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I went to see my therapist, E, today to work through some of the uglies of the past six months and wala, I feel better. I haven’t seen her for a while. Probably the most important thing I got out of talking to her was permission to grieve my mother and also permission to not have to be strong all the time. Yes, okay, so you know this already and don’t need a therapist, well you know what, I know it too, but sometimes I need a therapist to give me a non-biased opinion.

After months of heightened worry when my mom went in the hospital, I actually felt at least one monkey jump off my shoulder – the one that felt like I was holding her up. The reality of her situation though is that I’ve been sitting in the middle of nowhere after more than three months in critical care because when I would cry over grief of her gone, I would realize she was still here and while I held no hope for a recovery, there were some who did. So I felt like I was living in a quagmire of emotional pulls, going downward.

As the Jewish New Year approaches I am setting the stage for how I will observe it this year. Last year, for the first time in a thousand years, I didn’t observe Yom Kippur because I was squeezed between business trips and so I was sort of observing from my hotel room, but it felt like a cheat. This year, as my usual custom, I will turn off all phones, computers, televisions, radios, etc and I will be by myself and spend the day in meditation on the year that went before and the year that is ahead. I will push out any lingering negative thoughts that are clinging for dear life and if I can’t banish them completely, I’ll write them down. I’ll also list my imaginings for the year that is ahead of me.

This is the great thing about my religion, this part, this soulful period in the fall when we ring in a New Year that is tempered by a ten day period till a fasting day – a period when we are reflecting on our actions and others and forgiveness. It’s sort of our confession only it comes once a year.

In yoga, we talked about how stress builds and builds and how the body and mind learns to deal with stress and it becomes programmed to receive stress and anticipates it. But how yoga practice helps you develop a more beneficial stress, the challenge of a pose, the push to have your mind believe you can when your tape, your stress loop, is saying you can’t. It’s very freeing to enter a pose that you know is ridiculously hard and then hold it when you feel every bit of your muscles telling you they can’t, won’t, shouldn’t – and then you take your last deep breath and you come out of the pose and your body just learned it can, it will, and why not.

All of these steps towards keeping the good and spinning off the bad is working towards a better place.

Sort of redundant but this means good good day and it is a greeting Jews deliver to each other around this time of year – the high holidays – this Friday night is the eve of Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish Near Year and literally means when we begin anew. Well, I’m ready for some newness that is for sure. And so the year 5770 begins this weekend and is followed ten days later by Yom Kippur – a day of fasting and forgiving.

This is also a special time to reflect on the year that has passed and to reinvigorate for the year that is beginning.

The best way to do this is with honey cakes! And we are getting ours at Brocato’s – the oldest Italian bakery in the city.

I was reading in Urban Bark that you should sometimes give your dog the walk the dog wants. So yesterday evening I let Wolfie have the sniff me to heaven tour and this morning I allowed Loca off the leash to do somersaults in the mud puddle in the park with a big once white sheep dog. Everyone had a swell time.

The artists have returned to City Park to paint the live oaks with their heavy branches and moss dripping down as well as the pre WPA bridges that cross the lagoons and the barn red structure that sits by the old meeting hall. They have their wooden easels and oil paints and their hats and big white canvases all set up. Another sign that summer is over.

We were due to have yet another storm pass through New Orleans early this week but it never came. Instead there has been this thickness in the air that can best be described by trying to imagine you got up and took five Valiums and then walked out your door. That’s about what it feels like. But there is something about this humid, thick, air that has its benefits. Hair and skin stay moist even though aging is drying you from the inside out. Also, it calms you down because you can’t get too excited when you feel like you have a twenty pound wet wool blanket on you.

I went to step class today and I felt like I had to kick start each move to get going. I remember when I used to fly around that step. But the truth is it’s not just the weather, it’s me – I’m out of shape. Blech. The good news is I’m getting back in shape. Yay!

I think the thing about so many deaths and illnesses being the main topic of summer when it was supposed to be the summer of a birth is that it makes you become a miser of your time and you start counting up your years and your possible years left and those around you and their years left and soon before you know it you have this very limited view of the world.

The Mayans believed that you could live many lives within one lifetime and I know that I have. And sometimes when I’m lying awake at night before going to sleep I feel as if those lives line up symmetrically and make me deeper, wider, and heavier in a good way.

Recently though I’ve been waking up with nightmares near about every night because it seems in each of those parallel lives there is a crack and something as profound as possibly losing your mother seems to pry open each of those cracks and expose the underbelly of those short but well lived lives and that’s when it gets scary.

What if? You say to yourself.

Well, last night as I lay whimpering in the midst of yet another nightmare, I thought about the upcoming high Jewish holidays and how Yom Kippur is when you forgive others and ask forgiveness, but it’s also a time to forgive yourself.

There is a line in Caddyshack where Bill Murray is teaching the caddy how to play golf and he tells him, you have to get down, and “be the ball.” You got to get your head in the game was what a 7-year-old told me once when we were playing Fish and I was losing. Today, my housekeeper said you have to project to the universe what you want to get back.

I was tilting towards another entry on death – Patrick Swayze, three more people diagnosed with cancer, and a distant relative on her death bed. Good grief! But I said this is a time of transition, things are changing – people are dying off and new ones are being born and conceived. There could be a sperm floating to an egg right now destined to make a baby that is headed towards my arms. Wow! Now, that’s awesome.

There’s also the get down on your knees and thank your lucky stars for just everything you have. Eyes that see, ears that hear, lips that speak. Two feet to carry you where you want to go. Two hands to hold your loved one. Dogs who look at you adoringly. A cat who comes home every night. A home to house you and your loved ones in safety and beauty. A bayou that always pulls my eyes to it, like a painting that never goes stale. A city to call home that resurrected itself from a 100-year flood.

I could keep going but I think you get the drift. Be grateful for what you have and if you spend your time thinking about all of your bounty and appreciating it, that leaves little time for dwelling on things outside of your control.

My mom’s current condition has me blue. But I’m grateful for the years I’ve had with her, especially on returning to New Orleans the last five years. My two uncles told me the same – that they came home a few years before their mother died (my grandmother) and those were quality years that they are so grateful to have had.

So again I say to the universe I am mighty blessed and let me look outside of myself and see what I can do for those who are not feeling so lucky today?

We had a sub for Michele in yoga today, and she talked a lot about how our thoughts tend to get in this circular pattern and we focus in on one thing and then endlessly analyze and rehash it – whether it’s somebody we felt did us a wrong and we play out all the scenarios in which we respond or also simple things like I need to go the gym, I need to go to the gym loops. The thing is that yoga is about forcing yourself out of these thought loops so you can witness it going round and round but not participate in it.

I had an occasion to do this when my friend approached me on the bayou yesterday late afternoon, when I was out with Wolfie and Loca and enjoying the pink puffy cloudy sky. My friend prodded me about the ducks. For a moment, I thought it was out of interest in wanting to know my point of view, but quickly I realized it was more about wanting to kickstart the loop, so I stood back, and just witnessed it, and in the end didn’t get sucked into the duck controversy as it went spinning round and round.

This morning when I was walking, it crept into my thoughts and I said, enough of this and banished the loop out of my mind.

Sometimes, we are capable of grand personal feats.

Loca and I left for our walk a little after six this morning, when the sun had not risen and the houses around the bayou were backlit as if the water, the structures, the trees were all a negative image, overexposed to some pockets of light. We walked over to City Park and the Museum with its night lit facade looked imposing and made a statement at the end of the boulevard that is the entrance to the park.

I marvel at how beautiful our area of the world is, the lovely bayou, the Great Blue Heron sitting by the edge of the new big pond in the newly redone area of the park, the bald cypress, and the large live oaks stretching their arms in ever direction.

I was speaking to a friend last night and we were talking about someone we know and I said it appeared like everything was coming up roses for them, and my friend said, well, things are not always what they appear. And she’s so right. We make assumptions that sometimes prove to be so far off the mark, it almost sounds like we pulled our thoughts out of a completely different script.

Today, the washing machine repair man was here for the third time and he was standing by the front door trying to get me to come down from the office and so he was staring at the photograph of Tatjana and I in the living room for a while. When I got down there he said, “Nice photo. Your husband looks just like Mick Jagger.”

I said well he’s a she and thanks, a lot of people think that. As a matter of fact the photo was taken by our friend Marc Pagani for an exhibit he was doing that challenged the notion of femininity – again asking the viewer to look again – things, like people, are not always what they appear.