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Well a few days post cruise and I think my body and mind are getting back to normal although I still smirk when I see a pigeon (what happens on the cruise stays on the cruise). I was supposed to go on my run this morning with Loca but ended up in a slow walk because the air was pregnant with water molecules and it weighed too much to move through it. The Crescent City Run is this Saturday and for the life of me, I can’t imagine putting in a 10K right now with these knees and my hip and back. Oh but whatever. I am pushing through the pain. Today in yoga I actually put all my weight on my right hand which is so tweaked out it is almost useless and I just grimaced through.

The message today was about wringing out the core – cleaning out the clutter – and then getting down to business and that is how I felt the last 48 hours. I have been working through an email issue and my computer tech Christina was able to resolve my issues but not without some hand wrangling. I don’t know what possessed me to even think of getting an iPad, STOP, I said to myself, I need not one more &%(#! consumer electronic, digital device to make my stomach clench.

I’ve been floating in an ether of ideas lately, trying to venture outside my comfort zone and LOOK around because it seems like there have been interesting doors opening around me that were previously disguised under a curtain. Now the question is is there a wizard of Oz behind there or am I the wizard?

My body and mind told me I needed to get away from it all and reevaluate everything and when I did I was able to see clearly what the priorities are in my life and I came running back to them. It’s hard to hear what your mind is telling you or what your body is telling you because there are too many competing entities vying for your attention. That’s where I was when I left – multitasked to hell and back. And now having been back a couple of days and not having yet gone back to my meditation in the morning, my being is begging me to LISTEN up and get back with the program of stilling my mind.

Tomorrow night at 7PM the Fair Grinds Coffeehouse will debut Bayou St. John: Portrait of a Neighborhood and I will bring my computer to show an continuous loop on Bridge Stories, part of the ReBridge project. If you are in New Orleans and in the area, come on down and see what all the fuss is about. Meanwhile, the stories will be moved to the blog on ReBridge after the opening.

The notion of making money by popular work, and then retiring to do good work, is the most familiar of all the devil’s traps for artists. -Logan Pearsall Smith, essayist (1865-1946)

We watched Tin in his crib this morning – he was speaking full sentences and complex ones. He was charming and playing his flutophone that our neighbor’s son passed on to him. He’s big and grown up and ack!

Now what?

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider–
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give–yes or no, or maybe–
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford

From the vantage point of the Sky Bar on our mega cruise ship, we looked out over the baking bodies lounging by the pool and spotted what we nicknamed The Real Housewives of Miami – social Xrays with leather tanned hides wearing gold Rolexes that sported diamond bevels, a diamond infinity pendant, the right shade of red toenail polish, and perfect French manicures. They were lusting through magazines ripping out tear sheets of merchandise to buy when they returned home – all perfectly correct symbols of who they believed they were and should be.

Since the middle of the ship was a shopping mall of weird jewelry and clothes that you’d think no one would ever buy, we stood there, smugly, watching the housewives dream their dreams. I said it made me think of a dear friend who told me once that I’m a free spirit and she knows no one else like me. I was shocked by this statement believing myself to be just like everyone else. At issue is long ago with friends in their Bear River Reservoir cabin I proclaimed myself to be unconventional only to have my friend tell me he believed me most conventional. Careful what you believe and who. Identity questions are not what I ponder a lot but looking at these women I wondered if they had arrived at their own state of Nirvana because they were from top of head to bottom of toe a type.

Later, at the airport returning home, I was convinced the guy who kept staring at me was looking at someone other than me. Having just survived a foodathon on the cruise, I could not surely be the object of anyone’s desire. I chastised the snarky tongue of my inner critic and a battle royale took place for a few seconds, the winner being the obvious – the back of my sundress must be tucked in my panties and that is why he was looking. After boarding the plane, the woman next to me admired my scarf (actually it’s a jacket I told her, used like a scarf because I alternate hot and cold without warning – a knowing look by the two women seated there) and in flight, the flight attendant touched me on the shoulder from behind and said I love your dress and it looks great on you.

As if to form a compendium of my experience on my recent journey, Claire Dederer wrote a book called Poser that my friend in Boston sent to me after she read it; Dederer turns out to be a woman Tatjana knew in school who had always wanted to be a writer; Poser turns out to be a book that I usually disdain because they are mostly first-person narrated memoirs, but even though I flinched on page one, I could not put it down, and it ended up capturing the plight of a woman much like me and succinctly described how our past informs our present and how we are all pulled by different perceptions of ourselves and those we love and try as we may, no matter what we aspire to do or be, perfectly and perfect should not be the goal.

But I digress, to the housewives and others on the cruise, I wanted to shower them with these lines I savored by William Stafford quoted in Dederer’s book:

A pattern that others made may prevail in the world
And following the wrong god home we may miss our star

(excerpt by William Stafford)

I could rant for days about the excessive amount of food eaten on this cruise, or the crowds at the pools and jacuzzis, or the entertainment by the Sea Group (read: c group as in best of the worst ice skaters, musicians, dancers) but like all things painful, you forget, and what stays in your head were the best parts. To me those were the sunrises and sunsets seen from the wide open sea.

Sunrise – look across the sea and there is the horizon, no impediments to watching the big red sun poke up and spread its light. Magical. This photo is on our return so there is a spit of land, but out at sea I didn’t bother with a camera, I just enjoyed.

Sunset – how many sunsets do you watch? Here on the bayou we try to get outside for the sun setting and then the gloaming, but we are looking east and so it is always behind us. Out at sea, the sunsets are a cause for celebration.

I don’t have a photograph of the full moon that illuminated the inky sky on the last night of the cruise. Wonder.

I did the unthinkable and went on a cruise. The venue was forced by my austere budget constraints coupled with my desire to take a break and spend time with a friend. I think that all of my reservations about taking a cruise were confirmed and perhaps amplified, but like all things in life the experiences shared with a friend made all of them resonate with laughter and memories.

When I say cruise do you instantly conjure up an image of what the cruisers look like? I do, but actually there were Serbians, Romanians, Ukrainians, Indians, Philippinos, Turks, Nigerians, and I could continue but that is only the staff. I found out about the plentitude of Eastern Europeans when I decided to speak in Croatian to insulate our conversations. So gle ovo (meaning look at that!) was picked up by the first Serb and then I knew we better speak in whispers a la Louise from Louise Logs (one of many lol moments recalling Louise being an efficiency expert).

One thing I can tell you is that in a crowd of cruisers it is hard to remain anonymous. Not only do they get nicknames – the “thanks for dressing up” guy the comedian pointed out to the audience but you do too – “EXCUSE ME” chorus from those almost knocked down on the running track that spanned the top of the ship. We started with the mantra “do not make eye contact” and by the second day believed others were not wanting to make eye contact with us.

Ship? When I say ship, I use the term loosely, this was a monolith, a behemoth, a floating city or shopping mall depending on your state of mind, it was like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my life and most like never want to again. It was a cruise ship.

Warning objects in rear appear smaller than they actually are:

To be back home again. Here are things you don’t hear at sea:

dogs barking

cats body slamming into doors

birds singing

jet engines

cars

sirens

alarms

little boys shouting “Superdome!” “Marching Bands!” “Louis Armstrong!” “Cuddle Bug!”