I had lunch with a friend today and she told me something that was going on in her life that brought me to tears. I told her something that had been going on in my life that brought her to tears.
We just looked at each other across the table, both of us crying, both of us with our hand over our heart.
She and I have been meeting up, seeing each other here and there, talking this and that, while our kids have been playing together, and neither one of us knew that inside we had come face to face with the worst that could happen.
I don’t know how people hold themselves together in the face of adversity, but life has sure been teaching me how for a while now – how to hold myself together when the world is falling apart.
Could I get my A+ and diploma now, and finally graduate from this helluva school of Hard Knocks? The lesson plan for this decade has been Resilience. That is Resilience 101, 102 and 202, 302, and upwards to 1002. I have become an expert in how to pick up the pieces and go on.
When I was in San Miguel de Allende I went to see The Treasures of the Sierra Madre – at the end, Walter Huston laughs at their bad luck and Tim Holt looks at him in disbelief and says:
You know, the worst ain’t so bad when it finally happens. Not half as bad as you figure it will be before it’s happened. I’m no worse off than I was . . . .
Remember that we are all living quiet lives of desperation as Hemingway said many years ago. So let’s all try to practice random acts of kindness to lift up all these weary souls and walking wounded who are around us.
I’m hobbling through life right now and on my way to get a hip xray. What? That’s right, this is the second injury that I’ve sustained just trying to work out and be in shape, so I want to make sure there is nothing wrong with the structure – the bones – of this operation.
So many of my friends who are over 50 talk about the injuries and long recovery times, and yet none of us want to accept what is happening to our bodies. I struggle between settling into long walks and going for fast runs. Can I do it is my perpetual question. I still believe I’m spry and flexible and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and yet my body keeps failing to live up to that expectation.
I’m trying to come here – to be here – where this place is at 56 years of age. I was walking Stella this morning – hobbling to the neutral ground to head to the bayou – and I saw a young mother with her young son asleep in her arms as she carried him into the 24-hour nursery. I whispered thanks to the wind that I never had to drop my sleeping son off at a nursery. He had a magical nanny and he has a mother who works from home. This was a gift to me and to my child.
As I walked around the bayou, I thought of a trip I almost was going on. A friend and I have talked about heading towards Chicago for her to see her mother and me to visit my dear Flower and the organization of the trip fell apart. Just as well because I am overdue to go to see my family in Washington Parish. I crave the country and sitting in my aunt’s porch swing and seeing Tin run around with all his cousins. I need to visit my mother’s grave too because word has it that a strange man came and took the last flowers I placed there for Mother’s Day and replaced them with sunflowers. Which is odd, because i had put sunflowers.
My mind is cluttered right now and my body is reacting. Or even worse, the world is a hot mess, the city is a danger zone, my body is a hair trigger away from imploding, and it makes me crazy. The other night, I sat in my bathtub – with epsom salt – trying to heat up the hurt on my right side that has dogged me since I injured it while running the Crescent park three weeks ago. I was also trying to loosen the iron band that had me in a vice grip all the way up to my neck from being poisoned. A friend had given me a bowl of soup but neglected to say it had flour in it and I was wretchedly ill.
I started crying and couldn’t stop. I was crying because I was so mad about who I had become – a person allergic to food, the mother of a youngster, with all my energy zapped, a woman who felt as if my sexy and mojo were all gone and here I was starting all over again in a bath of loneliness and salt water tears. I ran from the tub and threw up several times and then dragged my sorry ass to bed. Disgusted with the cards I had been dealt.
A friend sent me a photograph of her gratitude jar the next morning.
I haven’t put one single note in mine in the past several months. So I thought about what I’m grateful for – and I started with hot water. How many people in the world do not have hot water? A woman my grandmother’s age when asked what she was thankful for in her life said indoor plumbing. My grandmother didn’t have indoor plumbing when I was a kid. When I asked my grandmother and my mother what they were grateful for they both said without any hesitation their children. And I am forever grateful for my child.
As I took each painful step walking Stella the next two mornings, I saw an ancient and wrinkled man walk out of the bank with a walking stick. I remembered that I would recover from this injury. That I would get back in shape. And I thought how fiscal health never matched physical health – or mental and emotional and spiritual wellbeing.
Like my father was want to say when I was growing up, it’s always the darkest right before the dawn and sure enough when I woke the next morning, I was a different person and able to reclaim happiness and most importantly, gratefulness. The world lately has been a hot mess and it can’t but seep into our pores and try to undo us. We need to remember that we are capable of great regeneration.
I listened to Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot talk about the age from 50 to 75 years old with Bill Moyers and she said there are two paths open – stagnation or generativity, which in her definition meant creating to give to the world. The last six of my fifty years have been the most creative and generative – fiscally and otherwise. I am going to celebrate that – my Third Chapter as Lightfoot calls it – and I’m going to be thankful for the mornings, which always prove smarter than the nights.
And once these xrays are over with, and the blood work finished, I’m going to take that much needed walk in the woods to claim my own regeneration.
I returned from San Miguel de Allende under its spell. I’m not the only one, everyone who goes there, returns, and some pack their bags and move there immediately. A woman I met told me it is because it sits on a rock made of quartz and so it has incredibly healing qualities. That said, I did meet a lot of speculative healing types there. But I’d say San Miguel is one of those places like New Orleans, where people can express the craziness of what is inside them without fear or repercussions.
My trip was seen through divided eyes, by looking at San Miguel through the eyes of ex-pats, wealthy ones mostly, who have fallen in love with the city and have made a second or permanent home there. This is where I was able to see first-hand the incredible craftsmanship of the Mexican laborers – stonework, tiles, incredible mantles, gargoyles, terrazo and terrace, buildings that fit together from magical architecture.
My friend has built a house there and you can see by these few photos below that inside and outside is not your everyday. Each roof terrace has a spectacular garden filled with succulents and bougainvillea so bright it dazzles your eyes. I told one of the people I met that each day they went to the roof they needed to give thanks to all of their neighbors who provided them with an incomparable view because of the well tended potted plants and flowers.
The colors of Mexico are vibrant and best observed under the bright white light of a Mexican city like San Miguel de Allende. Every flower blooms extra bright, every cloth is more colorful than any you have seen before. It’s a riot of color that explodes in every nook and cranny of this city, up and down, and all around.
There is a large hotel resort in the middle of Centro called Rosewood and for as little as $30 (all inclusive) you use the pools and jacuzzi, order poolside service of drinks and food and basically luxuriate galore in a manmade but so beautifully landscaped place that you never want to leave.
Each view is more incredible than the next because San Miguel is hilly and surrounded by a mountain range, Los Picachos, where on top of one high peak sits a Catholic Church with the largest statue of Christ (larger than the one in Rio) imaginable. Most every day I would look out from the terrace of the house we were renting and see a hot air balloon traversing the blue sky.
But it was the Mexicans that I fell in love with the most, Salvador the driver who picked me up from Leon for an hour and a half drive to San Miguel. He talked to me about his beloved casahuates that bloom white flowers on the branches after they have dropped their leaves. As we drove through desert hills with vernal pools of brilliant yellow wildflowers and fields of hot pink cosmos, he explained the many varieties of cacti; the nopales cactus and the tuna (the berry) that is sometimes so sweet and juicy and other varieties are sour and used in picantes. He also told me more than I wanted to hear about the corruption in politics including but not limited to the 42 college students who were murdered by a mayor who was upset that they had protested – this info was only assuaged by the average Mexican’s incredible joy of life.
Then there was Amalia, who said the most profound thing to me. I was asking her about racism and she said there was not much in San Miguel. I said maybe it’s because there are so few Blacks here and she agreed. She said that generally if a Black person was around, people looked because they were not used to seeing Blacks, but then she acknowledged that “sometimes you injure a person with only your eyes.” Indeed.
When it was sadly time to head home, Salvador and I stopped on the way to the airport, at this strip of food stands in La Sauceda and had an incredible meal. So good, I want to fly back right now for lunch. Handmade corn tortillas and gorditas with pots filled with menudo, chicken in mole, potatoes, barbacoa, pinto beans, and a vat of warm corn juice to drink. Oh my – this was one of my favorites – guess how much lunch for two was? That’s right – $3.50.
If you are going to San Miguel, beware that you might not come back. Keep in mind, mañana doesn’t mean tomorrow, it just means not right now.
I vacillate between the dark and the light – the little dark fury that sits on my shoulder says some pretty nasty stuff like you are not accomplishing anything right now Rachel, you keep getting injured and it sabotages your physical routine Rachel, you’re never going to (fill in the blank) Rachel. The light airy fairy flutters around and makes me feel like I’m on Cloud 9 and overflowing with gratitude for all the bounty that is my life. These two need to meet and have sex.
Just sayin.
A friend of mine built a beautiful house in San Miguel de Allende and invited me to come visit him. I made these plans in early January, when there was the promise of work, not the dismal reality of a paycheck to paycheck livelihood that has punctuated 2015. Food on the table, clothes on our back, gas in the car – I tell myself we are not poor, we are grateful. But that ditty wears thin.
So I’m out of here – what can I say? I’m going to visit my friend in Mexico and soak up the sunlight of another place. I’m fortunate. Yesterday in a board meeting, one of the members was late because her friend, a woman of 56 years, dropped dead all of a sudden, shocking her loved ones. See, I’m 56, I’m still living, and if I’m still living, then I’m still wistful about the promise of tomorrow and grateful for the reality of today.
It makes no difference that I dreamed the other night I was in a valley and up high on the ridge were not one but many people pointing rifles at me intending to kill me. I ran and ran and I wound up in an old deserted office with file cabinets and boxes, and I was on top of the tallest file cabinet when I saw through a dusty window one of the guys about to enter, beside him was my trusty dog, Arlene the Bean. In that instant of terror, I was stunned to see my dog who I’ve missed for so long and a smile automatically came to my lips, then I realized the guy was intending to kill me so I jumped in the closet – there was plenty of time it seemed to get snug back into the clothes when suddenly the man entered the office and was standing in front of the closet and he opened the door and pointed his rifle.
I woke up.
The dream was coded, there is something I have not brought to light, something that needs to be said. Something that needs to be aired in the breaking light of day and the dark cloudless night, and perhaps I need to open the window and throw this out to the universe – I do miss having a partner, having lived most of my life with someone to love. Yes, single life is all easy and doable, but I miss nights of curling up on the sofa and watching a movie with a lover, having sex in the grogginess of the morning before either of us is quite awake, and even text messages that are endearing or sexy or both, and worth saving. The world is too much with us, and I would like to have someone to share my bounty with – that’s all I need to say.
Perhaps this longing was spurred on by a note my neighbor left in my mailbox two days ago that asked me to call him, just to talk, that he is “ready” – he is also married, sadly. I saw him today. I looked him in the eye. Sometimes loneliness is harder when you are with someone rather than by yourself.
I feel for him, but I’m ready for love, not lust or wanderlust.
Today is the 14th anniversary of 9/11, another tragedy revisited and recalled in horror on the heels of the tenth anniversary of the 2005 Federal Flood.
Again, the talk is of resilience.
How appropriate that these large scale tragedies dovetail into Rosh Hashanah, which begins this Sunday evening, and I will spend it breaking bread with new friends. These friends have helped introduced me to a concept that I would have never imagined a few years ago – Jewish renewal. I first read about it in Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus, and I’m happy to report that he will be in our little group. It is the Jewish New year, 5776, and I would like to wish everyone L’Shana Tovah and ask that May You Be Inscribed in the Book of Life — as it is believed God opens the big book and makes all of the executive decisions for what will go down in the new year.
Rosh Hashana is … also the birthday of creation. It is a tradition that recognizes human frailty, freedom of choice and responsibility. A tradition that calls on each of us to re-create ourselves anew; to come closer to living in accord with our ideals and highest values. For the religious it is a chance to walk the path of God’s will, for the secular it is a chance to tune up their super-ego.
Jewish Renewal has no cogent definition especially for non-Jews, but suffice to say this Jewish girl who was raised Orthodox and who became a wandering Jew when my synagogue would not count me as the ten men needed to have a minyan to say the Kaddish (prayer for the dead) out loud for my father found renewal in its concept. The concept is that gone from the practice of Judaism today is the spiritual, the song and dance, the mystical and the magical and that was precisely what was missing – for me anyway.
I take Jewish renewal to mean going back to my foundation of what God and life is, and finding the wisdom that translates it all into modern knowledge. The God within us, the awe of life, and the magical breath, the in and out of breathing until you find a meditative or transformational state of mind. It means celebrating a Jew’s view of tzedekah – which is not simply charity but instead tzedakah is the root of life. When you give to others, you raise the sparks from their broken state. And you elevate your own soul. This is not simply giving, it’s about joining.
So here, days before the New Year, and days before the ten days of awe until we get to the fast on Yom Kippur, I will leave you with the most important part about this time of year. It’s a time to start again because God did not give Adam and Eve the key to how to begin in the Garden of Eden, he gave them the key to how to begin again. And that is truly what resilience is all about.
L’Shana Tova; May you be inscribed in the Book of Light.
Da Capo
Take the used-up heart like a pebble
and throw it far out.
Soon there is nothing left.
Soon the last ripple exhausts itself
in the weeds.
Returning home, slice carrots, onions, celery.
Glaze them in oil before adding
the lentils, water, and herbs.
Then the roasted chestnuts, a little pepper, the salt.
Finish with goat cheese and parsley. Eat.
You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted.
Begin again the story of your life.
My new life arrived a moment ago, a day ago, last week, sometime in this year, perhaps it was last summer during a New Orleans rainstorm – I don’t quite remember the exact moment, but it’s here.
Last night, I went to a soiree – let’s call it that, although it was simply a gathering of writers, book store owners, journalists, and yes, Chris Rose. Ex-Times Picayuners. It was held in this hidden world atop a parking garage off St. Charles Avenue. You rode up the rickety elevator, pushed back the metal gate, and stepped onto marble floors and into a stage setting for a life I’ve imagined. Large glass door archways gave way to a stormy sky and the side terraces that were so large, my whole house would fit into one side, and then there were rooms and rooms of art, and hidden gardens and a photography studio, Butler’s pantry and a smoking and media room complete with three large screens. Red sheer silk covered sofas and chairs. An enormous ceramic wood stove oven stood majestically in an alcove.
Where was I?
I turned and spoke to the woman by my side who turns out to be nearly two decades older and yet she was ravishingly beautiful. During the course of our conversation, I asked her if she was seeing anybody because she said she was no longer with her sons’ father, she said “no, but I do have a few young lovers.”
I didn’t want to step out of this dream.
There was a cat with copper-colored fur and exaggerated gold eyes that occasionally showed up for an ankle rub down and the entire house smelled like Popeye’s fried chicken, which was on the menu. But the clincher was this – I had been imagining this bathroom that I had in a hotel I stayed at in Bali – one that I have always hoped to recreate – and then I walked into the bathroom of the master suite and there was my tub with the plate glass window looking onto a dreamy garden of statue and leaf.
Uncanny, how this seems to happen so often in this new life, where images manifest from my imagination and people appear larger than life and encounters are more a puzzle piece from my own mystery than not. It’s as if Neil deGrasse Tyson were my spirit guide here in this multiverse.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
An informed opinion is never based on somebody else’s opinion, lest you empower others to do your thinking for you.
See, I have become, as the adages say, more of who I am and in that transformation, the interstitial veil that separates me from magic has grown thinner. I do see myself standing in a whirling planet able to hold myself stiller than inert matter, and yet I feel that tendrils and roots are growing out of me and connecting me with hidden dimensions. And yet, sometimes I spin.
I left this gathering, and drove to my friend’s to sit on her porch and talk into the wee hours of the night. We wrestled with past and present relationships. Relationships it seems have been defined for us – our relationship to our current state, who we love, even the numbers of people we should be loving at any one time – and yet, it is discordant with our reality – these edicts and bylaws – the parts are greater than the sum as if the math doesn’t work anymore so now there are affinity groups instead of reality loops.
To everything there is a Come to Jesus, and this now, this moment I’m in is a time of being because I’ve arrived fully into this particular chapter of the story of my life. My feet have even grown half a shoe size as if I needed physical evidence. It’s as if I have burned myself in effigy. I’m birthing one of the many books I will write in my lifetime. I have the privilege of experiencing life through the eyes of a six year old child. I feel no tug of war between the the polarities of gravity and weightlessness – I welcome both even when they follow each other in rapid succession – the rush is exhilarating. Life Don’t Frighten Me At All.
There is a popular business dictum that says it takes ten years to become an expert in any field. So here we are 10 years after the 2005 Federal Flood and it’s a full moon.
I know only this as I sit in my garden having my morning tea.
I am a change expert.
Steeped in the knowledge of uncertainty.
A practitioner of faith walks.
A teacher of love.
I follow no plan, only my spirit.
Ten years ago, after the collective trauma of a marriage falling apart with love slipping through my heart like barbed wire, loss of child (read: too many to count), not to mention loss of place after a return to the home that haunts me only to watch it sink under a toxic stew, and then a slow progression into madness,
I picked myself up.
Even though I had built my marriage over much compromise, love, joy, and years, I turned and dove in to the house construction of the remodel designed by my then architect-husband and the nightly house terrors to make the LaLa a home on the bayou — my sweet dream finally seeing the dawn.
Eight years of white knuckling and kit glove maintenance on a structure that had way too much emotional and spiritual baggage, I sold it. It no longer served me. Yet, I had built that too.
I worked for nearly 18 years until my dream job sucked, and bosses sucked, and I sucked, and I felt the same warmth that comes over a person when they have to pee so bad and they’ve been holding that pee for so long in a jostling car (cruising down a New Orleans potholed street) and then you finally pee and there is this pain and warmth and release much the same as when I was finally let go from the suck ass job where they suck and I sucked and it had sucked the life out of me and I had been sucking on its teat for way too long because I couldn’t walk away since I had built that too.
I built myself up.
I met my son who I waited half a century, a whole lifetime, to meet, to be his mom and guess what? On Tin’s entrance into 1st grade this year, six years later and also the 10th anniversary of the 2005 Federal Flood, his teacher asked me to describe my son, and here’s what I said:
Tin is creative, independent, energetic with incredible spatial and musical talent. He is stubborn and perceptive. He is able to grasp large concepts such as spirituality, relationships, society, and the duality of human nature. He is willful and loving.
Her response? “Yes, I can tell he is a deep thinker.”
I have found mothering at 50 to be sort of like a spoonful of sugar and then vinegar, you are gagging sometimes and other times spitting and hacking or backwashing then smacking your lips with the sweetness oozing all over. The honest truth is I never say I wish I hadn’t of … . I’m raising a Black son in New Orleans where Black boys are churned under a chronic mix at an alarming rate and yet, I do not know where else to raise Tin but in this Chocolate City, where I have met some of the most beautiful souls.
Every day I keep my heart open.
I lost my hair, what had defined my beauty because I had so damn much hair and it was thick and long and gorgeous and I had started coloring it red in my thirties and it suited me and it was a flame that announced the type of woman you were dealing with right off the bat. It all fell out. From top to bottom, I became hairless overnight (albeit it did take weeks to completely shed). Then I learned it would never grow back. Never. Ever. No hair = no woman, I imagined. I was different without hair. I would walk by the mirror and look at my reflection at first with anger then with hatred then with utter disgust until slowly, so painfully slow it seemed, though it was only actually six months, I came to see me again.
I got over it.
On this day, 10 years after the day the federal government failed us all, I have a hard time reading about August 29, 2005. Everyone is talking about the city – how is SHE doing?
I’m sorry, but I’m gonna spend this moment on self reflection. How am I doing? I am not sure if I love New Orleans as much as I did on August 30 or September 4 or October 10, 2005 or in 2006, 2007 and possibly 2010 at our five year celebration on the bayou, when we were living, as my friend said, “in the most interesting place in the world.” When my friend Dina was living right there beside me.
People here are dying from cancer, from guns, from despair.
I’ve lost so many who tied me to this place, my mother, my grandmother, my first love, my friend Dina, and more friends and also dogs. I’m not trying to figure out how New Orleans is doing right now ten years later. New Orleans near and far is haunted by the remains of my ancestors who were on the move for centuries and now my mother’s and my father’s bones are buried under this waterlogged ground. My grandmother and grandfather are buried near here. My friends are buried here. My dogs’ ashes are scattered in this land. My past mistakes and miracles are buried under the layers, how could I walk away with no ashes, no urns, no gold medal of having survived to carry away with me to some land unknown, some place not steeped in my own history?
In one decade, I have spun round and round the spiral of life, revisiting the familiar and the absolutely astonishing, encountering best and worst case scenarios – yet, I have kept my heart open – at times prying it with archaic tools, or lighting a fire deep inside of it, and sometimes just bathing my heart in a wash of warm tears. I tell myself “I love you, Rachel” often, especially when I haven’t heard someone tell it to me out loud.
In the depth of Winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible Summer. ~ Camus
So no, I’m not thinking about New Orleans, the city, on this decade milestone anniversary, I’m thinking about Rachel and I’m commemorating thriving, not just surviving. Each time the whirly gig of the spiral goes into a full tilt boogie, I take a beat and a breath. I have now come to rely on all of my senses to guide me – have I been here before? We enter hurricane season each year on June 1st and not until October do we stop clenching our teeth. The truth is that I have looked at hurricanes from both sides now, from near and far, having experienced them most of my life, from Betsy to Gustav, and the anticipation of the as yet unannounced one.
The 2005 Federal Flood brought a serious question to the minds of every person who had to leave this city – where will we live? Every time I come around the spiral, I have less layers to peel back to find my center of joy. The spiral continues to bring questions, most of these questions are the same but are met under the guise of something new. Have I met this person before? Will this pain change who I am? Does it matter?
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
falls drop by drop upon the heart
until, in our own despair, against our will,
comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
~ Aeschylus
The question of the day at this juncture is not where to live, who to love, how to be but Where might I contribute the most of who I am to the most of who we are?
I have more questions than I had a decade ago, but I am no longer afraid of the answers.
Ten years ago, I had a cataclysmic undoing, part was the neglect of others, and a major part was the federal government. Today, my friend in the midst of a divorce over a margarita confessed, “I was not a good steward of my marriage.”
Ten years later, my family suffered an assault, again the neglect of others, and I indict the government again for willful neglect in its glacial prosecution.
Everyone is writing about Katrina – I don’t know her. I don’t know her at all. Don’t talk to me about Katrina.
I do know this, Fortuna’s wheel spins and many times you land where you least expect. Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down, but don’t get comfortable in either place because one thing we know for sure, everything spins.
