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We barely have spring and fall in New Orleans, it is more like between hot and freezing and that is the season we are finding ourselves in right now. Oh lovely day! The nights on the porch watching the light reflected in the bayou are magical and the mornings, well getting up before dawn to prepare ourselves for the rise of the Prince now that he gets up at 7am for ‘chool (no s’s please) has got us on a new schedule ourselves. Such is life, we had gotten in the luxurious habit of waking to our own rhythms and now just when we thought we didn’t have to march to anyone’s orders at this point in our life – bam comes Mr. I Don’t Think So.

Oh well, it forces us to get up and see the dawn and it keeps us hanging on that front porch after he is down at night to enjoy the stolen moments of quiet. It’s the tween season for us – between being older parents and being old, between hot and cold, between knowing and utter ignorance.

So be it.

I went to sleep last night with a full moon hanging over the bayou and woke to a rosy dawn – signs all is okay. The Times Picayune’s history archive the other day was about how Rex, the first official Mardi Gras krewe in New Orleans, pressured the city to close down on Fat Tuesday, which began the real Carnival season in New Orleans over a hundred years ago. This morning the front page of the TP was about Rex reasserting itself in the city as an upstart, Tit Rex, they claim is using their branded name. Over a century later, and Rex is still flexing its muscle in the Crescent City.

But what caught my eye this morning was not on the front page of the newspaper, but several pages in where I read that a Super Earth has been spotted from the single vibration of an orange star. It’s given some scientists hope that when we have finished ruining this planet, there will be a place to go. Ahh, the hum of an exit sign. How comforting is that?

This week the National Newspaper Association is in town for a conference and I am seeing a long time source of mine for dinner. Our conversations for the past few years have been about the future of newspaper and will a printed rolled up digest of the news be thrown to our children’s front porches.

This past Thursday, at the drum circle in Fortier Park, Gingerbread sang an Abbey Lincoln song, Throw it Away, a rift on letting go and letting God and that song has haunted me since then for its melody and its lyrics. I also read an article this morning in Renewal, the Waldorf’s school’s journal, that Rudolf Steiner described the brain as an “overrated” organ. It is designed, he said, to be an organ of reflection. Not much original work comes directly from the brain. When it is well developed through experiences and activities that create complex neural pathways and is balanced during sleep, the brain becomes a sophisticated organ of “mental digestion.” It processes our daily experiences and learning and reflects these back to us in an available form for deeper understanding. Again it is another signpost in my journey to get out of my head and get into my heart.

In bed last night, in the last moments of this splendid, full moon, I spent a long time trying to fall asleep because my brain was trying to tell me something. I had potential worries stacking up in the parking lot of my mind, vying for mental space with my general bonhomie, and Abbey’s voice kept saying over and over again like a melodic mantra, throw it away, throw it away, throw it away, give your love, your life, each and every day.

I woke this morning feeling as if I was floating on a gold radiance tracing a beautiful journey to destination que será, será and behind me were streets with names like shoulda and coulda and in front of me were bridges that abruptly end, and so I did what I gave me pleasure. I made a cup of strong pur uhr and went on the front porch of the LaLa and watched the sun come up over Bayou St. John. The horizon was deep rose and youths were running around and around the bayou so fast they seemed like visions. Round and round at power speed.

Tao te Ching #48

In the pursuit of knowledge,
every day something is added.
In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.
When nothing is done,
nothing is left undone.

True mastery can be gained
by letting things go their own way.
It can’t be gained by interfering.

We woke late.

I made pancakes.

Read the New York Times on the front porch.

Neighbors stopped to visit and sit for a spell.

I was going to post a note about 911 and then I read this post, which reposted this note, and so I am now triple re-posting.

Imagine someone is telling you this grand, epic story, and you keep impatiently asking but what happened next or how did it end? Yesterday, we started with toddler apocalypse, out of a good morning came chaos trying to get ready to go to another toddler’s birthday party, I DON’T WANT TO through streams of tears and anguished cries, one hour of this and both of us saw our nerves fray into thin whispery strands barely hanging together. But this is a special day I kept saying, today we’re having dinner, we’re going to ask Evan to be your godfather.

Later that night, Evan and Nina came bearing a clarinet, a real one, that he had bought for its mouthpiece and was going to turn into a lamp, but decided Tin might like it. Like it? He was crazy over it. Marline was here too; we has asked her to be Tin’s legal guardian when we adopted him. We popped the cork on a bottle of champagne and everyone was about to cheer when I asked Evan if he knew that Marline was the legal guardian for Tin and that we felt good knowing that if something happened to us, she would be there for him to love and raise him as we would. I said we would like Tin to have you as a mentor, a man who can show him what it is to be a man, teach him about music, and be his godfather. That’s when we all started crying – tears all the way around the table. When we composed ourselves, he said, “I’d be honored.”

So here’s the story, a little boy was born in Gary, Indiana, and then he was adopted into a family in New Orleans, Louisiana, and he channels Louis Armstrong, and the first instrument he recognized was the clarinet and the first musician he wanted to hear again and again was Evan, and we asked Evan to play at his first birthday party, and he said he would do it for free because he had been adopted and he was flattered, and then Evan started coming around, bringing a butterfly kite (or bagash kite as Tin called it then) or a book or a stuffed alligator that is now called Evan, and something in the way they connected, these two souls, made it all seem so natural and organic. Then I was walking on the beach in Nantucket with a dear friend who had a child alone and she had said, the best thing I did was ask a man friend of mine to be her godfather, and I said, oh, and that would be Evan and then I talked to Tatjana when I returned home and she said of course, it would be Evan, and there we were, Tin walking around with his big clarinet that Evan had just brought, all of the adults that will care for Tin being very sentimental at the table with glasses of champagne, and we toasted to Marline’s, “This is what makes life beautiful.”

If you think about it, how often I rush to fill in the details of my own story instead of letting them unfold organically, you realize that the universe provides a better story than the one we were about to write for ourselves, so shhh, don’t be in such a hurry to get to the end, let the story unfold… .

My horoscope today said that I have a great team of friends who are here to support me, after all it said, that is what friends are the people who don’t judge you but rather they bring out the best in you. So when a colleague/friend decided to go back to divinity school and hang out his shingle as a life coach, I knew when we were catching up that it was more than just hey, how’s it going? He really wanted to know how I was poised for the next level and what work I had completed and what I still needed to focus on.

After a battery of tests to ferret out my innate abilities, we also did a few on optimism and my inherent outlook and he said:

Your strengths include zest, appreciation, gratitude and optimism. You are hard coded to be happy on the inside whether you like it or not. This is a very good thing. In fact this combination is very rare and a huge gift.

Then he began to unpeel the layers of where I seem to be stuck, as Ellen Glasgow said, the difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions, and measuring how deep the quagmire is gives you a good blueprint for how much work it will take to get out. I candidly told him what the second and third and fourth voices were saying, even though my first voice is always saying a resounding yes to everything. He said:

Being busy and exhausted sounds like it should compromise your well-being. On paper it should make you unhappy. But your DNA is optimistic and happy. The planner in you might be catastrophe-izing the future telling you that you’re not on the ball, you should be doing something now, the future seems blurry, etc., and ultimately all of this is making you anxious (which is different than unhappy).

Then we did a session where he nudged and coaxed me and teased out of me an idea that has been gestating for many years but not acted upon, and when he brought it out to play and dusted it off, it looked like a shiny new idea, one that was worth more than a nod, but an investigation. What are you good at? What are your talents? What makes you tick? He told me I have a knack for connecting the dots, for seeing patterns where others don’t see the same thing. We talked about how much I love what I do as an investigative reporter. I was reminded of this quote by Joseph Campbell that I came across recently. “I think the person who takes a job in order to live – that is to say, for the money – has turned himself into a slave.” While I agree with Campbell, my first reaction was to feel that maybe this was a little elitist, that there are some people who can’t do what they want to do but must do what they have to do. Then I thought deeper about the path, the one where you are you, and we are all being for real, and I realized that everyone is entitled to this happiness because in life there is work for everyone. Perhaps you want to be the Madonna of fiction and that is too lofty a dream, but you can be a blogger and you can ply your trade and you can figure out how to do this. Perhaps you love nothing more than working with a team of people you have the utmost respect for and the greatest amount of fun – you can make this happen in your life with adjustments not throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

A good coach knows how to coax the best out of you, not outline your every move in the game, they trust your instincts and recognize what makes the light come on and what shuts it off. I am the choleric child just as Waldorf’s Rudolf Steiner spoke about, the one that is creative and energetic, but put a lot of structure around me and I’m a bull in a china closet seeing red in every approach. My core strength is zest (and sometimes zealous-ness) to a fault sometimes, I do admit, but most times it is what makes me uniquely me and why when I’m on my game, I fall back on my favorite quote from the poet and dramatist Aeschylus who said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.”

I’m living a remarkable life, I looked around last night at a good friend and neighbor sitting nearby, at my partner (I still recall what my high school friend said when she met Tatjana, she said, how many people in the world switch teams and get it right the first time? you lucky dog!), and my kid – can you believe my little boy? – he is so awesome that he blows me away.

And I think to myself, what a wonderful world.

[dear reader: anyone who is need of a life coach, I know a good one]

I’ve spent the week on Detox to come back down to earth. Mornings have been a blender with low fat yogurt, chia seeds, flax seeds, blueberries and strawberries, a dash of local honey, and some aloe juice. Lunch has been vegetarian mainly a mix of edamame, corn, red onion and red pepper tossed with rice vinegar with a splash of sesame oil, broccoli and carrots steamed tossed with lemon juice and flax seed oil, and two boiled eggs, and then dinner has been the vegetable juices that Tatjana makes – kale, beets, dandelion greens, celery, ginger, apple.

I was doing fine for three days and then by the end of the fourth I went to Whole Foods to shop for dinner we are having here on Saturday and I was ordering meat and the guy put the recently cut piece of raw red meat on the counter and my first voice said grab it and eat it. Usually raw meat somewhat repulses me but my primal canine was about to tear into that beef as if there was no tomorrow. I realized I was lacking protein or something – I had the edamame and I had the eggs but my whole being was craving meat and so I bought two strips of smoked brisket and ate them after I finished shopping. My body said, thank you, immediately,

Now it is day five and my headache won’t abate and I need to retox. My body is in dire need of four square mini meals that have some complex carbs, some protein, some fat and it wants it now.

Albeit I must say I have taken immense pleasure in cleaning out my body, my liver, my kidneys and last night on the porch after Tin had gone to sleep while everyone was having their TGIF cocktail, I was more than satisfied with my ice water with a dash of lemon. The idea of waking up on Saturday feeling refreshed and well rested seemed like a much better proposition than entering the weekend like many a Friday night goes – a couple of cocktails, food eaten too late at night, and not nearly enough water.

The week was bookended by Labor Day on Monday and a summary from my new Life Coach on Friday and that about sums up a week that was pretty damn informative. In the end, I figured out a lot of things (with help), but what I wasn’t prepared for was to have the week capped by Tin picking up his ukelele and busting into song – how appropriate it would be You Are My Sunshine, written by none other than by Louisiana’s Governor Jimmie Davis (with some embellishments by Tin).