Dangermond.org

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.

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 gotten to know others a little bit more. These connections energize me. Whoever you allow into your world, expands it.

In the last 30 days, I started blogging again after years away.

Headspace-wise I am in one of the best places I’ve been in my life.

I dove into a collage book during a snow day. We had a historic snowfall here on the Gulf Coast and were forced to watch this miracle from inside the coziness of our homes, it gave me an opportunity to step out of my routine and create something new.

In these 30 days, my challenges with my son were about letting go and trusting he has the foundation he needs to move into his independence. My other challenge was to keep those at bay who do not serve this process; whose ignorant miasma could derail his development.

Other challenges – those people. The Tucson Air BnB owner who held my money when the snow storm forced me to cancel my plans – her venality was a disappointment and a lesson not to trust people you don’t know.

Another challenge – a voice from the past who carried the same message of chaotic thinking and accusation. Lord Today.

Also, the snow I marveled at also impacted my time with my son.

I had a dawning of the facts, that this aging in my body is screwing with my energy field and keeping me from moving at the break neck speed to which I am accustomed.

The slow down is real.

In the last 30 days, I learned that the years, months, weeks, days, hours, and minutes in which I have read, discussed, watched, learned and grown spiritually and emotionally have helped me know more of who I am, what I want, what I desire, what I think, and have made me brave enough to open wider to vulnerability.

Vulnerability – my glorious theme of the year.

In the last 30 days, I’ve learned that not everyone deserves my story. I’ve learned to be patient to other people’s stories unfolding before I judge or react to them. I’ve learned that a healthy body deserves my attention and intention. I’ve learned that desire deserves expression. I’ve learned that putting myself in a creative head space gives me access to lighter parts of my being and this translates into everything else I do.

And most importantly, I’ve learned I don’t have to do anything, I don’t have to be what people want me to be, and even sometimes what I want me to be, I can just be and breathe and that is good enough (my other glorious catch phrase for the year).

I’ve said this before but I’ve learned how grateful I am that I am rich in friendships. Throughout most of my adult life, I have been surrounded by artists, musicians, thinkers, and creative souls who offer my life texture and meaning. My only hope is to learn from them and from those who think differently, behave bizarrely, and take radical action. These live wires are my north star.

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 to fight your own damn war / ‘Cause we don’t wanna fight no more. He was singing the same battle cry of Bob Marley’s War – War in the east, war in the west / war up north, war down south / war, war, rumours of war and Edwin Starr’s War – War, huh, yeah / What is it good for? / Absolutely nothing, uhh.

War then and now was not the answer.

I want to go back in my thoughts and see if this was groundbreaking when I watched it, see if I felt the energy of a revolution on TV, when I think back, I can recreate the feeling of excitement but I didn’t see it back then as transformative, as counter culture, as risky and new thinking.

It seems new only in hindsight.

When I was a young girl and the world was on fire all around me, I did not fully understand what was happening and what might happen next. There was the threat of a nuclear missile from Russia, there was the horror of the Vietnam War, there was Cambodia, Watergate – so much blowing up all around. Today, I’m a woman, the world is on fire again – demagogues running countries and resistance rising as the only true part of our shared history.

A half century after SNL launched, I have lived many lives through many relationships, through different cities, through too many demagogues and the only peace I have known is the one I have cultivated inside me. If there is a trend to point to, the nearer we get to the turnstile of change, things fall apart and happen at a clip, and you cannot fight the change that is coming, but rest assured, you will be part of the good things that are created.

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 you how to drive?”

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 the next line of elders. I think I awkwardly voiced this thought to them. I wasn’t necessarily thinking of them dying so much as once their line aged, my line would be next.

The back of my car held three different bouquets of silk and plastic flowers that I accumulated from having not gone to my mom’s grave for nearly a year. I also had metal flowers and a metal red cardinal I had bought in Texas on last year’s road trip. Last year was a wing ding doozy, so I had not found the time to make this traditional three-hour round trip.

My mom died a week before I met my son, so I have not visited her grave without him by my side. We would go for Mother’s Day and her birthday, December 28th. This is another reason why I have been away so long, because last year my son was on fire and it was difficult to put it out long enough to drag him along. I was supposed to be in Arizona visiting him at his school, but the snowstorm cancelled that trip, and now here I was going to my mom’s grave without him for the first time.

I have fond memories of visiting my MawMaw when I was a child. My parents would drop off my sister and me, and we would spend nearly the entire summer there on my MawMaw’s dairy farm.

My mom’s younger sister is ten years older than me, so I feel as if my aunt and I grew up together. She and my uncle and I sat around the kitchen table yesterday as their great great grandson dashed in and out of the house. My uncle said they were married at 17 years of age and ten months later had their first child. I asked what it was like to always have children under your feet. My uncle said he’d had to pray because it had not been easy, and he had not always known what to do. That’s about as vulnerable AF an answer as you might expect from a man in his late seventies.

Children, grandchildren, great grandchildren are each their own energy force bringing unsolvable and novel challenges – most of which you don’t want! You don’t learn from raising one how to handle the other. It’s a dynamo of edge-of-the-seat action and response.

Just then, Chai ran up to the outside window dangling a dead mouse by its tail.

Lord Today!

My aunt, though close in age, has taken on the role of matriarch in my mom’s family. My MawMaw is gone. My mom is gone. My aunt fills those shoes naturally.

I left to go over to my mom’s grave, which sits near Thigpen Road (her maiden name is Thigpen), in front of her deceased brother’s house. His wife and her great grandson take care of the small graveyard that holds two large camellia bushes on either end with a chain link fence that squares off the gravesites along with my mother’s, my uncle’s, my cousin’s, and my MawMaw’s graves — with room for mine one day.

I next drove over to my uncle’s house where as I was looking for the driveway to turn in, I saw a sign that said ASSHOLE painted on a metal rail staked into the ground by the next door property where other cousins live.

I visited with my uncle and his wife and grown son. My cousin is a photographer who captures bugs, slugs, and mushrooms in intricate detail. We all (the elders) traded ailments and remedies for nearly an hour before I left.

I learned my uncle had painted the sign because one of my cousins had unmercifully cut back a row of old growth azaleas that lined Old Choctaw Road. Unfortunately the metal rail doesn’t stay put so it is hard to tell if the sign is pointing to the neighbors as the asshole or my uncle, my aunt told me.

It warmed my heart to know that even as you are entering the real old age years, there is still enough passion to warrant a sign painting. The last few days of dealing with my own known assholes endeared me to my uncle’s cause.

I drove home listening to a nostalgic song I play every time I head there and back – John Denver’s Back Home Again. The song hits me every time. The farm produced profound memories for me as did my MawMaw – one of the kindest humans I have met, and memories of my mom and her vulnerable beauty, well, it’s all a cry fest every time I go.

Hey, it’s good to be back home again
Sometimes this old farm feels like a long lost friend
Yes, and hey, it’s good to be back home again

I drove home a different way than I had come, so the road seemed new and the way back felt hopeful. Before I left, I had hugged everyone tighter than I normally do because I ache for them and for me, for our shared history and lost love ones, for all we lost, are losing, as much as for all we have gained in walking the earth at the same time.

I feel vulnerable to our connection to each other.

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 a child when things did not go his way.

You’d think that would be enough, but wait there’s more. I went to a matinee to see the Bob Dylan movie and before the film began, the theater previewed horror movie after horror movie, people dismembered, bloody, banging themselves to death until I, too, was shaking in my seat. My sensitivity to gore is acute. I got up, not certain what to do, but knew I didn’t want to stay for more.

I spoke to the manager who said they have no control over the previews. I then got a refund and went to my car and waited till I was calm. I drove to the Post Office to mail a book to a friend and saw my friend Linda there. I was sitting at the desk about to write in the card when she came over and sat with me. We laughed about our day, the absurdities of the mundane, the insanities of people making choices that are head scratchers, the desire to be alone in our house and not have to confront other people’s mishegas. And yet, there we sat, connecting at the P.O.

I am vulnerable to other people every day, every interaction, every communication. The awareness is helpful but it doesn’t block or prevent me from being dumped on. In a clearing of the air, I held all of today’s affronts in abeyance till I finally decided to respond. It was Adam’s voice in my head: tell them what you need, tell them what you want. So calmly, I responded to each interaction, I called the corporate office of the theater to make a complaint. If they don’t know, they don’t know. Now they know. I responded to the Tucson woman that her venality is on her, I won’t hold that for her. I protected my child. I met the other’s lashing with humor.

I was done with responding, trying to connect, and being vulnerable to half-formed adults. I went back to reading my book, Jon Fosse’s The Other Name, which is described as hypnotic and truly that is the perfect word for Fosse’s prose about an artist and his doppleganger and the choices we make in our life and why.

And what about my choices in life? I cast a wide net, so naturally it leaves room for the emotionally and spiritually immature to get swept in. I know better than to write myself as the victim of my own story, so it is with awareness that I witness and take a beat and a breath before responding to these folks. It used to be very easy to goad me into a reaction because I have my own childhood wounds that love to bleed just like anyone else’s. It is tender loving care that allows me to hold my wounds gently, lovingly, with breath, and know where I began and end.

… and sometimes to wrap myself in a force field when it gets too turbulent out there.

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 the suffering is resisting the threshold of change. And change appears, over and over. I wonder how many times I need to hear, learn, feel this in this lifetime?

My vulnerability path today is to try to unravel what was supposed to happen and did not. I should be in Tucson, waiting to pick up Tin tomorrow, instead I’m in Bay Saint Louis, trying to recalibrate my never having left. All around me are the notes and signs I was leaving here to go there, now I’m here with my mind there. I feel vulnerable to melancholy, to not completing what I set out to do, to missing Tin and straddling two worlds.

So this weekend, I am clearing a path, instead of the road to Tin, I will tend the flowers on my mother’s grave, which I have neglected for too long. I’ll free my voice trying to unearth deep seated beliefs that close me off and allow vulnerability in.

I have been trying to learn how to fly for quite some time. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember. I am uncomfortable with change, especially plans going awry. So this is an exercise in listening. Today, I will follow my spirit, not my plans, which means anything is possible.

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 to another person’s concept of fairness.
You allow yourself to be vulnerable when protecting your child.
You allow yourself to be vulnerable to hints of largess by people who offer no means of delivery.

So much vulnerability exists and so little time.

Oh, and I have a knee jerk reaction to someone asking: Rachel, why do these things happen to you? No, no, I do not like this question. There are no answers, themes, centralizing energies around what happens to me – good, bad or indifferent. [Unless it’s all lollipop goodness than, yes, of course, the trend is my friend.] But when I am vulnerable to someone’s venality or manipulation, no, I don’t have answers for why people do what they do or why or if I attract these types of people. The same questions could arise at why I attract wonderful people who are generous and kind.

Last year, in Oxford, The Oliver Hotel completely wronged me – they raised their room rate from $140 to $1800 for a reservation I made months in advance and then cancelled all my reservations for the next three months when I balked. Customer service – no ma’am. At their mercy, vulnerable, I found other places to stay – The Treehouse Gallery and Fox Fire Ranch and my friend’s brother’s brand new condo – so many good places appeared from The Oliver’s greed. So many silver linings and memories for a lifetime.

This year, a friend of a friend with a Tucson Air BnB said she’d rent to me off platform for my January and February visits. When she text me that the roofers would be there my entire stay in January, I said, ok, I understand, even though I knew roofers banging all day would disrupt my tranquility and writing time.

WHOOSH, out of the blue, a rare Southeastern snow storm blanketed the south the likes of which haven’t been seen since 1963; the storm cancelled all flights; I couldn’t fly out from any location. Oh no, trusting this friend of a friend, I had paid her in full for my stay.

Her response, “You didn’t book on Airbnb.”

Ah, the vulnerability of trust, so easily eroded.
The vulnerability of outrage, so easily exposed.

I’m leaning into my propensity for silver linings with new rules:

– never pay all of your money up front
– friends of a friend are not your friend
– don’t accommodate other people’s problems (roofers), because
they will not accommodate yours (extreme weather event)
– there are always silver linings

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 remorse in other people. One day, I was putting up tables in the Hall and I said to my friend who was helping me, do you ever have a day where you remember all the slights against you and you just feel grudgy?

“Oh my God, Rachel, never. Why would you think that,” she said.

I was quiet the rest of the morning. If you know, you know, is what I thought. I think about people who have hurt me and not shown any remorse. I’ve told each person they hurt me, so it isn’t as if they don’t know, and yet no show of remorse. Sometimes I collect my box of other people’s non-remorse and open it and peer inside and wonder why?

I do not wonder why they have no remorse – they are dead to me – I wonder why their insult or slight or intentional harm was able to prick me. I know now that I have not had appropriate boundaries in my life, and for the love of God, being a parent has helped me to confront this genuine flaw of mine. And to correct it.

Would you tell your secrets to someone who doesn’t protect you? Would you bring someone into your house who would harm your family? Would you spend time with someone who has no facility with the truth? The people who drain you don’t always come with warning signs, and if you don’t have boundaries, these people push your boundaries without a second thought – they get so used to your generosity, they don’t realize they are overstepping (Brene Brown has covered this idea many times over).

How much time do you spend replaying conflict in your head, sure, it is time wasted. I do think every now and then you might allow yourself to take out the box of remorse – other people’s – remind yourself that those people suck and to hold your boundaries against future invasions.

I do this so that it keeps me focused on people who uplift and support me. Yay them.