I told a friend I’m mystified by the unavailable men who keep popping up in front of me. Like the one yesterday who told me “I’m bringing you my truth” about being married. I had asked the universe to bring me a partner who could bring truth and accept mine.
My friend’s response:
Oh lord. Well, a wise woman once told me, ‘getting what you want often begins with saying no to what you don’t want.’ It’s a spiritual challenge.
I came across a bunch of inspirational cards that a friend in San Rafael had given me many moons ago. It was great opening a box of books where I was searching for my Haggadahs. We’re getting ready for Passover and the seder and I have an assortment of them that had gone missing. Inside one box were these cards and so I took them out and read each one and felt quite happy that I’m in a good place now.
I’ve been having close encounters of the interesting kind as of late. I met someone recently who I’ve met before but this time I saw him, I looked into his eyes and I saw his kind soul and I felt connected. I think it is that way with souls – sometimes the window opens. I spoke on the phone to a dear friend who I’ve loved from the time we met – he’s in a rough place now – and I felt an overflow of love for him as we spoke and I told him so. I said I love you and he said I love you back. Our birthdays are near and we are going to go celebrate even though he does not feel too social.
It’s been an odd day. A man stopped me on the street and said he’s seen me around and he wanted to tell me how much he thinks I’m beautiful and he held my hand and asked for a hug and all that was going on and then he said, “I’ll be truthful with you, I’m married.” And I dipped my sunglasses and looked in his eyes and said, “And I’ll be truthful with you, I don’t mess around with married men.” Later, another incident happened where a woman pulled up behind me and got out of the car and said she has been seeing me around and she wanted to give me this card that she’s had on her dashboard for a while now – it’s her mother who has alopecia and she started a foundation to help young girls with alopecia accept their baldness rather than hide under wigs – her whole life is dedicated to bald is beautiful and she just wanted to tell me that I’m beautiful.
Well I tell you – it’s been a day.
And I came home to watch my two little pups scamper around the backyard. I turned down dinner at the Taco truck for my PJ shorts and a big oversized tee shirt another friend left me when he visited from LA – I turned the Taco truck down for some much needed rest.
I’m always on the sunny side of the street, and even told the first therapist I ever saw that I felt like I had sunshine on my shoulder and was pretty happy most of the time. She told me that I succumbed to magical thinking. She didn’t mean it kindly, but the fact of the matter is I think it’s true – still. I am the manifestation of the bumper sticker MAGIC HAPPENS.
My life ain’t rosy and to quote Langston Hughes, it ain’t been no crystal stair either. But then again, as my birthday approaches – another revolution around the sun – I’m beginning to like when it’s not rosy just as much as when it is. I’ve had all the childhood elements of what normally sends people to the therapist’s couch – alcoholic parent, rage-oholic parent, as well as family psychosis, secrets, and cray cray, and I survived it all pretty much unscathed.
Of course, and then, it felt like I didn’t. My whole body just shut down two years ago and literally my hair fell out and my financial world collapsed and all that I had feared might happen happened. And there I was.
There is a diagnosis for what I had – it all falls under the umbrella of fear. I can’t tell you what I feared, this blog post couldn’t hold that long a list, but I can tell you a lot of what I’ve feared in my life has come to pass. No kidding.
So now, almost as a matter of practice, I have taken to appreciating the weeds in my garden, the ones I used to furiously pull out and toss. And these weeds are so beautiful in their ordinary way.
I took a few shots of the weeds in my backyard. There is a vine with tiny purple flowers clinging to the fence and there are a smattering of daisy varieties (daisy fleabane pictured here) growing from under the house and in the interstitial space between me and my neighbor.
The cat’s claw on the back wall was almost eradicated by me – I was going to pay Joe $150 to get rid of it but he never showed up and time passed, and one day I learned to love the vine that threatens to take down brick and mortar (that’s what cat’s claw does). But I gave the wall to the claw – HAVE IT, it’s yours, I told the vine and so as thanks, the vine sent me buttercup flowers this spring.
Stella peed on the floor the other day and I said, “Arlene!” It is uncanny how much Stella looks like Arlene and how I keep feeling like a new chapter is being written just having this puppy in my life.
It took a long time for Arlene to get bladder control and to learn about going pissy piss outside. Stella seems to be following in her footsteps. I was showing a photograph of Arlene to my friend and she said it is downright creepy how much they look like each other.
Just like everything else in life, I knew the right puppy would come into my life – when it’s right it’s right – you know it.
To the woman in the cream colored VW bug who became apoplectic because I stopped to take this photo – when you see a bald woman taking a photo that says I BEAT CANCER – you don’t know if it’s me it refers to or my friend battling stage IV ovarian cancer – and so show a little tenderness – would ya?
The Spirit Group met last Sunday and this time the topic was What is God? The answer is not so simple. If someone walks up to you and asks, “Do you believe in God?” – most of you will stumble for an answer, because it is not so simple. If you’re like me, and were raised in a religion, in my case Judaism, but you no longer are observant, then you hem and haw over the first question – what is God? So we decided to talk about answering that question first.
The other day, during the Oscar awards, Matthew McConaughey thanked God for his win – the way he couched God was by referring to a quote – “if you’ve got God, you got a friend, and that friend is you.”
What does that mean? Reductively that God is you?
I’ve been compiling a prayer/inspiration journal because after more than half a century of saying the same prayer my mother taught me, I decided to find a more positive way to frame my gratitude and prayer. “Dear Lord forgive me if I have this day, done any wrong in work or play, always help me to do what’s right and watch over me all through the night.” For some reason, that just doesn’t do it for me even after saying it religiously (pardon the pun) for over fifty years. I looked at many prayers that are already in existence and the one that came closest to what I wanted to say was the 23rd Psalm. There is also a beautiful prayer in Judaism that is said upon awakening called Modeh Ani, thanking god for giving us back our soul because when we drift into that other world it is thought that our soul travels back to god to be repaired – this goes hand in hand with the new research about how dreams sweep clean our brain’s hard drive – again metaphor?
In the journal I’m composing, I wrote a few definitions of God that had sprung up in my readings:
God is a way of life
God is I AM
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all level of intellectual thought
God is the Power of Life itself.
The word God has become so maligned in our culture because we have grown weary of folks fighting in the name of God, hating in the name of religion, and dying and taking others with them for their almighty God.
It all really gives God a bad name.
I got an audio book of Wayne Dyer’s The Power of Intention the other day and was listening to it on a walk with Heidi. Dyer says:
Carlos Castenada said there’s an immeasurable, indescribable force which shamans called “intent” and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is connected to it. You can call it spirit or soul or consciousness or universal mind or source. It is the invisible force that intends everything into the universe. It’s everywhere. This source is always creating, it is kind, it is loving, it is peaceful. It is non-judgmental, and it excludes no one.
In the Old Testament it says, “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth and everything that God created was good.” That leaves nothing out. So good and God are what it means to be connected to our source. If you go to the Gnostic Gospels — you know, the gospels that Constantine in the fourth century decided shouldn’t be in the New Testament — if you study the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of St. Thomas, they don’t refer to God as God, they refer to God as the “The Good.”
Whenever we are in harmony with that source from which we all emanated, which everything came from, we have the powers of the source. And when we let go of our connection and rusty up the link between ourselves and this connection, dirty it up by living at the lower levels of consciousness, then we create things like illness and poverty and sadness and fear and hatred.
We have to take a look at every single thought that we have and ask ourselves, “Is it in harmony with source or isn’t it?” Any thought that isn’t loving, any thought that is filled with hatred, is a thought that is inconsistent with, not in rapport with source.
The next time our group meets we are going to take up the question again because the answers only generated more questions. When I said “Why can’t we say a resounding yes when asked if we believe in God” – one answered, “Because that is saying yes to his God, and I wont do that.”
The word God is divisive and if you feel as I do that God is you and me then you can’t really know another’s God unless you are using universal metaphors – to know someone else’s God would be like saying you know the entirety of that person which is impossible, so I get what she meant – I won’t say yes to his God – but I do want to understand our God – the god who connects us to each other – the One Love God – the God is Love god.
As I said, our group will have to revisit this question in our next meeting – please chime in if you have any thoughts about this subject – I’d love to hear from you no matter what your framework is about God.
Step One – remove the grass and first part of topsoil:
Step Two – hand till the soil:
Step Three – add sand if clayey soil, then manure and conditioner, then organic soil, line the bed with wine bottles donated from your local wine store:
Step Four – plant vegetables that are prolific, pole beans, cherry tomatoes, and others, along with hardy flowers then mulch:
This weekend, New Orleans hosted the Tennessee Williams Festival and several of my friends were panelist and moderators, and a fellow blogger was covering the festival, which is now in its 28th year. In the past, I’ve always gotten my festival pass as soon as they were available but this year, sign of the times, I was cherry picking which panels to attend. I went to a panel moderated by a friend on memoir writing as one of my books in gestation includes a memoir. It was interesting to see four white women on the panel and hear the subject of race featured so prominently. Turns out one of the women’s father is African American and the other woman of color is Argentinian and grew up in a small town in Alabama during the Civil Rights era. The true memoir was Blake Bailey’s The Splendid Things We Planned, which is a harrowing account of his very disturbed brother’s collision with his family. A friend is lending me the book all the while telling me it is very disturbing. Oh, I can’t wait to read it.
The other panel I attended featured another friend – a woman I had hired as a reporter at OTR Global when the bottom was dropping (read: one of the many times a change in direction, reorg, panic, and mayhem had ensued). She wrote a book about the Times Picayune, Hell or High Water, that is a must read for anyone interested in the newspaper industry and also the overarching theme of how corporations grow so out of touch with the people who work there that they implode [sound familiar?].
She invited me to join her at a cocktail party, where I sashayed into the courtyard of the New Orleans Historic Collection and an attractive woman said to me, “I like your look” – this woman turned out to be Naomi Wolf, here with her son on her first visit to New Orleans.
I had seen Naomi speak when The Beauty Myth came out, in the early 90s and here she was, not looking worse for wear, telling me she liked my look. Banner day, I thought. Naomi was visiting New Orleans for the first time, which I thought odd, how could someone who had gone abroad for school never traveled to New Orleans – one of the most interesting cities in the United States?
Naomi followed us down to Le Petit Theater’s newly remodeled playhouse to see Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and I thought, well, maybe Naomi’s never been here because here – in New Orleans – celebrating the playwrite, Tennessee Williams’ life, at an eponymous festival – here we sit in our sad little excuse for a theater after one of New Orleans preeminent restauranteur families, the Brennan’s gutted the larger theater to put in a restaurant – making the case to the city and planning department that they were the ones with the white hats – saving the theater from itself – turning the smaller theater in back into the real Le Petit Theater. Sad, is all I have to say, very sad.
Since Naomi lives in New York – why would she come to New Orleans? Is there any reason to leave a place where theaters overflow?
I was late to the festival panels on Saturday because of Stella who chose to get up at an ungodly hour – we continue to be in puppy triage around here – and afterwards, Saturday evening, I went out dancing to celebrate a friend’s 40th birthday party. We started at Delachaise for cosmos, Sex in the City style, then headed to dance with DJ Soul Sister at the HiHo – much later, we wound up on Frenchman Street where everyone and their mother was visiting – tourists – it’s a hate and love thing with these out of towners – everywhere I looked were tourists – Frenchman has become Bourbon Street for real.
Que lastima!
The weekend ended with my spirit group meeting at my house again – our question this month was What is God? – weighty subject but it’s a question everyone should be able to answer.
In the afternoon, I walked down the bayou to a fantastic party at a friend’s. They had catered both low country and southwestern cuisine in honor of where their children’s new spouses hail from – and it was a lovely day all the way around – so much so that I missed the Stella and Stanley calling contest in Jackson Square which ends the festival. I sat on my friend’s veranda enjoying the beautiful weather and thinking about how it is 40 degrees in New York, and no one there lives in houses that have French doors opening out to a garden which is nearly in full bloom in March – so that is a reason to come visit New Orleans, that is what seduced Tennessee Williams here, into the romantic and intoxicating ether of New Orleans – and that is why I am here.
We live our narratives down South as Eudora Welty was want to say.
