When I was in therapy after my divorce, the therapist said that we each come to a relationship with a bucket of love chits and that we keep exchanging them, keeping our buckets full (read: best case scenario). In the case of my relationship, my bucket was feeling lighter with each passing year. I felt I was the one always bending to the beloved. Concessions, compromises, love, acts of service, and all of those love…
I’ve been thinking a lot about renewal and beginning again these days. It’s the topic of much of my conversation and thoughts and musings. Then suddenly I was sucked into a whirlwind of activities. In only a week, I was at a train birthday party for one of Tin’s friends: Then it was a Stevie Wonder concert. A while ago, a friend had said that he had an extra ticket for Stevie Wonder that I…
Anybody who went through the 2005 Federal Flood became comfortable with “re” glommed onto whatever word you can think of – it was reNew Orleans, refresh, rebuild, relive around here for quite some time. This year will be ten years that we are commemorating what happened down here. In ten years, though the Flood was epic, it pales in comparison to other events in my life that have caused upheaval and the need to pull…
Somedays the struggle just gets tired and I want to give it a rest I want to braid my little one’s hair and watch her jump rope to play with her. Sometimes the rhetoric gets tiresome no matter how true and I want to listen to my son sing at the drum to sing with him. Somedays the cause get tedious no matter how pressing and I want to watch my sisters dance jingle dress,…
The Invitation by Oriah Mountain Dreamer It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing. It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dream, for the adventure of being alive. It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your…
My therapist said to me yesterday when I saw her out walking, “Adulthood sucks.” Her best friend had died. I ran into a friend of mine at the dog park this morning, she told me a mutual friend of ours had died. Chris, who started Bacchanal, a place where we would gather after the 2005 Federal Flood – 10 years later, he’s dead in his sleep. How can this happen? My friend writes to tell…
My friend, Kim Frohsin, posted this image she photographed recently at some construction site in San Francisco. I had it as my screen saver because it’s beautiful and blue. But my blues kicked in this week, and I can’t look at the blue without feeling my blues skim the top of my ocean. So I’m changing my screen saver to something that fills me with hope, not more blues. Because as Emmy Lou Harris sang…
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…
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…