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My friend, Mudd Lavoie, reached out in the middle of the twilight to make sure I was alright. She’s a kindred spirit on this next level that I’ve reached on the wrung of life. So many were left on the lower wrungs that I sometimes carry the sadness like a ball and chain, but then I realize I moved up on this journey, the air grew thinner, the view expanded and became broader, the people here are intuitive and kind, we are climbers, sojourners, warriors of the light. On this path, we take no prisoners and we always stop and pick up the wounded, show them love, and help them scrabble back to the road.

My horoscope this morning:

Taurus
One good friend is all you need to make it through the day — even if things look really dark. There’s definitely a bright side, though: You know there are people who’ve got your back.

I went to see a few of the P3 exhibits around town and came upon one by the Propeller Group that featured a film about and not about a Vietnamese funeral. The take away – when you try to forget someone, you end up remembering them – so remember them … till you forget them.

I found this rather poignant given the last week. On Tuesday, someone wrote to tell me he no longer wished to communicate, and on Wednesday in a light store, I met Sty. I asked him if, “He was looking for a light?” and guess what he said. This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine …

What’s coincidental about eight months ago Stella arriving and now [Stanley] coming in on her heels (no pun) – Tennessee would be so proud of this plot twist.

Ah yes, a woman with a past narrates a rich and interesting life moving forward, not backwards – silly! You say no mas, but who is talking about the past? The present is not jarring, it is multiflorous and mellifluous. And we all strut across the stage … erect.

I’ve gone on break from social media having spent the last few days being entertained by a luddite – a music man uninterested in technology; the only platform he uses is a talking drum and an open heart. Mmmmm. Nize.

In my late night confessions, I have admitted to being a Warrior of the Light. You see, you have to be a warrior, to actually see the light – it’s in the manual.

I’m on the board of SISTAWorks – an organization that helps students with high school costs in Ghana. We’re hosting our second annual fundraising gala in November and the theme is a musical tribute to Maya Angelou. I have always loved her poem, her spirit and her ability to reconfigure herself in iconic ways throughout her life. What a role model – geez Louise, stand aside Wonder Woman, Maya is all that.

So it is with interest that yesterday I received a notice from an ex that they would prefer to not have any more contact. I took it with some pain, but decided okay, if that’s what you need, I can do that. I went to walk Stella and we ran into my friend who was outside of her house, with a jar of mineral spirits, trying to get the tag off her car. Someone had written their name across her hood and we both were rubbing on it – as she spoke to her dad, whose girlfriend has moved out, and I waved to people who went by in trucks and cars and on foot – one had lost her husband to cancer, one had lost her boyfriend to an open relationship, and one had recently found a new love. Life goes on. There we were rubbing the indelible letters off the hood of her SUV with John Waite singing “I ain’t missing you” playing our theme song.

I rose this morning, to a new light, to a new day, and I stopped in the lighting store to get a few bulbs and met someone. Funny how life is, huh. I left with a new reading lamp and his phone number.

QUEEN
Bohemian Rhapsody Lyrics
(Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide
No escape from reality;
Open your eyes
Look up to the skies and see)

I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy
Because I’m (easy come, easy go
Little high, little low)
Anyway the wind blows, (doesn’t really matter to me),
to me

Mama, just killed a man
Put a gun against his head
Pulled my trigger, now he’s dead
Mama, life had just begun
But now I’ve gone and thrown it all away
Mama, oo-o-o-o-oo
Didn’t mean to make you cry
If I’m not back again this time tomorrow
Carry on, carry on, as if nothing really matters

Too late, my time has come
Sending shivers down my spine
Body’s aching all the time
Goodbye everybody – I’ve got to go
Gotta leave you all behind and face the truth
Mama, oo-o-o–oo – (anyway the wind blows)
I don’t want to die
I sometimes wish I’d never been born at all…

INSTRUMENTAL BRIDGE

I see a little silhouetto of a man
(Scaramouch, scaramouch will you do the fandango
Thunderbolt and lightning – very very frightening me)
Gallileo, (Gallileo),
Gallileo, (Gallileo),
Gallileo Figaro – (magnifico-o-o-o-o)
I’m just a poor boy and nobody loves me
(He’s just a poor boy from a poor family
Spare him his life from this monstrosity)

Easy come easy go – will you let me go
Bismillah! No – we will not let you go – let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go – let him go
Bismillah! We will not let you go
Will not let you go – let me go-o-o-o-o
No, no, no, no, no, no, no no no-no-
Oh mama mia, mama mia, (mama mia let me go
Beelzebub has a devil put aside
for me
for me
for) ME!

INSTRUMENTAL BREAK

So you think you can stone me and spit in my eye
So you think you can love me and leave me to die
Oh baby – can’t do this to me baby
I just gotta get out – just gotta get right outta here

INSTRUMENTAL BRIDGE

Ooh yeah, ooh yeah, ooh…

INSTRUMENTAL BREAK

Nothing really matters
Anyone can see
Nothing really matters – nothing really matters…
to-o meeee………..(Anyway the wind blows)………

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Things to Think

Think in ways you’ve never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
Larger than anything you’ve ever heard,
Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.

Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,
Maybe wounded and deranged; or think that a moose
Has risen out of the lake, and he’s carrying on his antlers
A child of your own whom you’ve never seen.

When someone knocks on the door,
Think that he’s about
To give you something large: tell you you’re forgiven,
Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time,
Or that it’s been decided that if you lie down no one will die.

~ Robert Bly ~

My days are packed, my nights are short, because I do not have time to while away the hours. Besides running two companies, I work as an investigative reporter for two other companies, and am the parent of a young child. I am on the board of an active organization involved in girl’s education. I volunteer at my son’s school. I have a puppy.

I’m here to say it is exhausting this life of mine. I saw this blue glider on Broad Street at an antique store, but it was sold before I could even blink. Mind you, I have a back yard filled with rockers and adirondacks and a lounge chair so I don’t really need a glider. I need to schedule gliding into my daily life.

I spent yesterday at a seminar about everything dreams. We heard a presentation about how dreams are a gift, and that we should receive them without judgment. A couple spoke who do dream work and they said that dreams give space to locked battles and old hurts. I did a writing workshop using the bridge dream that shook me up so much a few summers ago in Spain and inserted a character I had made up on the fly – a mature man, spiritual healer, age 50ish, salt and pepper curly hair is the one having my dream – now that was fun! We heard a panel discuss what dreams are for, with Rodger Kamenetz riffing off of a NYT article that Michael Chabon wrote called “Why I Hate Dreams” – and we also heard from a person who believes that there are other beings here on this planet that are chaos and we are light – I wish I could have had the chance to explain to him that we are all chaos AND light. It seems like someone already did – as he was sporting a black eye.

I also had a one on one with a dream worker about a dream that has reoccured many times in my life. It began during my marriage and continues today, but one of the latest was so richly detailed that I couldn’t shake it. I told her about the dream that turned into another dream, and she turned it around on me – I became the person who is indifferent, who I was dreaming about was the one who is hurt, I am the “ex”, and the quiet man observing is not unimportant. I was listening to her and then it all sort of hit me, the way I’ve narrated the story to myself and others, and it took on a different direction, which made me suddenly start crying.

Even in my dream remembering, I still assign the same roles, cast the same characters, assign the same blame, and end up wanting. We’re told our dreams are a gift, they are a full-fledged play performed for an audience of one – ourselves. We need to be open to what we receive from our dreams because they peel back our layers, they tell our stories, they develop our characters or as Rodger said, they educate our intuition.

A woman said her husband doesn’t want to hear about her dreams – they’re nonsense he says – so she doesn’t tell him the dream, but she does use what she learns about herself in relation to him. He may not want to hear her dream, he may assign dreams to the same place that miracles and divine grace go for some, but he can’t not be active in her dream work.

As a creative – a writer – the process that guides our dreams is similar to the one that guides our art. We think sometimes it comes out of the ether, but it actually bubbles up from the wellspring inside of us. Why not plunge deeper into its meaning and learn what is being said? Why not allow one more cue to our existence, one more layer of meaning, one more chance to revisit the stories we tell ourselves? None of us want to keep getting it wrong.

And yet there is no right. Rule #1 of dream work, there are no rules.

Today, I was at the Ogden Museum for Southern Art and we were there particularly to see the Prospect 3 exhibit and while in one of the galleries a woman approached and said my name and told me she reads my blog. She introduced me to her S.O. and we all shook hands.

I’ve met a few people who have followed my blog over the years – strangers not friends, well that is until we met in cyberspace and became friends. One is Alice in Salt Lake City, who has been a supporter of mine. Another is Mudd in Canada who has been a kindred spirit as well. I’ve spoken with few people who read my blog. But every now and then I meet someone in real life flesh and blood who I’ve never met before and it has been remarkable.

I was at a friend’s party once and a woman came up who lives in New Orleans and said she knew me from my blog. A few years later, I was at another party and was speaking to that same woman and another woman I had just met and the first turned and said, “You need to read her blog, it’s worth it.” Twice this person – Leslie – paid me a compliment that she didn’t even begin to know the ramifications of – at both junctures I was ready to give up, and both times I ran into her and she told me this and it gave me faith.

I met another woman who is married to a college friend of mine – she told me that after the 2005 Federal Flood she was at home with a newborn and PTSD like all of us had and her husband told her to read my blog and she did and she said it was helpful. She didn’t know – Megan – that her words encouraged me to keep writing.

At the museum, when this woman approached while I was gazing at works by artists I admire, and told me she, a woman who lives in Santa Fe via New York, follows my writing, well, I have to say I was flattered – I don’t get paid for my writing with a million commentators like some have on their sites, I don’t get paid with posts going viral, my currency is that someone, somewhere found value in what I wrote.

Thank you, woman I will not name from Santa Fe – you made my day.

Today, while at the Ogden Museum visiting the Basquiat on the Bayou exhibit, Tin had his pen and pad (because he was still in Tin Tin costume minus the orange hair from the night before) and he was drawing. A woman asked him if he was an artist, and I said he’s a creative. Which means he is talented enough to create his own world, something I have been striving for my whole life.

When Tin was a baby, an artist friend gave him a book called Life Doesn’t Frighten Me At All – verse by Maya Angelou and paintings by Jean-Michel Basquiat. It’s been one of our favorites, so today we went to see Basquiat on the Bayou, part of the Prospect 3 exhibits all over town for the next couple of months – lucky us!

Every now and then when someone has seen Tin drawing, they’ve said, “he’s going to be the next Basquiat” like they used to say when they saw him with a trumpet in his mouth: “the next Louis Armstrong” – but the truth is that even though Tin can do a mean imitation of Tin Tin and Satchmo, I wish for my son to be himself because that in and of itself is the ultimate goal.

I sat in the backyard with a friend today while our kids played on the trampoline and our sibling dogs caroused the yard and said that I wished for my son a radical education rather than the one that is here for him – but a few nods and shakes of our head and we both yielded to the reality that he is happy enough with what he’s got – it’s literally me, who wants to shake things up.

A creative soul = someone who destroys to create and creates to destroy.

I am not talking about the song from Frozen, I’m talking about what I said to Flower the other day on the phone when I said that while the world was falling down all around me, I held on with a death grip to every pillar, person and place I knew. And what I should have been doing is letting it go.

This is such a hard concept for all of us who were taught to build rather than destroy.

And now I’m thinking of another myth I have told myself, the one where I need to be in a partnership or married or in a relationship. I worried that I would be like my mother or the countless other women who after 50 never married again.

But having a temporary roommate has helped me see the light – I was wrong – they were right. Living alone, being single, has more benefits than living with a partner.

Here are my reasons:

1) I have an active career that requires me to juggle many different schedules. Not having a partner means that if I have to devote a day to any one of these projects, it’s totally fine.

2) I love to go to sleep early and wake up early. I don’t have to dicker around with a partner who is a night owl whose comings and goings after I’ve turned off the light keep me from going into my deep REM sleep.

3) I’m clean and tidy and I like it that way. Most people are not clean or tidy or they are clean and tidy in different ways and it’s aggravating.

4) I have an active social life that never needs to be compromised by someone else’s agenda.

5) I spend the holidays with MY FAMILY or MY FRIENDS and don’t have to endure another’s holiday drama or bad food or tired traditions.

6) I have space and time to myself without having to worry about it being invaded.

7) I can travel to places I want to go and not have to compromise my dream journeys.

I really could go on, but are you starting to get my drift? This is new to me – I’ve been married three times, lived with lovers, and only now do I understand that living alone is the greatest gift in the world – to MYSELF.

Well, it turns out I’m a cliché once again, because Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist, spent seven years conducting interviews that reveal a startling change that he documents in his book, Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone.

“People who live alone,” writes Klinenberg in Going Solo, are now “more common than the nuclear family, the multigenerational family, and the roommate or group home.” As a society, however, we seem to be in denial of this new reality: While some ignore it, others deplore it, branding it a symptom of social fragmentation or individual narcissism.