I spent yesterday doing what I love: being around writers, readers and books. They haven’t figured out the venue or logistics, but Homegrown, a literary festival by the public library, is getting a lot of things right. I ran into a friend who I met when I first moved to Bay Saint Louis. A writer, photographer, journalist, jewelry maker and publisher, she moved away a couple of years ago. When she saw me, her eyes…
A recap of the last four weeks is contained in my buzzword: vulnerability. My community feels as if we are knee deep in troubled times, and I fall back on we’ve been here before – our shared history is resistance, and I believe in US. I am vulnerable to the fear I feel, they feel, we feel and I also know it is fear. In the last 30 days, I have met new people and…
I watched Questlove’s 50 years of SNL music history on Monday night at a friend’s house. I was 15 years old when the first episode aired. I realize it was radical television but hadn’t understood the groundbreaking thinking and eclectic music it introduced me to over the years. Songs of freedom, songs of resistance, songs of transformation. Prince was not Prince when he sang PartyUp on SNL then stormed off stage singing: You’re gonna have…
I’ve struggled with a vision for what happens next with Tin. What would coming home feel like? I dreamed last night Tin crawled in bed with me. At first I turned, thinking it was the version of Tin as a young, footed-pajamas boy, but I looked again and he was a full grown man. He lay there beside me, his body stretching longer than mine. I smiled and said, “Do you want me to teach…
Yesterday, I drove windy backroads lush with pine forests in and out of Louisiana and Mississippi that lead to Franklinton, where my mom is buried and where her people are from. My mom’s people – salt of the earth – are farmers, paper mill workers, teachers, geologists, photographers, artists, nurses and 4H competitors. The day we buried my mom, I walked up to my uncles and aunt who were standing abreast and thought they are…
Yesterday was a day to reconsider my relationship to my choices. So many adults chose to behave like children stuck in their own wounding. Venal is a word that comes to mind for a few of these adults. A woman in Tucson who believes her own story of loss pocketed my money outright. A couple of adults have co-opted a gift meant for a loved one. And yet another adult chose to lash out like…
I’m falling all the way into the quagmire of vulnerability as I dismantle a few walls. Why? the idea would be to grow into a better version of myself. Maybe even work my way up a few rungs on the spiral of my life. This accepts that with more vulnerability will come more suffering, so it also means accepting I will suffer more. Years ago, I spent time with a zen master who told me…
Have you ever felt an intense sense of indignation? You want to grab a bullhorn to rail against the outrage you feel and then there is nothing you can do about it. So, bullhorn in hand, you rush to join the stage with the same clowns who have been trampling your trust and sadly realize you are now even more vulnerable because effectively you have joined their circus. Curses! You allow yourself to be vulnerable…
A friend gave me a gift, a book she came across that reminded her of me. It’s possible because it was written by a Jewish author, and has a lot of Jewish references, but the subject of the book is remorse. I read a page a day and it always leaves a wry smile on my face. So I’d like to lean into remorse for a moment. I want to lean into the lack of…
Last night, my friend who is a pizza master held a house party to raise funds for the people who lost their homes in the L.A. wildfires. Nearly everyone at the gathering is a seasoned survivor of natural disaster. You don’t survive unscathed; we all have PTSD from Katrina that was not addressed then, or a decade later, and now, twenty years later, has still not been integrated into an understanding of the psyche of…