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A 14-year-old and I were talking about boys and it was an interesting conversation. She was explaining to me that boys are weird. And of course, I gave that knowing nod in allegiance with our girl-ness. But then I offered her another explanation and that is think about the boy/girl dynamic from their point of view.

I had thought about this earlier when Tin had been watching Toy Story for the first time and Woody calls a meeting at the beginning of the movie and Bo Peep sidles up to him and says, “Hey, I can get someone to watch my flock later if you’re free,” causing Woody to blush and become completely discombobulated.

I thought ha, does it take a woman to be brazen to get a man to ask her out or what?

So this is where my young friend finds herself – asking this same question and the answer I gave her was imagine how hard it must be to be a guy and protocol says you should be the one to ask a girl out and how many rejections can one guy take in his lifetime? I certainly, as brazen as I am, would not venture to put myself out on a limb to be rejected even if I had never been so before but only feared I might be so.

It takes cojones made of kryptonite to rally to this cause. My young friend was receptive but still not convinced that boys have it harder than girls until another friend in his late twenties came over and joined our conversation. He said, “Who wants to be rejected? There are so many women who are really nasty as if not only do they want to reject you hands down, but they want you to know that you are completely worthless as well.”

So today I am grateful for all the men who have dared to greet me. It must be no easy task because as one long time source of mine told me, “Rachel, gal, you are tough,” (read: as in what man would ever go out with you). Well he was wrong then and he’s wrong now, he only knew me in business where I can be tough, but I’m actually mush – complete mushy mush – and not tough at all in my personal life. But I guess I have a demeanor that makes me appear to be capable of ball-breaking feats.

My young friend left feeling as if perhaps this boy/girl thing is a universal issue – and maybe not one that is only “her” dilemma. My 20-year-old friend left still puzzling over anything women-related from the get go. And I am left thinking, ah hell, I’ll just let the mystery be.

I have a voice in my head or voices shall I say. They tell me things. For instance, no matter how ahead of the game I remain in my work, these voices tell me it is not enough. No matter how clean my house is, it could always use more. No matter what I’ve done to keep myself in shape, healthy, and fit, my voice tells me that it’s not good enough.

These are the voices in my head. They are amplified under any sort of stress to the mind or body.

I am a relatively happy and confident person, so these voices or harpies in my head are incongruent but they are entrenched.

At meditation on Sunday morning, we had our dharma talk afterwards and the topic was Emptiness. The underlying theme is that chaos exists and we have to learn to create emptiness and steady our thoughts so as not to succumb to the allure of chaos.

The harpies that hide behind every nook and cranny in my mind are always on alert whether I’m aware of them or not and they always come out and try to tear me down. It’s not good enough, they tell me, you, you’re not good enough, or my favorite because it has an apocalyptic feel to it, it will never be good enough.

This morning as I went through my exercise routine and thought about how I feel like I’m getting back on track after a long illness (read: two weeks), I started chastising myself but another voice was answering, “What? I was supposed to stay on track while sick?”

My head harpies are good for one thing and one thing alone – to invoke fear. Fear that no matter how hard I work or try or force myself that I’m on the brink of annihilation. Thankfully, I have the other stronger voices in my head telling the harpies: “Namaste Bitches.” But on days when I’m coming out of a period of illness, my resolve is weak and they find their way to the podium and begin their assault and it is then I feel defenseless.

What I’m aiming for – is to bury those suckers. Because enough is enough. And so today, I am lighting a candle to ask my ancestors to help me over this hump – they gave me these glorious genes, now I need help to goose the low flame once more.

I’ve spent the last seven days in the trenches of a head cold almost-flu-like disease that Tin had caught at school and suffered one minute of a sniffly nose from and then passed to me in which it became the most infectious disease of the year. I told a friend of mine in California who is a life coach about my subsequent laryngitis and she said, “Laryngitis is when the words are blocked in your head and won’t come out.”

How appropriate that I needed one more reminder I’m not spending time on my book that I’m writing (or not).

When my hair started falling out in March of 2012, another spiritual healer type friend told me that hair loss meant humiliation and wow, how spot on this metaphysical reading of illness was back then because it had coincided with the loss of my work, my fear of losing my house, and not providing for the many animals and persons who had grown dependent upon me to perform like the one-trick pony I had become.

I don’t own any of these books that show the correlation between physical illness and emotional lack but when a friend was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, someone told me this illness is the manifestation of not having been nurtured. And while yes, I have grown more spiritual and metaphysical in my thinking of late, I still approach most of what comes my way with a high degree of skepticism.

Which brings me to dreams – my head cold led to subsequent sleepless nights as well as the neti pot becoming my BFF for days on end. It also helped me dig deeper into Rodger Kamenetz book, The History of Last Night’s Dream. To say that my and other’s dreams have fascinated me from time before time is an understatement. I have served as interpreter of many a person’s dreams. But a romp through Kamenetz’s version of why we dream completely changed my perspective on what it is that dreams are telling us.

I am haunted by certain dreams that I still can’t shake – the most profound being one I had in the summer of 2011 – a nightmare while in Spain that bordered on a revelation/hallucination/a work of art. I was in a small economy car headed across a bridge over water, when suddenly the stable bridge became a rope bridge that was swaying in a tempest, the entire landscape turned into Gotham at the Sea, with the white-capped waves reaching swells of magnificent proportions and the bridge undulating more and more until I got to a point where I could clearly see the bridge just stopped, ending into the storm tossed sea and a landscape of black and grey. I shuddered and backed up, putting the small car in reverse and cautiously headed backwards.

When I woke from that nightmare/dream I was shaken to the core. My natural dream interpretation skills kicked into action and I could have sworn that this dream was a state of the union. My job and livelihood was coming to an end. My foundation was undulating underneath me. And I saw no way forward. It all made sense to me then even though I still am fascinated by the almost immersion into a giant canvas painted in charcoal and ebony that I was moving through. I kept scratching my head about the end of the bridge – I back up. But why wouldn’t I back up, it was freaking scary to go off the bridge into the tossed sea? I mean, who would do that?

Towards the end of Kamenetz book I started to realize something profound. In many times of transition in my life and upheaval I have had a similar nightmare, one where I am in danger. This manifests itself into two different types of dreams. One is a dream where I walk out of my house and into the street at night, but suddenly I’m very far from my house, and the street is not just dark, it’s pitch dark and I am suddenly in a not good part of town and to get from where I am to home requires me to walk through dangerous areas and I am utterly alone. While the landscape of this dream shifts subtly with new geographies, the dynamic is always the same. In the other dreams, a more creative touch is applied as I am killed or about to be killed in a myriad of ways. One is I’m Princess Diana in the back of the limo and the limo driver turns out to be the killer who pulls over under a freeway and takes out an elaborate leather choking device and puts it on his arm like a tefillin and then begins to strangle the life out of me. This is only one of many ways I’m about to die in these dreams. And similar to the dark street dreams I’m on my own.

In Kamenetz book I found a key to get inside my dream and change that device. He talks about how dreams have a pathology and once you identify it, you learn more about yourself than most waking lessons provide in a lifetime. My pathology, I realized, was that in every situation where I’m in danger, I’m alone and more importantly, I don’t think anything of that being the problem. I’m alone because I never seem to call out for help, I never seem to ask anyone to show me the way out, and I always think in the dream that I have to figure this out myself or I’m doomed.

Just in this last week of illness and coming to the end of Kamenetz book, the worm turned in my dreams. I dreamed the other night that I had walked out of my house and was going to get something and then wound up on that dark street, in that bad neighborhood, only this one was really bad because it housed an infamous criminal and yet, the first thing I did was turn to a young girl walking her black lab and ask her for help. She smiled and said, “Sure,” and then she told me that she had gotten her dog from that very criminal and began to tell me the history of the neighborhood. She walked me home, and suddenly the dark eery landscape softened and became a place, a place I wasn’t scared to be in (read: because I wasn’t alone).

I went back to other dreams that have proliferated my nightscape since I moved to the Spirit House, where I’m holding children, babies or toddlers, or speaking to people with toddlers, and I came to realize they were all trying to help me learn more about myself in an unencumbered way. The child’s way is not blocked by the adult’s fear. These weren’t babies as in my wanting more children in my life, but rather as Kamenetz says in his book, the child in the dream is a gift who helps you learn your soul’s path:

… First you must encounter your predicament, and see your opposition; this is the first gift of the dream. Then you can find the essential image of the soul; this is the second gift. Finally, as the child you explore this imaginal space and learn from the archetypes; this is the third gift.

Seeing as a child removes the stacking fears that we as adults have accumulated in our life. Acknowledging and accepting, not removing or eradicating, fear in my life has helped me tremendously. I owe learning about fear to my being able to move up a rung to a level that still invokes a touch of altitude sickness in my gut, but each moment I am able to hold my eyes wide open for any length of time, I’m blessed with a view.

And this ain’t no ordinary view, people. Because this ain’t no ordinary life.

I went last night to a friend’s fundraiser for girls in Ghana who are unable to go to school. This is part of a long trajectory she has taken in the form of raising money to help women in Ghana. The fundraiser was billed as a Nina Simone evening as Simone worked in clubs to pay for her own classical piano lessons without telling her mother, so with the same fierce determination my friend is helping women who might be the next Nina Simone reach their potential. As she got up to speak, she got choked up as she recalled the challenge of starting this business years ago and she thanked her dad who had flown in from California because he helped her set up the program. Afterwards, we watched a film her husband had put together of the women in Ghana applying for the program.

I left and went to a friend’s 40th birthday party across town. She told me her friends all got together and bought her and her husband a dishwasher because their’s hadn’t worked for seven years and when her friends overheard her talking about it, they decided to put in together and buy her one. Now those are friends with benefits.

photo by Josh Brasted

This morning, I woke at 3AM with my head cold and laryngitis and thought my brain would explode. Tin woke up late, thankfully, but then when I tried to lay down again, I became his human trampoline. Seeing how there was nothing else to do but get this boy some activity, I tried to figure it out – a) couldn’t do a playdate because I couldn’t speak to the mother; b) he didn’t want to go to the zoo or aquarium, c) amusement park!

So C it was – we went over to City Park’s Amusement Park and he rode all the rides and some pretty hairy/scary ones at that! I was impressed by his utter indifference to heights and fear, which was good because I was incapable of going on spinning rides in my condition. I had to ask one guy if he would take Tin on the Ferris Wheel because I was so dizzy I couldn’t go up there. So he was able to ride even the rides that required an adult.

As we were exiting, a petite, older Asian woman with a tiny baby in a stroller asked me what my name was – when I told her, she said her name is Rosa and she would start praying for me if I didn’t mind. “I don’t mind at all.”

Tin and I strolled over to Morning Call and sat outside on this fine, beautiful day, and Tin ate beignets loaded with powdered sugar and I had a cup of delicious cafe au lait. A very tall and large man walked over to our table and said to me with conviction, “It’s all going to be good, you hear.” And he spoke to me as if he knew me and knew what my definition of good might be, so much so, that I just nodded and said thank you.

Everybody needs somebody sometimes, it’s just the way we are designed.

Friday night was the Lantern Walk at Tin’s Waldorf school. This was his/our third year doing the ritual and it has become so ingrained in him as an annual that he thinks of the Lantern Walk in the same list as Hanukkah, his birthday, his homecoming anniversary, etc. We sing songs and make a paper lantern from the painting that the kids do and then on the night of the Lantern Walk, the kids carry the lanterns in the darkness of the evening around the school and back inside for a puppet show about a lantern that helps light others’ way.

Like Hanukkah, like Diwali, like Christmas and Kwanza – these are all rituals to help us tolerate the darkness that descends on us this time of year. It warms our soul, which in turn warms our heart.

Go away blackest, darkest night
Go away
Give way to light

My surge in activity landed me with a horrible head cold and laryngitis – thank goodness I’m a writer and not a singer is all I can say. Thursday, I went to see the Robert Glasper Experiment at the newly renovated Civic Theater. And because it was a school night and my babysitter is in high school, I had to leave just as they were warming up. I’m not the only person/parent who has trouble seeing live music anymore – 10PM start time is just too late especially because it said he was coming on at 8PM and especially for those of us that depend on our sleep to thrive.

Robert Glasper just came out with Black Radio II – the first CD, Black Radio, is fantastic and if you buy no other music this year, this is the one you need to buy. As Glasper says on II, “90% of what is on the radio is whack” – so he’s raising the bar too many notches to count.

I went with a friend who also has young children, so it was with our heads hanging that we left and went to our cars 40 minutes into their set.

I came home and got in bed and dreamed of Glasper – sitting at the keyboards grooving out here in New Orleans. All was not lost.

I have to remind kick myself every day in order to remember that I don’t know anything because I don’t. When your mind gets anxious, it’s because you are worried about the outcome of something – the trick is you think you know the outcome and you worry, but the truth is that you don’t know it – you haven’t met all the people in the world, you haven’t been to all the places in the world, you haven’t read all the books or seen all the movies or danced to all the sweet music the world has to offer, so relax, there is nothing to be anxious about – the world is unfolding.

The past 48 hours I’ve been dealing with some nasty stuff, but while that was all going on, so were a number of wonderful things – good news on a friend’s diagnosis, another friend completed her last round of chemo today, and a bevy of new people entered my life when a friend posted my Transracial Parenting site on her Facebook page.

We are on the constantly evolving train journey to wonderland – and the icky parts come only from resistance to the ride. Those who clearly see that the reign of terror is over are more scared than ever – that would be those who are rich beyond measure as well as those who are ignorant beyond baseline.

So people – celebrate not knowing what is coming and open up to what is here.

I was sitting on a blanket in the sun today and I was telling a friend how I had developed the art of serial monogamy without missing a beat – yet there were always flashes of time when it was just me. At 20, on a ferry going to Ship Island, I leaned back and watched the Gulf gently toss us to and fro – I was light and giddy and perfectly unattached. At 24, sitting on the back steps of my shotgun apartment ($265/month) on General Pershing after divorcing my first husband – smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee under the shade of a very old pecan tree – I was there, by myself, at peace. It wasn’t until I was 47, divorced from my third husband, before I had the next glimmer – and that was riding a bike in Mississippi counting roadkill in my head – I was there, by myself, content.

So now at 54, I am digging the solace of me, myself and I. Even though today, the woman speaking to me said she had raised her two children all by herself and never in a million years would she have thought she’d be single for this long. I told her I always had someone when I left someone and she said, “That’s not about them, that’s about you. You had not found peace inside of you.”

Au contraire, I told my French friend, I had found it, but it was fleeting because I couldn’t sit with it – I was not calm in my youth. I had wild romantic notions and lustful loins and I only envisioned myself as a semicircle, incomplete.

Well, it’s happening. I’m coming out of my hibernation, at last.

Thursday was Halloween and no one who has a kid may opt to stay home. So in the morning, I dressed my fire breathing dragon for school and let him heat my tea water with his fire breath:

Then in the early evening, Tin changed into an astronaut and we ventured over to our old stomping grounds in Faubourg St. John to partake of the blocked off streets and contained trick or treat spirit.

And then Friday, it was time to behave like an adult. A friend and I went to another friend’s reading in the Bywater, which ended up being a mix of musician/writers reading from their books and playing music, while my friend read her poetry from her phone accompanied by Amzie Adams playing his melodic dulcimer. Her erotic poem ended abruptly (coitus interruptus) but up until then we were enjoying the hell out of her sweet and tipsy presentation – complete with vintage white patent leather platform boots.

Then it was off to pass the night with DJ Soul Sister, who was holding court at One Eyed Jacks for her Prince Dance Revolution (No. 2) – and that is where I cut loose the ties that have bound me for months now – three hours of nonstop dancing to my heartthrob as he appeared larger than life on the big screen.

I went to sleep that night way past bedtime, but as a friend reminded me, this new routine of bedtime at 9PM is self-imposed and new, so just like any other habit, it can be broken at will or whim and should be.

This morning after thoroughly cleaning the house from corner to corner, I then went and met friends for a picnic in Audubon Park – it was a rare fall day in New Orleans – the sun warming the chill in the air. We sat on blankets – me with my three French friends – one had made a quiche, the other a quinoa salad, and one had brought a box of sweet treats from her bakery, and I brought fresh fruit – satsumas, pears, apples – and while the kids played, we chatted and laughed and savored all of it – the calm, the delicacies, the sun.

Beside us was the swing set that my dear friend had erected when her two year old daughter died of a brain tumor. As I was nearing the end of this nearly perfect weekend, I looked at the children swinging and thought how all of this life is one part magic, one part motion and a large leap of faith that everything is going to be okay in the end.

And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

Tomorrow is All Hallow’s Eve, which I heard today has become the second biggest holiday in this country. Considering the amount of decorations that are in front of my house right now, I’d say I’m down.

This holiday resonates with me on a much deeper level – other than in my dreaming life, it is the only day that I might come close to those who have passed as the veil between us thins. I will spend my day tomorrow focusing on this wondrous interstitial place as I think of my parents and grandparents, uncles and cousins who have transitioned out of this life. I long for nothing more than to touch them through a gauzy curtain of love.

We have lots of trashy candy here filling up the African wedding blood bowl for the trick or treaters, and will go to Fortier Park where we join the revelry there of kids in costumes and parents smiling behind them. Meanwhile, I’ll be looking in the alleys and up in the trees for my loved ones as they smile behind me.

Oh ancestors, hear my words: I miss you so.

Photo by Anastasia Traina ~2013~