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I left for Spain having lost six pounds the hard way (running, weight lifting, watching what I eat) and managed to gain eight while there. How’s that possible? I now believe it comes down to too much salad. A slim friend in Spain told me that she doesn’t do a lick of exercise, but only controls everything that goes into her mouth. When I told her a typical day’s meal at home in New Orleans, she noted that I was eating too much salad.

I’ve come home after several weeks of basking in the beach life of Andalusia. This was my sixth year in Zahara de los Atunes and it’s nothing short of marvelous to be there and to watch Tin grow, develop, thrive and be. He’s quite amazing by the sea. The experience of sitting on a pristine beach and looking across the Mediterranean to Africa’s hills rising is in itself mesmerizing.

Six years of watching the sun set at almost 10 PM and watching friends there bend, grow, step sideways, and fall in and out of love in just the short span. The changes and the certainty of these individuals are something to behold.

In the mirror of the last decade, I’ve watched myself swell, shrink, and go bouncing along a continuum that has been high and low and never dull. A friend in Spain asked how this year’s work has been, knowing that the past few years have been fraught with me trying to build a business. I said this year I made less money than any year in the last six, but that I had accomplished a whole lot more of my projects than any other year. Seven chapters of my book workshopped through the Walker Percy center at Loyola University. As well, I’ve made more connections with networking around my core work on parenting and race. Time with Tin. It’s been a very productive year, despite what my bank account says.

The career I left behind versus the one I’m working to build have nothing in common, but I preminisced no return of the salad days of big fat paychecks, huge mortgages and Prada shoes – not because it is not doable, it is simply not desirable.

Yesterday, I cooked collard greens with ginger and cumin seeds, then lentil curry and plain brown rice. It’s such a joy to be home again, in my own kitchen, sleeping in my own bed, using American bathrooms, and organizing around daily routines. I think my Spanish friend was right. I have a tendency to go too far in one direction trying to do what I think I should – in this respect, I am purely American. I didn’t start off chasing the brass ring, but I did fall into it in a big way and found myself running in step with the whole pursuit of success that brought money and no time, items that were overpriced and underused, and then there were the shoes – instead of contemplating sunsets, holding a child in my lap, or simply being.

Now here I sit at my table to enjoy a delicious meal in a sanctuary I call home.

My friend’s right. I have been eating too much salad.

Stargate: Madrid, July 29, 2015
Inma and David came for a visit and to go with us to China Mandarina for dinner. Inma brought three presents for Tin: 1) a nerf hoop game, 2) an abstract puzzle with magnets, 3) a dinosaur sticker and coloring book. And lagniappe was a pencil with a shark on top and a wooden T to hang on his door at home. Inma had a lot of questions for Tin, tiring quickly of the interrogation; Tin looked at her and said, “Let’s not worry about the questions right now.”

Stargate: Madrid, July 30, 2015
Miss Sushi with Luis and Alex and Tin and Tanja. Luis, Alex, and Tin play a game of unrelenting torture and poking. It’s hard to tell who is enjoying it more. Tanja asks, “It’s crazy how much Tin loves to play with them.” I say, “Because they are boys; boys never really grow up.” At that moment, Uptown Funk comes on in the restaurant and the Spaniards who know not one word of English mouth the lyrics to Bruno Mars, singing with excitement, “Too hot! Call a police and fireman.”

Stargate: Madrid, July 31, 2015
Alex’s apartment on the 4th floor, designed by an architect complete with river rock walls, is over an organic grocery. I made us lunch composed of carrot pasta with spinach, leeks, mushrooms, onions and ginger, which is sumptuously good after three days of “on the road” food. Avishai Cohen’s From Darkness is playing on the Bose boom box. A lovely bottle of Ribera del Duero taste like Spain as it should. Afterwards, I flop on the couch with first book cracked this vacation – The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert – I’ve been catching up on a few journals before plunging into my summer reading. I then drift into a well-deserved nap.

Stargate: Madrid, July 31, 2015
Sitting in El Secuestrador de Besos having a cup of rooibos in the early evening. The name has caught my attention every time I walk by on the way to Plaza Santa Ana. The Kidnapper of Kisses. Surely hetero men must find it hard to come in here for a copa? Hard to say. The man behind the counter is a big bear of a guy with a disarming smile. He’s the one who suggested the rooibos since yesterday’s red pu-ehr kept me up all night.

Stargate: Madrid, July 31, 2015
I vowed celibacy from devices this entire trip. I’ve cheated. I checked to make sure a gift I sent to Flower arrived (it didn’t); made sure my work invoices were received (they were); looked to see if one payment had arrived (it hadn’t). Honestly, it does take a moment to wean you off the teat of the social beast. I wonder what has made Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and Instagram so ubiquitous for many – I know why I gravitate to it. I work in isolation and so when I step out – virtually – I enjoy strolling – scrolling – through my friend’s posted lives no matter how contrived I know them to be, it does feel like a connection. But I confess that just like fast food fails to satisfy after the first flush of salty goodness, social friendships have a way of leaving me longing for more tangible connections – touch, voice, sight, proximity, breaking bread, sharing a bottle of wine, scent, body language, facial ticks and laughter.

Stargate: Madrid, July 31, 2015
I left behind so many movies to see – Trainwreck (forever now tainted by the foolish bloodshed by a maniac), The End of the Tour, and Amy. But I came with so many books to read! I finished Ta-Nehisi Coates Between the World and Me before leaving, started Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things, then moved onto Edith Pearlman’s Honeydew, Juan Felipe Herrera’s Loteria Cards and Fortune Poems, Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle, and Lydia Millet’s Mermaids in Paradise.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 1, 2015
The gloaming descends as we walk down the stretch of beach that extends to Barbate. It is 9:23, a time that would signal dark skies in another land. Across the silver water rises the black hills of Africa. In front of us is smooth lavender sand gently washed away by foamy waves of grey, silver, rose and purple. I do think I am in a sensory bath of sound, sight and smell. Oh, lucky me.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 2, 2015
Of all the constants even here on the beach are the changes. Two anchors, two women we wait all year to see, are taking excursions away from here while we visit. What you don’t expect when you are counting your days, making your plans, and generally looking forward to is that whom you seek is seeking something else. “I’m in love,” one friend says as if to excuse her absence.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 2, 2015
Levante is here – the wind from the east that lifts the sands and pelts your near naked body till it is intolerable to be anywhere near the beach, but it is heavy and hot anywhere not near the beach. Caught in a trap of weather related delirium.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 3, 2015
I treated the Spaniards to a Monday night dinner of red beans and rice and collard greens. We passed a good time.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 4, 2015
I’m not much for plunging into cold water and the water here is sometimes cold. Last year, I swam a handful of times because it never was hot enough to endure the cold. Today, the sun was out; it was hot; levanter was gone; I went swimming. I enjoyed it so much; I went again except this time I stepped on a pez araña – spider fish [its name is The Greater Weever, which is a weever fish of the family Trachinidae. This venomous fish is found in the northeast Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Black Sea] – it shot its venom into my second toe and made me hobble back to my towel, where I learned I needed to go to the clinic. Fast. At the clinic, the nurse soaked my foot in boiling water to reduce the spread of the venom. Cold amplifies it. These treacherous creatures come to the shore seeking heat to mate and bury themselves in the sand.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 4, 2015
This afternoon the over pur-ehr rojo conversation was about infidelity and men. Can a man be faithful? The answer does not seem so promising after reflection on the men we collectively know. A few yes, most no. This is a sad state of affairs that belies any logic. Surely, the risk never seems great enough to not cheat. Is this too facile a conclusion? Perhaps. An overgeneralization based on the experience at hand. And a none too welcomed one, I might add.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 5, 2015
I took a nice long walk down the beach towards Barbate this morning and noticed just how many people have descended on this village. Usually, our side of the beach is relatively unpopulated, but now there are people already out with umbrellas and chairs all the way down the usually deserted beach. What I notice most are young Spaniards with waist length hair taking photos by the water. Each time they re-pose, they flip their hair back and forth. Even though I still have moments where I flinch before leaving for a walk because I am not in the mood to withstand the stares of young children and other women because I’m bald, I think of the drape of hair that I used to tangle with most every morning and feel incredibly lucky to be free of it. I’m truly a card-carrying Super Alopecian.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 6, 2015
I’m having a reading crisis. I started with The Signature of All Things and now nothing is working. The short stories by Elizabeth Pearlman don’t stick – they go down like cold water and don’t quench my thirst. I picked up instead Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Beautiful Struggle and I struggle with its unrelenting poetic pace. So I’ve defaulted to the New York Times and an occasional blog post – so not what I was expecting since I usually use my time on the beach to devour a library.

Stargate: Caña del Meca, August 7, 2015
A walk up to the lighthouse to look out at the sunset. When you have a six-year-old child, standing on the rocky mote around the lighthouse looking down at the cliffs and rocky surf, makes moments like this memorable only in the fact that you kept your child from plunging to his death. Later, we head to relax under the giant Moroccan tent, only by now everyone is sauced at the place and the music is louder than your mind thinks is possible and the beach, although within site, is so far away in sentiment it is anathema.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 8, 2015
Hang around here long enough and you will be talking about the wind. Is it poñente, is it levante, does it come from Africa, does it come from the north. This conversation is endless because the wind is everything in this small village – it will determine your mood endlessly as well.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 8, 2015
We made the greatest find here – Tin Tin made out of wood, with Snowy in his arms. The beauty is that Tin Tin is brown – a glorious shade of brown – because he is carved from one piece of wood! I could not be more thrilled. So brown Tin Tin is coming home with us. It’s a beautiful thing when all of the Tins come together – Tin Tin and Tin.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 8, 2015
Paula wants to take a bath with Tin. No. They play incessantly up and down the stairs from her grandmother’s house to our apartment. Although no guns have been allowed in Tin’s arsenal, he has taken the nerf goals that made up a game Inma bought him in Madrid and now he and Paula both have satisfactory rifles. We go to have a tinto de verano at El Corral and there are kids playing with the equivalent of AK47 water guns. He pleads for one and so we talk about the Second Amendment, the fact that two people were killed holding toy guns, the gun violence in America, how guns killed people. Tin just look with longing at the little boys his age who are holding AK47s that shoot streams of water and are able to knock over the glass bottles they have lined up as targets. They are Spaniards, it’s different here, is the explanation Tin refuses to hear.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 9, 2015
We went to a dance last night – part of the Feria that is happening in the village this weekend. There was a three-piece band playing unfamiliar Spanish pop and although many people were dancing, I could not find my way into the unfamiliar songs and rhythm. Then it was the endless parade to find a bar to have a nightcap that wasn’t packed with tourists (read: they are all packed with tourists). By 2AM, I’m already exhausted from the hunt, but my group heads for churros – fried bread dipped in hot chocolate. I head home. After all, levante has come and I’m feeling under pressure.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 12, 2015
Tin says that he saw Paula, Toñi and Umbrella. I stare at him puzzled as he continues to mouth the word “umbrella” uncomfortably – something is wrong with the word yet right with the word in his mind. He tosses it out again. I stare back with a question mark. Then I figure it out. Abuela. Paula’s abuela.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 12, 2015
The menu of manchego, farm tomatoes, olive oil, fresh fish and Garum wine – later figs and peaches – is divine.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 12, 2015
The ocean has been divine on these hottish days. The sea is so translucent you see the floor with algae and schools of fish. You can taste the salt as if it was skimming the top. Beach days like none other.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 13, 2015
Took Tin to a music class being sponsored by the symphony – he was shy, he was misbehaving, he was not interested, he even turned at the beginning and said, “Oh, they don’t even food!” but when he got the opportunity to play the devil, he went for it hook, sinker, line.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 14, 2015
The penultimate day for Zahara and everyone is sad. We are leaving easy breezy mornings, late nights, swimming and sand castles, and friends for home. Home where dogs are desperate to see us, school is starting, and routine awaits us.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 14, 2015
For Spaniards, who are not allowed to carry firearms, there is no repercussion from having this law. I asked, “What about Franco?” I tried to explain to my Spaniard friends that the fear of government and the militia guides each American every day to reconfirm the 2nd Amendment. I don’t think anyone means to banish it so much as make this more doable – assault rifles? Please. Mental health history. Um, no. Could we just not focus on the black and white and instead seek middle ground. NO ONE HERE IN SPAIN IS SCARED OF BEING SHOT DEAD.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 14, 2015
There is a very long leash that children are on here in Zahara. Everyone is a parent, everyone has a kid, and all know who you are. There is tribe like a Spanish tribe. Why don’t the children move away – because Spaniards are tribal.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 14, 2015
The beach here is beautiful, beyond words beautiful, but it is completely unpredictable – what is one day calm, transparent, and cool, can be wild, freezing and opaque. Spaniards here talk about the direction of the wind incessantly, but for me, it’s two things – is the sand blowing? And is the water cold? That’s all you need to know.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 13, 2015
This entire village is Tin’s friend. It’s crazy. We always say that our friends here are cousins with everyone here. But the truth is Tin is a friend to all. The woman at the Parafarmacia loves to grab him when he walks by. Buja who used to own El Vapor is always seeking some dap. Chippi is Tin’s true friend at Ramon Pipi, although Piné is a definitely a contender. Chippi’s mother is always waiting for Tin to cook for him personally a platter of French fries or Pasta – whatever he wants. And then of course, there is his family – Ana, Felipe, Sonia and Gonzalo, Chari and Manolo, Pablo and Alberto, Toñi and Jesus, Irene and Carmen, Toñi and Paula and abuela.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 14, 2015
The poniente is here – meaning it’s cooler. Some are saying this will last the rest of August, but I will give you a million dollars if anyone here were able to predict the weather. We had our goodbye party last night at Sonia’s – our group is large now – about 15 of us around the patio table eating too much food, drinking too much wine, and eating chocolate covered figs. Our bounty runneth over. If there is anything more to life than eating and drinking and laughing with friends, I don’t know what that is.

Stargate: Zahara de los Atunes, August 15, 2015
The end is here. Our sixth year in Zahara de los Atunes. Tin’s Spanish improved greatly from having Paula as his constant companion. I will miss easy mornings with Tin in my lap. I will miss the sound of the waves and the infinite sea. But back we go – more will be revealed.

My “family” was in town this weekend joining other “family” for events that I was wholly unaware of. Let me remind you that the family I put in quotes made a decision some years ago to part ways over something that my niece’s husband, Mark, claimed happened to him. It started with a strange phone call one night. It spread through my family like a virus. And it culminated in this rift that is nothing short of absurd.

Families are strange and I have many in my family who I shake my head about and many I love and respect, but honestly, this whole rift with its genesis in a man’s claim against a woman who was accused, tried and handed a judgment without so much as asking her side of the equation brought me to the conclusion that the universe had closed a door for me. A favor.

However, I have to say that when my family members, who I am close with, were in this weekend for the “family” birthday party and baby shower, I felt not my exclusion, but heavy that Tin was not invited to participate as a family member with his cousin’s once removed that are his age. Being a single mother and raising a son makes you fantasize about that mother now gone, who would have been a loving and doting grandmother, and my father who would have adored Tin and for cousins that perhaps would yield friendships like when I was growing up and enjoyed hanging out with my many cousins on both my father and my mother’s side of the family.

Cousins are such a wonderful breed of family.

So I had a heavy heart of what I perceived Tin to be missing. And then I just now, as this weekend was coming to a close, I saw something that changed everything – a Confederate flag – posted on the Facebook page of one of these “family” members.

As my friend is want to say, often, “More Will Be Revealed.”

Again, Universe, I am grateful that these people are not Tin’s family, that we are not invited to their parties, that we are not part of their celebrations, because I am here to tell you – that Confederate flag – oh honey – nah, don’t get me started – #knuckledraggers – we would have to go there and it would not have been pretty. So everyone was saved that embarrassment this weekend and a good time was had by all.

#blacklivesmatter
#yourheritageishate
#theknuckledraggerswillnotinherittheearth

The Layers
BY STANLEY KUNITZ

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was,
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray.
When I look behind,
as I am compelled to look
before I can gather strength
to proceed on my journey,
I see the milestones dwindling
toward the horizon
and the slow fires trailing
from the abandoned camp-sites,
over which scavenger angels
wheel on heavy wings.
Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!
How shall the heart be reconciled
to its feast of losses?
In a rising wind
the manic dust of my friends,
those who fell along the way,
bitterly stings my face.
Yet I turn, I turn,
exulting somewhat,
with my will intact to go
wherever I need to go,
and every stone on the road
precious to me.
In my darkest night,
when the moon was covered
and I roamed through wreckage,
a nimbus-clouded voice
directed me:
“Live in the layers,
not on the litter.”
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

Last night my nephew and his family were over because they are visiting from Atlanta. Yes, I was across the counter from a man that I knew as a baby all grown up now with a child around half the age of my son. Well that’s a history in and of itself.

Yet, that’s not what is on my mind. The world has grown so heavy, so violent, and frightening and well, I feel that it is coiling tighter on itself from one catastrophe after another and there is no place for all this grief to go. It can’t sit on your spirit because you won’t be able to breathe. It can’t be held in abeyance because you might forget about it and not do anything to heal it.

We have to practice self care, which means pausing in that interstitial between beauty and horror. Filling the spaces with silence, art, nature and love. This is not a call to stare unblinkingly at paintings in a museum or sit contemplating under a moss laden oak tree, it is a reminder that if we accept the unrelenting pummeling of senseless violence in this country as who we are, what we are, and where we are going, we will all perish.

Hope dies last.

The struggle is getting harder, the pain is intensifying, and it can push us further forward. All change comes with pain. We are moving out of one cycle and into another.

How many innocent people must die before we register a problem – we might be at our limit right now.

Sometimes when I have a lot on my mind, I go to bed and read until the book is falling out of my hands. Well, I always go to bed and read till the book is falling out of my hands, but sometimes I notice that as I close my eyes and drift into slumber my mind is speed racing through thoughts that feel as if they have landed on a dreamy loop going round and round – I’m asleep already or in a suspended state of mind – then suddenly I jump off of that thought disk and onto another thought disk, this one always has fear associated with it. I am conscious that my thoughts have been buzzing and suddenly the wheel has slowed down enough for me to realize that the spinning is no longer happening. Fear appears – it’s a soft edged fear – nebulous – amorphous – it interferes with falling asleep.

Then the fear itself starts playing hide and seek with me as I try to suss it out and find out what it represents. Next thing you know I don’t remember what my thoughts were spinning and I don’t know what caused me to come out of that groove and I don’t know what the fear was I felt upon coming out of it and now I just really want to go to sleep but I now feel as if I have to find out what just happened to me.

Recently, I find that I go ahead and tell myself that nothing is going on. Not a damn thing that is worth my sleep is going on. Nothing that would warrant me thinking about it is going on. Sometimes, I do get up and write, roam the house, check on Tin, drink some water and then I head back to bed and breathe myself into sleep.

What are the mechanics that set the first spinning disk in motion that then jumps to another disk, and why is fear perched so readily to catch the thoughts that flow off the first disk and is any of it important to explore or best to ignore and perhaps I shouldn’t consider any of this at all but just watch these thoughts and fears drift by like clouds in the sky.

A friend shared this poem.

psalm 88: one of these nights

just like they say:
it’s always worse at night.
the shadows lengthen
and once again the dread slowly starts
its nighttime creep.

it’s really quite the routine,
this nocturnal dance of mine
go ahead, enjoy the show –
i’m sure it must amuse you
the way I thrash through the night,
sheets coiling tighter and tighter
around my throat like
some demented night serpent
faithfully returning every night
to feed on my fears.

one of these nights though
when you least expect it,
the joke will be on you
that’s right i know you’re there
do you really think i can’t see you
lurking offstage in the shadows,
enjoying the nightly entertainment?

oh yes, my latest act
is opening soon and
i just can’t wait to see
the startled confusion on your face
when i finally stop struggling,
spread open my hands,
and sing psalms of praise to you:

the one who hides
in the darkness.

I have contemplated work for the last three years. What is it? What am I doing, who am I doing it for, and what is the compensation? Is my time worth this work? My shift has been glacier, but steadily I have moved away from the work that came easily to me to that which feels less like an excuse and more like a reward for having lived so long.

“Give me whereon to stand”, said Archimedes, “and I will move the earth.”

I’ve asked this of myself – of the universe – of anyone around me who would listen. My work is ? I’m a writer by trade, and so I found my calling in my book that I’ve been writing. I’m about to workshop Chapter Seven of a 10 chapter book – a primer and memoir combined. A book that is needed and I believe will be received.

Meanwhile, there is other work – there is legacy work that entangles me but sustains me, and there is ongoing work to try to keep a conversation about parenting through an anti-racism lens. There is community work, there is social justice work, and there is my work with the girls in Ghana – to help them along their journey. There is a lot of work to be done.

David Whyte wrote:

Good work like a good marriage needs a dedication to something larger than our own detailed, everyday needs; good work asks for promises to something intuited or imagined that is larger than our present understanding of it. We may not have an arranged ceremony at the altar to ritualize our dedication to work, but many of us can remember a specific moment when we realized we were made for a certain work, a certain career or a certain future: a moment when we held our hand in a fist and made unspoken vows to what we had just glimpsed.

[…]

Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world. Like the person to whom I am committed in a relationship, it is constantly changing and surprising me by its demands and needs but also by where it leads me, how much it teaches me, and especially, by how much tact, patience and maturity it demands of me.

My friend in Boston sent me David Whyte’s Consolations, with his musings on many topics. This he wrote of Work:

To reduce work in our societal imagination merely to competition, and to the act of beating the competition, is to condemn our societies, our communities and our individual lives to imaginative poverty of the very worst kind. In the real world it is also an isolating approach that closes off the possibilities of cooperation and conversation across scientific boundaries and artful borders. In the mystery of real contact and of real creativity, as in the lover’s embrace, there is no abstract other and no competition. With the right work, the right relationship to that work and the mystery of what is continually being revealed to us through our endeavors, we find a home in the world that eventually does not need debilitating stress, does not need our exhausted will and does not need enormous amounts of outside energy constantly fed in to sustain it. We give a gift, not only through what we make or do, but in the way we feel as we do, and even, in the way others witness us in our feeling and doing, giving to them as they give to us, as fellow lovers, fellow struggling marriages: with a person, with a work, with a craft, attempting to keep the conversation alive with the core mystery of what makes us make; a gift that is twice given, physically in the present and imaginatively in the future; a work and an identity that holds both together, not only for an end, but for every step that shapes an onward way.

Work is a gift, it is both given and received. It is a relationship. It is a marriage of sorts. As my work unfolds differently, changing before my eyes, I am confident that what I seek is seeking me. And today I took one step closer to that reality.

I have spent a lifetime in partnership with atheists, those who don’t believe and some who thought very little of those who do believe. Believe in what? Well, I could answer simply with the word – God – but that would not define the believers I know. Yes, some call their faith religious, and some call their creator God, but most of the people I surround myself with these days believe in spiritual connections, believe in mystery and majesty far greater than our conception, and they believe that we – human beings – are not at the center of this diorama, but instead we are only one part of a vast network of interfaces between a world so grand it is incomprehensible and a world so tiny and two-dimensional we often seek bandaids to cover our wounds.

A healer recently told me that my mother weighs heavy on my soul and that I needed to address her. Really? My mother? I thought I had opened that can of worms a long time ago and stared deep down into the abyss and I do believe I have come away more loving a daughter for having peered into her darkness. So why is she weighing me down? Well it could be a number of things – perhaps she wants to tell me not to worry, perhaps she wants to tell me to love myself more, perhaps she wants to say that I’m not a bad mother myself, or perhaps she wants me to write HER story, when I’m effectively writing my own.

I woke this morning hugging myself. I did it on purpose, not because I suddenly found myself in a half Nelson on waking. I hugged myself because another healer told me to do that, she said you need hugs and if you are not getting them from other people, then hug yourself. And so I did. I tell myself “I love you, Rachel” when my mind starts having some nasty conversations about what if and other parts of my narrative that simply cannot be changed. Every day, in every way, I am showing my belly to the world – I’m saying yes, here I am, vulnerable, and open. You could grab my belly meat and pinch hard or you could hug me, I’m going to roll with it either way, because my faith in my ability to withstand life – while remaining open to living – is unshaken.

This has not come from some rational accounting of what was and what will be, this has come from an audit – a spiritual one – where I strung together beads that were building blocks of my life – the thread is time, the beads were experiences, and strung together in a necklace they represent a bold piece of jewelry that is unquestionably gorgeous and magnificent and yes, remarkable. Parts of it are bullet proof and parts are soft like the flesh of my belly. Though you’d have to know me deep and dirty to know which is which.

I learned recently that Ta-Nehisi Coates is an atheist – something I guess I could have concluded myself by his mind, which is so lovely and versatile and strong. That was always my attraction – the mind – I leaned into brilliance whenever it flaunted itself in front of me. I was a sponge, a sucker, a vessel wanting to be filled by knowledge. And now I no longer crave that same platter. My soul cries out for kindness, for love, for hugs, for gentle evenings of hand holding and soft moonlights of awe. I am no longer hungry for what I might know, but instead am thirsty for those who make my heart purr.

My stream of consciousness uses a vocabulary of luck, the number 4, exits and entrances, I’ve passed through here with you before, and rungs on the spiral. I read tarot, I read Black Angel cards, I wish upon stars that I see outside my bedroom window at night, I give thanks when I wake up that I have all my toes, my fingers, my eyes, ears, and nose. I have a magic vibration inside. I’m a believer. Lady Luck favors the prepared.