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Last night, a single winner won a $400 million Power Ball. They haven’t been identified yet, but imagine if you realized last night that you were the winner of $400 million. That would be a game changer. And how would it change your game?

I already know that I would create a few foundations – one to address the education of history in this country so that white people would become more comfortable with teaching racial history and the real nation building facts to their children. I would also have a foundation that was focused on innovations in education from the lens of people of color so that America could start editing the script of what it means, truly means, to be an American – not just the white washed version but more like the version that the newly crowned Ms America (Daviluri) presents:

These are my dreams of money these days. For the first time in nearly two decades, I find myself without money. A good friend called me yesterday and she said she was a little worried because I’m living on pixie dust right now and how am I really doing with that? I said fine. Really, I have food on my table today, gas in my truck, and me and my loved ones are healthy. I’m rich. I’m holding in abeyance any concerns of financial well being because I’m pursuing a vocation that matters to me, that came to me in my path of transition, and made me see in new ways. I feel inordinately wealthy as if I had woken up $400 million richer.

Now on my fourth reading of Eckhart Toile’s The Power of Now, I’m nearing the end and arrived this morning at this section on Impermanence and the Cycles of Life:

The Power of Now

IMPERMANENCE AND THE CYCLES OF LIFE

However, as long as you are in the physical dimension and linked to the collective human psyche, physical pain although rare is still possible. This is not to be confused with suffering, with mental-emotional pain. All suffering is ego-created and is due to resistance. Also, as long as you are in this dimension, you are still subject to its cyclical nature and to the law of impermanence of all things, but you no longer perceive this as “bad” it just is.

Through allowing the “isness” of all things, a deeper dimension underneath the play of opposites reveals itself to you as an abiding presence, an unchanging deep stillness, an uncaused joy beyond good and bad. This is the joy of Being, the peace of God.

On the level of form, there is birth and death, creation and destruction, growth and dissolution, of seemingly separate forms. This is reflected everywhere: in the life cycle of a star or a planet, a physical body, a tree, a flower; in the rise and fall of nations, political systems, civilizations; and in the inevitable cycles of gain and loss in the life of an individual.

There are cycles of success, when things come to you and thrive, and cycles of failure, when they wither or disintegrate and you have to let them go in order to make room for new things to arise, or for transformation to happen. If you cling and resist at that point, it means you are refusing to go with the flow of life, and you will suffer. It is not true that the up cycle is good and the down cycle bad, except in the mind’s judgment. Growth is usually considered positive, but nothing can grow forever. If growth, of whatever kind, were to go on and on, it would eventually become monstrous and destructive. Dissolution is needed for new growth to happen. One cannot exist without the other.

The down cycle is absolutely essential for spiritual realization. You must have failed deeply on some level or experienced some deep loss or pain to be drawn to the spiritual dimension. Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure. In this world, which is to say on the level of form, everybody “fails” sooner or later, of course, and every achievement eventually comes to naught. All forms are impermanent.

You can still be active and enjoy manifesting and creating new forms and circumstances, but you won’t be identified with them. You do not need them to give you a sense of self. They are not your life only your life situation.

Your physical energy is also subject to cycles. It cannot always be at a peak. There will be times of low as well as high energy. There will be periods when you are highly active and creative, but there may also be times when everything seems stagnant, when it seems that you are not getting anywhere, not achieving anything. A cycle can last for anything from a few hours to a few years. There are large cycles and small cycles within these large ones. Many illnesses are created through fighting against the cycles of low energy, which are vital for regeneration. The compulsion to do, and the tendency to derive your sense of self-worth and identity from external factors such as achievement, is an inevitable illusion as long as you are identified with the mind.

This makes it hard or impossible for you to accept the low cycles and allow them to be. Thus, the intelligence of the organism may take over as a self-protective measure and create an illness in order to force you to stop, so that the necessary regeneration can take place.

The cyclical nature of the universe is closely linked with the impermanence of all things and situations. The Buddha made this a central part of his teaching. All conditions are highly unstable and in constant flux, or, as he put it, impermanence is a characteristic of every condition, every situation you will ever encounter in your life. It will change, disappear, or no longer satisfy you. Impermanence is also central to Jesus’s teaching: “Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal . . . .”

As long as a condition is judged as “good” by your mind, whether it be a relationship, a possession, a social role, a place, or your physical body, the mind attaches itself to it and identifies with it. It makes you happy, makes you feel good about yourself, and it may become part of who you are or think you are. But nothing lasts in this dimension where moth and rust consume. Either it ends or it changes, or it may undergo a polarity shift: The same condition that was good yesterday or last year has suddenly or gradually turned into bad. The same condition that made you happy, then makes you unhappy. The prosperity of today becomes the empty consumerism of tomorrow. The happy wedding and honeymoon become the unhappy divorce or the unhappy coexistence. Or a condition disappears, so its absence makes you unhappy. When a condition or situation that the mind as attached itself to and identified with changes or disappears, the mind cannot accept it. It will cling to the disappearing condition and resist the change. It is almost as if a limb were being torn off your body.

We sometimes hear of people who have lost all their money or whose reputation has been ruined committing suicide. Those are the extreme cases. Others, whenever a major loss of one kind or another occurs, just become deeply unhappy or make themselves ill. They cannot distinguish between their life and their life situation. I recently read about a famous actress who died in her eighties. As her beauty started to fade and became ravaged by old age, she grew desperately unhappy and became a recluse. She, too, had identified with a condition: her external appearance. First, the condition gave her a happy sense of self, then an unhappy one. If she had been able to connect with the formless and timeless life within, she could have watched and allowed the fading of her external form from a place of serenity and peace. Moreover, her external form would have become increasingly transparent to the light shining through from her ageless true nature, so her beauty would not really have faded but simply become transformed into spiritual beauty. However, nobody told her that this is possible. The most essential kind of knowledge is not yet widely accessible.

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The Buddha taught that even your happiness is dukkha a Pali word meaning “suffering” or “unsatisfactoriness.” It is inseparable from its opposite. This means that your happiness and unhappiness are in fact one. Only the illusion of time separates them.

This is not being negative. It is simply recognizing the nature of things, so that you don’t pursue an illusion for the rest of your life. Nor is it saying that you should no longer appreciate pleasant or beautiful things or conditions. But to seek something through them that they cannot give an identity, a sense of permanency and fulfillment is a recipe for frustration and suffering. The whole advertising industry and consumer society would collapse if people became enlightened and no longer sought to find their identity through things. The more you seek happiness in this way, the more it will elude you. Nothing out there will ever satisfy you except temporarily and superficially, but you may need to experience many disillusionments before you realize that truth. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they will also give you pain. Things and conditions can give you pleasure, but they cannot give you joy. Nothing can give you joy. Joy is uncaused and arises from within as the joy of Being. It is an essential part of the inner state of peace, the state that has been called the peace of God. It is your natural state, not something that you need to work hard for or struggle to attain.

Many people never realize that there can be no “salvation” in anything they do, possess, or attain. Those who do realize it often become world-weary and depressed: if nothing can give you true fulfillment, what is there left to strive for, what is the point in anything? The Old Testament prophet must have arrived at such a realization when he wrote “I have seen everything that is done under the sun, and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind. ” When you reach this point, you are one step away from despair and one step away from enlightenment.

A Buddhist monk once told me: “All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know.” What he meant, of course, was this: I have learned to offer no resistance to what is; I have learned to allow the present moment to be and to accept the impermanent nature of all things and conditions. Thus have I found peace.

To offer no resistance to life is to be in a state of grace, ease, and lightness. This state is then no longer dependent upon things being in a certain way, good or bad. It seems almost paradoxical, yet when your inner dependency on form is gone, the general conditions of your life, the outer forms, tend to improve greatly. Things, people, or conditions that you thought you needed for your happiness now come to you with no struggle or effort on your part, and you are free to enjoy and appreciate them while they last. All those things, of course, will still pass away, cycles will come and go, but with dependency gone there is no fear of loss anymore. Life flows with ease.

The happiness that is derived from some secondary source is never very deep. It is only a pale reflection of the joy of Being, the vibrant peace that you find within as you enter the state of nonresistance. Being takes you beyond the polar opposites of the mind and frees you from dependency on form. Even if everything were to collapse and crumble all around you, you would still feel a deep inner core of peace. You may not be happy, but you will be at peace.

Now here’s a shout out to my bike – that I love. It fits me like a glove. And I haven’t been on it in a very long time – too long a time. Today we rode 10 miles to the end of the bayou bike path. Bike – I love you!

Hey Rachel, I want to give you a shout out for having a productive week. You have worked on your book project, dotted the i’s and crossed the t’s on your workshop plans, interviewed sources for your upcoming Media report, attended school meetings, done all the laundry, cleaned the house (except the tubs and toilets), finished one long ass book and started another, written in both blogs, checked in on Facebook, researched Media, Racism, and more, built engines with your son, exercised, and said your prayers every night and meditated every morning, as well as picked up the dog shit on your neighbors front grass (because they don’t) not once but several times.

Woo Hoo!

You go girl!

Glad to see you in such a great place in your life!

Amen, honey!

Yeah, and to tie the whole enchilada up in a nice pink bow and mix metaphors at the same time – you, Rachel, have kept a positive attitude.

So I just want to say, Rachel – you dat. You dat, honey. You all dat.

Keep laying those tracks and planting those seeds because you are already harvesting the bounty.

Yesterday, I spent the day in Baton Rouge in a meeting with the Secretary for the Louisiana Department of Family Welfare and several groups of foster to adoptive parent associations. I was making my case for training of industry professionals and prospective parents about race and parenting. It was a long day, it was a fulfilling day, and it was interesting and eye-opening from the get-go. I had poured myself a cup of tea and the tag on my tea said, “Be proud of who you are.”

Racing home through almost 5 o’clock traffic, I was able to leap in the house and do a James Brown turn around and head out to a Waldorf parent/teacher committee meeting that lasted until 9PM – a meeting that seemed to drone on as my interest in the topic had waned and my feeling of fulfillment was lacking. I came outside and someone had run into the side view mirror on my truck and I had to search for more bungie chord to tie it up. I had forgotten it was Friday, the 13th.

I also forgot Yom Kippur had begun at sundown. I hadn’t really eaten all day and I was starving and I ate some crackers in the school meeting. My goal because I had gotten a babysitter was to head over to Tipitina’s for D.J. Soulsister’s 8th annual birthday bash. I wanted to dance and groove out after this week, but I didn’t go. I was hungry, still not realizing it was Yom Kippur and that I usually begin my fast at 10PM, and I knew there isn’t any food at Tips.

So I pointed the truck towards home, stopped at the bank to pay the babysitter, and then decided to go to Felipe’s, the new branch that opened down the street. I parked and made my way with my umbrella and arrived at a scene that almost made me spin on my heels and go home. Everyone looked like they had already had one top shelf margarita too many and all I wanted to do was sit at the bar and get a bite. I did sit at the bar, and sit, and sit, and sit. After 20 minutes I got my umbrella and purse and went back to my truck and came home.

When I got in, I had all sorts of visions of making myself something to eat but I couldn’t get in the groove of what that might be and so I decided to just forget it. When I crawled into bed, I remembered that it was Yom Kippur. And decided that some force was keeping me from eating and it certainly wasn’t me.

Since the babysitter is a friend and was spending the night, I got up the next morning and spent most of it in my room in my annual contemplation. Forgiving myself. Forgiving others. Asking forgiveness. And writing down how this year has been in my Wonder Woman journal. The first entry in this book is from 1998 and is entitled “Ideal Scenario for My Life” – nice – ha, ha ha – that was back in the day when I must have thought I was really in control of the outcome. I couldn’t imagine entitling anything as “ideal” knowing what I know now. All of the things I listed under this ideal scenario are amusing though – I wanted to develop a career (which I did), I wanted to make a professional salary as a writer (I did), I wanted to live comfortably in a nice house with a garden (I did/do), I wanted to accept my face and body and appreciate the way I look (I have), I wanted to be in nature more (never enough), I wanted to travel comfortably (I have), I wanted to have good friends (I do), I wanted to go home to New Orleans and see my mother as often as possible (sigh), and I wanted to have a hopeful outlook on my life’s possibilities (and that is where you find me 15 years later).

I fasted all morning, I meditated, and then I began cooking. I made coconut rice and lentils, shrimp and tamarind curry, roasted asparagus, roasted napa cabbage, and brown rice. Then I took the babysitter and Tin to the Amusement Park in City Park and we rode crazy rides. The first one we got on went all around and spun around and Tin at first was freaking out but we told him to scream and once he started screaming as the ride was going fast, he totally got it. We went on the beautiful old fashioned carousel, Tin went on the airplane and motorcycle rides twice, we went in the ship, and he went in the Goofy house, he and our friend went down the gigantic slide and then we walked over to Morning Call and I broke my fast with beignets and cafe au lait.

Here’s to a sweet life! I said to my dining companions as they stuffed the pillowy goodness of fried dough and powdered sugar into their eager mouths. Out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of a little girl with her grandmother – I knew who she was and knew that she was about to turn eight years old. Seeing her flickered a memory in my mind of eight years ago when I had fallen prey to idealizing – people, situations, and love. I wore a groove in that story so deep the bottom fell out.

Then we came home and friends came over – friends came with their two year old, friends came with their guitar and lyrics, friends came and we all feasted and then we sat in the living room and sang the Doobie Brothers and Sade songs and one person played the thumb piano, Tin played the drums, someone had the egg, another the tambourine. Out of everyone in the room – some were vegan, some were gluten-free, four were not drinking alcohol for gout, inflammation, diet, or Hashimoto’s.

And I had entered nirvana – I had blown the shofar to start my day and to end the ten days from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur – to end the ten days where the Book of Life was opened and God was deciding what the next year would look like – it came to me, sitting there with everyone, singing Sade’s lyrics: “There must have been an angel by my side/something heavenly led me to you/Look at the sky/It’s the color of love/There must have been angel at my side/Something heavenly came down from above/He led me to you/He led me to you/He built a bridge to your heart/All the way/How many tons of love inside/I can’t say … I realized I am living the ideal scenario for my life – dig?

There are days in your life where you have to say AMEN – today was one of them.

My horoscope after coming from Baton Rouge:
September 14, 2013
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
You’ve been anxious about an upcoming interview, date or audition — but today, you need to relax about it! Whatever you’re about to do will go very well for you, there is no question about it. You’ve got the skills and the personality that everyone is looking for. You’re the right fit for that job, for that single cutie, or that role. There is something attractive about you and it’s going to open a lot of doors. Be confident and know that there is no one on earth who is quite like you!

I titled this “Finding your life’s work worth” because that is exactly where I am at this point in life. Fifty four years of trying to figure it out through education, marriage(s), and wandering has brought me to this place. Where I have found, well let me not beat around the bush, nirvana.

Nirvana is an ancient Sanskrit term used to describe the profound peace of mind that is acquired with liberation, and as Janis Joplin sang many moons ago, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.

The NYT had an article about our interior moral compass and how our genes play a part in our happiness. Turns out if you are primarily hedonic or are based on consuming things, you have unhealthy profiles and increased inflammation, if you are more eudaemonic or have a sense of higher purpose and service to others you have anti-body producing genes and lower levels of inflammation (and in case you were not aware inflammation is the new stress – as in buzzword for all that ails us).

What’s interesting to me is not to question why this took 54 years to be revealed because time is a linear construct, it’s to be grateful that I got back on my path. Remember, how I’ve said many times that up until I was 30 years old, I was seeking a higher purpose through my writing, but I moved out west to California and therein lost that self in a sea of “getting and spending” that transformed me into a stress ball, or in the current parlance: an inflamed tick on capitalism’s hind. In being thrown off the yellow brick road, through no due diligence of my own, I was blind, but then I saw [read: again, but this time more profoundly].

My wheelhouse is no more about getting the rich richer (despite the fact that my true aim in nearly two decades of that work was delivering truth to Wall Street), the core of my new wheelhouse is about race and parenting and how this will affect my child, affects me, and informs our society. One spoke of this wheel is my blog, another is workshops to help adoptive and foster parents become racially aware, the other is a book, and there are many other spokes manifesting as I type – in other words I am launching rockets of abundance.

I took Heidi on a long walk to City Park this morning and ran into just about everyone I knew and the last person I spoke with said, “Remember you were born under the sign of Taurus, which means you are strong and steadfast.”

My horoscope today – drumroll as these Yahoo ones are eerily on point for me:
September 11, 2013
Taurus (4/20-5/20)
Today your heart is feeling generous, and it’s telling you to do things because they are the right thing to do — not because they are profitable. You are coming to understand that if you only think about financial gain before getting involved with other people, you will ultimately be selling yourself short. Acting selflessly today is very likely to create greater gain later on down the road, so don’t be shy about asking who could use a helping hand.

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.