Archive for January, 2015

Happy Birthday, Stella

Wednesday, January 28th, 2015

Stella turns one year old today and just to make sure I don’t love her too much she ran out in the street crowded with the traffic of parents dropping off kids at the school next door. She peed on the dining room floor – something she hasn’t done in a while. And she wouldn’t come when I called her – several times today.

BAD DOG.

Actually, they say there are no bad dogs, just bad masters.

BAD MASTER.

Happy 1st Birthday, Stella – you know you were wanted because you certainly were not NEEDED – ha!

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My hair has been loved off

Wednesday, January 28th, 2015

When a woman is in the midst of a Love TKO, she forgets how well she has been loved in life. The love she has had in her life has shaped her heart and is the REALity of who she has become – a woman with the capacity for profound love. This never leaves you, even when love seems to be passing you by – it is not really – because love is you and you are love.

Open your eyes and be grateful for all the love that has sustained you.

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The Universe Provides

Tuesday, January 27th, 2015

My friend, who is a Yoruba priestess, called from California to tell me this one important fact: The universe will close a door that you don’t have the power to close yourself. When this happens, be grateful.

For these doors that have closed, I am grateful for:

Discovering a lover was cheating because it allowed me to walk away.

An email from an ex that proved for the last time that he is truly an ASShole.

A friend’s rude response when I asked to take her out for her birthday lunch, thus eliminating a negative person.

A rude and nutball neighbor who caused me to look and find the Spirit House.

A former lover’s desire to travel to see an ex as we were working on our relationship leading to our breakup.

The end of a long-time friendship over an innocuous comment – eliminating another negative person.

Getting fired by a man I have no respect for, from a business I built, and sitting back to watch him destroy not only its culture but its existence.

Losing all of my hair so that I could let go of the LaLa and with it the dream I clung to for too long.

WOW – I am digging this gratitude. Thanks Universe, you have my back.

To all on this list – #IDFWU.

The Intersection of Love and Loss

Tuesday, January 27th, 2015

My friend text me last night and said: “Woman, I’m going to kill you.”

What did I do?

“You knew that man was trouble from day one, so why are you surprised that he lies and cheats?”

The willing suspension of disbelief.

“Girl. Uh uh. You know you’re strong, yeah.”

Here is a photo of me being strong by Gus Bennett – this is my Tai Chi bow – a fist for strength covered by a soft hand to present my force to the world.

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The morning after Sty slept with another woman I was walking down the bayou and a taupe-colored Challenger pulled up to the red light. The man was yelling something to me but I couldn’t hear so I got closer and closer to his window.

“Are you married?”

How old are you?

“40!?”

I could be your mother if I had started early – now go on.

My texting friend picked up the phone and told me: “You were enjoying Sty too much and you needed to be shaken out of it. That’s all.”

Hmmm, interesting parallel. I had a dream one night with Sty in Destin where my mother walked into the room and told me to “Stop it, right now!” Which I thought was odd, given that my mother was a bit of a hedonist herself. The dream haunted me a little, but I couldn’t make sense of it.

Okay, everyone (alive and dead), I have stopped it. Satisfied?

I saw the man in the Challenger again this morning and he waved and smiled as if we were old friends as I walked across the bayou with Stella. 40 isn’t that young, I thought. One door opens, another closes. When my last husband told me he no longer wanted to communicate because he had remarried, I met Sty nearly 16 hours later. When I told Sty I no longer wanted to communicate, Mr. 40 Year Old Challenger appeared in the same time frame, on the same corner where most of my undoings happen (Orleans and Jeff Davis) – there must be some powerful vibration going on right at that intersection of love and loss.

You cannot let someone in if you haven’t let someone out. Women refer to this notion as parking spaces. Women have only one parking space and if a man is pulled in or blocking entry or even doing a drive by, it stems the flow of traffic.

So you need to let love or the whisper of it (lust) go, so you can wind on down and clear the road . . .

[My texting/calling friend ended our call with this statement: “You are strong. You stopped the abuse. When a woman let’s a man use her and abuse her, it snowballs and he goes on to use and abuse. But you stopped the FLOW. Stay STRONG.] AMEN.

Quote of the Day

Monday, January 26th, 2015

From Rodger Kamenetz’s Stalking Elijah:

“People think of violent crime as physical violence,” he said. “But I perpetrated emotional violence because as a con man I got people’s trust and abused it. In some cases that prevented people from trusting others again.”

#thereitis

The Truth Will Set You Free

Monday, January 26th, 2015

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The best way to get over a breakup

Monday, January 26th, 2015

The New York Times published an article about the best way to get over a breakup saying that writing and journaling is a healthy, productive tool.

Obviously, writing has been my tool, but in the public sphere of writing it is hard to really call out the one you are breaking up with on their behavior. You have to be sensitive to a public viewing. On the other hand, you also have your own portrayal of who you are in the whole unwinding.

I’ve been honest to a fault at times and yet surprisingly tight-lipped in other areas. I think the thing about break-ups, any type, are that they are painful and yet provide endless self-revelation.

In my relationship with Sty, I didn’t realize how we went from a chance meeting to speaking several times a day, to planning future events, to engaging life philosophies into a single thought process. While it may have only been months of this, and while there had been flags I heeded, the unwinding or abrupt departure from this is just plain sad.

Maybe not sad in the way the ending of a 16-year relationship is, but sad in the hopes and dreams that are dashed when the promise of what’s to come suddenly dissipates.

The best way to get over a breakup is to suddenly be aware at how much this person’s presence had infiltrated your life and to now suddenly have that time made available to you again to do with what you choose. In one particularly painful break up, my therapist had asked me what I missed the most and I told her the witty and sexy text messages. She said find a friend who sends you witty text messages and engage them in repartee. It’s not the same, I said, because it does not hold the promise.

In Alain de Botton’s Essays in Love, he writes:

A long, gloomy tradition in Western thought argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated, Marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality. According to this view, love is simply a direction, not a place, and burns itself out with the attainment of its goal, the possession (in bed or otherwise) of the loved one. The whole of troubadour poetry of twelfth-century Provence was based on coital delay, the poet repeating his plaints to a woman who repeatedly declined a desperate gentleman’s offers. Centuries later, Montaigne declared that, ‘In love, there is nothing but a frantic desire for what flees from us’ – an idea echoed by Anatole France’s maxim that, ‘It is not customary to love what one has.’ Stendhal believed that love could be brought about only on the basis of a fear of losing the loved one and Denis de Rougemont confirmed, ‘The most serious obstruction is the one preferred above all. It is the one most suited to intensifying passion.’ To listen to this view, lovers cannot do anything save oscillate between the twin poles of yearning for someone and longing to be rid of them.

I don’t think it is unrequited love that turns us on, but instead the promise of tomorrow. Tomorrow is what makes today so exciting, without it, you return to living in the present, which we have all learned is where we need to be, but is often times, somewhat dull and routine for anyone with a romantic yearning. Oh yay, more work, oh yay, parenting, oh yay, the toilets need to be cleaned. Yes, you should turn to the bluebird whistling outside your window, but you are in the midst of a breakup and so I think a little wallowing is in order.

My brother has admonished me for being a romantic one too many times in my life. I guess, at this point, I will die a romantic. It is what it is.

Superstition and the Torah

Monday, January 26th, 2015

While Tin was at Sunday school yesterday, I attended a pop-up university lecture at the synagogue on superstition and the Torah. Gathered with mostly elderly Jewish couples, I listened to the academic yoking together of superstition, religiosity, and Judaism and had to chuckle as most in the audience talked about how Judaism, religion, worshipping, and putting on teffilin are all strangely superstitious and irrational, so what’s the point?

I’m so into you, I can’t get to nothing else

Sunday, January 25th, 2015

The warning signs were everywhere and yet, and yet …

He played nick nack on my brain with a nick nack paddy whack give the dog a bone, this boy keeps calling home.

And what? Do you feel me … is my message getting through???

How about the truth, sugah, that’s all mama wants.

Dang. I’m gonna take a nice hot bath and dream of Cuba.

FACTS: birdbrain. #IDFWU.

Lemonade out of Lemons

Sunday, January 25th, 2015

Darrin came over Friday night and turned the house once again into a home made barbershop. He took Tin’s hole in his afro and styled it into a beautiful fade.

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Now he’s so darn cute I have to stop looking at him all the time.