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Heidi went to live with Tatjana when we moved away from the LaLa but she never really left my heart. Shepherds are a dog apart from other breeds. They exist to remind us that we are sentient beings with a soul because their eyes reveal theirs so clearly.

These German Shepherds bond so tightly with their human comrades that they don’t recognize they are a different species – we are one in their mind.

Heidi has a huge heart too, which makes me think she is my mother reincarnated. Her gold flaxen hair and her well-lined dark rimmed eyes, her beauty, her loving and laid back style all remind me of my mom.

German Shepherds bond with the whole family, but they have a distinctive relationship with one member in particular. And for Heidi the special person is Tin. Heidi adopted Tin as her ward from the very first moment the two met. And Tin adopted Heidi back. There is nothing more beautiful than a boy with his dog.

Thoughts of the week:

I woke this morning with a clear vision that you meet people where they are at, and sometimes where they are at, is not where it’s at. Enough said. Proceed with love.

Tin has rhythm, no doubt about it. He has been fooling around with music since the day he could move his body on his own. And he loves to draw and I’ve seen those drawings go from trying to draw a straight line to squiggles to trains and planes and automobiles. He’s also a master builder and has taken his blocks and created the Superdome and he’s even created a space landing station that was as wide as the Superdome is tall.

But I thought he’d like soccer because he also loves to run and jump and be with other kids until I’ve seen him on the soccer field. My little Ferdinand I call him as I watch him staring at the blades of grass or the clouds moving overhead while all the other children are fast and furiously chasing the ball into the goal.

The creative type, I tell the other parents who turn to look at me.

And we all know there are many different types of intelligence and ways of being. Should Tin grow up and pursue a creative life, he will have the pleasure of pulling from all the wonders of the universe to see the world differently. And as a parent, I just have to be flexible enough to let him forge his own path, while presenting him with opportunities.

Tomorrow morning someone dear to me is having surgery. My prayers tonight are simply: this chapter ends with that being the story – a dear friend of mine had surgery, and we all went on with our wonderful lives.

Someone once told the anecdote of the woman who inherited her great grandmother’s roast pans along with her recipe. Take a large rump roast and cut it in half, put one half in each pan, and season well then cook. No one knew why the great grandmother had split the roast but each generation kept doing it because it was so delicious. Turns out the grandmother only had two small pans and not one large enough to hold the roast and so began the tradition.

And so it is that I’m reading J. Krishnamurti’s Inward Revolution and his explanation of training the mind to see everything anew. Remember that fight you had with your partner: try to envision them as they are in this moment, not as the accumulation of all the hurts you have given each other over the years. It’s very eastern, very zen, very much that you can’t change the way of the world, but you can change yourself and with that comes a complete revolution. Krishnamurti says:

To understand the mind you cannot interpret it according to somebody else’s idea, but you must observe how your own total mind works. When you know the whole process of it, how it reasons, its desires, motives, ambitions, pursuits, its envy, greed and fear; then the mind can go beyond itself, and when it does there is the discovery of something totally new. That quality of newness gives an extraordinary passion, a tremendous enthusiasm, which brings about a deep inward revolution: and it is this inward revolution which alone can transform the world not any political or economic system.

This is not for pussies – take it from me – reorienting your mind away from its grasp of memories, joy and sorrow, and the ruts that have been grooved into your brain from experience are hard to just shake off. But you must, in order to see things as they are rather than stuck in time. For instance, what if I went back to my ex husband and said I love to feel the wind on my face. He would think you, you never loved the wind, you hate wind, that’s what you always told me. But he wouldn’t know that now that I have no hair, that my facial hair, nose hair, ear hair, wisps of hair, are all gone, I love the wind. He would not know me now and I would be stuck in time to him.

Right now the world seems so out of control – the government is shut down, no one’s food stamp cards worked at the grocery stores today, threats of war, secret killings and missions are being carried out as I type, and yet, you can work inwardly on your own framework and re-see the world with a different lens. If we could set free most of the imprint in our mind, we could also shake loose of resentment, fear, sorrow, and disappointment.

Tin and I walked down the street to get some milk this morning. We passed a house with a gabled roof over an invisible entry and made me think that a lot of times things remain that have no purpose and we hold onto them because they were so meaningful at one time.

Tonight, we walked Heidi around the block after sundown and passed some people on the porch. I asked them if the house next door (which is directly in back of me) had sold at the sheriff’s auction – this couple bought it – the ones on the porch – Andy and Andrea – and I thought about all the people who live on the edge in this neighborhood – the ones my yoga teacher at Swan River was worrying about this morning – the ones that will get edged out of the transition that is underway here – Whole Food going up down the block, a new school going up next door, the Bio Med center already under construction – and the infill of all these old and charming New Orleans houses that will be bought up by those who can afford to buy, to renovate, and to reinvigorate.

Is it a loss that all of these have nots will be ousted? Is it a gain that all these houses will be fixed up? Is trying to make things not change right, wrong, indifferent? I passed the house where the squatter lives with the mangy dog – the guy who showers with my faucet outside – the one I told in no uncertain terms to stop. I even called the police and then I felt bad. This guy doesn’t have running water because he’s squatting. And yet I do. If tomorrow the world flipped upside down, would he give me water if I needed it?

TGIF has come to represent many different acronyms – depending on the mood:

THANK GOD I’M FABULOUS – is my default chant.
THANK GOD IT’S FILM(NIGHT) – is Tin’s chant since Friday’s are movie night.
THANK GOD I’M FINISHED – is my end of project whoop.

After years of my prayers of asking for forgiveness, I’ve shifted all my prayers to avowing gratitude instead. I am thankful morning, noon and night. Gratitude oozes from my every pore.

And I’ve come to believe that simple things like walking to City Park this morning in hopes of seeing pelicans, is in and of itself a way to isolate time for joy. I realized the cool front we had for a moment was just a tease and they are not ready to come inland to winter, but still I am looking forward to their return.

I feel as if my soul has been tie dyed out of all of the colorful events that have made up my life as of late, and now I just am awestruck by how beautiful things are – the rye grass growing by the post office, the humongous sunflower in front of a house I saw on the way to the park today, a blue jay that hopped over the grass to get to me, the milkweed I planted in front that was devoured by caterpillars and has now leafed up again ready for the butterflies to emerge and start the process all over again – and the sum of this beauty lies in wait for a beholder.

Me!

Someone posted this today and I snatched it:

Plotinus phrase has me awestruck: the soul that beholds the beautiful becomes beautiful.

The writer and poet Jaiya John posted this today on his site:

Two desires live in us. One of the soul, and one caused by fear. Learn to live a life of soul desire. The beauty of which will set this world afire. And a new world will rise. And you shall taste the sweet spice of Fulfillment.
© Jaiya John

I now add to my repertoire of TGIF chants:

THANK GOD I’M FULL
THANK GOD I’M FEARLESS
THANK GOD I’M FLYING
THANK GOD I’M FOUND
THANK GOD I’M FINE
THANK GOD I’M FORTUNATE
THANK GOD I FLOWER

I was on Pinterest looking for natural hairstyles for my friend’s 14 year old daughter in hair crisis and I came across this site for Bald women. There were also tee shirts that said BALD IS BEAUTIFUL. We had just spent forty five minutes telling the 14 year old to embrace what is hers, to own it, to not want what she doesn’t have. So today, Friday, TGIF, thank god I’m fabulous day, I want to tell you that bald is where it’s at – I do believe this has got to be a trend for women. I read this lengthy detail of how strippers prepare themselves for their evening at the dance clubs – they shave and shave and shave – and WALA, I don’t need to go there. Then I watch my friends struggle with their hair – it’s not straight curly thick thin enough and WALA, I don’t need to think about it.

So on this fabulous day, I give to you the gift of myself and say you, do you, whatever that is.

I put tonight on my calendar along with the other events that I put on my calendar but never attend, but I knew I would go to this one, even if it meant Tin would be in tow. Right before the Dalai Lama arrived in New Orleans, Rodger Kamenetz wrote an essay about him that was so moving, I was compelled to learn more about Kamenetz. He is the author of The Jew in The Lotus, which of course I had heard about but never got around to reading when it was first published.

After seeing the Dalai Lama, I picked up Rodger’s book and read it in sort of disbelief. Here was this religion that I had grown up in and grappled with and resisted as an adult, carefully choosing atheists as partners to move me further away from my religious foundation until one day the whole house of cards collapsed. What Rodger showed me in his book is that Judaism has so much more to offer but the very essence of what I desired has been withheld from me and other Jews as Judaism became more ensconced in rationality in lieu of spirituality.

As I reframed my life the big soul doors flung open wide to a big gust of spirituality that washed over me. And interestingly enough, it was on the other side of upheaval that I picked up Rodger’s latest book, To Die Next To You. I read it one poem at a time because each one required readings for me to figure out what moved me and unmoored me at the same time. These are not necessarily poems of death, they are musings about opposing forces, about what appears to us in layers and gets stripped away and rebuilt and stripped away and rebuilt. They are not death, but life itself.

It’s as if the idea of rebirth, of multiple experiences, of plurality had transformed into ink stains on each page – one side thoughts, one side images. And what kept bringing me back was how much each of these pages spoke to me, uniquely, in my myriad lives and incarnations.

I went to hear Rodger introduce his book at Octavia Books tonight and learned that his poem were written during a reframing in his life and I also learned about his dreamwork. The dreams I’ve been interpreting on my own – the tossed sea where the bridge ends abruptly and I look out at the tempest and retreat. The nightly murders that plagued me until I realized that I had cut off a part of myself and was living a lie. The giddy joy as I tip toed around the LaLa after moving into the Spirit House.

Rodger read After the Flood, one of the more hauntingly beautiful poems in this collection. And oddly, it was not written after the 2005 Federal Flood, but years before. And when he was done, I had him sign my copy on a page that has a poem that I felt secretly spoke to me – much like the flood he hadn’t met yet. It is Miniature Elegy:

Her hair now is a memory of what her hair was.
As her smile now treasures all her smiles.
There is nothing like her, but what she has lost.
There is nothing like her, but her lost her.

And therein lies the poem that will be nailed to the door, not the final nail in my coffin nor the final nail in my brand new frame, but the nail to mark when a poet’s words were able to sum me up in a moment in time.

I read the Obit today in the NYT for Rabbi Ovadia Yosef and I am once again wondering how to deal with the lack of greatness in a great man.

Here you have the leading Torah authority in Israel and the world, a Sephardic* rabbi, which in and of itself is odd since like here in the U.S. it is those of European descent who claim authority over any ruling, and yet the turn towards hawkishness (away from this land is your land) and the hatred of gays, makes me question any authority he ever had.

(*Sephardic Jews were originally those who left Spain or Portugal after the 1492 expulsion, many of whom settled in North Africa and the Ottoman Empire. In modern Israel, the term generally refers to Jews who came from North Africa and the Arab world and who complained of decades of discrimination and humiliation at the hands of the Ashkenazim, Jews of European stock who made up Israel’s early leadership elite.)

When I was a child, my parents would take us to the Mardi Gras fountain on Lakeshore Drive and they would buy us an ice cream or popcorn and then we’d stroll around and around the fountain. I remember those visits as encompassing almost the sum total of my childhood. It would just have become dark, the humid air would still be warm from the day, the colors of the fountain were exciting and mesmerizing. All of us children felt as if we were on a big outing.

The fountain has been defunct for a while and I just found out it was restored.

I’m looking forward to taking Tin to see it – where I hope he feels the same indelible magic I did.

My father would have been 90 years old this past January, and my mother would have been 78 years old this December. They are the bookends to the book I’m still writing.