Fuck Shit Up!
My friend Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr. came in for Mardi Gras since he was our King last year for the Krewe of 100 WOMEN DBA. The word character is the best way to describe a man whose talent and zest for life and use of the beauty of words give so much delight.
On Thursday, Amos was selling some of his books and posters during the Hall’s Lava Lounge. I found mine instantly – FUCK SHIT UP!
I needed these three words.
Lately, I have fallen deep off my gratitude wagon and have been on a road of self-flagellation and asking myself on repeat the worst question I’ve ever asked – why??? I just couldn’t come back to me. Tears kept coming, regret kept spewing, and a plethora of why’s circled my mind.
It’s not my mind. It’s monkey mind – I have a dumb monkey high on adrenaline who runs around my mind wreaking havoc. The monkey goes on and on about how I’m not good enough, about how I’ve gained weight, about how I don’t know how to be a mother, about how I don’t think I can go on anymore like this. I want to fuck that monkey’s shit up. Hear me?
Centrifugal force tethered to that damn monkey’s mind had pulled me away from center. How do I fuck shit up? I dug deep into gratitude. I breathed. I told myself I am okay. Then I looked around to see what’s here in front of me. My niece turned to me in the car in Tucson and said, “Aunt Rachel, you’re a good mother.” A woman visiting Bay Saint Louis and the Hall for the first time during Lava Lounge turns to me and says, “I want to tell you, what you have created here is fantastic.” No, you don’t have to rely on outside validation, but sometimes it does nudge you back to center. The center where you give thanks for all the work you’ve done to create a life with meaning.
I’m an ordained minister and have the privilege of marrying a beautiful couple this Saturday at the Hall. I have been collecting anecdotes about their life together. Their best trip? A hike that led them to Cape Disappointment – named because the man looking for the mouth of the Columbia river came upon the cape and felt he had failed to find what he was looking for. Like this man, the couple had accidentally found Cape Disappointment with its breathtaking vista, unparalleled natural beauty — they discovered a place of vastness holding the power of nature and it was anything but disappointing.
Joseph Campbell said “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”
How many times must I hear Campbell’s words to lasso all my energy back to center. To fuck shit up along the way and come back, again and again to myself, and to know that what awaits me is good and is breathtaking and is vast and is powerful and is not disappointing.
And if I take a deep breath and hold still, I can see it right here, right now, all of the time.
