Dangermond.org

What do you want to look at?

Yesterday, I was riding around with a friend looking at possible trees to replace the fallen palm in the side yard. I think brugmansia or angel’s trumpet (horn of plenty) is the answer. But as we drove around and looked at other gardens, down a side street of the Bywater came a girl on a bike carrying a large gleaming brass tuba.

We had just been talking about focusing on those images and thoughts that bring beauty, love, peace, relaxation into our minds, rather than looking at the blight, thinking about the fight, and you know the drill.

I went to walk the dogs in City Park this morning but not, of course, at first having a conversation about the front porch rotting off and why it needs to be replaced with something very expensive and why wood was a poor choice and why the person who built it used the wrong nails and on and on and on. And I get nasty now in my responses – really? the person who built it was a nail freak, a nail psycho, who ordered nails from all over because he was psychotic about nails, now you’re telling me that nail nut used the wrong nails – oh god, give me strength is all I could think.

And so I walked – for sanity more than anything else.

Tatjana returned last night and so she took Tin to school and I began my routine of work without the impending obligation of having to take care of a 3 year old willful child all by myself. It did indeed feel better.

The torah reading on the Huffington Post says that Moses was given commandments by God to work your fields for six years and then rest on the seventh year. Perhaps, this the seventh year since I began plowing these fields, is my rest period and it has been forced upon me by an eye for an eye god who demands that I follow his commandments. Just suppose that were true. And now head uncovered, here I am yielding to the demands, because actually what choice do I have?

I keep waiting for the Universe or what have you to answer my questions – do I keep this house? I want to live in a house with benign neglect like everyone else I see in New Orleans and my neighbor said, “Well, you could start right now.” But would it be benign? I don’t think so given all the horrors that people tell me await this house – it will fall down, it will be destroyed, a plague will visit your family – IF YOU DON’T SPEND COPIOUS AMOUNTS OF MONEY to fix it right now.

Is this my seventh year and is it my year of rest? If so, then Shabbat Shalom.

I went to walk the dogs today in City Park and a friend/neighbor was on her way there and so we joined forces and did a major walky talky – she’s older and her child is grown but it doesn’t mean her mothering has ended as she is now a grandmother with lots to do. But where we are is familiar – looking at the rest of our life which would most likely span a shorter time than what came before, and trying to let go of who we became in an effort not to give way to despair – we worked like trojans, took care of others, and never once lost control – and now we are trying to give up the very thing that we have become experts in – control.

At one pause in the conversation, we rounded the lagoon and before us stood mighty oaks dripping with moss and she said, “Isn’t it beautiful.”

“We’re lucky ducks to live by this park,” I said.

My neighbor went shrimping yesterday – know what I was doing yesterday afternoon – peeling shrimp. Yes, indeed.

Interview with self:

Interviewer: I’ve noticed you’re more motivated to give up cigarettes, exercise, and work on projects. When did this change?

Self: I’ve grown tired of myself, the constant whining, the lethargy, the no end in sight mode. I was coughing like a 40 year seasoned smoker, I was tired just trying to lift Tin, and work, I was so meh over work I was beginning to fantasize about a life without work rather than a life with work I love.

Interviewer: But what motivated you when you were complaining of no motivation?

Self: A few things, a friend sent me Frankl’s book about Man’s Search for Meaning and it sort of capped off what I’ve been experiencing – that anytime I thought I had it bad, I would speak to someone who had it worse. Another was yesterday I found my mother’s letters and they were written 59 years ago but I could still hear the woman she was through her voice and I thought about how at 50 my mother’s life changed – my father died of a massive heart attack and she was forced to enter the working world again. She shook when she had to write a check, and she had no sense of who she was in space and time; she began dressing like Madonna and when I told her once that I could see straight through her dress she said, “Slips are out of style, darlin’.” And I watched my mother regress to the young woman that she was never able to really live because she met my dad so young and inherited four boys and had two girls of her own and her life was carried away by the needs of others. Suddenly given the opportunity to have her turn, she had no idea what to do with it – on one hand she regressed and on the other she became a Director of Nursing at a series of nursing homes where her sole ambition was to care for the elderly. She needed to feel needed to find her self-worth. She was 50 and had no sense of herself.

Interviewer: And you are 50 now and want to have a sense of yourself?

Self: I am 53 now and I have a greater sense of who I am than ever but I’m on the bridge – not the same one I dreamed about in Zahara last summer, not the one I have been working on for the community, but a bridge that is connecting my old life to my new life. You could say I’ve been in a funk or you could use the word transition – it’s hard to let go of who we were to become who we are. Transformation and metamorphosis are painful – just ask Kafka; I wonder if Gregor had to die in the end for the situation to improve – an American would have painted a more rosy ending. I think I like Ram Dass’s messaging a little more than Kafka’s because of who I am.

“It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.”
? Ram Dass, Be Here Now

My lucky number has always been four, and this morning as I was walking the dogs through City Park, I was lost in abstract thought, grooving to the smells of some tree or bush when I saw a lucky penny. I stopped to pick it up after checking to make sure it was on heads and right then four green parrots flew from the ground up that I hadn’t noticed. I said to myself – lucky day.

As I rounded the park, I stumbled onto four fluffy goslings waddling in the grass with their parents. Four again.

I had read in Frankl’s book that “For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement.” And I thought about that as I as in a contemplative mood, and was suddenly feeling lucky because I am working on the alchemy of what is and what could be with my situation of late.

I asked myself with this newfound luck what I would like and what popped into my head unannounced was a visit from my mother. Of course, I knew the only way that would be possible is for her to visit me in my dreams and I thought that would be nice. I came home and while working remembered that I wanted to move something out of a box into my dad’s old medical bag to keep it in safekeeping. I opened the bag and paused for a breath at what was in there.

Thirty-eight letters written by my mother to her mother during 1953 to 1955 – I STRUCK GOLD.

I sat back on my bed and started reading – the first postcard written from Hotel Phillips in Kansas City, Missouri she said to her mother, “I’m fixing to have breakfast. I didn’t tell you in the letter but I’m the only queen here from all over the nation. There are delegates here from all the U.S. possessions too. So you see about where I stand in popularity.”

I don’t know for sure what she was doing there but I know she had won pageants and perhaps as Ms. Dairy Queen or something she was there? Hard to say. But what a lucky day indeed.

When I took Tin for his 3-year check up the doctor asked if he is telling stories. And I said yes, we tell stories a lot. She asked, does he tell them? “Yes,” I said.

There is no doubt in my mind that if you read to a child their world will enlarge. I remember when a client of mine told me he didn’t read fiction and I said, “Why not?” He said he was only concerned with facts, and I said well fiction contains all the facts of life. Reading, story telling, fiction or nonfiction – reading gives us the tool to think outside our own box, to imagine a world better or worse or just different from our own. For a child growing up with not a lot of options – reading is a gateway.

The phone rang at 6:30 this morning and an elderly woman said, “RACHEL DANGERMOND,” and I said yes in my groggy state. “I was read to as a child by my mother and I thank you so much for writing that in the paper today, reading matters.” I thanked her and then got up out of bed.

On Monday a man had written into the Times Picayune saying taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund pre-K – while I applaud his reading to his grandchild, it is disconcerting that he espoused a very narrow view of the world. I had written to the Times Picayune in response and that is why the early morning phone call.

Reading to a child is everything – the whole kit and caboodle – but more importantly, is an understanding, an empathy for those less fortunate than we are.

The story is the same no matter where you go.

Someone’s father is home from the hospital, someone had a baby, someone is pregnant, someone just found out he is going to be a father, someone celebrated a 70th birthday, someone is in the hospital waiting to come home, someone is …

I started working with the life coach yesterday and she asked me to visualize a giant outdoor billboard whose message would reach many people – what would it say?

My response: “It’s going to be okay.” Not original, I saw a bumpersticker that said that a few years back driving around New Orleans after the Federal Flood.

Today I called a friend who is vacationing in New York, I told her about my screw up this morning at work and she text me back after we hung up, “It’s all going to be okay.”

So whoever out there is wondering – it is – going to be – okay.

Last night, friends came over and we ate risotto with the last of the truffles from Istra, that’s because Tatjana is bringing home more. It was nice to gather at the table with friends, but I did overindulge in just about everything – shades of not having had a proper lunch and feeling starved by the time we sat to eat. It all led to a restless night, where I kept getting up thinking it was time to get up, and it was only 2, 3 then 4.

Both Tin and I woke with horrible allergies and are still wheezing and sneezing, but apparently everyone has allergies, even people in Zagreb, so it must be global pollen.

And so maybe it was the lack of sleep, or the allergies, or the allergy meds that made me screw up on something I was working on this morning. It caused me to question everything as I’m wont to do lately. I ran into friends who I had met in 2004, who left New Orleans after Katrina, who then returned and who now told me they are leaving again. They said the Universe kept pointing them in the direction they were supposed to go – “I’m waiting for the Universe to show me,” I told them.

Another person was telling me about two major choices that are causing a fork in the road for her – one is the pursuit of her dream, the other is a safe bet. I said follow your dream. She said, “Thanks, you’re the only one telling me that and it’s good to hear.”

I have spread my dreams beneath your feet. Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
W.B. Yeats

I came up with a life’s purpose today:

I am the beacon of light that inspires others to become self-actualized.

And now to design the blueprint for that to manifest.