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So I got back from the Dreamforce conference with tired achy feet and just barely got to the lobby in time for a glass of wine and, and well a tarot reading. There she was, Margaret, set up in the lobby with all of her tarot cards laid out in front of her and I said what the heck and sat down to a reading. I didn’t tell her at first that I read tarot cards because I didn’t want her to be self conscious. But she gave me a helluva reading. At the core, the King of Swords and the King of Pentacles – she said not bad Rachel, not bad. You’re not a genius and you’re not rich, but you’re doing pretty good. And what covered me – the Hanged Man – things are about to change, but I need to wait and just hang back. Isn’t that what I’ve already intuited? Yes.

Then partnership – two of cups – good. Then in the next three months, ace of wands, here it comes, a creative, intuitive, a natural change but alongside a warning card – the four of pentacles – don’t worry about what you give up, take the plunge.

But she held back the outcome card, she had turned it over at the beginning and she told me I could change it. I said what is it – the 10 of swords – only her deck was a set of medieval cats so the images were different from the Rider Waite deck I use – and instead of a man lying face down with ten swords sticking out of his back, this was a cat face with swords pointing at its neck. She didn’t like it and she said it was a bad card. I said I didn’t think so and we talked about it – she then referred to her book and sure enough despite its ominous look, it signifies a culmination – an end to disappointment – the card is actually showing a sunrise and a beginning after a difficult end.

I pranced up to my room and went out for some pud thai afterwards – feeling as if yeah, you’re right.

It is that time in the cycle of life when people are talking about revolutions again and they are happening. This morning at the Dreamforce conference in San Francisco, Marc Benioff referred to the Arab Spring brought about by Social Media and warned we might be seeing a Corporate CEO Spring very soon as it seems most are out of touch with their employees, their clients, and their world.

Since I had flown out of New Orleans on August 29th, the sixth anniversary of the Federal Flood, I was feeling somewhat revolutionary myself as in honor of the date, I was reading Howling in the Wires, which Mark Folse had generously brought over to my house not but just a few weeks ago. How appropriate that Howling is a collection of dispatches from the diaspora of 2005 and how raw and radical were those missives of people who could no longer follow convention but instead turned to howling from all points available.

How wrong to think that a revolution hasn’t already happened.

I sat this morning in Cafe de la Presse before seeing Marc, having checked into the hotel (I’ve been at a friend’s) this morning, and I had a bowl of latte and a few missives for breakfast. It steeled me for heading to the conference where I hoped to uncover trends about mobile, social and the cloud, little did I know I was headed somewhere which would confirm what I already know.

The revolution is now, howling from every corner near and far. ¡Viva la Revolución!

“When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.” ~ Buddha

The last time I was at the drumming circle a woman was there with a little boy who I had seen earlier at a film showing. I asked who she was because her little boy is so cute and was told that she had asked about me too and not in a bad way, like a lot of African Americans might because you are a white woman with a dark skinned child.

This morning I saw a little boy that looked just like the one from the drumming circle and he was on a little bike and his mother was running to keep up behind him and he was yelling, “Mommy. Mommy. Come on.”

He sounded so much like Tin I wanted to board the next plane home.

I was walking up 4th Street to Market when I saw a woman in a tight floral dress, a cigarette dangling from her mouth, changing from tennis shoes to high heels, her skate board propped against the wall the whole while.

Homeless people dot the landscape.

A man walked by with both of his eyes black and blue and he was arguing to himself.

A man walked by with angry eyes and was cussing under his breath.

A man walked by in the throes of a coquettish conversation with himself.

This morning started out funky – I was stiff from having spent the night on a friend’s couch and was freezing cold since the fog had rolled in and had just not rolled back out. I walked over to sign in at the conference and stopped at Cafe de la Presse for a decaf latte in a bowl, which was nice and hot and felt so good in my ice cold hands. Really folks, it’s August and i was wearing gloves. No lie. Thank god I found them in my coat pockets when I was but a block down the street and freezing to death.

The chatter in my head was rising to a grand crescendo having everything to do with the kind of talk that makes you want to curl up in a little ball and roll off a cliff. I kept trying to quiet it (them) but they were unrelenting.

Then I saw an email come across my Blackberry, a client I’ve worked with for many years had wrote the nicest recommendation for me on Linked In – out of the blue – and I was taken aback by his words. Then I met a friend and colleague for lunch and felt bathed in the light of being with someone who feels like family.

Later, i was passing a church in the car with another friend and the marquis read, “The Structure of Truth and Love” and I had a confluence of events, past and present, traipse across my mind’s eye, as I was with a friend getting a divorce, had just been speaking about another friend in the throes of a divorce, and had just learned my friend’s sister had divorced, and then ran into an old San Francisco friend who had just divorced. All of these were relationships that I would have bet on not just a few years ago. I thought about some of the marriages I would have have bet against and they remain intact – very odd.

As I walked down Union Street with my friend and sought out a place to stop and have a cocktail to talk, I stumbled upon buckets of dahlias that were so perfect, they looked fake, or impossibly real, and I realized right then and there their perfection was based on their fragility. And a marriage might be perfect but that doesn’t mean it will last.

I’m going to stay for a couple of days with a friend who recently left her job after 19 years with the same company. I am bringing her essential oils and bath salts called OPEN ROAD, because both are to open up all the possibilities that await her in her new life. Similarly, I’m having dinner with two gentlemen, one on Monday and one on Tuesday, both who are standing in the middle of my open road beckoning me to come hither.

The best is yet to come.

August 29, 2011

1. Taurus (4/20-5/20)

   Whether or not construction is in your blood is completely irrelevant — today is a day when you need to start building something new. This new formation could be a relationship, it could be a personal fitness regimen, it could even be a career objective. Lay the foundations by planning out where you want to be and when you want to be there. If you follow the path of least resistance, there is no way you can go wrong. Don’t challenge yourself too much.

A long time ago when I was outraged by Amazon (before they were actually helping support independent bookstores) and fearing and loathing Barnes & Nobles and Borders, I never would have thought that I would bear witness to the closure of the mega bookstore and the rise, yes dear lord the rise of the independents. Maple Street Bookstore opened in the Healing Center – I bought a book for my friend I’m seeing in San Francisco – the Power of Now (pass it on) and it is opening in Mid City – is that possible? Is it possible that right here on Ponce de Leon Avenue, we are FIGHTING THE STUPIDS? I got my bumpersticker with my purchase yesterday and can’t wait to put it on Old Blue and wear it loud, wear it proud.

We are getting a small independent bookstore in our neighborhood. Ha!

As Tin is acquiring language and I mean rapidly acquiring it, he often gets one word off, like when he asks, “Can I hold you?” I’m leaving for California this morning and last night he asked me in the bathtub if he could hold me several times and then afterwards when we got out. He’s at that stage where tender is achingly tender and terrible is even worse. While he was supposed to be napping, he ripped two of his favorite books. Tatjana and i were trying to figure out how to discipline him and I went online and there I read so many things that it made my head twirl – one mother talking about how she put a television in her toddler’s room and let’s him watch a show before he falls asleep. He’s three years old. Unreal. A psychologist who says that you should remove all the books because they are going to rip and then you should maybe give him a magazine that he can rip (isn’t this like giving your dog a shoe that he can chew?). Unreal. Then there was the mother who said that books that were destroyed were gone and not replaced. More our philosophy.

Instead we called Tin into the den for a family meeting about ripping books. And we taped the pages that were torn and have now put the books away for a period of unspecified time. We don’t rip books, we told him. Again the language – as if we (Tatjana and I) are even accused here. No, we don’t rip books, we should have said, and neither do you.

I dreamed that the guy working on our house was also doing an elaborate wood carving to hang over the doorway and I was flipping through a magazine and found a full page ad about his work. Fitting as I feel as if everything is being done to perfection around here but wondering simultaneously if perfection is what we’re after.

I couldn’t sleep because of the marsh fire that is sending thick smoky air our way. It smells as if someone just burned a piece of paper and left it simmering in the ashtray by my bed. Itchy eyes. I woke up Tatjana and asked her about the smoke because at that time I didn’t know it was marsh fire.

Meanwhile, here it is, pre-dawn, the sixth anniversary of the Federal Flood and someone said yesterday, it feels like yesterday, and yet for me it feels like another lifetime ago. Yesterday, as I was putting the details together for my trip west, I thought to myself, having not traveled for a while, how anything becomes normal when done often enough. It became normal to live in the no man’s land between Ft Worth and Dallas in a cramped apartment with a few pieces of clothes. It became normal to return and live in a city that was flood ravaged and broken. It became normal to have a job where leaving and returning was second nature. It became normal to stay home. It became normal to get up to pee in the middle of the night and check the video screen to see Tin’s outline.

The thing about fire is that it destroys and reduces to ash what was once there, but afterwards, when the healing begins, something else grows in its place – sometimes shinier new and sometimes a pale remembrance of things past. We humans are only as good as our resiliency, that is what makes us strong – adaptability.