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Over a year ago, friends went on a trip and they brought back this little bud vase for us. During the hurricane, a lot of my succulents had hell to pay for being left outside and so I brought a clipping of one and put it in the bud vase. Since the light has changed in August and now seems to stream in golden and horizontal into our kitchen, I noticed the bud vase was glowing and realized that it was partially transparent and was capturing the light inside its belly.

Now that is what I call lagniappe.

I was on my way down the bayou this morning towards City Park and I ran into a friend who has been having some troubled times. He said he is coming out of an eight month hole via medication. Now he’s trying to put the pieces of his life together again. Only, very similar to me, because he and I have had these discussions walking in the park for years now, he really doesn’t want to go back to who/where he was before and so now he has to figure out where he wants to go, who he wants to be.

It’s this art of becoming that arrives without a blueprint that seems overwhelming. If you are like me you would like to be becoming too many different people and so you get dizzy from your own depths and heights, plunged only in your imagination, but all leaving you sort of exhausted before you even begin.

I ran into another friend yesterday who tagged along on my walk and she said that sometimes you have to let the universe just take you. And take you it does, even the best laid plans can be wiped away when the universe decides for you what your intentions are. I believe this, and yet I fear it.

I keep an image from a magazine I cut out once with a woman balancing on a large oak branch that says sometimes the best place for a woman to be is out on a limb. And so, here I am. For better or for worse.

I’ve been in the weeds with work and hardly able to catch my breath the past weeks upon returning home from our two-month sojourn. And it seems as if the world has sped up yet again, just in time for the fast moving holiday season that begins here in New Orleans end of October and goes all the way through Jazz Fest. Which means zoom – there it is.

So I’m trying to get my head around slowing down and I know it’s all the rage, but it don’t come easy. You know it just ain’t easy.

I met a guy who wants to do a co-blog with me – it sounds interesting. Tin is good one minute and a nutball the next – the age, they say. Tatjana is leaving for New York tomorrow and I have four days to think about work, Tin, reading, writing, exercising, and not to mention I am still catching up with friends.

I’d like to slow down – but whatyagonnado? – time is not necessarily on my side.

“Since time is the one immaterial object which we cannot influence–neither speed up nor slow down, add to nor diminish–it is an imponderably valuable gift.”
Maya Angelou

I’ve always considered that my place of worship is City Park. I’m not sure when it became so, but I did realize one day that any day I did not walk through the park was a day without my soul being inspired.

This morning, I was walking through the park and looked across the lagoon to the Peristyle and saw a gospel choir robed in purple and gold lifting their voices to the sky.

On a tree stump nearby was a slick black cormorant with its wings outspread.

A black-crowned night heron, both an adult and an immature one, were davening in the thickness of the banks. (Honestly, I never knew herons were Jewish.)

And so began my Tuesday.

The morning began like this:

And quickly segued into this:

All because the weekend had been filled with too much of this:

I was behind on everything, including the stuff I do for free:

The tasks kept piling up, a swim lesson was added at the last gasping minute:

And I passed a house on Tchoupitoulas street that had a message for me:

So I came home and regrouped in my comfort zone:

Happy New Year to you too!

I didn’t realize when I was “let go” from my job of many years that it would be the best gift someone had ever given me. So it was easy for me to tell my friend, Bill Lavender, that his “letting go” would be the best thing that could happen to him.

Bill instantly did what Bill should have done a while ago and that is hang his shingle out, or rather dust it off, because Lavender Ink has been a reputable publishing house for a while now.

And so our loss has turned into our gain, because with Bill publishing work again, and giving me an opportunity to read new and interesting work and review it, well, say no more, I think we found our silver linings.

So here’s my review for:

Altercations in the Quiet Car
by Richard Martin

Somewhere on a couch, on a chair, on the porch, on the stair is a man who thinks too much. The man lives in “a world full of questions without answers.” This is not your average taciturn male, but a loquacious, disturbed and disturbing, insightful and delusional man for the ages. And Richard Martin’s Altercations in the Quiet Car has 44 plus male characters like this who pop off the page as if you just walked up and asked them for a light.

In most of these stories, the man in question or the questioning man has partnered with a super model babe whose boundaries are so clearly delineated that they appear to have all gone to the same university for learning how not to suffer these types of men.

The pace of the stories makes you want to read one after another, but they are best read one a night, for 44 nights, and once you have spent some six and a half weeks in Martin’s orbit you realize there is nobody quiet in the Quiet Car.

Caution: re-entry into a world filled with quiet men may not be possible.

We watched a fabulous animated film last night called, Sita Sings the Blues, which I highly recommend. You can get it on Netflix, but you can even see it free here.

The animation is so original and imaginative that it draws you into this parallel life, the modern one and the historical one (Ramayana). But the film itself was not made without turmoil. The artist Nina Paley used her own life trials for the modern version. Paley gives great sympathy to Sita who is treated like a used up pebble by Ram, but who never gives up her unconditional love for him.

Meanwhile, a neoconservative faction in India has denounced the film saying that it betrays and perverts the Hindu story.

The strong outcry from a few in India reminded me of what Obama said recently when he responded to the angry mob that sprang up over the YouTube trailer – “Let us never forget that for every angry mob, there are millions who yearn for the freedom and dignity, and hope that our flag represents,” he said.

Similarly for those in India not happy with the revisionist version of the Ramayana, there are many who also saw the film and said, “Yeah.”

When we were sitting on the beach in Zahara de los Atunes, we looked up at the 2:00 pm sun and saw this incredible phenomenon. The sun was surrounded by a dark black circle and surrounding the darkness was a beautiful rainbow. This phenomenon I later learned is called a solar halo and it was eery in the sense of awe and wonder and also had many of us questioning if it were the end of days (which gives you a clue into how many of us were feeling).

Later, someone was repeating the story to another and said, it was so eery it felt like the beginning of a new world – talk about lost in translation – or seeing the glass half full.

My favorite retelling of the story happened in Tangiers when my Spanish friend told her friends that it happened in the morning (it was 2PM – morning for Spaniards).

Whatever it was, it was a phenomenon, rarely seen and precious to behold, and it made us all stop and notice.

First, let’s start with shana tovah u’metukah, which in Hebrew is a wish for a good and sweet new year. Symbolically, we’ll eat apples with honey in this house – this is tradition. And on Rosh Hashanah, which starts tonight and also starts a ten day trek to Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, it will be all about teshuva or returning to what is pure inside of us and realizing where we might have gotten off track.

Catholics have confession, Jews have the High Holy Days – everyone needs a good purge and a chance to begin again.

This is a time when we are also supposed to look for the kernel of good in everyone, including those people who have wronged us, those we have turned away from, those we have become indifferent to – and that is a tough row to hoe for even the best of us, but try we must.

This morning I watched a guy carrying a placard on CNN and it said, “Islam will dominate, Freedom will die” – now you know this guy would be hard to love or forgive even in the best of us.

Tonight, I will blow the shofar, but eventually hope Tin will learn how to do it. And I will begin these holy days by saying I’m sorry to those I have wronged, consciously or unconsciously, and I hope when our paths cross again, I will be a better person and a more forgiving person.

Happy New Year everyone, may it be a good and sweet year for all of us.

I was just reading that the mystery producer of the anti-Islam film is a Coptic Christian living in California. He said Jews backed him by giving him $5 million to make the film (lie easily detected in that the film looked like it was made on $5000); the guy lives in Cairo but also in the U.S. so now it’s America’s fault that this film is out there; and in the meantime, so his insensitivity fanned the flames of oversensitivity and ignorance abounds.

You see stuff like this going on in the world and you think, are you kidding, I’ve got nothing to complain about on this fine day (except that there are idiots in the world).