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I was in Shanghai when my sister from another mother, Gloria, took me to see an I Ching Master. We walked up the stairs to the small government apartment and knocked on the door, and I’m not sure what I was expecting, but a very thin, grey haired man, opened to let us in. He led me to small table by a window with two seats. He sat in one and I the other, while Gloria retrieved another seat and pulled up near the table.

Then he began talking with his delicate bony fingers moving to an unheard rhythm, while Gloria began writing, both in Chinese. She translated the highlights there and gave me the full version later when we had one of those hours long foot massages. The I Ching Master made many observations and predictions, and some actually happened in the time frame he said they would. My mother died in 2009. The relationship I was in struggled in October of 2011. But what struck me most about what he told me was this: You are a woman, but you have a lot of boy qualities in you.

It is a theme that comes up again and again in my re-discovery of my childhood. A beautiful mother, a beautiful sister, and yet my father and brothers treated me like one of them. A boy. My understanding of the feminine was to wear make-up and girly clothes and shoes – I eschewed defining myself their way in favor of androgyny. Then my body betrayed me and I became more womanly than anyone in my family imagined and so next was this intense focus on my body by everyone else. My curves became the object of desire to all the wrong people – the father of the boy across the street, the father of the birthday girl at the party, the men in stores, the men I passed on the sidewalk.

My first physical reaction was to close in on myself, wear something akin to maternity clothes, whatever it took to hide my body from a gawker. I was nearly 30 years old before I embraced and sought my feminine side. As with any pendulum, I went clear the other way – low cut blouses, high, high heels, make up (eww), and an awkward attempt to look more girlish. Yikes, sometimes this was a hit, and sometimes I deserved a fashion violation (royal blue knickers anyone?)

I straightened my hair, I permed my hair. I colored my hair, and changed the color, that style, I had make up tutorials (ewww), and tried to layer on all that foundation (double ewww), and my only take away from this time in my life was my mother begging me, “At least wear lipstick,” and so I do.

Throughout this physical change from boyish to womanish, I matured into a confident woman. And I noticed something about my interaction with 85% of the men I connected with – I had a lot of men friends. I worked with a lot of men. I hung around men. When the genders separated at a casual house party, I found myself, cigar in one hand, bourbon in the other, in the backyard with the men.

I didn’t and don’t watch sports. I didn’t talk about cars. I admired and admire women. But somehow the company of men was more welcoming to me than the conversations of women. James Baldwin said, “But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other — male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other.” James Baldwin

I believed I embodied fully my yin and yang. Then one day I changed. My desire for the company of men waned. I was witness to the struggle of my women friends and their relationships, their careers, their bodies, their mental wellbeing. I connected with women more than men in these areas. I admired women’s courage and strength. I admired a woman’s tenacity and capacity for joy. And somewhere around 40 years old, I began to embody womanhood in full force.

Yesterday, a friend asked me when was the last time I was in a relationship. I had to think – my last long-term relationship ended in 2011. I’ve dated casually but after being in a contiguous monogamous relationship since I was 20 years old, the freedom of the last years has been a godsend. I’ve raised my son being both mother and father. I’ve built my own career path from the ground floor up multiple times. I’ve spent the better part of my years alone, unencumbered by another’s life intersecting mine – and yet, there are no knowing glances across a room when I hear someone say something that deserves an eye roll, no one to plan a 5-year goal with, no one to think about traveling with, for good or for bad – I’ve been free to be me, and just me.

A well meaning friend once said, “Rachel, it would be hard to be in a relationship with you, because you are such a strong woman.” Pishaw! I readily replied, “Strong women intimidate boys and excite men.” (I have a tee shirt with this on it.) In hindsight, maybe that declaration was also an act of vulnerability.

When I lived on Bayou St. John, my friend Mimi was curating an exhibit about how perception differs from reality. I sat on the front stairs of my bayou home while my partner at that time stood behind me and Marc Pagani took the photo. Wearing a low cut dress: I was the bread winner, the owner of the house, the one who got it built after Katrina. Don’t ever underestimate a woman, whether she appears strong or weak, whether soft or hard, women contain within them a divine source of energy that defies knowing.

Before Steve and I married, there were moments that have now become seared in my memory where he said something, I felt something, and yet we went on as if nothing had happened. One of these moments happened right after we had had sex in his bed on the floor, on Mason Street, with the foggy light of the San Francisco summer, and the noise of the trolley clanging its way up the hill.

“I love you,” he said.

“Will you love me forever,” I said.

“I can’t really say forever. No one knows forever,” he said.

If I close my eyes and try to imagine Rachel, 30 years old, having just left her second husband, living in a place unknown and unfamiliar, lying in bed with a 26 year old who wore 501 jeans and wrinkled shirts, after she had done something familiar – leave one man for another – fall into a relationship whole hog – what was she feeling when he popped the amorous bubble she was floating inside?

She felt fear. She felt that she was not enough. His inability to look romantically into a future together that would never end made her believe he saw her shortcomings too.

Fear is a place I will never go again.

What has changed in my relationship with fear is it does not cripple this Rachel, or make her believe she is not good enough, or powerless, or weak, or stupid. Albeit it had done this many times in the past.

I am grateful to Adam for my therapy. He has helped me look at Rachels from my past who were terrified and paralyzed by fear. Not feeling good enough was the underpinning of most of my fear.

And I remember facing fear for the first time without balking. I was standing in the kitchen of the Hall, on the phone with my attorney. She was telling me something I couldn’t do that I had already done and as she spoke her fear became transparent.

She argued why I should be scared, when she was the one who sounded scared, and I tried to respond but she cut me off, so I tuned out her words and zeroed in on her fear. If this happens, then this will happen, and it could make this happen. Outside the tall windows, kudzo vines were trailing upward and criss crossing the window panes creating a natural shield against the Mississippi sun and heat. We are going to have to make this happen because if not this could happen. I closed my eyes and breathed in slowly, thinking she is so scared about what might happen and I am here, breathing, and I calmly welcomed her fear. So what? I said.

This was a turning point for me. I had made a mistake in one of my Rachel versions where I signed an agreement that I shouldn’t have and for over a decade it cost me sleepless nights, and endless worry, and oh, oh, oh, so much fear. People had warned me to be scared, even my son’s therapist had predicted, “As long as there is breath, you will be in battle,” and I was scared about it all.

Then one day, I just didn’t think that fear was bigger than me anymore, and I met it head on. And that is when I truly became clairvoyant about fear, mine and other people’s, and I knew how to respond.

Is this the part where I let go? I ask now when fear comes calling. This version of Rachel feels damn good enough and often times better than good enough.

During the time of Covid, Susie and Ceil and I started a book club – we read Intuitive Eating, and the best thing we read were The Paramis. Susie had made copies for both Ceil and me (perhaps at her funny Jewish friend’s copy shop in Boston). I sat at my kitchen table, by one of the tall windows where kudzu, having died back in the winter, was now sending young bright green shoots wending upward. Spring had sprung and with it, a worldwide pandemic. Fear inducing, and yet so out of context, it was interesting times.

The Paramis are the ten qualities of character that can be developed to support the path of awakening. What I took away from my reading was this: when the tidal wave is bearing down on you, stand there open arms, in your truth, face it, eyes open, let it wash over you, under you, through you — the wave will pass, and you and your truth will still be standing.

This is how I approach the place called fear. Recognize it, empathize with it, and let it go.

The other fear I’ve known is a place I’ll never go again.

Today, The Writing Room has a visiting writer facilitating the group. Ellen Ann Fentress, a friend of Ellen Morris Prewitt, our writer in residence. I was thinking about The Writing Room in a conversation with Marta Szabo, whose Authentic Writing workshop was a game changer for me many years ago. I came across one of the first essays I wrote in The Writing Room, which coincidentally was about The Writing Room:

What Matters? (Oct 2018)

The moment is fixed in time: I’m sitting at the table by the large picture window in Café Puccini. An aria is playing on the jukebox, which is overshadowed by conversations all around us. Columbus Avenue is alive with early Friday evening activity. The whole night looms ahead of us. Right now, it is the gloaming, when manmade light competes with the waning natural light. The week is ending and the beginning of something new is palpable. My back is to the wall so I can observe each person and notice every table is full. My husband of a few months is at the counter, wearing the wool blazer with tiny emerald checks that we found at a second hand store. The smell of old wool stitched into it. He is ordering red wine for us, which will come in thick glasses. His college buddy, now my roommate, sits across from me adjusting his black framed glasses. The linoleum tabletop is freshly cleaned and still damp in the corners. Evening is arriving and my heartbeat is slowing. Freeze. Right there joy was framed. I felt it. I feel it now. I remember the exact moment so out of step with countless others.  

I’ve had more of those moments. The ones I remember when the world rushes in and I pause and I am able to articulate joy as it arrives. The moments continue to be out of step from the hustle of life. I had one yesterday, I walked through the large blue kitchen into the living room with its tin ceiling on my way to the bedroom and as I passed through, the light, the fall’s slanted light graced the red oilcloth on the lamp table in a certain way, I caught it and said aloud, “Thank you.” I knew enough to welcome joy in its fleeting visit. The poet, Jane Hirshfield wrote, “How fragile we are, between the few good moments.” 

Three months ago, I began a new chapter in my life; I left New Orleans behind and moved to Bay Saint Louis. I don’t want to call this transition magical because it would deny all of the pain and loss that led me to gather up my belongings and make this move. The beginning had everything to do with the ending of so much of what I had clung to for years after a series of major losses. In hindsight I should have, like my dear friend says, let that shit go. But I’m loyal to a fault. I don’t end relationships when I should, I don’t put down my dogs when I should, I don’t give up when I should. I keep on keeping on until every voice in the world shouts it out of me. I’m stubborn that way. 

But this is different. This is the first major endeavor in my life that I have undertaken alone. I’ve been married or with a lover at all the major junctures of my life. I went west with husband #2. I started writing with husband #1. I built a career as an investigative reporter with husband #3. I adopted my son while I was with a lover. But this move, this buying an African American landmark on the Mississippi coast and opening the doors to The Writing Room, to bringing music back to the Hall, to figuring out the bar, and the large blue kitchen and the ancient-ness of the place and the spirits up in here, this was me, alone, placing one clumsy foot in front of the other. 

The day of the closing I sat around the table with the agents, buyers, title people, and when we were done, I drove to my friend’s house where I had spent the night. I was alone. I came inside and started crying – heaving and sobbing. There was no one there to hear but me. And yet, often when joy comes, it arrives quietly, intimately, and it is only me. 

I am sitting now in the Hall, looking out the front door that I have propped open. Today The Writing Room is open, but I am alone. Perhaps this won’t happen, this workshop I had hoped to foster here at the Hall. Maybe it’s The Writing Room for a table of one. That would make me sad because I truly enjoy being in the company of other writers who share their stories, offer feedback to mine, and are willing to expose themselves in ways that most people are not. 

Is there something you want to tell me?

I am a conflict of speed. My go to is to move fast, think fast, and I feel an inner drive to go faster and faster. My body is telling me to slow down, I’m moving too fast, I need to be kinder to the age of my vessel. My mind is telling me to slow down, I’m thinking too fast, I’m turning and spinning too fast, and I need to slow down. My spirit is telling me this is my time to slow down, so enjoy it.

A friend from afar called to chat with me, it was a catch up since we haven’t really spoken in years. As she asked a question and I sped through the details, she would ask, “Pause, Rachel?” She wanted to digest what I was saying and ask a question before going further. She was keeping time, and I was speeding through it in my rush to catch up.

Adam, my therapist, will stop me and say wait, right now, there, how are you feeling? Are you in touch with how you are feeling? We are on zoom but he notices me becoming breathless, my pings of sadness, my anger coming through a tonal change. He catches these nuances as I speed through them, racing to get to the point.

A fortune in a recent cookie said, “Take time to relax.” I taped it to my kitchen window, above the sink, below the hanging plants put there to hide the iron curtain wall erected next door. I can’t see the words because the light is too bright outside, my cataract is getting bigger, and so I squint to see it, to remember what my need is – to slow down, to relax. Ah, yes, I remember.

There has been speculation that perhaps my urgency is a trauma response. I grew up amidst chaos and so there is a part of my central nervous system that is wired for action and reaction. In my ACA meeting, we all speak about this chaotic upbringing, this wiring inside of us, this need for drama because it is so familiar.

I’m not the duck though – the one who is calm on the outside while her legs are paddling up a storm. I am the busy bee. You could see my energy visibly as I move quickly from one task to another, from one thought to another, from one word to another, fast and faster. Many people have asked me to slow down if they are walking with me, biking with me, conversing with me.

Yet, there are so few external stimuli that relax me. It used to be a glass of wine. It used to be strenuous exercise like marathon, triathlon, running. Now I read a book and fall asleep mid-sentence. I go to a movie theater and keep myself from falling asleep in those new comfortable chairs. My speeds are go or sleep.

My heart says slow down, honey, you are running to your grave. Take a beat. Take a breath. Pause. Wait. Feel. There is a wide territory to explore between go and sleep, I need to train my mind, body and spirit to explore this landscape and find out what and who awaits there.

“Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life. Worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and our ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true, at evening will have become a lie.”
Carl Gustav Jung

I am in several weekly groups – parent coaching, virtual parent meetings with other parents like me, ACA meetings, and it seems that none of us were prepared for this phase of our life – the afternoon.

I came across the Jungian idea in a meditation and it resonated. No longer concerned with the accumulation of life, the accretion of things, the pursuit of money, success, accolades, I turned inward to what drives me, what is me, but I did so under duress.

I got to the afternoon on my knees.

At 59 years old, I was at a cross roads in my work and life, I boldly stepped into the job market with a resume and interviews, something I hadn’t done in decades, and I was passed over for candidates with less experience but more morning in their lives. When I learned about the pass from the two jobs, I drove over to City Park and walked into the least populated area and got down on my knees in the still wet grass and said aloud, “What do you want from me?”

It was then that I stepped into the next reality of my life – the 100 Men Hall – where my afternoon has become full of meaning, purpose, community and all of the areas I was seeking but honestly, had no idea it was what I wanted. I wouldn’t have been able to articulate this need or desire. It was only after Faire Magazine asked me a question for an article on artists and makers about myself that I wrote:

My idea for the next chapter of my life was to move into an old dance Hall and write in community with other writers, but instead I became an impresario. It was in my car, windows down, radio playing a familiar song, that a moment of glee caught me by surprise, and I laughed and called myself an impresario for the first time. 

When first I walked through the 100 Men Hall’s doors, I was looking for a place to live and host writer’s workshops away from New Orleans, where neighborhoods were flooding regularly after the 2005 Federal Flood (aka Hurricane Katrina). I needed a new career path, and a friend had sent a link to a Blues Hall for sale in Bay Saint Louis, Mississippi, so I went for a look and ended up buying the Hall. I imagined fellow writers driving the hour from New Orleans for a respite by the breezy Gulf to enjoy weekend-long writing retreats. 

Nothing I had done in the past prepared me to be an impresario, yet everything had. The day I went for the property inspection, a circle of feathers lay on the ground so symmetrical they appeared to have been arranged. “An auspicious sign,” my Yoruba priestess friend told me, who suggested I pour libations in the center of it to thank the ancestors. Two days after moving in, a woman with long dreadlocks and deep roots with the Hall rode up on a rusty bicycle and hugged me by the scraggly oak tree thick with resurrection fern. A train went by that I would later learn rolls by on the regular yet with no discernable schedule and lays on its horn as long as possible as it crosses the intersection. In the grocery aisle on day six of owning the 100 Men Hall, a man lining cans on the shelf said to me, “You the lady bought the Hall. I saw Sam Cooke there when I was little. I snuck in behind my older brother’s legs.” His story now blurs with countless stories of children sneaking into the building to hear musical legends. 

A new plan was being born, not only would this be a great place to raise Tin, it also had rich ties to African American history. I envisioned one day my son would operate the Hall and half-jokingly referred to him as the 101^st man. Follow your spirit not your plans, a friend told me long ago, and here I was whisked into a narrative that is being written for me. We live in a dance Hall, an African American landmark, a rare building on the Mississippi Blues Trail, a place where memory clings like voices in the walls from dark days long ago. At that time, segregation forced Black musicians into a narrow, yet robust performance corridor called the “chitlin circuit,” a historic network of performance spaces that eventually put the Hall on the Mississippi Blues Trail map.

The Hall was built by and for the African American community during the long days of segregation and a Southern pandemic called Jim Crow. Inside, the building tells a more nuanced story than the one you will hear about Mississippi; it’s a story of self-reliance and resilience. A group of civic-minded men gathered together to take care of burials and medical bills in their African American community by establishing first a nonprofit then building a place to gather. The Hall soon became a Black energy center for a community shut out of mainstream white establishments and within its walls joy and friendships were celebrated. 

During the 1940’s through the 60’s, many of the region’s greatest blues, R&B and soul music artists performed at 100 Men Hall. This Hall was a regular stop for artists working on the famed “chitlin’ circuit” – James Brown, Ray Charles, Etta James, Sam Cooke. It was in the heyday of New Orleans rhythm and blues music that performers as legendary as Big Joe Turner, Etta James and Guitar Slim to James Booker, Professor Longhair and Deacon John, a who’s who of musical stars, played the Hall. 

My story, though, is always getting ahead of me. The vision of writer’s retreats, writing in a historical building, has given way to resurrecting the nonprofit originally started in 1894 by those men. I would continue the historical (almost “sacred”) tradition of presenting live music on its stage and gathering the community. An impresario was born. The community would rise up to meet me, bringing an energy vibrant enough to carry me through a barrage of hurricanes, tornadoes, pandemic shutdowns and small-town politics. 

To know the feeling of rejoicing in sorrow is nothing strange to me.

Over the front doors of the Hall now hangs this quote by James Carroll Booker III, the brilliant and outrageously talented pianist who the Hall pays homage to in our annual fundraiser, Booker Fest, every Labor Day weekend. A writer’s material derives from experience and the story of the Hall and my/our story are wending towards a future moment when I will sit back to write and recollect how my son and I came to live in a historical Black dance hall in a small coastal town in the deep South. For now, the show begs to go on.  

My dreams are always of flight, but my reality is always to freeze. I’ve been saying to my concerned friends that I am frozen, waiting for the sign of what my action should be, guarding my energy so I know where, when and how to strike.

My friend stopped by yesterday in fear flight – she is riding the roller coaster guarding her activities, guarding her speech – she is guarded, guarding and on guard.

Shouldn’t we be en garde?

We are all vulnerable. What a year to pick vulnerability as my theme.

I follow IKAR and yesterday was listening to Rabbi Hannah Jensen as she sounded the alarm to those of us in flight or freeze mode, she was speaking to me, to you, to us – don’t go numb.

Connect – Join – Serve

In our ACA meeting tonight, we talked about red flags and the familiar way we all ignore them. And then one person said that a writer had written about all the lovely red flags flying all around. The image cracked me up.

I’m trying to find the humor in the moment.

I struggle.

All the red flags flying all around
All the red flags flying all around

Yesterday in a zoom meeting someone mentioned this poem:

Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
~ Galway Kinnell

And then I got in bed, and read, and started falling asleep to words, and then I turned off the light. I pulled the covers up and began settling into a deeper breathing. I welcomed sleep.

And then I woke up two hours later. Some of the what is was circling my brain. Why this, why that? I thought of old wounds. I thought of new wounds. I thought of why I suffer because I am not letting whatever what is is, instead I am wondering why it was.

A friend has been caring for a severely special needs boy whose home life has been a wreck. Another friend wound up in the hospital. Someone I know who lied so many times so long ago continues to reach from beyond with more lies and manipulation.

How do you go to sleep with what is? What is is what I want (to accept) and yet, here I am at 1:13 am wondering why it is so. I began my Thích Nhat Hanh breathing – I’m breathing in, I’m breathing out. I turned to my right side and cradled my pillow. I turned to my left side and now was thinking about things that have not happened that could.

I lay on my back with my fists clenching the covers. Surely, something had stirred the machine, and so now instead of ridding myself of my thoughts, I began unearthing them, looking for the root cause of this disturbance that had flared. I am still reading Jon Fosse’s The Other Name, it’s a tedious book to plow through at night so to treat myself, I read another chapter of Margaret McMullan’s Aftermath Lounge before I got in bed.

When it comes to reading, I’m not monogamous, instead I have two to three books going at any given time.

Was it remembering Katrina as the 20th anniversary looms, was it my friend who is so good and kind and cares so much for children who suffered for a child, is it my son who deserves to have a clearer path to what is rightfully his, where was my tossing and turning coming from?

After an hour, I picked up yet another book, an easy reading romance novel also by my bedside, and distracted myself with the mindless drama of other people so that I might sleep.

I woke hungry for whatever what is and the delight of hearing those words strung together on that call yesterday, a call with others like myself who are also seeking ways out of suffering and into accepting – whatever what is is is what I want.

In times when everyone wants a piece of you for their own gain, become more yourself.

After a few years hiatus, I’m back to the blog.

And while you’re at it – check out my niece, Lexi’s blog too.

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 lit up and she said I had a dream about you! I dreamt I had come back to Bay Saint Louis and was walking around and you had been beamed up and it left a vacuum in the community.

My first thought was beamed up where? I love dreams and analyzing them. I fell deep into my friend, Rodger Kamenetz’s dream world where he, “inspired by the focus on dreams in both Tibetan and Jewish culture,” wrote The History of Last Night’s Dream and was interviewed by Oprah on her Soul Series. Rodger gets to the heart of the dream.

My other friend who sat next to me said, I had a dream about you. Your bald head had an image of the brain drawn on it, but instead of the actual regions named, the names were more beautiful and the whole drawing was mesmerizing.

I became aware of these dreams of me before I headed to the panel with author, Lisa Genova, who spoke about her new book, Maddy, about a woman who is bipolar. Genova is the author of Still Alice and Remember, both books about the mind. Genova has delved into how the brain rewrites memory and how people with Alzheimer disease and bipolar disorder view the world and gives us their perspective.

And I wondered why my friends were dreaming of me – do they know something I don’t? And I remembered what Rodger told me – that dreams embody all facets of ourselves, something Adam says as well when I recount a dream to him. The dream of Tin lying on the bed next to me and my asking him if he wanted me to teach him to drive? Well, both are me, and I am learning to drive, and to have different modes of being, lighter, freer, less in control.

My friend who saw me beamed up perhaps saw herself, an artist and community participant, now gone from a community she was strongly tied to. My other friend is fascinated by the brain and its states of being, and perhaps she transferred her own curiousity onto the only bald head she is familiar with – mine.

I know the first thing that registered for me was fear in hearing their dreams of me, and it’s the feeling that Rodger talks about. Why fear? Perhaps it is approaching my 66th birthday and considering mortality, and learning during our Chinese New Year celebration that the Chinese Pig meets with financial, relationship and health setbacks in 2025. Chani Nicholas says 2025 is a year for tending to your secret dreams if you are born under the sign of Taurus.

I know future thinking creates anxiety, and I know dreams and fortune telling and astrology and all of the desire to know the future fall short of actually pinpointing what happens next.

I came home from this full-day seminar a little uneasy despite a beautiful day outside and an enriching day inside. I learned Tin had dislocated his shoulder playing basketball, and this also made me feel uneasy, not being with him, to being able to tend to him myself and see if he was okay.

I sat on the couch and drank a hot cup of tea and read. This soothed me.

I focused on my breathing. I did my physical therapy. I drank my hot tea. And I calmed myself to sleep.