Do you know someone who has had a challenging life? You think why her and not him? We are all born with amnesia but more than likely this person was standing in line when they gave out assignments and she raised her hand and said, “I want to be challenged!” Perhaps her previous life she was like a house cat, sitting around waiting for something to happen.
But she decides to take on a bigger assignment with challenges that come large, come small, but always come and always stand out like a red eyed beast ready to dismantle with the swipe of a hand what she has just created.
Sound familiar?
Over two decades my life has not been about winning; it’s been about losing. Yes, I do believe I was the one in the front row saying “Ooooo Oooo” I’ll take that adventure when they were handing out assignments for the next incarnation. The life where there are way many epiphanies and ah ha moments, and too many times where that smug smile gets twisted and contorted into “Oh No Oh No” and then off to a new adventure.
A friend who is a social worker said there is a degree in social work that allows you to take classes on Saturdays. I said I’m interested. What? Well, why not? I’m no longer chasing the brass ring where I return to the financial comfort of a career – that expired – I spent the last nine years chasing that fantasy but there has been no magic portal opening up allowing me reentry. So I’m here to be of service. I believed it was the 100 Men Hall, but maybe it’s something else. As I said on a Zoom life coaching call the other day – I’m open, receptive, flexible.
This weekend, a friend of mine drove out to Bay Saint Louis to get out of New Orleans for a respite with her young son. She stayed with other friends here. She is part of a great love story that had a painful twist. The father of her son – the great love of her life – died of cancer without him ever seeing their child.
On my walk with Stella this morning, I listened to a meditation by a woman who spoke about Loving Kindness in Challenging Times. She spoke about how Love is often viewed as being in the hands of another — someone who could give it to us and who could also take it away from us.
My years of therapy with Ellen showed me a different view. When I worried after divorcing my husband I might not ever love again in that capacity, she said, “But Rachel, it is your own capacity for profound love that you experienced. It is within you, so you hold the key to love.”
That was 14 years ago when she said these words to me, and the truth is I have never loved again and I must admit I don’t know if I ever will. Yes, I do love my child, my friends, my family and even myself, but I am speaking about love with a romantic partner.
The meditation teacher was focused on agape love and she spoke of love as being an ability not a feeling. And despite what I said a paragraph earlier, her words gave me hope, because I know deep within lies the ability to love but maybe I’m short on the desire to love again.
I’ve been content to leave my own footprints in the sand, and every year this becomes more of who I am.
Even this pandemic has taken my yin yang with being an introvert/extrovert and ratcheted up the Introvert in me in a very pronounced way. I’ve had one too many friends call out for help because they are quarantined with their significant other. Hell, there are times I crowd myself out in my home. Perhaps the truth is I have no imagination for what love would look or feel like in my life now.
Yesterday, I witnessed the unprecedented – the price of oil dropped to negative $40. While oil price gyrations send shock waves throughout too many industries to name, let’s talk about what it means to me.
At the end of 2011, I was laid off from a company I helped build where I covered Global Media along with a wide array of other industries. When I left, two long-term clients came with me. Within a year, both left their companies which effectively canceled my contracts with them. I could not have predicted this: one had worked for his company for 27 years, the other 23 years.
In 2014, I began covering the Oil & Gas industry for a former editor/reporter of mine who had left the company before me. Six months into this contract the price of oil dropped from $85 to $40. I was able to keep the work but my rate was cut.
In the meantime, I sought other work, new careers, trained to become a facilitator and mediator. However, for four years, the O&G work put food on our table and kept us from food stamps (although some years we were close).
Then in 2018, with oil prices around $60, the price began to drop again, and by 2019, my O&G projects dried up completely. So I focused on a new business – a nonprofit in Mississippi.
Now in 2020, a pandemic hit and my new business is temporarily shuttered, potential new work I had been courting has been shelved. Then I got a call in April to work on some quick turn reporting again in the O&G industry – yes, prices were low, but most believed the industry had hit its bottom.
They were wrong.
Oil prices sunk to negative $40 a barrel yesterday. Unprecedented. What does the drop mean to me – chasing work has required me to constantly rise from the ashes. The small amount of work I had contracted a week ago vanished overnight. A part of me believes I just cannot rise one more time, so my daily work is to remember that I always have.
This often seems like the most difficult question to answer – whether it’s what do you want this day to be or what you do want your life to be.
World peace rolls off my tongue, but as to what Rachel wants, I’m often stumped.
Maybe I wanted this messy life, filled with love and beauty, trials and error, poetry and trash memes, friends who stay, friends who come and go, friends who leave, indelible lovers and lovers easily forgotten. Hot mess.
At one point, I would have said I wanted to be somebody important, maybe someone famous owing to a life of publishing literary wonders that explained multitudes. At another, I wanted a family – a passel of possum joeys – all huddled and cuddled in a king size bed. And in its recent iteration, I wanted more time and space to breathe and be (spoiler alert: I got it).
I have formed a habit of not wanting or wishing for a future I know nothing about, not in fear of disappointment, but only to leave myself receptive to wonder at what comes next. It’s never truly what I envision but often times it can be construed as what I wanted, only transformed into the unexpected, and always with a dash of are you kidding me?
Yesterday was the last night of Passover and I’m still eating matzo. This morning, I made my Earl Grey Lavender tea, broke a piece of egg matzo, and put some blackberry jam my friend Kim gave me for Easter. Yes, it’s all a mash up. I had something old – the bread of our affliction, I had something new – Kim’s blackberry jam, I ate it sitting by a pillow that was not necessarily borrowed – Jean gave it to me, and I’m blue.
Not blue in the way you might imagine. I’m blue because I’m watching Ozark by myself and this is a series that needs someone next to you so you can scream each time something really fucked up happens (spoiler alert: it happens a lot). I’m blue because I’m almost out of that jam Kim brought me. I’m blue because I keep saying I’m going to have my tea in my breakfast cup that I save for special occasions and I keep not getting it out of the cupboard even though I would definitely call this a special occasion. I’m blue because I truly missed our Passover seder this year and it was like pulling teeth to try to improvise with Tin on a night when I was just not feeling it and then I watched this Passover video and I cried and laughed the whole way through it.
I’m blue because I’m burying old pieces of myself. Facebook prompted me to have a fundraiser for my birthday and I did it. I arbitrarily picked $5000 for the Hall and before a week was out, I had raised it. So just as arbitrarily I ended it two weeks early. $5K would pay for months of no revenue. I told my friends who asked me to keep it going that I don’t need the next two weeks because I’ve finally learned all I need is what I need.
Oh, I have dreamed of money in the bank. Money saved. Money rolling in on a consistent basis. And all those dreams have been dashed for some nine years. Now, I dream of not wanting those things. I dream of peace of mind. I dream of this crazy thing that the pandemic has handed me on a silver platter – time. I dream of being loved and I am. I dream of helping others and in a small way I can.
Tomorrow morning, I will get down the breakfast cup. The cup and saucer I spotted in an antique store in San Francisco so many years ago and fell in love with and have rarely used because I don’t want it to break. Tomorrow I will bask in the fragility of my special cup and in the illusion that money in the bank brings security, happiness and certainty.
Yesterday, early evening I did not go on my bike ride so I could join my friend’s Zoom life coaching call. Veronica’s a warm and wonderful friend, and I’ve been the beneficiary of her coaching largesse on multiple occasions.
My take away from last night’s forum was “use everything” – Veronica’s mantra that all of it – the relationship crap, the coronavirus pandemic, the under-earning, the life struggle whatever it is is there for our learning, growth and upliftment.
True enough for me – every sucker punch has taught me how scrappy I truly am. Yet, this time, it’s different. I don’t hear this aloud but I hear it in the undertones of the jokes and memes that circulate on social media or get sent to my phone – we are okay.
We are surviving a pandemic! That’s pretty big.
What being scrappy means is I’ve learn that this too shall pass, but having gone through the biggest upheaval in my life – the 2005 Federal Flood – I just don’t want to go back to business as usual. I don’t have that REBUILD OR LEAVE motto waiting to spit off my tongue.
We survived, but now what?
Friends from near and far have been calling and getting in touch. I have a lot to say to a handful of people, some to say to a few people, and then my ability to process on the phone with distant friends drops to an “uh huh”, “yes, we’re okay” and “stay well.” Perfunctory courtesy and platitudes are all I have.
Meanwhile, there is a dim lightbulb trying to come alive as I walk and gaze absentmindedly at the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico – actually it is a multitude of bulbs and they surround a marquis that says when this time out is over, I’m not going back.
I don’t want what was – the constant constant – I don’t want one bit of it. I don’t want a new chapter – I’ve done chapters – I’m ready for a new book.
I moved to Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi nearly two years ago. I had a strong yearning to be part of a smaller community, surrounded by nature, experiencing a slower rhythm, with space for my child to run on a longer leash.
I had to juggle – I knew what I wanted, but making it happen took stacking uneven blocks on top of each other, not being able to connect all the dots in the future plan, and also not subscribing to fear.
Fear balls were hurled at me. You can’t move. And I stared fear in the face and said, I’m going.
Now in the time of the plague, I am so grateful for that decision. To be here just three blocks from the beach, in a community that has put their loving hands (now virtually) on me from the get go, to be here where there is breathing room, to be here where I walked through the wall of fear and found a better me on the other side – is the stuff of miracles.
Then I walk outside each night to take Stella out and I look up and there above me is a vast sea of stars visible in the inky sky. Last night, as I looked up with Venus high and bright surrounded by a constellation upon constellation, I said, “I came here for the stars.”
Flower, my Russian friend, has many pithy sayings but one of my favorites is “Hope dies last.” This has been a reminder during my darkest hours that to give up hope is the equivalent of annihilation. So I always go through my list and at the bottom is this: I hope I don’t give up hope.
On Friday, March 13, I decided to not send Tin to school. At that time, I had been sick for two and a half months and frankly didn’t want him to go to that petri dish of an institution and bring home yet another germ. I wasn’t really thinking broadly about coronavirus, COVID-19 or a pandemic. Instead, we went for a walk to the beach with Stella and both he and the dog went into the water, while I found an Adirondack chair to flop down in and let out a big deep breath.
As I sat there, a few things happened: I didn’t feel the need to get up, I watched Tin and Stella splashing in the water with a smile on my face, I thought about this coronavirus, and I got sunburned. I credit that sun absorption with my turning a corner on my own illness. A heavy dose of Vitamin D coursed through me that I’m sure had a big influence on my recovery.
I also credit that day with my coming to terms with the coronavirus being a pandemic. I had a definite understanding right then that social isolation was not only imminent but also necessary. I worried about Tin in New Orleans the next week and came home and sent an email that spoke plainly about my concerns – I’m over 60, with an auto immune, and have been sick for two and a half months so I’m vulnerable and don’t think he should go to school, go to his annual check up with his doctor, or for that matter be around anyone.
On Sunday, however, I came back from dropping him in New Orleans, and went to my neighbors’ house for hamburgers. There were nine of us sitting around the table in the carport. The entire conversation was about the coronavirus, so much so, that by the time I went home, I was more seriously going down the rabbit hole of the rules of engagement for a pandemic.
On Monday, I was to be on two television programs about the St. Joseph altar that would be at the Hall on Thursday. The TV stations told me not to come and said they had cancelled all in studio interviews. We had modified the event to have the doors open with air circulating, to-go bags of cookies and to-go cartons so folks could take their food rather than eat together in community. But by Tuesday, we had cancelled the altar, the Arts Alive festival after party for Saturday, and pretty much everything else went on lockdown.
Then it was April 12th and all the thought pieces on COVID-19 are that it is here to stay and either some of us develop immunity, a vaccine is made, or pretty much we can expect huge numbers of deaths and one area in particular is on everyone’s radar – New Orleans – whose numbers are spiking exponentially on a daily basis.
My year had already started off rocky. I had caught my first bug at my great niece’s bat mitzvah in Houston on January 3rd. The two revenue-producing jobs I was seeking hard evaporated before they even materialized. While the Hall had upcoming events that were to help pay for more events at the Hall, it did little to put food on my table or gas in my car. And now not only was there not going to be any revenue in my personal life, or for the Hall now that all events are cancelled indefinitely, but my dwindling 401K I was going to use to thread my way to being able to collect social security had been greatly diminished by the market crash.
Lions and Tigers and Bears – oh my.
As I’ve moved in and out of a paralysis that seems to shut me down in mid thought, I am fascinated by just how much I am not freaking out right now. I don’t feel hopeless, albeit I lack any desire to address this crisis like I have all the crises in the past where I’ve reinvented myself, taken risks, worked my fingers to the bone and drew blood from the proverbial turnip. This time, I feel like I’m floating on a feather hammock – I know it can’t support me – but if I don’t move then just maybe … .
And to be clear my hope remains in the unknown that this pandemic will change us all and change my child because we need to change. That a big pause in consumption means a big pause in pollution. That a big pause in mobility means a big pause for the environment. That a big pause in the absurdity which had become my life – driving two to four hours a day to bring my son to a school I knew was underserving him because I was held hostage in a system that didn’t support us – would give me time to help my son get his bearing now to be able to move up.
This big pause I set my hope on might be what our world needs to correct course. That is what the crises in my life have brought me – a redirection – except this time it is a global pandemic so the gasps, grinding, and gumption is coming from all of us everywhere rather than just inside my tiny being. In this I am not alone and that gives me hope.
Even having glimpsed hope in the ruins is a miracle. In years past, in struggles past, I have always resisted the crisis. I would try, white knuckled, to hold onto the old way even as the new way eclipsed it. Noooooooooo, my mind and body would shout. Please, no change, noooooo, I don’t like it. Then as the crises began to stack, I realized the noooooo was when the suffering appeared.
The admonition to go with the flow that so easily rolls off my tongue when my son is having a hissy fit just didn’t present itself to me for the big flow of life. The big flow begs us to follow not lead – so what if everything we know is changing so we have to let go of every thing that brings us comfort – money in the bank, bills paid on time, house security, food security, toilet paper security and of course, plans and goals?
How will we measure how we are doing if we don’t have currency? How will we know we accomplished anything if we don’t have benchmarks? What if Donald Trump is the president who flips the U.S. democracy to socialism because he has no choice? How will children play together? How will we unwire our brains for distance? How does hope play out when we don’t even know what we are supposed to hope for in the end?
Every year for Passover, we host a seder and invite people from all backgrounds to join us as we remember when we were slaves in Egypt. We tell the story of the Exodus so that our children realize their freedom is precious.
When Tin arrived in my life, our seder became more multicultural as we blended the narrative of African enslavement in this country with the Jewish enslavement in the old country.
I love the ritual and symbolism of this holiday even as I have modernized it to accommodate health issues (gluten free matzo – surprisingly great) and a more inclusive seder plate:
The typical seder plate has a roasted egg (fertility), parsley (hope), salt water for the tears of our oppression, a lamb shank bone to symbolize the 10th plague and how God passed over the houses of Hebrews who marked their thresholds with blood, the maror, which is the bitter herb of our oppression, and haroset, which is the mortar used in physical labor under the Egyptians.
We add:
Orange – women and LGBTQ community who have been marginalized in Jewish tradition.
Banana – favorite food of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi who washed ashore fleeing his war-torn homeland Syria in solidarity with the 60 million refugees worldwide. (My paternal grandmother was born in Aleppo.)
Olives – solidarity with the Palestinians.
Beet – for the vegetarians.
Collards and Chicken Bone: Freedom Seders: collards to represent the gardens of enslaved Africans, a chicken bone to represent the last meals made by African Americans fleeing the South during the Great Migration, their last Southern cooked meal being fried chicken. The salt water also represents the waters of the Middle Passage that brought the enslaved Africans to live under oppression.
This year, we have our matzo and most of the ingredients for our seder plate, AND we also have a plague. If these were biblical times, we’d say this plague was sent by God to destroy an evil pharaoh. Perhaps in these non biblical times, we could say the plague came and forever broke the shackles of our over scheduled prisons.
