career crazed woman but recently she stopped – everything. She’s become a stay at home mom and her relationship with her husband of many years has entered a hallowed honeymoon state. She’s enjoying her kids, planning trips with her husband. She looks rested and calm. We talked about kid stuff and schools, and I left there feeling remarkably good.

Then I came home and spoke to a source who I haven’t spoken with in a while but since he’s changed positions he is back on my radar and we reconnected on all of the developments that have changed media for good. I made myself a green shake. I’m trying to watch my calories and lose this middle puff inner tube that has appeared during my grapple with my moribund thyroid.

Again, in the kitchen, watching my clothes hanging on the line, I came back to this feeling of being relatively calm. The weather was lovely outside, warm with a slight chill still in the air – spring – I’m excited about my new house and, let me repeat, relatively happy and calm.

I picked up Tin and we went to the toy store to spend his tooth fairy money on a train. I loved watching him skip in and try to find what aisle had the trains. Then later at music, he jumped in my lap and said, “Mommy, I love you.”

I’m not sure how we got here but I’d like to stay and sit with this place for a while.

This morning Tin’s tooth fell out and tonight the tooth fairy is coming – all of this is happening at the Blue House (read: not my house). I’m not going to boo hoo but I’m just going to say this – it sucks. You wait 50 years for a child and have to split your time and it just sucks. Just sayin.

No one goes into a relationship thinking it won’t last and no one begins to parent a child with someone thinking they will split up and there are millions of children raised in divorced families and they are well adjusted. Tin has had his moments and he often feels conflicted about where he wants succor – the Red House or the Blue House – but I have to say, for me, the parent, it’s weird to say goodnight to your child and watch him walk away knowing the tooth fairy is coming tonight while he sleeps.

Very weird.

The Dalai Lama on tour now in the United States … “we are the same human being, the way we are born, the way we die. We all want the same things – happy life, peaceful life.

Bill Clinton @ Howard commencement … “the genome study shows we are 99 1/2 the same.”

On the ride home from Donaldsonville yesterday afternoon, I told my friend when I was in the last years of my corporate job I would go to yoga and dedicate my practice to the CEO because I felt like he was lost.

She was aghast, “How could you? Why would you?”

I did it because when he came into my life, I had begun to hate him, and that hate had begun to poison me, and I wanted to exorcise the hatred and simply ignoring him in my life wasn’t going to do that, so I had to see how I was connected to him, and how he was a human being on a different journey, at a different level, in a different time, and that he was utterly lost and to shut him out would keep him that way, but to send him love and positivity might actually help him be found. And in the end isn’t that what I wanted – for him to find his humanity so that he could connect with mine?

Mother’s Day – it started with Tin in my lap on the toilet while I swayed back and forth. He had fallen and hit his tooth that is about to come out, the one he fell on more than a year ago when he fell on the bricks in front of the LaLa. The one the dentist said he would lose and has hung onto this long. Now it is coming out. Every time I went to get up, he would say, “Mommy, keep holding me, keep swaying your legs” and so we sat there rocking in the bathroom for twenty minutes and I wondered after a few minutes why on Mother’s Day, I’d want to be doing anything else than holding my baby on my lap, swaying and soothing him.

We went to Metairie and bought an electric dryer and left it there because the family had two kids and wasn’t leaving for two weeks and I didn’t need it for two weeks. We went to pick up our friends to head to Donaldsonville to the African American Museum. We spent the day there and listened to the vision of a woman who has been on a 19 year quest to change the status quo – she has done so much, and yet she has her work cut out for her.

We come home to sadness. New Orleans bleeding red, BIG RED, and no end in sight. I read the Facebook posts how everyone is disassociating themselves from what happened – as if they aren’t part of it; unmitigated sadness.

Before we got out of the truck, Tin said, “I love you Mommy” – out of the blue. It just came and was hanging there in the truck between both of us and I turned and said, “Thank you. That made my Mother’s Day.” I then watched as he transitioned to go to Tatjana’s house – the son I waited 50 years for, I grabbed him one more time and told him he had made me a mother. Him, and him alone. I wanted to cry but I have to keep these transitions neutral.

Tonight, with 19 people shot in a Mother’s Day second line, I wonder what to do – how to be a parent, how to deal with my separation anxiety when he’s not spending the night under my roof, how to live this life that holds me in its arms and sways me back and forth and then let’s me go.

Last night, my friend’s daughter spent the night and about 3am I had to get up and turn off her light and Tin’s – my friend says that there is no difference between my 4 year old and her almost 14 year old – and she’s right. They both switch from moody to joyous in half blinks of the eye. And as we all got ready to head out to Zumba (it was 8:45 am) my hater neighbor began beating on the walls. We all just looked at the wall as if it was possessed.

Tin asked me why she was doing that and I said because she’s a witch. He asked, “A good witch or a bad witch?” And I said, a plain old witch. Then she started hammering up and down the wall from the front of the house to the back of the house – I mean this was witch gone wild kind of stuff.

A friend of mine is getting ready to move out of her tiny apartment and suddenly it feels so cramped. I feel the same, cramped and tired of living next to a hater. Life is too short to be crazy.

Right now the Formosa termites are swarming outside and everyone is flipping their light switches off. But my predator neighbor keeps chewing on the wood lights on or off.

There’s really got to be a better way.

Thursday – it’s Frank Ocean wannabe day, which translates into Tin dictating what music we are listening to and having me repeat the song ad infinitum. His mannerism, his focus, are all too old school for his tender age of four.

Friday – it’s Sippin in Seersucker, a New Orleans tradition, but my first time to attend plus raining and cold outside. How does one dress for the occasion? Pulchritude in Seersucker (and a sweater).

Saturday – it’s Doodle Bug playdate time and even though we missed all the potential events that were on our calendar (India Day at the NOMA, Morris Jeff’s Fiesta Primavera, Sculpture Garden, Train Exhibit), we passed ourselves a good time.

When I was young people would tell me I looked like Stevie Nicks – and I think it was more because of my big hair than that we actually looked alike.

We were of the same era – big hair:

Stevie

Rachel

Then right after Jazz Fest a friend sent me this email (while Tin and I were knee deep in mud watching Frank Ocean, Stevie Nicks was performing across the Fairgrounds with Fleetwood Mac):

Rachel, I hope all is well with you.
I hope you aren’t offended about what I am going to say, but I was at the Jazz Fest and saw Fleetwood Mac. Every time Stevie Nicks was shown on the big screen I thought of your mother. I think she looked just like your mother. I think she even sounded like her. Well, at least to me.

Gone are the days when big hair made me, but not the memories of my Stevie look alike days.

So I guess while I’m whining about cashing out my 401K to buy my house – #firstorsecondworldproblem – these two things scrolled across my screen:

1) The Dow Jones industrial average hit a new milestone Tuesday, closing above the 15,000 mark for the first time in its 117-year history.

2) MP (Facebook)
3 hours ago near New Orleans
Wow. in the past five years, I’ve paid out nearly $150,000 to the bank for my mortgage and only $15,000 of that has gone to the principal balance. Makes me feel really good to give the bank $135,000 for doing essentially nothing but updating my monthly statements. I fully realize that “that’s just how a mortgage works”, but if the Senate and House weren’t full of former and future bankers who go to work on the boards of these banks when they are done “serving the people” the laws would be very different. Yeah, it’s Capitalism and everyone needs to make a buck, but when only 10% of what I’m paying is going to actually paying off a loan, that seems a bit extreme.

Read: Bucking the trend, I have made the right decision at the right time.

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Today, I went to Canal Street Bistro to meet a friend for lunch who I see once a year. We had just sat down, and she said, “So how are you handling being bald?” And a very, very cute waiter (not ours) with long dreadlocks came over to the table and said to me, “You are beautiful.”

I said, “Uh, like that!”

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Rejoice Rejoice Rejoice
And keep that attitude of gratitude!