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Yesterday was a rough day and it left a sort of kathunk in my chest. We were supposed to go to a friend’s house for dinner because another friend was passing through from Peru. I was close to canceling. But instead, I went and soon I was transported into another space and time, a much needed other space. As we sat on the balcony watching the pink gaudy sky turn dark, looking out over the rooftops of New Orleans lovely architecture, enjoying the unusual cool breeze, we spoke about Peru and earthquakes, and New Orleans and Katrina, and about how there is so much to do and yet nothing gets done and how opportunities are lost.

All of this was discussed in Spanish.

I have so few opportunities to speak my father’s native tongue with my dad gone, uncles now passed, my grandparents gone, and the younger generation in my family rarely using Spanish. So one of the pleasures of being with T is that she brings me back into a world once so familiar, where people think a little differently, speak in another language, and have jokes that are only funny if you have a working knowledge of the culture.

This morning I smelled something noxious in the backyard and feared there was a gas link or something chemical burning. Turns out there was, only it was at the Dow Chemical Plant that had unleashed some of their lovely product into the air. How would you like to be Dow Chemical – the very name Dow Chemical sends shudders and expectations of foul odor into my my body.

On Sunday, I went to my friend’s dedication of a swing set she had erected in Audubon Park for her daughter who passed six months ago. Today, another friend is in ICU near losing her child. Each of these horrible situations makes my insides feel mangled and an existential emptiness rises up inside me.

A good friend in high school died in a car accident on her way home from a party. She was with her fiance. Her father, an atheist, blamed himself for the rest of his life and converted to Catholicism.

For me, in a life searching for meaning, trying to find lessons from challenges, I have learned this – WHAT THE FUCK? – losing a child is the worst possible scenario.

An old highschool friend contacted me on Facebook and said about my mother:

I have always remembered how beautiful she was..she has always been in my heart…she was really good to me.

I saw in my yoga book “Beauty is a remembrance of the whole,” by John Friend – it was a poignant statement.

Michele was speaking about the full or poonam moon and how it is a like a large mirror that reflects our image back at us. It followed a thread from this morning, when I was sifting through the NYT and came across the article on Happiness and then read some of the comments, I stumbled on one, from an older gentlemen who was regaling his beautiful life with his young family and 35 year younger wife but he said, I don’t know what to do about those moments of sadness from my past.

I wanted to write back and say, hey, they are one and the same.

What I would tell this man in truth is that to live is to experience anguish and regret, and joy is amplified by knowing sorrow. When I think sometimes of my past, I have a huge elephant that sits on my chest who wants to crush me until it squeezes out the last tear but then I catch a deep breath and next thing you know I am on top of the elephant and riding high into the sunset.

Joy – sorrow, happiness – sadness, they all come together to make a whole and they are the foundations of my beautiful life.

There is a great article in the NYT about happiness – not the article itself which is just saying that Pew did a study on happiness and the results of their survey are not surprising – friends and financial security make you happy. The best part of the article are actually the readers’ comments. One of my favorite is the following because it is what I have done, refresh and renew and reward those friends who are good for me, and I recall what Rick Reynolds, a comedian, said one time, he said every year he goes through his list of friends and cuts out anyone who has been annoying:

I would argue that it is not the act of spending time with people that makes you happy, it is the act of spending time with happy, accepting people that makes you happy. Ditch the people in your lives that are judgmental, show no sincere happiness for your personal achievements, and generally lack any good will toward others. You’ll be happier for it.

If you can’t access the article it is under the New York Times’ Health section,

June 30, 2009, 6:50 AM

What Makes Us Happy

Last night, I spent time on the telephone catching up about friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in a while and there was something wistful in the air – air so thick because it represented another piece of this large life I have been living – life is short, but it’s wide – yet there are dimensions of your life, which are not on the daily path, where people and places live in darkness until someone shines a light in their direction. And yes, those people age, and yes, those people harbor regret and sorrow, and yes, some things/people/places have changed irrevocably – yet, they are all part of your life, happy and sad, short or wide, old layered on new, and how you see and how you feel is what is in you.

Today, the meditation from the Tao te Ching is about how opposing forces may coexist:

Page 2

When people see some things as beautiful
other things become ugly.
When people see some things as good,
other things become bad.

Being and non-being create each other.
Difficult and easy support each other.
Long and short define each other.
High and low depend on each other.
Before and after follow each other.

Therefore the Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
Things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

I got a good eight hours of sleep last night but the morning seemed to come a lot quicker than I expected because all night I was dreaming I was in surgery and I kept having to be rolled into the operating room and I was concerned because everyone seemed to be taking the entire procedure a little too lightly. I kept telling myself not to worry but frankly I was.

This is typical of the anxiety dreams I have been having lately which have ranged from bulls with shaved off horns chasing Loca and me having to rescue her to me rolling around on a gurney not sure about whose care I am under.

Realizing yes it is Monday, and I have to get up, I went into auto pilot to brush my teeth and put my clothes on to take Loca out. One nice surprise – cloud cover – which took a little of the heat off even if the humidity was up around 2000%. We went over to the Big Lake, the new improvement that City Park has done on the right of the museum, and we walked that new path where the black swans like to hang out.

As I was returning to the house, I took a deep breath and said, okay, let’s roll. And so it began – a teenager who is forgetful, a household unused to disorder, an appointment cancelled because one person forget to send a reply:

WHAT HAPPENED TO STARTING EACH DAY WITH A SUN SALUTATION, RINGING THE BELL MY FRIEND FROM INDIA GAVE ME AND TAKING A MOMENT TO MEDITATE ON BEING, AND GREETING THIS DAY, THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE?

Poof – it’s Monday!

I have a painting that hangs above my desk of a woman – no one I know – but a woman who posed for a friend and artist (Randall Sexton) – and for some reason the first time I saw this painting, I knew I had found my muse. She’s a robust woman, with a nondescript island foreignness about her looks and the colors – turquoise, navy, green and plum – are colors that put me in mind of my tropical past.

A neighbor and fellow writer just started a blog using the poems of Emily Dickinson as her muse for contemplating and writing. I thought good idea to stand on the shoulders of a genius in order to see farther.

In a lot of instances, I feel inspired to write and in a lot of other instances, I feel like I have absolutely nothing to say. Or at least, nothing new.

So today, I’d like to borrow from my friend’s daily habit and begin a meditation on the Tao te Ching. Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching (pronounced Dow Deh Jing) was written over 2,500 years ago but seems as current as if it were coming across Twitter. What is the Tao? Well it’s a book of poetry, maybe, or a philosophy, sometimes, or perhaps it is a meditation, on life.

Page 1

The tao that can be told
is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named
is not the eternal Name.

The unnameable is the eternally real.
Naming is the origin
of all particular things.

Free from desire, you realize the mystery.
Caught in desire, you see only the manifestations.

Yet mystery and manifestations
arise from the same source.
This source is called darkness.

Darkness within darkness.
The gateway to all understanding.

Caught in desire you see only the manifestations – when you fill in the blank of I want ____ – you no longer really know what it is you want. This is a trick bag I have often avoided like the plague. I was never one to wish for ____ for fear _____ would be my undoing. I don’t cast a penny into a fountain and say, “I want a baby.” I throw it to another place – happiness, health, love – which come in many manifestations.

The interesting thing about family is that you love them despite them. Take for example my own mother, just speaking to friends recently who are in the tormented years of being parents to teenagers, I realize my mother must have gone through hell with six teenagers coming up in our household. Pure hell. So the very fact that she stuck it out with us for all these years, means that we owe it to stick it out with her.

But despite our best intentions, life isn’t always so simple and easy going. Yesterday, when the kettle was about to start whistling, T and I headed out to get a beer, only even the decision of where to have it was as fragile and loaded as what preceded it, but once we started walking in a direction, the distance from the house opened up a new perspective for both of us.

We walked across the bayou to Nonna Mia and sat down in the misted courtyard with the bright colored umbrellas and right away, the waiters attended to us, they put the fans on high and created a nice little oasis in the midst of one of the hottest days of the summer – so hot it was causing everything to roil to a boil – and what transpired was a calming, a nice attitude adjustment.

By the end of the evening, when the fireworks were outside and no longer inside, and bright colored lights seemed so close you could touch them, our 4th of July turned out to be wonderful. The good old-fashioned American holiday with friends over, watching fireworks on the porch both near and far, and homemade apple pie replete with mini American flags to wave.

America, America, god shed his grace on thee…