Dangermond.org

So all of you parents out there trying to raise your child gender neutral – good luck.

I was watching Tin play as well as the other kids earlier this week and the first grade boys were all playing together and the first grade girl came back to the adults sulking. Girls sulk when they are not getting the attention from boy(s) they want. They do this at 50 or at 5 years old – it’s sort of amazing.

Then I picked Tin up from school two days ago and he said, “I don’t like girls.” I said, oh really, well I’m a girl. “I don’t like white girls,” he said. Well, I’m a white girl and so is, and I rattled off countless names of white girls he loves. “Nah, I don’t like girls. I just like boys.”

I wondered about this conversation. Was it just four year old inanity – of which there is plenty – or something else? Naturally, I wondered about the “race” part of the dialogue. Then I was speaking to his teacher and found out the root of this conversation. Tin has a crush on a girl in his class and they have been thick as thieves, but just this week, she has taken up with another boy. She hasn’t dissed Tin, she has just included the other boy and has one sit on each side of her commanding both of their attention like the princess she is.

Tin’s pissed.

Already next week is full. How is that again? Yes, next week’s calendar is full and it hasn’t even arrived yet. Playdates galore for Tin, work goals for me, and Jazz Fest starts on Friday. My Jazz Fest junkie days are gone, perhaps, because I only have a ticket for each weekend and I know the second weekend is Saturday, but the first is still up in the air as to which day I’ll go. Am I nonplussed? I seem to be when it has to do with this festival that I have held up on a pedestal for so long.

Today, I get to walk a block to Fortier Festival and hear Walter Wolfman Washington and Allen Toussaint – really? Like in the pocket park a block from my house? Yep. Tomorrow it’s Earth Day with Panorama and the Stooges Brass Band. A few more blocks away. Nuts huh?

Right now I’m moving from one event to the next, each one is fleeting: hi, yes, sip sip, yawn, k, later – someone put in an email recently “am in crunch time” – another wrote “not one day on my calendar to do laundry” – another said, “talk to me now cuz I’m about to drive off this bridge and everything is out of control” and I am sticking to my usual refrain, “No time to spit.”

In the light of day, juggling is easy. It’s the night time where things slow to a rhythmic dance full of ghosts and fantasy. Last night, I watched skinny friends try on skinny jeans as I sipped red wine from a plastic cup, then later chatted till the cows came home at Bouligny Tavern munching on tempura green beans and roasted kale. But in bed, I read till my eyes rolled back and dreams swept me into worlds of reddish brown hair growing in abundance from my head, a friend with a fly on his nose, and someone’s button that wouldn’t stay buttoned, two friends leaning in, one with a mysterious new haircut and eyeglasses that made her look like Tina Fey (a change from her goth style).

Then I woke up again, forgetting where I left off… .

I used to live on the North Shore in Covington in the 1980s. I had bought a house with my first husband off of Old Military Road because I was on a quest to recapture the joy I had known staying in the country with my grandmother when I was young. I was also running a lot during those days and had a great route that took me down a road that had woods on both sides and houses only here and there. It was that rural run that made me feel so at one with the world and at peace with myself.

Until the morning I had gone out for my run and a car was coming down the road from behind and slowed down considerably causing the hairs on my neck to stand up. I turned a couple of times till the car had pulled up rather close and the man driving said, “You like running on this road don’t you? I’ve been watching you run here.” I did not engage – neither smiling to appear nonplussed nor telling him to fuck off appearing crazy – I didn’t do anything but stare straight ahead and keep running and calculating where the next house was because I was scared shitless.

He drove off as another car was approaching, but several minutes had passed and I had lived several lives in the interim. When I got home, I was shaking and I called my husband and told him what had happened. He told me not to run down that street alone again, but I said to myself and to him that I wasn’t going to let that guy defeat me or take away my simple pleasures.

Then the next morning came, and I couldn’t return to the road. And another morning came where I still couldn’t return to the road. And after many mornings of not returning to the road, my fear became rage because the perp in the car had won – he had taken away my feeling of safety and peace. I was furious.

And weeks passed of my fury and rage until I realized there was not much I could do about it. I could bravely go back to the road but that could be stupid because how would I defend myself against a man and a car? So I accepted defeat and I began to find other places to run but they were along busy streets, but eventually because they brought me no peace competing with traffic and noise, I quit running all together on the North Shore.

I thought about this as I watched Boston in lock down mode and as I read the email from an ex colleague who was running the marathon, who said she would run again next year. We can’t let fear hold us back. We cannot. But sometimes we have to accept that our sense of the world, our perception of safety and protection, of the certainty of the status quo, have been irrevocably altered and our minds can never go back to that time of innocence.

It’s Paradise Lost.

I think the issue with writing a blog and being a witness to your own life, is that sometimes you come home, and the house is quiet. The only thing you hear is the chatter in your head and it may be the same conversation your self has had with your self over the last few days that even meditation has been unable to burn and disperse. And you sit here and you wonder at the end of the day, at the end of days such as these, if we are indeed as Hemingway once said, living lives of quiet desperation, or if it is still possible to get excited by a teacher who saved the baby sparrows that fell from the nest as she carries the cage to her house to care for them on the weekends (one died, the other lives), if the jolt of that possum who scaled the back fence and crawled through the elephant ears disturbing all the morning pleasantries you envisioned would await you when you had your coffee in the back yard could happen again, the same way, and whether it is possible to meet another person who could tell you stories about themselves that would make you sit on the edge of your chair, whose sorrow moved you, the type of encounter that made you think you were meeting a person as if for the first time, as if you are a person for the first time interested, and interesting, and you know that what awaits you tonight is sleep, perchance to dream, and then again, awakening and repetition or re-creation or revision or redundancy or realization or reality or real – just something real – at the end of the day, when you come home, and you have been witness to your life, and the house is quiet, you want to reach for what is real to know that you are.

I withdrew slowly but painfully from my delicious pu-ehr tea that was very expensive and only found in New York, of course, and backslid to decaf coffee. On a whim, I decided to get some Vanilla coffee to add to my decaf coffee to make it – you know – more exciting. And they only had Vanilla in caf, not decaf, and although I incorporated an eighth of a cup into a full bag of decaf, it has sent me into the stratosphere for two days now. I’m riding the hallucinatory energy level that coke freaks dream of and I can’t get my toes to touch down.

As if the decaf wasn’t enough.

I went today to go look at a house for sale just down the street near Canal Street. It was cheap, so I wasn’t expecting much, and that is certainly what it was, not much. Mind you I love old New Orleans shotguns, but usually they are made out of cypress and pine and have characteristics that make them like fine antiques that you want to preserve and refinish and enjoy. This one seemed built on broken dreams.

I went ahead and parked and got out to see it, even though there was nothing about it that would make me want to stop. I wanted to check out the backyard because if I could put a bouncy house in back for Tin to play on, perhaps I could live there. There wasn’t enough room – I crunched over empty bourbon bottles on my way to look.

However, I got back in my car, disillusioned and as is the case with New Orleans, I drove to the corner and saw another house for sale – the haves and have nots coexist here. Now if I was drawing my spiritual house, it would look like this with the Asian flair to the roof wouldn’t it? – well sort of – I am not looking for grandiose, just beautiful.

I’m not sure what the answer is to home yet – but lots of options are swirling around in the air and I know the right one will come my way. The purple house, the spiritual house, whatever it’s name is, it will be home.

I was marveling at how little things used to disrupt my day – at how bigger things would disrupt my life. And now I marvel at how far I have come in centering myself in the now and how I’ve come to be able to see the power in myself against external forces with a thread that connects me to all my experiences.

I read this in my morning passage from The Power of Now:

THE INSANITY OF PSYCHOLOGICAL TIME

You will not have any doubt that psychological time is a mental disease if you look at its collective manifestations. They occur, for example, in the form of ideologies such as communism, national socialism or any nationalism, or rigid religious belief systems, which operate under the implicit assumption that the highest good lies in the future and that therefore the end justifies the means. The end is an idea, a point in the mind-projected future, when salvation in whatever form happiness, fulfillment, equality, liberation, and so on will be attained. Not infrequently, the means of getting there are the enslavement, torture, and murder of people in the present.

For example, it is estimated that as many as 50 million people were murdered to further the cause of communism, to bring about a “better world” in Russia, China, and other countries. This is a chilling example of how belief in a future heaven creates a present hell. Can there be any doubt that psychological time is a serious and dangerous mental illness?

How does this mind pattern operate in your life? Are you always trying to get somewhere other than where you are? Is most of your doing just a means to an end? Is fulfillment always just around the corner or confined to short-lived pleasures, such as sex, food, drink, drugs, or thrills and excitement? Are you always focused on becoming, achieving, and attaining, or alternatively chasing some new thrill or pleasure? Do you believe that if you acquire more things you will become more fulfilled, good enough, or psychologically complete? Are you waiting for a man or woman to give meaning to your life?

In the normal, mind-identified or unenlightened state of consciousness, the power and infinite creative potential that lie concealed in the Now are completely obscured by psychological time. Your life then loses its vibrancy, its freshness, its sense of wonder. The old patterns of thought, emotion, behavior, reaction, and desire are acted out in endless repeat performances, a script in your mind that gives you an identity of sorts but distorts or covers up the reality of the Now. The mind then creates an obsession with the future as an escape from the unsatisfactory present.

And just the other day in a meeting, a friend concurred with my realizations about fear – fear is what you know, not what you don’t know. She quoted J. Krishnamurti:

Can you watch fear without any conclusion?
Can you watch fear without any conclusion, without any interference of the knowledge you have accumulated about it? If you cannot, then what you are watching is the past, not fear; if you can, then you are watching fear for the first time without the interference of the past.

In that same meeting, another friend said he believes there is a new humanity presenting itself, a new consciousness. I wholeheartedly agree. Barbara Marx Hubbard describes it as the Universal Human being created:

In this awakening it has become clear to many that it is self-conscious humans feeling separate from each other and from nature, who are threatening our world. At the same time, if we look closely, there is also arising, for the first time, a more universal humanity.

Our crisis is inducing the birth of a more universal human.

We are the crossover generation moving from one phase of evolution to the next! Although barely perceptible, as were the earliest humans in the pre-human world, a young Homo universalis is emerging everywhere, in every culture, faith, and background. The signs of our emergence as universal humans include an unconditional love for the whole of life; a powerful, irresistible passion to unite with Spirit within; and a deep heart-felt impulse to connect with others and cocreate a world equal to our love and our capacities.

I entered this day believing in the bigger picture – even while I toil at the work of a mere mortal, I do believe I am transitioning.

Fran Leibowitz once said the great outdoors was from her front door to a taxi cab, but she and I had nothing in common when it comes to nature. I love the great outdoors. Right at my doorstep is the bayou and City Park and I have not been on it, in it, in quite sometimes. Every time I am about to go for that walk, I get side tracked.

So today, when a friend stopped by, we made dinner and headed to the back yard to at least sit in nature. And there is a general good feeling here despite housezilla in back of us, and the double whammy corner of construction out in front of us, there is something very peaceful about this spot right here.

I am grateful that I found this place when I was looking for a place to give me shelter from my storm.

I slept the sleep of the dead and woke this morning to be productive. I was headed to yoga midday and got off track as I wound up at lunch with a friend. But it was serendipitous because the friend actually knows a lot about real estate and pointed out some options for me and one was an option I really like – so fingers crossed.