“If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”
Joseph Campbell
I cut out a Joseph Campbell saying a long time ago and its applicability to my life at any given time never ceases to amaze me:
“We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” Joseph Campbell
Yesterday, as the sun was setting I strolled down to the zen center to meditate and hear a talk by the Rev. Paul Haller, former Abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, who spoke about the discipline of practice and the delicate balance of awareness. I was in a contemplative mood as I had been thinking that maybe it was time to let go of the LaLa and move on. On the walk there I thought about all the ties that bind me to this house and what leaving it behind would mean to me.
It’s wrapped up in an image, an image of myself that goes all the way back to my being in San Francisco and speaking one day with a friend about New Orleans. My friend said she pictured me coming from one of those big old Victorian houses in New Orleans and I thought about that image and wanted to be in it. Instead, I grew up mostly in rented apartments and hotels as my father was a gypsy doctor who took us all over Central America and the U.S. trying to find a place to feel settled, and never really getting there.
I’ve thought now that perhaps the vagabond in him was more about his not really have a medical license than his own inner need to move, but I will now never have the answer to that question. So the focus is on me and my urges or compulsions. I moved into the LaLa in a dreamworld, wanting so much to be in New Orleans and have a family in a house that I loved and so I did. I imagined I would die in this house much as I imagined I would grow old with my husband, much as I imagined I would have had many children in my life.
I was corresponding with a friend the other day and told her that I feel like I’m trying to move beyond who I used to be but I am too fearful of who I am to embrace it. She said maybe its who I think I should be. And perhaps that is what this is all about. In my adulthood, I wanted to be a settled person (not like my father), I wanted to live in a beautiful house with a garden (much like my mother wished her whole life), I wanted to have a family (and we all know that was fulfilled but very differently than conceived). And so that is how I found myself in the LaLa, a beautiful home on the bayou, the house of my dreams, or my nightmares, you decide.
And that is how I came to be wondering if it was time to let go of this dream and embrace the realities. We have a 30-year mortgage on the LaLa whose clock got reset last year when we refinanced. 30 years paying a staggering monthly amount that does not take into account the pull of maintenance that is always more costly than you might imagine. This year, the front porch needs to be ripped out and redone, the back needs to be reskinned with HardiePlank – I already have the estimates, and not the money.
I tried to get these thoughts out of my head as I sat to meditate and then later while Haller was speaking, tears welled up in my eyes because I realized how sad it would be to leave this place. The bayou, my neighbors, the beauty. Even living in the back we are surrounded by this intense beauty, up in a tree house watching the tops of the Queen palms swaying to the thunderstorms, looking at the bayou without the bayou being able to see us, the screen porch that looks at the yard and flower beds carefully tended. This morning I lit the candle by the Yemaja statue for my mom, and for my mind, and a hummingbird worked in and out of the yellow flowers planted as a screen in front of the air conditioning units.
A life well crafted to be beautiful.
And I have been waiting to cross that hump, to get to the point where this house doesn’t weigh me down, but it seems every year (now I’m in my seventh year) that goes by roots me further and further into a life where I’m obligated to do for it, not it do for me. This is my practice Haller would have said if I would have spoken up, this is what has me in conflict, what has made me creative, what is asking me to be flexible, what is testing my mettle. This is my hump, it is not coming up in the distant future, instead it faces me every day.
To stay at the LaLa is to believe in working for money, something I never thought I would do in my life until I moved to San Francisco and money became the raison d’etre for me and nearly everyone who wasn’t on the streets already. I came back to New Orleans to get out of that pernicious life of getting and spending. I found myself in a quagmire whose levels grew deeper and deeper:
Countless miscarriages
Affair
Katrina/Federal Flood
Loss of godchild
Divorce
House (read: The Money Pit)
Pay Decline
Mother dying
Failed adoptions
Adoption
Loss of job
Hair loss
How low can you go, how many more levels does this pit have? I hate to ask. So how to make my life, and my practice more harmonious, how to let go and let god? I thought as I was walking back from the dharma talk that I could leave now. I could. I could find another place to live, perhaps in the hipster Bywater, and I could cultivate a life whose ties are not to making money but instead about returning to where I started in 1989, when I left New Orleans to find myself and become a writer.
After all I did become one, I am a writer, so I should be thankful that my practice has given me a plethora of topics to write about. Right?
April 06, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
You will find a great deal of comfort in your daily routine today. What might seem dull or boring to other people is something you will find very rewarding. The patterns of your life are coming together to form a very interesting picture, and it’s one you should enjoy contemplating. All your questions are starting to get answered, and this is a time when you should revel in your accomplishments and savor your success.
I’m coming around the bend again, she’ll be riding six white horses when she comes, when she comes, okay so that is not what is happening this time around, but I recognize all the dissonance that I am now on a first name basis with I take a step forward and get knocked to the left, knocked to the right, and I turn to do the hokey pokey only before I can return I’ve lost my footing. But this time my cry that I used to be somebody is not a joke, for I was, seriously, somebody to someone who did something somewhere and now, who am I?
I described the latest round to a friend and she said, “Wow, that’s a lot of stuff at once but all of them seem symptomatic and could be chalked up to “normal hormonally changes”. The good thing is that it sounds like you are going through all these checks and balances at once and I only think things are bound to get better. I swear that some of the unbalances we feel while experiencing menopause nudge (ok more like forcefully shove) us to reevaluate and make changes in our lives for the better. I know I have and although it wasn’t fun at first I continue to feel stronger both emotionally and spiritually more than any other time in my life.”
Well, here we are at the rodeo, and I’m gearing up with my chaps and fringe and the only thing that has not changed is that I’m dealing with my hair (this time its absence).
I wonder about lifetime warranties and what will happen to them as uncertainty and flux become more the norm. If you believe in a lifetime warranty, I have some swamp land I’d like to sell you.
Or are there?
So yesterday I was driving and I had a conversation in my head that went something like this with my neighbor:
Self: I was thinking about whether we should move to long term rentals up front and spoke with someone and they said that when people rent from you long term they tend to get very proprietary and very demanding.
Neighbor: Well have you thought about getting a job?
Self: I knew you would ask that, but what would you do if you weren’t working for your family?
Neighbor: ____
Later, I went and sat down at the table on the bayou and a bunch of neighbors gathered liked birds on a wire and one was talking about her new job as the Social Director at a home for the elderly and THAT neighbor said, “I’d love to do your job.” SHE ANSWERED MY QUESTION – so weird.
The other day I was driving down the street and I saw not one, but two Winnebagos that were the perfect size for my family to take to the open road and see America. I want to rewrite Travels with Charly for modern day, instead of it being about this lone male and his dog, it would be this beholden over 50 woman dragging her adopted child, partner, and crew of animals – I had this thought in my I’m going to India mood, because why go to India, what I’m searching for is in my own backyard, no? I had this entire conversation about this and then … .
My cyber creative friend Anne Flournoy sent me a note via Facebook and said, I see you are friends with Mudd Lavoie and I said, “Who?” So went to her Facebook and then blog site where I read one post on her Westfalia love and I was hooked and thought, “I want to be friends with Mudd Lavoie, I am friends with Mudd Lavoie!” ALL OF THIS HAPPENED IN A PARALLEL UNIVERSE.
Things are getting interestinger and interestinger.
Remember The Secret, someone gave it to me when I had had foot surgery and was prone and had not a lot I could do but read. I read it and thought, ok, then someone gave me the video, and I watched it and thought ok. Game changer? I dunno.
Then I started thinking back to it when I stumbled onto this or that. And lately reading about Steve Jobs and how he made manifest his desire because he saw no limitations and made others believe there were no limits.
I read an affirmation today that said act as if – eliminate thoughts of conditions, limitations, or the possibility of it not manifesting. If left undisturbed in your mind and in the mind of intention simultaneously, it will germinate in the physical world.
I thought again about Steve Jobs, how he thought different, and how he revolutionized personal computing and then I thought why is he a hero? He gave us a box to be enslaved by, he then made it portable, he killed the music industry (not that it was benefitting the appropriate people), he neutralized the camera industry, and why again should we be worshipping at the altar of what was truly a very maniacal and manipulative person again?
A friend who had cancer and is now in remission, numbers her birthdays as a year(s) past that date she got cancer, it is her rebirth. She does not have a smart phone, she does not have cable, she does not have internet. She said she used to, but now, she finds no need of these disturbances in her field. She’s a musician. She makes music.
Here ye, here ye. Act as if you could think for yourself.
Anyone in New Orleans last night that didn’t stand lay in awe of mother nature and her majesty, you must have been anesthetized. It was, in a word, gnarly.
You wake and the storm is still raging and you feel as if all routine must be put on hold to accommodate an unprepared for event – namely flooding streets, an electric light orchestra, pounding drums of thunder claps, and all the while you realize if not now, then when?
When will you change your life? Pebbles in your pocket – some dark, some light – you take a light one when you’ve contributed to it, caring, helping, supporting, you take a dark one when you obscure the light, gossip, slights, and indifference.
What if the heart is a red pebble? Where does it go? Which pocket? Who decides?
I dreamed last night of one horrific scene after another, they tore the sheetrock off the walls, they purged on the floors, they stained the sheets with goo and sperm, they had firearms and ammunition, they were all here – why?
Kettle drums beating down on my head as a back roll.
* * * *
3 doctor’s visits later:
Long and short, DIAGNOSIS: alopecia areata, some patients have said intense emotional stress preceded the occurrence. PROGNOSIS: There is no known path, some recover hair in less than a year, some recover then lose again, some never recover, etc. Accompanied by thyroidism.
PRESCRIPTION: My blood work yields low thyroid levels – hypothyroidism – we need to replace your thyroid, that butterfly organ (how appropriate). So pills, we’ll start at low dosage and check your blood levels in two months as it takes a while to regulate.
You must de-stress your life.
Roger – 10-4 – on it.
I have relied on the kindness of my friends to get me through most of my bad patches and this one is no different. A friend writes from New York:
First, and most important: remember, bald women are sexy.
Second, why are wigs for just the Black women? Rock it Lil’ Kim. But how about Lil’ Danger?
…
My wise friend Rachel told me: boredom is good, leads to change.
Shaving my head and starting over? Won’t rule it out.
LMK if you need anything.
You’re the best, so if anyone can get through this hump – it’s YOU.Just don’t start eating live animals:
