The Middle of Nowhere
Who said the middle of nowhere is the center of someone else’s universe? I don’t know but I hear ya.
Recently, someone in D.C. said that in a poll of those making under $75k a year, 100% said their financial situation has grown worse in the last four years. There you have it. Here in a city where poverty and neglect are as common as crawfish, I’ve entered the hard times with the rest of them. I left this city to chase my fortune in 1990 and returned in 2005 on top of the world, and had some serious Come to Jesus’s since then that have left me hustling – not working – hustling like a two bit pimp.
This is the reason why my new refrain is “I’m exhausted” and I’m not the lone ranger here because at least I get to work from home, I think of the other parents who are working two and three jobs to put food on their children’s table and I mean grueling work – cleaning toilets, mopping floors, stepping and fetching and what do I have to complain about? Recently, my prayers for work were answered, only they were answered all at once and that has put me in a cyclone of having to do, and getting it done, and yelling.
Yes, I’m reduced to yelling STELLA about 1,500 times a day and I’m yelling at Tin because he doesn’t LISTEN and I’m yelling at myself in the mirror about a body that is not responding to exercise and just lumps there, lumping along and getting doughier as I watch myself disappear in the full length mirror. I’m a YELLER. A HOLLERER. A WAILER. And I know that just going back to my meditation would help stem the tide, and yet, I can’t find my way back right now because I’m too damn busy to think clearly.
In the era when I was on top of my game, sitting in a hotel in New York, listening to all these powerful women in media, the keynote speaker was sitting next to me – attractive – we both were, our hair nicely blown out, our Prada shoes touching – she said the best time in a woman’s life is when she had let go of the trapeze and before she caught the next one – it was that interstitial space, up in the air, where all things are possible. And yet, here I am, having been forced to let go of the death grip of my old bar, and I’m HOLDING MY BREATH, when I’m not SCREAMING, and so I’m still not seeing it because it’s the bar that’s coming that is going to save me.
And still I have faith – and that is a miracle in and of itself.
