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My dear friend, Susie, in Boston recommended WILD by Cheryl Strayed, which I read in a fever since I’m actually trying to finish up two books about race and kids, and another book published by Lavender Ink, and I couldn’t put it down. I changed my meds a few days ago and that has me a little feverish, a little antsy, a little out of my mind. Several times I closed the book and was envious, envious that this woman had the guts to go take a hike and prove her grit and then write a best selling novel. That’s my life, I kept saying to myself, I was going to write a novel.

And instead I got lost on the trail. I got caught up in California where life became more about making dollars than making sense, and my novel, my book, got shoved under a burning bush somewhere. Even now I sometimes set off for an urban hike and I find myself agoraphobic, unable to leave the confines of this bayou, drawn to it like life’s blood.

What about my torturous hikes along the way of my journey? What about the walk of lame that led me back to New Orleans to be near my mother and then watching her decline and die? Or the walk of shame back in 2005?

I’ve been scrambling over boulders, dodging feral spirits, wailing for my demon lover and messing up and picking myself up for a good long time. But what use is it to put that all in a book now, when I feel like every day I am still unwritten?

In 2007 and possibly before, I began developing Hashimoto’s Disease, which is not uncommon in women, but because the period of 2004 to 2011 was seven years of undue stress, my condition was amplified and all of my hair fell out and my energy level plummeted to zero. To learn more about the thyroid and how it is the master regulator of your entire body, watch this slide show.

My blood test last week revealed that I am overmedicated and suppressing my thyroid so I was put on a new level of medication – my seventh adjustment in seven months. Each adjustment brings with it many adjustments. For the past couple of days, I’ve been crawling out of my skin – unable to be at peace in my own body. I think that perhaps my thyroid is waking up – or at least that is what I’m telling myself. I could run on a hamster wheel and not stop for days is what it feels like.

A doctor I saw on Monday asked me how Synthroid, the thyroid replacement I am taking is affecting my mood. I just stared at her blankly – what mood? – ask me again and I’ll tell you something different. Part and parcel to my new found search into just who Rachel actually is, is that Rachel keeps changing, and like a butterfly’s metamorphosis that takes the life out of the caterpillar and injects it into the butterfly whose flight is short lived only to lay more eggs and do the whole thing over again, I’m in a constant state of change or should I call it renewal?

Brittle nails – check, weight gain – check, hair loss – CHECK, energy loss – check, dry skin – check, and on it goes, my body reads like a text book case of Hashimoto’s Disease. But my spirit reads more like a textbook metamorphosis from shedding my hair continuously like the caterpillar sheds its skin, to building a chrysalis or a home within, to emerging, wings ready for flight, and able to start life’s cycle over again.

I don’t know why Monday, which is the start of the week, is always so disruptive. No matter how you line it up, Monday always decides for you how it is going to go. And so it was that this morning’s early walk with the dogs was hijacked by rain, and exercise time in between appointments collapsed into a disappearing interstitial. The grayness of a gray day is made grayer by being a grey Monday.

But this Monday I used my Insight Timer app that was able to help monitor my meditation and so the day began with progress – instead of the anxy attempts to meditate that are thwarted by an ever mounting to do list, today I meditated in peace knowing my app had my back. And it helped. When I looked I saw that 156 people around the world were also meditating – but when it asked me to sign up, the tediousness of detail the app wanted made me suspicious of letting anyone so close to my rhythm that they would actually be documenting to others worldwide that Rachel is meditating right now. TMI.

Speaking of TMI, sometime this morning I was asked to provide some background information and I found myself attempting to be the gatekeeper of too much information. Family history – uh, where to begin. Marital history – who to leave in, who to leave out. Job history – how to describe my current working life through a lens of gain and not loss while being honest.

This gray Monday disrupted my plan, the one that was on my calendar, in my mind, on my to do list and is not over yet. I interviewed a source about a recent Blueshift topic, I set about trying to write the mission statement for the transracial parenting blog, I searched my soul to make sure my actions were leading me in the right direction – and I took a deep breath.

While I spent my day wrapped up in trying to figure out what was the best way to spend my time – Tin started his morning by getting down on his knees and speaking to BamBam through the window. It is rare, but there are now times I wish that I could go back and be a child again:

In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, sometimes people forget that there is a whole slew of things we just don’t know.

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable still exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness.
Albert Einstein

I’m often amazed how I can feel rapture and at the same time envy – I was looking up the author of a book and when I read about that person’s success in writing, I had to admit I was envious. Trite, I know. And yet how is it that one person can be in awe with so much that she knows and so much that she does not know and at the same time be capable of something so petty, like the jealousy of someone else’s success.

It’s not as if I’m on the same path as anybody else, so why even compare or contrast?

And so onward in search of better behavior and opening up more to mystery and wonder.

The Elephant is Slow to Mate
by D.H. Lawrence

The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.

So to know me is to know that I dream of going to India. Previous plans have been thwarted by another dream and that was to become a mother (check). But India remains for me as tops on my bucket list and now it is just a matter of when. So I was thrilled when students from Tulane and friends of Tatjana’s and now mine came over before they departed on their six-month trip to India. There is something about the young and smart that makes me want to go back and do it all over again instead of getting mired in sex, drugs and rock n roll as I was at their age.

Or maybe not, actually I was already married at their age just like they are and thinking about babies. Sex drugs and rock n roll was earlier.

When I think of India, I think of color so intense that it is almost paralyzing.

Jennifer and Curry started their blog which I am reading so I can trace their steps – I want all this first-hand information for my trip.

The thing about these two young, bright individuals is I had already missed them when they left our house. They seem wiser and larger than we do sitting here in the LaLa carrying out our daily busy-ness. That night we were here, I had a conversation about when it is best to get pregnant and start a family and I kept insisting to wait as long as possible, then in a separate conversation with my friend and doctor about this same topic, I realized I had misspoken.

After spending my forties trying to carry babies who wouldn’t stick around, I said to anyone who would listen that if I knew now what I didn’t know then I would have started trying to get pregnant when I was 20. I remember a conversation with a friend’s daughter who was living with a man in London who was a professional gambler where she was lamenting wanting a child and he was too obsessed with his career to care, and I told her to have her child nonetheless. Her mother was horrified.

It could be it was adopting Tin at 50 years of age that made me think otherwise because I had lived a full life before I became a mother, which makes it easier to give up on this or that thing I can’t do because I have a child. But my doctor friend told me differently – he said it’s a bell curve and the very truth of the matter is that a woman between the age of 22 and 30 reproduces easier, makes better babies, and has the physical stamina to raise a child or children. Ever since our conversation, I wanted to get in touch with the young couple and tell them – have that baby right now!!!!

They will be great parents! Yet, I feel confident everyone’s life develops at its own unique pace and mine was always destined to be later in my life as I’ve been forever a late bloomer and that is my destiny.

It most likely wouldn’t be theirs.

Tomorrow is Saturday and like every day in New Orleans there is just too many events to do – there is the Treme Gumbo Fest, there is LadyFest going on and a parade at 4PM starting at Buffa’s, there is a friend’s 25th wedding anniversary party, there is live music everywhere, and there is a walk through at Carol Robinson’s gallery of Sandra Burshell’s artwork – some painted at the LaLa.

I didn’t get a chance to meditate today, because it’s been a full day of social media ranting and raving – why does Facebook make it so hard to just get a business page up? It’s crazy!!! Crazy I tell you.

Meanwhile, I picked up Tin and was driving down Martin Luther King Boulevard and I saw kids playing in the yard, folks sitting on their porch, and a general sense of slowing down, of the week being over, and I felt a keen sense that I’d better slow down or I am going to miss my own life. I came home and crossed three things off my list for tomorrow.

I need to time to be.

Tin has become a regular at Music for All Ages in Louis Armstrong Park so now the older musicians call him Pops. Love it.

We bought a great book about the Kapiti Plain and Tin fell so in love with it that he memorized it and loves to act like he is reading it himself.

James Earl Jones did a version and it makes you wonder what his voice sounded like when it was Tin’s age.

I was up this morning at some ungodly hour and was sitting in the womb chair in the living room listening to the sounds of silence when I checked my iPhone and found this interview recommended by a friend of mine. And it struck me, as I read what Christopher Bernard was speaking about, about being a writer and not tying up your art to mercantile pursuits because it will corrupt it, how I’ve come back to me, to who I am, but this time, it’s different, I’m on a higher rung.

Remember Flower’s adage that Russians believe life is a spiral and we start off in the smallest part but as we move along our path we move up to spirals that are more expansive so we come back to the same places, the same people, the same situations, but we’ve changed when we get there. This is the ideal progress for a pilgrim, it’s not everyone’s. Some are stuck on a rung. Not a pretty place to be.

Well, as I rounded the curve to this new height, I got a little dizzy. I couldn’t remember who I was or how I got here. And I started to panic. And my life coach helped me identify saboteurs who were jumping out of the bushes and trying to block my way. And my therapist gently reminded me that I am who I am.

So when I went to see Cloud Atlas and all I heard coming out of it was a moral tale of truth and integrity, I realized that when someone asked me what I do for a living and I said, “I’m a writer and an investigative journalist.” I am a truth seeker. My life and my work has been in the pursuit of truth – that is who I am. And yes, I have lost my way, my truth, at times in my life – feet of clay as my poet friend Bill Lavender reminded me, but when I quoted Henry David Thoreau the other day – about remaining in the channel, I started understanding who I am at my core more than I had known before.

My self-actualization – the purpose of me writing this blog since 2004 – was to record a woman’s self-actualization – so let me record this – I moved up a rung.

And yes, I have started Rockin’ it Bald as my friend Brian suggested back in May, but I’m also Rockin’ it Rachel, and this feels like swimming through warm, ocean waters instead of jello.

My now world is a creative interplay of my desires – I write my blog, I am starting a parenting blog about race, I’m working as an investigative journalist, I’m raising an awesome child, I’m working with Waldorf and some fabulous people there to make Tin’s school be the best school, and I’m rockin’ it in the free world.