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The dharma talk at the zen center today was Communication – a chapter in Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Suzuki Roshi. “When you listen to someone,” he says, “you should give up all your preconceived ideas and your subjective opinions, just observe what his way is… Just see things as they are with him, and accept these. This is how we communicate with one another… A mind full of preconceived ideas, subjects, intentions, or habits is not open to things as they are.”

I don’t know anyone who listens this way, who isn’t poised ready with their own litany of things to say just waiting for their turn to jump in. There are those who jump uninvited, there are those who sit back waiting for their turn, there are those who never hear a word you are saying.

Imagine listening to someone speaking to you without having any agenda, any response, any desire to do anything but hear them. It’s a startling departure from the every day.

I was finally able to get over to the zen center to meditate this morning and it was like a breath of fresh air. Literally. My new favorite saying to Tin when he is upset is, “Take a deep breath, and count to zen.” This morning, getting ready to go, I was in the backyard watering some of the plants and was thinking about the weeds. Along the fence between my neighbor and my yard are weeds growing – some sort of vinca flowering plant, along with a small daisy-ish looking plant – and along the back retaining wall is cat’s claw spilling over the concrete thick and clingy. I thought about them all as I was watering the flowers in the pot and decided to let them be.

I had told Joe to remove the cat’s claw and to weed eat the “weeds” and now I just said to heck with it.

Weeds are growing and I’m letting them be.

When I arrived at the zen center, I walked in and kneeled down to meditate and the first zazen began. Then a half hour later, we stood for the walking meditation, and as I rounded the front of the room where the buddha was, where the incense is, I noticed a small vase holding a nosegay of the blue vinca like weeds that have taken over one side of my yard. They had been elevated to an altar. Ordinary weeds.

I came home and cut a nosegay and put a few on one of my altars – here you go weeds, make yourself at home.

When I brought Tin to be tested for gifted, the woman said that he did not color inside the lines and recommended that he use video games so that he would be better at the test in six months. As if.

As if I would have him perfect video games to perfect that damn test. The nerve. I had been trying to get him into Hines Elementary nursery, which since the 2005 Federal Flood and its relocation to Lakeview has been only taking gifted students – coincidentally, Tuesday, I learned from prior Hines alum that Hines is not the place to be if you are young, gifted and Black – even if their demographics suggest otherwise. So I’m sort of relieved that whole thing didn’t pan out.

Meanwhile, about a year ago, Tin, who used to sign his name T i n – began using a more dyslexic style – notice his signature in the right hand bottom corner:

It’s interesting, because when his signature changed so did his drawing, which became much more animated and creative. My friend who is an artist credits his dyslexia with his creativity.

Meanwhile, I ran across something interesting in Tin’s adoption files when I was looking for something for his school – his birthmother listed her favorite color as blue, which is Tin’s favorite color as well. I told him this the other day, but he shrugged it off.

There are no coincidences in life, are there?

I know I am beginning to sound more like a new age blogger (not that there is anything wrong with that) than the usual crooner of the ups and downs of a woman’s life and self actualization, but I’m going to have to go with the new script – I feel amazing!

So many things make me smile that I just walk around on a cloud these days. I ran into friends last night at a birthday party and I was telling one of them about all the changes in my life recently and I said, you know it’s like I kept asking for clarity and suddenly – snap – I had it and once I had it, everything started falling in place, doors opened, people came into my life to help me – support, encouragement and love overflowed into my life. And I told her I went to the doctor and he said my hair would most likely not grow back and she said, “No, you don’t want that hair, it would mess with your spiritual leader persona you got going on.”

Ahhh, the Buddha that’s what I look like. Or let’s just say, I flipped the script from free falling to flying – much like Tin was trying to do the other day after watching Kiki’s Delivery Service. He grabbed the broom from the laundry room and clenched his teeth and lifted up on his tippy toes just trying desperately to take off and fly like the young witch in the movie.

Finally, he said with a frown, “I want to fly so bad,” and I said, “I know you do honey, but just imagine you are flying. Close your eyes and fly,” and then we both closed our eyes and pictured ourselves flying.

And so my word of the day is this – it’s actually printed on my tee shirt I bought in Gibraltar with my Spanish friend – Don’t worry everything is going to be amazing!

I have given up my nightly glass of wine and weekend gin + tonics for the time being and what has that gotten me – more energy. I spent Saturday, well eleven hours of Saturday, planting queen and palmetto palms and cacumba ginger and a keffir lime tree and vitex and some butterfly plants along with some madras plaid coleus (and a whole lot of liriope) and now the front looks amazing and I was walking like I was crippled when I came inside. Once inside, it was time to bathe Tin and shampoo his hair and on my knees over the tub, I thought it was really possible that I would never get up.

Joe had come to help me and from the get go he was complaining and telling me how he is not a gardener, he’s a lawn guy. We bickered back and forth for 9.5 hours of those 11 like an old married couple and at the end of the day, we got it done. Well most of it, at 8PM we could go no longer and there was still a pile of Katrina-laden mud – complete with marbles, a silver robot leg, stones, a lead pipe, terra-cotta, ceramic, bottle tops and one red glass heart – that we had dumped onto the street near the curb making it impossible for anyone to park there.

This morning, I woke and ran a 5K across the river for a friend’s birthday. It was a graffiti run where you and everyone else there sprinkle nontoxic colored powdered all over each other while you are running. We were in Avondale, which to me seemed in the middle of nowhere. It was sort of like stepping out of a routine into something ridiculously different. [I did notice a go cart track there and thought, now that would be fun too!]

When I returned I had a hunch that I better shovel the rest of the dug up mud and stones to the dumpster or risk getting caught in the rain and having it all turned to hardened concrete-like mass where no one would be able to park for days, maybe even weeks. So 30 buckets later, when I thought I might really collapse, I placed the final bucket in the dumpster and raindrops started falling on my head – my colorful, dyed head, as I was still in the same clothes I had worn on the run.

I came inside as it began to pour, down pour, New Orleans style rain, one minute “um it might rain” to “good god almighty” and all of my plants gave a hip hip hooray for they had waited patiently for eleven hours in the hot sun yesterday, their roots exposed, their throats dry, now they were happily rooted and soaking up the glory of H2O.

Tonight, I cozied up on the couch and tuned into Thunder Soul – and cried a little.

So Labor Day weekend, was actually quite the opposite of what it is intended and tomorrow I’d love to throw a barbecue in my backyard and enjoy the day, but honestly, I’m taking the day off, for real.

We’re sneaking around the corner again and coming up upon Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It’s that time of year when God trots out the Book of Life and decides what will be. During the ensuing ten days after Rosh Hashanah, there is time to ask for forgiveness from anybody you have wronged and to pray for forgiveness for yourself. It’s, as you might imagine, a time for reflection. Who have I hurt? And how have I hurt myself?

This is a year of abundance for me – my cup continues to runneth over. I moved into my lovely home and the gifts have just kept a comin’. A couple of days ago, a friend and neighbor told me she wanted to donate to me several palms – queen palms and palmetto palms – for my landscaping. My landscaping was ground zero and now it is about to become a tropical oasis. Yes, that is just one of the many gifts that have arrived at my doorstep as I’ve said to the Universe, “I accept gifts. I don’t always have to be the giver.” And boy, I hit the jackpot on this change of philosophy.

I spoke earlier with a friend, struggling with her chemotherapy – we spoke of work and I was telling her as soon as I had clarity the doors started flinging open. I’m on my way to Baton Rouge to speak to the State Department of Family Health and Welfare about my workshops on race and parenting. My first workshop is scheduled for January. My book is underway. My next career is in its nascent stages but already feels 99% complete, as if it has been waiting for me.

Another friend has been talking to me about her relationship and forgiveness, trying to find out how to forgive and love and not be subsumed by the dysfunction of another soul. My only advice is to keep walking the path of clarity – does this feel right? does this make you feel good? The answers should be a simple yes or no, anything that is complicated, I fall back on what my same friend told me a while back, “God does not do confusion.”

Now that, I believe. Clarity is a balm for this troubled world. So as the New Year preparations get underway, remember next Thursday to have honey with your apples or bread to symbolize a sweet life [I’ll be dusting off my shofar], and remember to pray for peace (read: NO WAR IN SYRIA). My grandmother was born in Aleppo, Syria before she moved to Constantinople and met my grandfather, which is where they married and then left when it became Istanbul. There is a part of my DNA in Syria and I just read that a few hours ago a playground was bombed there.

Playgrounds and Bombs do not mix.

So in the year 5774, let’s all try to tune up our souls and to conspire to greatness and to aspire to peace and to inspire by the very light we become. It’s our year dear friends – it’s time to make a difference.

It was National Dog Day this week and I was posting old photos of my dogs on Facebook and reminiscing about the good old companionship that I received from them. I also have been enjoying Heidi who stayed with me during July and some parts of August and who is on loan to me right now as there have been two armed robberies on my block in the last week. But National Dog day goes to Loca – my most difficult relationship other than Blacky – the cat.

Loca came to me at a time when I was resource limited – in the sense of emotional stores – and she needed a home. She had black eyes that would stare a hole in me and I felt that I couldn’t turn away from her. After all, there I was in 2007 with only one dog, and she was a geriatric, and everyone after Katrina was opening their home to all sorts of destitute animals – cats and dogs – it was raining them for a while.

I took her in, and in a one on one situation she was a good dog. She loved Arlene, and almost treated Arlene as if she was her long lost mother. And there I was, a mess. A royal mess and trying to get unmessed and there was Loca, crazy with energy and just wanting to be loved.

And I took her in. Took her into my heart. Took her into my home. Despite the fact that our love didn’t come easy. But we did eventually bond and that was our life, until it wasn’t.

Our life changed with the entrance of many other people and pets that came into the household and made Loca even more nervous and anxious than she had been before and then when things got really squeezed, when we moved to the back of the house to rent out the front to ride the waves of change yet again, she became impossible.

I had always thought that with all that energy, Loca should live in the country, like the dogs that used to populate my grandmother’s house that got fed out the side of the kitchen and lived a life of independent and wanton discovery rather than the passive existence of urban pets. And on Thanksgiving day 2012, Loca found her country home among the creatures that populated my cousin’s country Dr. Dolittle Farm. She would join Julio the goat along with cows, bulls, sheep, rabbits and Jake, the little black lab puppy, in the biggest romp of her life.

In February, my aunt said that Jake had died suddenly and so Loca became top dog there. She also became a fat dog, and spent her afternoons running across the holler to my aunt’s house to sit at her feet as she rocked on the front porch. Something about that image, of Loca being with my aunt, of her living on a farm, of her being in the country that is a landscape that continues to haunt me from my childhood, made me happy and less sad about having to part ways with her.

Then today I learned Loca died. She had developed a nasty habit of chasing cars and got hit by one. Much in the same way that my mother’s dog, Max, had died when she left my dad and ran away to her childhood home with Max in tow. My mother was a dog lover and I had my friend, Kim Frohsin sketch the likeness of Loca for my mom’s headstone because one time when Mom was watching the animals, she tripped in my bathroom and couldn’t get off the floor and Loca came over to her and laid down beside her and looked into her eyes with that stare of hers.

When my mom was dying she told me she would return as a dog. That’s how I would know her presence. Which dog? Hard to say – there have been so many in my life. I’m convinced my father came back as Samm, but which dog will be my mother, I’m not sure. It might even be Heidi because she’s such a stunning beauty and puts on her makeup every day.

But National Dog day is about Loca, who is now in dog heaven, may she run in peace.

You make a house a home. You can take that as a truism. My house feels so much like my home that I am thoroughly reveling in the feeling of really enjoying it. Two large items came into it to complete the picture. The cupboard found at Ricca’s that I boldly offered half of what they were asking and got it at that price and the baby grand piano that my friend gave me at a steal because he was upgrading.

Today I woke to the Sunday New York Times and my God on Sunday playlist and I needed to pinch myself because I couldn’t believe the good fortune of this house having found me. I was listening to a woman on my Ipod while I was in Spain, an inspirational recording a friend had given me, and she said that 99% of every creation is complete. In other words, this house was waiting for me at the right time and I walked in and made it a home.

I have tons of outdoor projects that I would like to do, but as my uncle used to always say, dinero no hay, and so I will sit with this incompletion of projects and focus on the work that lies ahead. I came back from Spain and the book I had begun to write before I left transformed itself while I was away and now I will begin anew in earnest. Having had a week of computer zombie freak out, the time to begin will be this week and perhaps as that woman said it is 99% complete already since I have it in my head.

And now the ability to enjoy being home, to enjoy all the beauty that surrounds me and makes me feel warm and cozy, is here to relish.

Tomorrow my little prince returns and while I have enjoyed every moment of quietness and repose and the freedom to place a pen on the coffee table without some little munchkin writing on the furniture, I miss him more.

Okay so I didn’t gain ten pounds, I just had weight from vacation – you know how delicious Spanish beer and cheese is and now I’ve shed some of it, so there. And as far as not having my hair ever, ever grow back, I’m totally fine with that too.

So here’s what I have to say about depression – it depends on what is going on. Jetlagged, detoxing from a vacation, and hearing your hair will never grow back makes you look depressed to some people who are not looking at the whole picture.

The whole picture is this, I returned, baked from no sleep and a friend came over in relationship hell and I wound up dancing and hula hooping in the backyard and not sleeping – for two days, I had a serious lack of sleep and then I went and had blood work. Oh joy.

So now, I have seen my endocrinologist, my therapist (who I haven’t seen in a while) and my obgyn and gotten a mammo and I survived a week of believing I had a virus on my computer only to learn that it was the anti-virus software some idget told me I needed that has caused all these problems. Yes, that’s right. Sophos – the antivirus – has caused my virus, which wasn’t a virus really, it was just an annoying deterrent to anything being able to run smoothly on my computer.

There you have it – re-entry folks was challenging, but I’ve made it to Friday and right now everything seems to be working again, just in time to get back to work in earnest.

yay [no one said].

Let me say this about that – I’m damn lucky. I have a great and awesome life. Who knows what I did in my previous lives to deserve this one, but I’m going to throw this week out the window and begin anew again.

This, my dear reader, you can do too.

My only real challenge is to figure out how to get my stereo to crank louder so that the next time I’m having an impromptu party I can goose it without shutting down the stereo. This is my major complaint right now – my stereo isn’t loud enough. I called the guy who does my stereo and had to admit that yes I am 54 years old and shouldn’t be wanting to blow the windows out but I do, I still do.

Whatyagonnado?

It’s one of the most amazing things in life to watch your child grow up.

Tin 2012 vs Tin 2013 – Summer in Spain

1) gets his own milk and water out of the fridge and even brought a glass to me

2) ridiculous (still) about his clothes and what he wears – crazed lunatic more like it – but he dresses himself for the most part

3) said he was “passed Louis Armstrong” and took no particular joy in music for the first time

4) draws like crazy – people, planes, cars, trains, monsters

5) got amazingly more handsome

6) makes friends with people of all ages – people buy him gifts (bracelet, shirt, ice cream, candy)

7) negotiates everything down to the most minute detail of life

8) his Spanish comprehension increased