I posted this on Instagram with “my loneliness ain’t killing me no more” – that’s how I felt when I was walking along this path – totally alive, not alone. I need to see this image so that I can go back there over and over again.
I’m forcing myself to stick my head way up off my shoulders and look at the big picture because it’s getting a tad cloudy down here in Rachel Land. This week started off on a melancholic note. There was the low after the high of being on retreat with people working on racial justice in New Orleans. There were connections with people that were intimate and natural and fun, and now those relationships don’t have a natural extension into my world.
I’ve been trying to shake that off – that little cloud of grey that followed me home. Then this morning I learned that one of my work contracts needed me to reduce the rate. I also learned that another contract is caught in a web of white lies and tedious bureaucracy. I had to dredge up my maxim – one door closes so another can open. But seriously it’s been a lot of slamming doors around here the past few days.
While walking Stella this morning, I ran into a good friend, who had just lost a good friend to cancer. My friend is two years in remission from her own cancer. Today I am healthy. My son is healthy. My loved ones are healthy.
Gears are grinding. Gears are turning. Gears get stuck. Gears get unstuck.
My facilitator’s training is supposed to pick back up with this group. My book is about to be on a regimen of being workshopped.
What care I that doors are closing if the doors I want have yet to open, or are cracking open, or are maybe waiting for me to pry them open. What care I?
My elephant necklace is securely around my neck. Focus on the big picture, Rachel. The minutia is where you get lost too easily at sea – adrift in the spewing foaming backwash that floats to the top. Dive deeper. Who are you and who did you want to be?
A writer, an author, and a change agent. Books that change how people think. Speaking to groups about change. All of these work doors that are narrowing are not a window into my actualization. They are simply about money. And the lack of money has been a sticking issue for the last three years and it makes me weary, but it has also kept me scrappy and flexible.
A lover, a partner, a friend. A relationship that builds on what I’ve learned about myself and others. An open heart received by an open heart. Truth without fear. With a person who is available and who wants only me. All of me – the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Deep breath in, deep breath out. Gratitude for a day with health. A day with friends who pick up the phone and listen. A day with a kiss from my son and big hug.
The rest will come. Just keep your eyes on the big picture.
I went away to the Welcome Table retreat this weekend and since it was a working weekend filled with laughter and tears and resolutions and revolutions, it’s going to take me a little time to unwind and figure out what condition my condition is in.
This week I start my writer’s workshop at the Walker Percy Center at Loyola and will look at the investment I have made into writing this book that has been my chimera. I am trying to slay, tame, make nice, peace, love with this beast, but right now I have put it behind a trap door that I tip toe around. Please let us be friends.
When I surface this week after this weekend of highs and lows, please know that I have come from a journey, come home changed, but some of the feeling that was packed into the crevices of this weekend will never be able to see the light of day. These tags will remind me and only me of triggers into these depths:
1) a klutzy nurse was in the hospital room, I felt weak and told her I needed to pray
2) debt, that is nothing; whatever I need to make happen I will use, if that means debt, it means debt
3) I loved that woman [she died of cancer]
4) She beckoned me over as she lay dying; I told her I loved her; I did
5) my most difficult relationships have been with my partners
6) I see clearly you hold the power; I wish I could have seen it in my younger self, because I gave my power away
7) I planted that tree [lie]
8) We’ve known each other about 15 years now [lie]
Woman goes on journey, comes home changed.
CHANGE verb (used with object), changed, changing.
1. to make the form, nature, content, future course, etc., of (something) different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone.
For those who know me and know that I own my baldness just as much as I owned my badass big red hair, this will come as a surprise. Not what I did, but that I had to even think about it as a radical move. Last night, before I went to bed, I changed my profile photograph on Linked In to one of me bald.
It has been three years this month since I became hair free (read: my hair fell out because of Hashimoto’s and a series of stress events that tore down my immune system), and I have left my Linked In photo alone as a vestige to my professional persona. I did this not for me, but for others. I wear a wig in Boston, not for me, but for others. I left my hair-photo up not for me, but for those sources who I speak with who don’t know anything about the changes in me.
Last night, I decided that I did not want to do for others anymore. I want to do me. And so I changed my photograph and this was a radical affirmation of acceptance for me. It is one step in many on my path to freedom because as Janis said, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.
Before
After
For those of you who will look at the old photograph and think I was beautiful then, I would say look closer and you will see the real me now.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” from The Country of Marriage, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1973. Also published by Counterpoint Press in The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry, 1999; The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008; New Collected Poems, 2012.
I woke this morning charged with a new challenge – accepting myself just the way I am.
Today, I will no longer critically speak to myself in [Louise] whispers about how I need to lose 17 lbs or else I am doomed to be that overweight, aging woman whose curves used to be meaningful and are now just shameful.
Today, I will not pummel myself for not having finished the book I started writing a year and a half ago because in fact, I’m starting a writer’s workshop next week and look forward to my lone efforts being supported by other writers.
Today, I will not bemoan food. I will not begrudge gluten. I will not descry cow milk. I will not rail against soy. I will not try to drink 8 to 10 glasses of water.
Today, I will not be looking for love, instead I will be loving myself, tenderly, sweetly, crazily, and justly. I love you, Rachel, is my mantra of the day.
Today, I will accept my debt, which is less than the cost of an expensive car and take pride in owning my home and truck.
Today, I will not beat myself up as a bad mother, but instead will relish being an older mother who has a more adjusted view of the outcome of childhood than my younger peers who are trying desperately to get it right(er) for their children. I know that any way it turns out is right(est).
Today, I will not worry about my life’s work, because every day I am working at my life, whether that be work I do to pay bills, work I do to change the world, or work I do to make sure the house is in some state of clean, it’s all work, and it’s all good.
Today, I will meditate because I always have time for a 15-minute check on my talking heads.
Today, I will not bemoan the weather, but will be thankful for the rain.
Today, I will simply be.
Don’t go changing to try to please me. Rachel, I love you, just the way you are.
Open you arms to the wonder that is your gift today.
I love that video of Chimamanda Adichie on why We should all be feminists.
I love the part when she asks why she would be interested in a man who finds her intimidating. I saw a video that was being passed around today where a woman says that those women who say it will take a strong man to appreciate a strong woman are dead wrong. That being a strong woman is what will turn off a strong man. I found that argument wanting because what she is preaching is that “to get a man, you must change not only how you are, but who you are” – as if – is all I want to say to her.
See, I’ve been thinking lately that the best thing to do is to make yourself look bigger. I hear from a lot of people that are strong that people “think” they are strong but they really aren’t, they’re just as weak as anyone else and they do want support at times. Well, the truth is my friends, you actually are strong. You seem strong. You are big and bold. Yet BRUISED. Yes, that’s what happens, the bigger you make yourself the more things hit that are flying at you.
Despite the urge to shrink and make yourself smaller so that some Romeo might scoop you up in his arms, or those flying objects will miss you when they are headed your way, my advice is to take your punches and carry on. Go Big or Bust. Take my friend, Anne Flournoy, who started this little, bitty, video project that started getting bigger and bigger and soon it wasn’t itty bitty anymore – The Louise Log – and she could have stopped there, but no, she decided to take it one more step up and go BIG OR BUST.
Go Anne – put your biggest, boldest self out there and take your bruises like a woman.
See, I like the idea of taking cues from animals in the wild – how do you defend yourself against the jungle – MAKE YOURSELF BIG and BOLD. And be okay getting bruised because those marks just end up being reference points and material for later writing. When you are at the mountaintop and showing others the way, you might say proudly, this mark here, I got it when …
I bring you the uncanny Yahoo horoscope:
Taurus
You might be needlessly licking your wounds from an emotional disappointment yesterday. Although warrior Mars is waving his banner today, you don’t have to go to battle to achieve a victory. The truth is you only need to be honest and speak from your heart. However, be ready to back up your words with action, if needed. There’s no reason to look behind you when there is so much potential just ahead.
Glorious day here in the Crescent City and you had to get out, out, out and enjoy it. So we rented a surrey for five in City Park and went on an outdoor adventure. With Tin at the helm with the map, we were happy to follow him anywhere. Let’s surrey to a stone soul picnic ….
The house that backs up to my yard and basically is the border of my yard, the one that the crooked contractor bought for $30k, then set fire to, and then went to prison for cheating all the post-2005 Federal Flood people, the one who transferred the house to his mother so they wouldn’t take it while he was in prison, but his mother died while he was in, and then he died when he got out. That house, which I offered his lady friend who inherited it but it was stuck in succession $20k for the burned-out shell just to raze it and get the eye sore out of my yard, but she sold it for $35k to a guy who lives in my neighborhood who is turning it into two apartments.
Well, that house is like a canvas in my mind and every day I try to imagine what I will do with that house, with the back of it now that someone else has bought it, because I own the back of it, I own it in the mere fact that it invades my yard, my landscape, my vista, and it causes me to think of ways to camouflage it. This solid mass of house that has no yard because it’s in, ahem, my yard.
Murals, trees, artifacts all vie in my imagination as screens between me and this hulking mass. And today, I think I have decided what will go on this wall. I intend to paint a giant, colorful, beautiful and exotic mermaid in a vast ocean landscape and underneath it will read:
Does the mermaid long for land?
