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Can my path be any more transparent than it is – it is a gland in the form of a butterfly that is producing my metamorphosis.

It is a Stick Figure leading me into the light.

My home is on the water, my city is on the water, and I’m headed to take the waters in Spain this summer for my healing process.

The website for thyroid suggests:

Our stress response can directly influence thyroid function. … Make it a priority to cultivate calmness throughout your day. Deep nostril breathing, meditation, and naps can all bring our stress hormones down. You may also consider simply getting more sleep at night to counter stress during the day.

Tip: Take a warm bath three nights a week before bed and make it special by lighting candles, using special bath salts, or playing relaxing music.

Explore your emotional health

Many ancient traditions believe that the thyroid is particularly sensitive to “bottling emotions” or “holding our tongues”. Recognizing your emotional health may be an important part of supporting your thyroid. As women, we are often drawn to nurturing others before exploring our own emotional needs. Spend time with your feelings. Whether you write them down or talk about them, expressing our emotions is the first step to emotional health.

Tip: Write one sentence a day in a journal or notebook about how you feel.

Hello yoga my old friend, it’s good to be with you again
Because my hours wasted on my tears, as light crept through the fears
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains, amped on the sounds of silence

Today, I made it to yoga in the first of two months where I’ve been spending time turning and turning a new chrysalis. The mantra was perfectly in tune:

Gurur Brahmaa Gurur Vishnu
Gurur Devo Maheshwarah
Guru Saakshaata Parabrahma
Tasmai Shri Guruve Namah

Loosely, the most difficult circumstances to accept in a positive way are the calamities, the injuries and illnesses that befall us physically or mentally … manifests as the big challenges in our lives, which actually provide us with the greatest opportunities for clearing away … and embracing all that happens to us as a gift … Destruction always opens the door for transformation.

This is an old favorite from circa 2005 Federal Flood:

Lee Lorenz’s comic showed up in the New Yorker and it was as timely as any to describe the beginning of our new journey. And so I say my problems may be small in comparison to those who suffer more, but they’re my bumps in the road, and I’m a sensitive creature who feels the highs and lows dearly and who offers a profound response each time.

Let the healing begin.

Friend who hasn’t seen me in a few months:

Friend: “Everything okay?” [puzzled look]

Me: My thyroid is whacked but the good news is that I’m going to the beach and I don’t have to shave!

Friend: “It must be hard without that beautiful hair of yours.”

Me: Yeah, but it will grow back … I don’t have my womanly hair but I still have my womanly breasts!

Friend: [awkward] “Right.”

She moved to the bayou because she wanted to live near a natural body of water, she arrived in a hurricane, literally and figuratively, and she and the house weathered the storm. She called the house her vacation home; a seven year old boy called it the LaLa. The LaLa was the end of a long journey, another adventure began almost immediately. So perhaps this is Chapter Two, but more likely all of that backstory belongs in a Prologue, written by someone else, in another time.

Her life was so abundant that she attracted those who needed what she had and she took them all in, indiscriminately, until the cornucopia started spilling out around her. There has always been enough money, there has always been friends to share it with, there has always been joy, dancing, and music. All in abundance, all pouring out over the brim.

Every step on this new journey brought her to today, and today unfolds fresh and exciting as a new day should with the LaLa greeting the bayou, and the birds and butterflies enjoying the garden, and all those who came for what they were looking for content with what they have found in spite of an open ending searching that will continue till kingdom come.

I listened to some tapes a friend had brought to me earlier this year, they are those Abraham Hicks sessions that are about this woman who channels Abraham. Another friend said she didn’t like the vehicle but she liked the message and I’d have to say I agree with that notion. The whole adoration of the process is a little off-putting but the message is on track. And zen in its perspective.

Interestingly enough I walked through City Park this morning thinking of a total edit of my script – you know the one – the one that begins every chance conversation with a detailed log of loss. So that grey bound log of loss is getting so heavy I’d like to burn it. And I’d like to start licking the tip of my pen and beginning to write again the story of my life.

In one of my life coaching sessions she asked me to envision my captain and I saw a stick figure – no gender, no muscles, no clothes – just a stick figure. Interestingly enough it was not Wonder Woman, who had shown up in my vision of a role model when in 1995 I was going through behavior modification for panic attacks and phobias that had arisen from anxiety. Wonder Woman is gone – but do not grieve, she died in her prime, looking as hot as ever. Better than watching an aging super hero, which would really be sad.

So Stick Figure, that is also the name I gave my captain, is here to bring clarity, but interestingly enough, not the “This is what you need to do,” form of clarity you might think I sought, but rather the, “No matter where you are in your life at the moment, it is exactly where you need to be, no matter how things may seem to appear,” form of clarity. Zen clarity which makes the ambiguous palpable.

The important thing about the Hicks tapes are the messages about being out of sync, about swimming upriver and feeling the strain against the current and about how it feels when you are floating along and going with the flow. So much better. Stick Figure is going to stick around as long as I need to remember to not only go with the flow but be part of it as well.

My horoscope today captured the moment perfectly:
May 21, 2012
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
By today, you have pushed through the most confusing part of your little emotional obstacle course — and things are starting to look clearer and you are starting to feel much happier. Your place among your friends is secure, and you know just where you stand. Hold onto your rising optimism, because it will take you the rest of the way. The going is not going to be so rough anymore, and you are about to experience an extended period of peace, relaxation and contentment.

Just the facts – alopecia is when your body has been shocked into an auto immune deficient state and you lose your hair. You can lose a little or a lot or all (as I have). What may accompany alopecia is a thyroid issue – whether it is the thyroid that goes first or after or contingent no one can really say, but in general it does go hand and hand. Hypothyroidism is when your thyroid quits doing what it is supposed to do. Simply put, your thyroid gland controls how quickly the body uses energy, makes proteins, and controls how sensitive the body is to other hormones.

I had spent the last year looking at my face in the mirror and feeling as if I didn’t recognize myself. I saw photos of myself and felt I didn’t recognize myself. I would be at the gym and watch people working out and marvel at their energy. I would not want to dance when everyone else was getting down – which for me is (ahem) unusual. Then my hair fell out.

It was not enough that I noticed my face was bloated, that I was acutely aware that I was fat as a tick no matter what I did, that my hair was lifeless, that I didn’t have enough energy to make it through the day – the hair falling out was the HELLO moment.

Two doctors who were over on Saturday night convinced me that I need to see an endocrinologist. I first went to a dermatologist because it was hair loss – that produced a blood test because I asked for one (read: educate yourself and take charge of your own health) – which led me back to my primary who prescribed the lowest dosage of Synthroid. I take the Synthroid in the morning and feel nauseous and like a chicken for a couple of hours and then I crash and stay in this funk the rest of the day. The doctor friends told me that most doctors will treat the numbers (read: my thyroid levels), but you need an endocrinologist to treat the whole person.

My dear friend is an endocrinologist – possibly the busiest one on the planet – but he said he would make room for me. Yay! Now I feel as if I am swimming downstream, before it was all up up up or more like swimming through jello.

I’ve learned how much that butterfly gland actually means to me, without it I’m overwhelmed by noise, people, tasks, activities, and most everything.

As for getting my hair to grow back – first I need to get my thyroid levels straightened and get myself in alignment then the rest will follow.

I spent a good deal of my day on Friday speaking to a friend about the flip side of the coin. Sort of seeking the tragic optimism that Frankl writes about in his Man’s Search for Meaning – of seeing meaning in the tragic. A few years ago I had asked a friend who had been raped what she had come to find as a way of explaining it all to herself and she said, “Nothing, it shouldn’t have happened.”

I stayed after meditation to go over the Genjo Koan at the Zen Center. And in going over the words over and over, I saw the dilemma there, or here.

Yet in attachment blossoms fall, and in aversion weeds spread.

Not because you are attached the blossoms fall, but even when you are attached they do, and even when you don’t look weeds grow. And so it is that I read this whole treatise with curiosity, a sense of a ha, a sense of uh huh, and a large dose of whatyagonnado?

I’m trying to see myself embodying nonattachment. I’m trying to visualize myself in a world where when a tree falls on your garden, you don’t dwell on it and find your meaning there. I’m trying to take steps away from the quagmire I found myself in, the one that clings to my feet as I try to step out, the one that obscures my heart.

I was in my driveway yesterday looking at some of the weeds that poked through – the marble rocks are blinding in the sunlight. A dear friend walked by with an out of town guest in tow, he looked a little awkward at my blinding bald head and the only thing he could muster was, “Are you wearing sunscreen,” as he hurried away his guest. I’m trying to wear my baldness with a little less weight.

When loved ones or friends say, “You look beautiful bald,” I nod. Beauty comes from within. I want to shout at Tatjana, how would you feel if you suddenly gained 60 pounds? Not beautiful, I bet. That’s how it feels to lose your mane (although an old friend told me the other day, “No one ever liked you for your hair, Rachel”) and your job, your energy and all those things that gave meaning to you, your sexuality, your personhood. “We’re here because we love you, Rachel, not your job, or your hair, or anything but you,” a good friend told me the other day at my table. I’m trying to wear my baldness with a little less weight, a little more positive meaning.

Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach.

Bayou Boogaloo is going on down the bayou and it looks like it has expanded even more this year, but I’m just not in a festival mood. Know what sort of mood I’m in – a sit on the beach and stare at the horizon sort of mood. Thank god it is almost summer and we are about to fly off to never never land.

I think I’m just a little festival’d out this year – but this too shall pass.

On my way to Zumba this morning all arteries to get there were blocked off and the policeman said, “You’re just going to have to wait 20 minutes,” I looked at him like he was a zombie come to eat my flesh and took the long way around. “Festivals shmestivals,” I thought to myself, “I want to live in a town that only has one festival, as my Nantucket friend always says when she leaves New Orleans.”

Tin woke this morning and got all his animals to be part of his band. Evan the alligator played clarinet (of course), Nina the turtle played the trumpet, Balthazar the Black Sheep played the piano, and Zebra was on the drums (Tin played the trombone and was the band leader).

The days are getting longer and hotter but that just means summer is around the corner, or actually standing on the corner peaking around the telephone pole. I was walking to City Park and stopped to talk to my new neighbor who bought the historic house on the corner – he was bringing down an enormous pecan tree (he wasn’t, the tree company was) because it was rotten. Yes those pecan trees grow gigantic but when they fall – well I still remember my neighbor’s coming down in my backyard during the Federal Flood and our having to cut it up and haul it out. Why I didn’t think to save that precious wood now is a mystery to me – but most likely because my mind was rotten at that time as well.

So school’s a week away from being out for summer and the annual picnic was held in City Park yesterday. We passed a good time, yeah, on the great lawn in front of Storyland. Evan commented on how well behaved Waldorf School kids are, of course, right before photo time, all those well behaved kids found the water fountain and all those cute little hair-dos and summer clothes were dripping wet – at least they were all smiling for the shot.