Dangermond.org

I am part of multiple groups all centered around addiction, but mostly I’d say these are groups of parents and adults who are living a life where things are not going as planned and none of us were given the skills to navigate an unplanned life. And while addiction may be our theme, it is only a subplot in a multilayered and complex narrative.

In one group, most of us could point to our parents and ancestors whose own chaos created instability and unsafe homes. I trace my instability to 1492 when Jews were forced out of Spain. I list all the women who died in fires on my mother’s side. I go no further than my mother drinking and my father raging. In another group, we all grieve the life we had planned for the one we have gotten. I start with wanting a family and become a single parent. In yet another group, we work on acquiring skills and tools to navigate unfamiliar and uncertain territory. “Don’t manage their feelings.” “Individuate.” “Love yourself.” “Boundaries.” Then there is the individual therapy that opens up a panoply of haunts and desires. “Talk to that child as if she were in the room with you now.”

Within all of this support and learning is a rich interior world layered with a very young Rachel, a teenage Rachel, a young adult Rachel, daughter, sister, aunt, lover, wife, mother and of so many other versions of Rachel. The goal is to integrate all of me under the wings of the current version of Rachel. So I conjure my male version with my female version and allow my creative self to grow, which allows my fear and anger to exist while I open my expanding heart. I am who I was and more.

“…I think we are well-advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.”? Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

My integration is coming through my dreams now, and thankfully, I have an A-1 dream interpreter in my therapist. We dissected one of my dreams the other day that now I see as a whisper – he took a dream that has been haunting me and gave it a narrative so much more expansive than my understanding. The takeaway – I am in a good and beautiful space in my life, I am integrating parts of myself – dark and light, male and female – I am creating. I am giving space.

My integration is also coming through my therapy, because I have a great therapist. Highly recommend. Most of Adam’s gestalt method is helping me be aware of how my present moment is informed from my past experiences. There is much work on speaking to the unresolved issue as if it or they were present in the room with me now. It’s an awkward, often times gut-wrenching approach, but it’s thorough and it definitely widens my arena for action and awareness.

All these people I used to be are in me – the scared kid, the outraged teenager, the rejected lover, the angry woman, the anxious partner, the risk taker, the lover, the creator, the force – all are here under Rachel’s wings. One of the many useful tools I’m acquiring is to embrace the suck and to call it as I see it – the not knowing sucks. The fear this brings up sucks. I suck. You suck. Doing the work sucks. Unlearning and learning sucks. Uncertainty – sucks. Being powerless sucks. Yet, being powerful sucks. Loving sucks. Not loving sucks.

What if you’ve been wrong about your limits all along?

I have a belief that I am unable to plan a vacation. The reason is because when I start to plan solo travel, I become paralyzed with fear – it’s too much money, it’s me navigating an unfamiliar place alone, it’s an investment of time and I may not enjoy it. There are so many reasons for me not to act on my desire that they would take several posts to cover the why’s.

In my career, I traveled to China, Europe, Mexico, and all around the U.S. by myself, meeting new people, staying in unfamiliar places, and yet, my dreams to have a camper, to travel the U.S. with my son, to hike in the woods, to get away to nature have always been foiled by my inability to pull the trigger.

So I am forcing myself to do something different in my life. In anticipation of my upcoming birthday, I have quietly made a deal with a friend to buy her used, small camper. It has two beds and a small kitchen and I can tow it behind my car. I have been deliberating on this for nearly a year. I know the camper is road worthy. And I know my friend has made many happy memories in it. So it comes as a gift of love and at a steal of a price and it is me facing my vulnerable AF self and kicking my own ass.

I began paying monthly on this camper a while ago, and plan to have it paid for by my birthday in early May. Whereupon I plan to take my maiden voyage.

And yes, I’m already starting to worry about my safety, and where I will go, and whether I can figure out how to back up with a camper, how to unhitch it, how to do whatever you have to do with a camper. I have a lot of fear and a lot of excitement about this bold move.

My friend, Karen, looked up groups where solo women camp. Another friend, Erin, told me about her 22 solo days of escape where she camped in her Jeep in different parts of the South. My niece, Michelle, took advantage of the pandemic to outfit her small car with a platform bed in the back and she camped in many places solo. My fear is not unfounded – a solo woman camping – but I have so many great examples of fabulous women doing this.

I am working on my fear. I’m going to be vulnerable.

I’m choosing to travel to places that are near to start. I want to take baby steps because this is a long held belief of mine that I cannot do this alone. I have waited for so long to have someone who would want to do this with me.

So I want to be gentle as I whisper: Rachel, you don’t need to wait anymore, go!

My starting list so far:

Land-of-Pines – family campsite, nearby in Covington, LA. Safe, family friendly, if I go during a weekday I can avoid kids!

Fontainebleau State Park – this is where Tin had his mikveh during the pandemic. It’s a beautiful park, and not far from where I live because I’m a wuss and just starting out!

Percy Quinn State Park – I used to do the MS 150 mile bike ride and we would end up at this park. It was beautiful, and it’s also close, safe!

Blackwater River State Park – Erin said it was beautiful here, a bit costly for camping, but gorgeous. This is farther down the line as I grow more comfortable with this camper.

I will grow more adventurous and possibly use HipCamp to find spots.

I’ve thought about driving to Arizona and picking up Tin to go camping.

Introducing (drum roll) WILD THING. Oh, the places I will go!

Every day, a new headline contains an egregious, outrageous and mind twisting claim that turns the truth inside out. And yet truth will out.

One of the 100 WOMEN DBA members sent 100 Men Hall rack cards to Welcome Centers across Mississippi. A few of the centers are closed for renovation, and yesterday, I got a call from one in Natchez saying our rack cards arrived, the address had been incorrect, and she didn’t know when or if the welcome center would be up and running.

She said she didn’t want to throw away the rack cards, so she was calling to say I could pick them up. I made a plan to send her a self-addressed stamped package to return them to us. And before I hung up the woman said, “I read your letter, and I was fascinated by the story of 100 Men Hall. I don’t know if you ever heard of Haney’s Big House in Ferriday, Louisiana, but it also was on the Chitlin Circuit. In the early 40s and through to the 60s, Ray Charles, Solomon Burke, Big Joe Turner, and Irma Thomas played there.

“In 1964, there was a bombing by the KKK of a shoe shop just a few doors down from Haney’s, when the Fire Department showed up the water had been turned off. A couple of years later, Haney’s Big House was set on fire and burned down. They didn’t arrest anyone, but everyone knew it was the KKK. Jerry Lee Lewis talked about Haney’s. As a child, he would go listen to acts there. He said he saw Fat Domino play. If it weren’t for Haney’s Big House, there might not have been a Jerry Lee Lewis.”

Ever heard of the chaos theory: if a butterfly flaps its wings it could cause a typhoon in another part of the world. There is always cause and effect. The history of 100 Men Hall, one of the few standing buildings on the Chitlin Circuit, is a true story about how people behaved in the past. It’s also about how people survived those dark ages. Haney’s Big House, burned to the ground, and yet, its story stands today, told by a Southern white woman to another on the telephone.

People behaved horribly in the past. History repeats itself. People behave horribly today. The stories are as old as the wind. Lies are told. Truth will out.

It’s been a week and it’s only hump day. Last night, I went to my ACA meeting where we get to eviscerate our insides and leave exhausted. Yes and it’s good. We were reading a line that said something like how do you recreate insanity in your relationships and I think that was when the chipping away exposed a nerve.

Yes, and I cried.

Like just out of nowhere or out of everywhere, I started crying. The box of Kleenex was instantly accessed and passed. The faces softened. I breathed heavily and audibly. I have learned boundaries. I have learned to feel what I need. I have learned to ask for what I want. Those are things I’ve learned. What have you learned? I realized that I continue to engage with people who do not respect my boundaries, and that’s me.

What’s you? My reaction steered us into a conversation about ego. The ego is always defending us against our fears. And what are our fears? That we are not good enough. It’s so pervasive in so many of us. And yet, when you are in the business of setting good boundaries and someone can only respond with ego, you’re at an impasse. Even the most mindful of mindfulness will tell you to walk away.

And this made me cry. A lot of my connections and conversations these days are with people who let down their guard and are vulnerable with me. I work daily to let my guard down so that I can connect with you. But what about them? Those locked in fear, responding with ego, impenetrable?

You must refuse to let their ego dictate your interactions. But anyone who is learning about boundaries in the afternoon of their life will tell you: letting go of managing other people’s feelings and being resolute in protecting your own feels vulnerable AF.

My father was a rageaholic. He was furious about things that seemed unimportant to the rest of us. He would yell, throw things, and get so angry his eyes looked like they had flames dancing in them and his neck and face would turn purple like a bruise. I saw this rage in someone I was seeing whose eyes would flicker with flames when they were angry and who one time pinched me so hard because I didn’t agree with them.

I had a boyfriend when I was coming out of high school who was violently jealous and who put me in the hospital one time, the last time, because my brother who was living in another state flew his Cessna plane to come pick me up and away from him.

I learned about my own anger after understanding my son’s. He would rage, and I would stand nearly paralyzed and scared. I had never learned to feel safe around anger because its expression was always threatening and violent. Since I didn’t want to express myself that way, I pushed my anger down until the only recourse I had was to walk away from whatever provoked it.

But my son’s anger, and how I learned to not only deal with it, but to feel safe while he threw things, raged, and his own eyes flickered, opened up space for me to be angry. Even in holding myself in a calm state I could say this is making me angry. I am angry because you did this.

While everyone gets angry, most people who I have met in my life, have no idea how to express and manage their anger. They either rage, they accuse, they cut a person off, they will not take any responsibility for their feelings or their anger whatsoever, so that someone else, something else, becomes the end all and be all reason for the rage.

Are you scared to ask for what you need? Try practicing affirmations such as “I am good enough” and then identify your need by asking “What do I need from you right now?” And then move right into how you are feeling, angry. “I am angry that you are dismissing my years of experience and thinking your way is the only way to do this and you are speaking to me as if you are the boss of me. I need you to know I will not respond to disrespect.”

Yesterday, despite having had a double booked to-do list all week, I drove to Jackson to the MS Museum of Art to see the Of Salt and Spirit: Black Quilters in the American South exhibit. I’m an avid quilt fan and first became enamored with quilting when I lived in San Francisco and went to the Gap Headquarters where they had a collection of Amish quilts on display.

My ex mother-in-law was a quilter, and I thought one day I’d become one too, but as with all things crafty, the patience and skill eluded me. I did ask my ex MIL to make me a quilt in the Amish style, and it is one I treasure so much I don’t even put it out. Most likely because it used to be my bedspread till friends came over and changed their newborn baby on top of it – leaving an indelible stain of diaper rash ointment.

The Southern Black Quilters works fall into the theme of if it breaks your heart, make art category. Two of the quilts told a story with one word so disturbing I had to walk away. They were small quilts, meant to be hung, not used as blankets. One quilt had a Black mother figure with children standing in a cotton field and the word POWERLESS written below. The next was a Black woman looking down to the right of the frame and to the left a white man taking off his shirt, and below it read POWERFUL. One word stories that made my blood boil.

Serendipity was the exhibit of artwork from Mississippi high school students lining the corridor. An incredible outpouring of talent and moving images. A colorful painting of a crowded bus, and in the back of the bus, in black and white, a drawing of a Black mother clutching her child to her tired body. Another was a garbage can with a mother’s toothbrush the artist could not throw away after her mom died. It was energizing and amazing to see these 8th to 12th grade students express themselves so profoundly through art. The exhibit was by the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers, whose mission is to identify students with exceptional artistic and literary talent and present their remarkable work to the world through the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards.

I came back invigorated to get to my collage book, to write, to live in the world of art and escape reality. I felt a need to do something that might help me piece together my own heartbreak that seems to show up without invitation. On Valentine’s Day, a dear friend said to me as I hugged him, “I feel so lonely today.” I hugged him tighter and shared with him this meditation I had listened to a week earlier – I too have felt the yearning for something from someone that at the time seemed overwhelming. I too have felt vulnerable.

I am learning to embrace vulnerability. I’m learning to express my vulnerability. It’s all learning.

I went on a biblical journey that centered around the Tin Shed. When I bought the 100 Men Hall, there was a work shed on the property, and I applied and received a permit to remodel it into a Musician’s Cottage with the help of grants from the Heritage Area and Coast Electric Round Up. The idea was to encourage musicians to come stay here, to soak up the ancestors’ vibe, and to relax into their music.

It was a chaotic time for me. I was in a Battle Royale about a sticky situation that was not getting resolved with my son. I was trying to fulfill a vision for the Hall to be more magical than venue. In the midst of all of this, my niece, Michelle decided to come for a visit, and we decided to do a 24-hour Vision Quest at my friend James’ bioreserve in the Kiln.

We arrived there with tent, sleeping bags, her instant coffee maker, and a desire to both rid of ourselves of the miasma we were living in. We gathered in the group teepee, we meditated alone, we focused on nature, we built a fire, we gathered to eat, we talked, we gathered to learn, and we left feeling as if we had had a spiritual (miasma) cleansing.

I returned to the uphill battle of a City Council that opposed a residential permit for the Tin Shed. In other words, no one could sleep in there. This was led first by my councilman – to say this surprised me is an understatement – but in this town, most everyone was in allegiance to some petty power that to this day escapes me. To give you an example of one of the arguments against letting musicians sleep at this century old African American landmark: “If we let the 100 Men Hall allow musicians to spend the night in the Tin Shed, next thing you know Burger King on Highway 90 will want to house its employees.”

The city wanted the Tin Shed, which is 450 sf structure to be 750 sf, so I called Mississippi State University to see if there was a Sam Mockbee-type architectural professor who might be interested in taking on this task as a student-led project. Several phone calls later, I met Chris Hunter who was interested in this project from the get go because he was documenting historical Black churches in Mississippi.

Chris traveled here to see the Tin Shed. He met with my architect friends here at Unabridged Architecture, he spoke to Gary Knoblock, the councilman at large, one of the two councilmen to show up when I invited them to come see the project for themselves. My councilman did show up albeit with no fresh material. At the end of his stay, Chris recognized what I was up against; yet, he said the project was too small for them to be a student-led semester project.

As I was driving him back to his car, he said, “Rachel, you are going to be okay.”

For reasons I still don’t understand, he repeated this to me nothing less than ten times before we got to his car, saying my name, “Rachel,” pausing, then saying emphatically “you are going to be okay.”

Months later, it was going on nearly two years into the struggle to get the Tin Shed permitted, to get the Battle Royale to go away, to get my life in the direction it needed to be in, and I decided to do a longer Vision Quest with my friend, James. So I signed up for a five-day quest he was hosting.

I was joined by a few others, none of whom I knew, and we were each assigned our own secluded spot in the woods. The bioreserve is on 23 acres bordered by a deep cavern and creek, and it is heavily wooded. My spot consisted of a blue tarp tied on two ends with rope to a tree and staked on two ends to the ground. There was a makeshift table and a burn spot. At the time, I had picked up smoking again, having given it up for good only to find myself in the midst of hurricanes and I get hurricane nerves, bad, so I had picked up a pack of cigarettes.

The group did a lot of gathering, a lot of exercises together, a lot of learning together, a lot of meditating, and we also had a lot of alone time in our secluded spots. For one 24-hour period, we fasted, and I sat in my spot, alone, in my chair, tending my fire and whittling prayer sticks. As I scraped the soft wood skin from the sticks with my knife, I repeated over and over again, Rachel, you are going to be okay.

I didn’t conjure those words, they came to me as a prayer, as a meditation, as an obsession and rumination. I would smoke, add wood to the fire, drink water, whittle, then lie down on my sleeping bag thinking those words. We were asked to meditate on our totem, on what animal called to us. James is nearly half Native American so most of his teachings derive from that lineage. And although I had grown up all my life believing I had an affinity with elephants, a stint I took to an elephant reserve years ago had made me reconsider this notion. Elephants are huge creatures. They love each other, and they are not paying that much attention to us. While I was at the elephant reserve, a woman who was also there was always fussing over the elephants, and kept kissing the wiry tough haunch of one of them. This irritated me to no end.

As I lay on the sleeping bag in the woods, fire crackling, I closed my eyes in one of those half sleeps that come from fasting, being alone out in the woods, and I saw a bald eagle circling over head. It was my imagination, I think. But how appropriate that a bald eagle called to me as my totem. Later on the quest, James saw a bald eagle fly over the tree tops. He said it was rare to see them out there. He said the eagle flies high in the sky and observes everything that is going on from a distance.

It’s a meditation – a totem – I could fly above the fray. The bald eagle is such a fascinating creature – it is known to have carried the heaviest load of any bird alive. I can relate. There are several myths about bald eagles, including they have the ability to rip out their feathers and rejuvenate themselves. Part Phoenix, Part Predator.

Rachel, you are going to be okay, has become my mantra. Adam would probably have me consider: Rachel you ARE okay. And that is fine too. I am okay. The Tin Shed exists as it should. My Battle Royale is a distant memory. I don’t smoke nasty cigarettes, hurricane or no hurricane. On my screen saver is a Buddha with “every thing’s gonna be ok” and this is true.

Amen. Asé. So mote it be.

I have led a wonderfully textured life surrounded by artists. In 1989, I moved to San Francisco, and lived on Mason Street in the middle of a three flat building on the streetcar line. I could see the bay on a nonfoggy day and the roof was perfect for watching the fireworks show when the barges rolled out in the water for Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve.

It was a wonderful time – pre dot.com – still funky, still brilliant. It was the middle of a five year drought where I rarely saw rain. Above me, lived two amazing artists – Randall Sexton and Kim Frohsin. Randy painted in the basement of the building.

I was lucky enough to get to know them as friends, to buy their work, to watch them grow. Time has passed, sadly Randall died a few years ago.

Kim, however, continues to be a rockstar artist and has a new website. I can’t tell you how happy I am to see her thriving. Her work has always been soulful and magical.

The beauty of my life is I am surrounded by artists who create excitement out of even the most mundane. My artist friends have encouraged and helped me start my collage project. They have supported my writing. An artist friend, whose design sensibility and dance moves have taken her all over the world, threw a party last night – always lovely – a covey of female artists. Whether through photos, food, writing, painting, fashion, curating, music, gardening – their beauty enriches my life.

There at the party, an artist friend gave me an intention candle. She had prepared it for me with beautiful tissue paper and a butterfly, and told me to add my own words to it – what I want to call into my life and then to burn it so all of these desires enter my universe.

I wrote down my words this morning:

Fun * Play * Vitality * Spirit * Book * Vulnerability * Family * Friends * Adventure * Creativity * Clarity * Support * Love * Power * Resistance * Pleasure * Peace

This exercise reminded me of where I was over a year ago, at the end of 2023. I sat in a coffee shop in D.C. and listen to a meditation by Darius Bashur, and he asked the same question. I was not in a good headspace. I had moments alone, my home life was blowing up, and I had nowhere to run for solace except these stolen moments at an unknown coffee shop. He said: without pausing, write down 20 words. Not what you want to call in, not what you want to get rid of, just 20 words. And I did. And it surprised me, these words of mine.

Excitement * Joy * Clarity * Effortless * Support * Resources * Flexible * Creative * Color * Expansive * New * Mysterious * Wonder * Partner * Risk * Book * Podcast * Music * Health * Harmony

Darius then asked us to imagine a color palette:

Orange * Ochre * Fuchsia * Royal Purple * Ruby Red * Gold * Cerulean * Chocolate Brown

It was indeed a conjuring, a way to get rid of words that no longer served my narrative and to embrace words in color that stirred in me. My end note to this exercise was: Asked how she did it, she answered with the profound response her teenage son had offered to her, “I don’t know.”

In the margin of my notebook I also wrote: Life is precious, there is pleasure to be had, seek it, enter your own life intentionally, and see what you bring forth. I have policed my own pleasure for too long.

I share my kitchen with the 100 Men Hall and many times what is on my kitchen counter is not representative of me. Right now, there is an enormous bag of cashews, a super sized bag of Fritos half empty, a box of cocoa dusted chocolate truffles, and a pint of rum.

I’ve committed to the health and vitality of my body this year and that means, physical therapy, massage and stretching, beginning to walk again after a months long hiatus, riding my bike and when the weather warms – swimming. It also means shaking off my lazy eating.

So every day for the past week, I’ve put an apple on the counter. I don’t put a note to eat an apple, I didn’t add eat an apple to my affirmations, I don’t need a reminder, on my counter sits a beautiful red and crisp apple.

As I scurry from computer work to Hall work to other work, I mindlessly reach for what is on the counter (except the rum) to satisfy my hunger when I don’t have time to stop for a proper meal. It is satisfying to take the apple, cut it in slices, and bite into its deliciousness.

Somewhere an orchard was planted where this apple (Envy is the brand) grew on a tree and someone picked it and shipped it and here it sits on the counter waiting for me to bite into it to nourish my body. It’s as easy as taking the rubber band off the half bag of Fritos or opening the cashews and I dare not open that box of truffles.

There is no scientific evidence that an apple a day keeps the doctor away, but there is empirical proof that biting into a crisp, red apple creates a sensation of feeling, a tingling in the mouth, a highly desirable crunch, an ease of digestion, and a belief that many factors brought this perfect piece of food to my counter for me to enjoy.