Nanda Mama

It's Not Always About Me

2012-01-09T13:00:00.003-05:00

Have you had the experience where someone you know or care about is going through a crisis of some sort and it reminds you of a similar crisis of your own? It brings up past hurts and challenges. And you don't want to put your situation on the other person, but you need to deal with all the crap that is coming up your drainpipe.
That is why I am so glad I have a blog today. I have crap galore coming out of my drainpipe.

A friend is battling cancer. My immediate reaction is to give advice and to help with their process of getting through this horror. Mostly the way no one did for me. But I am realizing that much like being pregnant and having had the baby - no one can tell you what the other side of the bath of fire will be like. You have to walk the path yourself to get to the other side. I know this and I am doing my best to keep my freakin' mouth shut. It's hard. So much stuff has come up in me regarding my own battle with cancer. So much I never talked about. So much I ignored because I needed to get on with life. And so much I felt was old hat now that it has been almost four years since the surgery.

But I don't feel whole yet. I have daily, constant reminders of all that cancer took from me. And, don't get me wrong I am glad it didn't kill me (most days) but when I remember who I was before cancer there are some things I liked about myself that I will never have again and with which I am having a hard time being okay.

1. The first are my scars. I wore them as battle scars for years, to show what I had been through and how I had triumphed over that evil tumor that no chemotherapy could abate. I had looked death in the eye and it blinked first. But now I look at my scars as a story that I have to explain over and over again should I ever wear anything that isn't a turtleneck.

2. My voice. Someone said to me the other day - "Wow, Keisha you always have a cold." Well, no I don't always have a cold. My voice cannot get above a whisper by the end of the day. When on the playground I cannot call my children because they can't hear me. And G-d forbid they were in any danger, I would have to grab the nearest adult to yell at them and get them out of the way. My voice gives out from time to time. And I think about getting back in front of a class and teaching again and I am overcome with tears. My voice was one of the best things about me. Gone.

3. My epiglottis, I still have to take my time drinking or eating lest any of it end up in my lungs - which is really freaking painful!

4. The missing lung is doing its own thing and as I exercise more, she is getting stronger and stronger. And for this I am completely grateful.

5. Anemia. A new edition to the list of side effects. I am cold all the time no matter what I am wearing. All I want to do all day is sleep because I am so exhausted even after a good night's - or at least long night's sleep. And there is not much they can do about it because the medicines cause more trouble than they are worth.

Now that I have enumerated all the things that I hate about being post-cancer. I don't know how to be a good friend to someone going through it in real time. I can say things are going to get better. But they might not. Fight the good fight, when they are exhausted and just want all of this to be over. It will get better, but what if it doesnt? And do I really believe that? Sometimes just being alive after enduring cancer is not enough. Okay, greedy me, but it's not enough. And walking around saying I am just glad to be alive is a bunch of Pollyanna bullshit. I want my life back. I want my family together. I don't want to be getting a divorce (but I don't want to stay together either). I want my house back with the energy to finally fix it up. I want my kids to still be able to walk down the street to school and for my Zachary to have spent another year at Playhouse. I want, I want, I want. But I don't get to have. And I have to accept that. Accept the life that I have right now in this moment. When I don't really want to. I am sick of all that cancer took from me. And not grateful for anything she left behind. But sometimes its not always about me.

My body in rebellion

2011-11-09T17:26:00.005-05:00

My body hates me. Which is a weird statement to make because what am I outside of my body. Well, I guess that part that recognizes that my body hates me. She doesn't like anything I feed her - the junk and the good. She doesn't like to sleep straight through the night. She can never be seated for longer than 3-5 minute stretches. She feels like worms or ants are marching beneath her skin. She is constantly hot and then cold and then hot again. And she cries at the drop of an emotionally well-placed hurt animal or emaciated child. She is in a word - completely irrational. And in another word - perimenopausal. That's right, folks. I am going through the pre-menopause stages. I am 40. Technically I should not be experiencing this for another ten years. And if we are working purely off my family history for another 5-8. My OB/GYN thinks I am going through all of this slightly early because of the chemotherapy and radiation I went through with the cancer. And because the type of couture cancer I had was hormone based. Ah. I am not one who laments what a thing is called when I in fact have that thing. I am more the type who gets happy that whatever it is that is happening with me has a name. If you can name it you can research it and you can deal with it. Or so I tell myself.

Presently there is not much I can do other than get educated on what is happening with my body. Pay attention to the signs my body is giving off and read as much as I possibly can so I am informed and can make healthy choices. I am not interested in hormone replacement especially since such treatments leave me vulnerable to a secondary cancer. But besides that I don't particularly want to take synthetic things to deal with an organic ocurrence. Just happy, at this point, to know that I am not getting crazier than I already was, that there is something real going on. The hot flashes are NOT a figment of my imagination.

And so here it is folks, the next evolution. So hang out here and at keisha-eats if you want to see how I handle this next part of my constantly changing existence. Food will definitely be my medicine now. I am having some interesting responses because I am also diagnosed with anemia based primarily on my recent diet choices. So it will be time to warm up the raw foods so I stay warm and to boost the iron (not in the form of supplements those give me constipation!).

I know there are those of you out there going through this same thing. Don't stand in the shadows. Don't hide the truth. Come on out with me and exclaim loudly, I am over 40 and my body is feeling it!!!

English, yea I can write it.

2011-10-12T10:03:00.003-05:00

I was a good writer. Yesterday. Today I suck. And using "Yesterday" is a sentence fragment. Did you know that? Even if it completely communicates my thoughts, it is not allowed in scholarly writing. Shit. Oops. Of course you know that it is a sentence fragment. The rules I have been using for writing (or not using) were by choice. I thought I knew the rules so then I would know how to break them. But it I don't and the way I write is not good enough for scholarly writing.

I had this vision of revolutionizing the world of scholarly writing. I was going to write the way I spoke. Present complex ideas and theories in an uncomplicated language of the people. The proletariat. But that is not the case with scholarly writing. You will be laughed at by your peers and you will not be taken seriously in well-read circles. Your writing will not be appropriately obtuse (ding ding SAT word!). And who in their right mind from the non-academic community would want to read a paper comparing and contrasting Elizabeth Alexander's poem Absence to August Wilson's play Gem of the Ocean? You would need to be familiar with the poem and the play to get the paper. So, I am finally starting to get why academic, nay, scholarly work is written in such complicated language because non-academic people are not going to read it!

I had a great professor in high school (I refer to her as "Professor" because she had a PhD in Medieval literature from Princeton. She deserved that title even though I called her K.P., in class!), she taught Dante's Divine ComedyHandmaids Tale and The Bible. All in one semester. She made me love Dante. Her incredibly descriptive accounts of what happened in hell made it accesible to all of us with only a sophomore high school English under our belts; even those of us who had attended rigorous elementary and middle schools.(now that was a bad sentence!). I wanted to write the way she spoke. To inspire people to read the Divine Comedy. To be taken in by the stories of lying, sexual misconduct and patricide as well as killing any neighbors who came by your house! Wow! That book would be a best seller. And then I read her book on The Divine Comedy and I fell asleep while reading it. It was her dissertation from Princeton. Dry. I wanted to throw pitchers of water on it. Or better yet just put it in the tub and let water consume it.

How could it be that this vibrant and amazing teacher could write something so boring? It didn't make sense to me. Not until years later when I had to write my college thesis. One member of my committee had also been my English Professor. She taught Dante, Chaucer and Shakespeare. I loved the way she taught and as a matter of fact she got her PhD from Princeton the same year K.P. did. They were friends. And my college professor was so incredibly vibrant in class. She described Chaucer with such passion that you wanted to perfect middle English! Then I made a huge mistake. I read her dissertation. Again, nod'sville. How was this possible?! She made me want to run away with Virgil! And to adore Dante. To this day The Divine Comedy is one of my favorite collections of books and The Inferno in the top three of my favorite books. However, this professor who had encouraged me to write the way I spoke told me that I missed summa cum laude on my thesis because I had "dropped the ball" on the use of language. It wasn't scholarly enough. The entire faculty was not going to stand up and then genuflect when I walked in at graduation (which is what they did with summa cum laude graduates. Okay not the genuflect part). And I wasn't going to get a nifty medal. Damn, Damn Damn! How did I know there was a difference in how I spoke and how I wrote?

Then I got it. There is a huge difference between scholarly writing, how one teaches, and how one writes for non-academic audiences. Scholarly writers don't really give a damn if the proletariat can understand their writing. It wasn't written for them. It was written for the academic community. And they expect, nay, demand that the writing be as complicated as possible so it shows how learned you are. I get it. And I also get that that last part wasn't fair to academics.

And now I have to learn how to write like an academic if I want my work to be taken seriously in certain circles. Ahh, am I up to learning those rules now, at my age. Well, it seems I have no choice if I am to be a scholar. There is a silver lining, however, learning to write academically does not mean I cannot also write for the masses. I can do both. Learning the rules of scholarly writing means I can break them in my blogs and other commercial venues. I can use it in my speech when I teach (oh, rhymn that is a no no!). And I can make things vibrant and inspiring for my students. Don't worry I will not bore you with my scholarly writings here. I will save that for another audience.

Be well,
K

What did you say?

2011-10-04T07:23:00.006-05:00

This post is primarily for those of you who have children. And those of you who do not, go ahead and post a response if you have any thoughts. RANT WARNING! So those of you not in the mood for that kind of thing can just skip this post. I am sure I will be back soon with something else!

Girls. What is it about being a mother and raising a girl that is so difficult? The boys are challenging, yes they are. But they are challenging in a different way. They want to kill each other most days and work that out through jumping on each other and chasing each other around the house wielding toys as potential weapons! This I can handle. This I know how to deal with. But girls.

I have to be honest, I am not the best of mothers when it comes to dealing with my daughter. There is something about the mother/daughter relationship that is different, easy to figure out on the surface but once you dig deeper, so hard to manage and to contain your frustration. I remember having the same beef with my mother. She just didn't understand. She wasn't listening to me. She is mean and quite frankly not in touch with what I am going through. Yea, I was one of those girls. And so I try to remember what my frustrations were as a daughter and use that to interact with my daughter, and you know what: It's not working!

Some of this is probably because this type of interaction is being interpreted by someone young, emotional and confused. We all were. And part of it is that I see in her every little thing that annoys me about myself. A mirror of my shortcomings. And that is an uncomfortable place to be. It hits every nerve in my body and I see myself outside myself acting like a crazy person. Unable to get a hold of my emotions. But the thing that drives me the most crazy is the mouth.

Talking back, mumbling under your breath, telling me - outloud - that I am mean and the ever popular: "Just forget it!" Well I can't just forget it. I was just slandered. I was just told that I didn't say something when I KNOW I did. I was being called a liar. And oh, my potentially calm mother instincts turn into a crazy, screaming banshee. Yes, I do scream. I try not to but it's almost as if I am outside of my body looking down at this out of control person and I am yelling at HER to stop screaming but she is screaming so loudly she can't hear me. It is that disconcerting and upsetting to me.

And I can hear all of you now, "It's not about you, Keisha!" And I know this. I know this. And I cannot get a grip sometimes. Believe me I am better than I used to be. I am better than the post I wrote a year or so ago. But I am not better enough. I have done the deep breathing and the time out for myself. I have counted as high as 100 to regain my composure. And when I am tired and frustrated, I cannot manage to go that place of serenity. To my "Woooo Saaaa" place.

There is no need to placate me or tell me that it is part of being a mother because I get all that. And I really want to do some kind of socialogical study on why it is that mothers and daughters are like this. I mean really understand it. It feels like something we can overcome, that we can break the cycle. Much like when your ancestors were alcoholics and so you decide to not drink. There is an emotional and physical response that maybe we can analyze and end, right? Oh please tell me that there is. And some women have perfectly healthy relationships with their mothers. I have a much better one with my mom now than I ever did and part of that was having my own children and learning how difficult it is to raise little people.

And I love my daughter. I adore her and think she is the coolest kid ever. I think she is talented beyond measure, creative, her own person and compassionate. And I don't like her very much. And when the two of us are in the same room for too long it turns into a battle. Like this morning when I told her she could not wear leggings with a ton of holes in them to school. You would think I was Joan Crawford in "Mommy Dearest!" The crying and the wailing. The talking back - which is really what set me off. So that my constant phrase with her is: "What did you say?"

There is a perceived sense of defiance on her part, a disrespect and an echo of me at 10, 11, 12. It's got to be in the DNA and its got to be rooted out. So, this is my dilemna this morning. And sitting down and writing this post has helped me calm down and think of all of this differently. And in the moment that clarity is so hard to find. And this is the nature of raising girls, some say. But I would like to defy nature.

My latest mantra - On Children ~ Kahlil Gibran
(performed by Sweet Honey in the Rock)
Your children
Are not your children
They are the sons and the daughters of life's longing for itself
They come through you but they are not from you
And though they are with you they belong, not to you.

You can give them your love but not your thoughts
They have their own thoughts
You can house their bodies but not their souls
For their souls dwell in a place of tomorrow, which you cannot visit
Not even in your dreams
You can strive to be like them but you cannot make them just like you...

Be well.

Wanting Memories

2011-09-14T08:09:00.002-05:00
How can you miss something you never had? I think it's very easy to mourn both that which you have lost and that which you wish you had to lose.

Wanting Memories

I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes
I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes

You used to rock me in the cradle of your arms
You said you'd hold me til the pains of life were gone
You said you'd comfort me in times like these
and now I need you
Now I need you
And you are gone

I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes
Since you've gone and left me
There's been so little beauty
But I know I saw it clearly through your eyes

Now the world outside is such a cold and bitter place
Here inside I have few things that will console
And when I try to hear your voice above the storms of life
Then I remember
all the things that I was told

I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes
I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes

I think on the things that made me feel so wonderful when I was young
I think on the things that made me laugh
made me dance
made me sing
I think on the things that made me grow into a being full of pride
I think on these things
For they are true

I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes
I thought that you were gone
But now I know you're with me
You are the voice that whispers all I need to hear

I know a please, a thank you, and a smile will take me far
I know that I am you and you are me and we are one
I know that who I am is numbered in each grain of sand
I know that I've been blessed
Again
and over again

I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes
I am sitting here wanting memories to teach me
To see the beauty in the world
Through my own eyes

Violence of Articulation - Living in Fear

2011-09-07T08:59:00.003-05:00
One of my favorite directors is Anne Bogart, even though I have never seen anything she has directed. I did, however; have the incredible joy of spending time with her in graduate school and even being blessed enough to cook for her. She ranks up there with Sweet Honey in the Rock in terms of awe and Anna Deavere Smith in terms of my girl-crushes.
My first year of graduate school she came to do a workshop with the playwrights and the directors were lucky enough to get a couple of hours of her time, which is due completely to my friend Wonder woman! I sat there with her on my right and she asked why we were here and what we wanted to do with our work once we left. But before that she gave me one of the best life lessons I have ever had: "Pay attention." So simple. So fucking hard. That is what I took from that time with her. Pay attention, which makes so much sense given especially that her background is in Buddhism, mostly Zen. Another lesson in mindfulness. For years I applied that directive just to directing but of course began to see that it was a wider command than just my artistic life.
Wonder Woman took another phrase from our time with Anne: "the violence of articulation." Kali herself. To create you must destroy. To speak is to put energy forth into the universe, be careful what you place out there. That phrase has lately become my touchstone, probably because I get the "pay attention" one even if I don't always follow it. But the last few weeks since the riots in England have caused me to re-think how powerful my words can be.
A really good friend suffered a horrible loss and I, in turn, suffered along with him. His good friend lost both of his children to mob violence. The son was dragged from a car and beaten within an inch of his life. He was put on life support which proved to be the only thing keeping him alive and so they turned it off. He was 16. His sister survived the attach but had been brutally beaten, raped and left for dead. She killed herself the day after her brother's funeral. Parents buried both of their children.
Before I knew the depth of this story I had taken the academic, well-read position. And I had also taken the position of someone caught up in the America myopia. Because I see everything that involves riots through a racial prism that is the same monocle I was looking at the riots in England with. I had seen a few liberal posts on CNN blaming the austerity laws and saying that this was bound to happen given the oppression of the poor people in the affected neighborhoods. And I saw the U.S. and racial profiling and Reginald Denney, and Larry Bird, and that bitch of a sales associate who followed me around the upsale clothing store, and the women who asked me how long I had been taking care of these kids and how much do I charge. Everything through the lens of racism. So after sending my friend, who is not American or British, a link from a public advocate in England saying how he could completely understand what happened and that the government should understand too, my friend and I got into a heated series of exchanges. HEATED.
I was academically dissecting this situation, it's the nature of oppression. Breaking down the language being used by US media - not taking into account that the UK was using completely different language. When my friend wrote back to me with the account of his friend's losses. He ended the paragraph with - "it seems as though you care more about how language is used to describe the situation than you do about the people involved in the situation." Yea, I deserved that. And I immediately began to research this event from every news outlet that was not American or created for Americans. Wow, guess what I saw? People were described by their behavior not by their racial make up. The pictures connected with the riots contained both black, white, Asian and Indian people. They photos were not skewed to make it seems like only one race of people were responsible. The issue was class not race. Back at Lawrence in 1994, Tim Troy repeatedly said that future mass violence would be socio-economic and not race based. It is unfortunate that socio-economics and race are so inexplicably intertwined.
I write this with lack of clarity and with caution as I know that at least 1/2 of the people who read this blog are from academic backgrounds! And I am trying to work out some of the kinks in my logic before I write this for Nanda Mama. But what I really want to say is that I am embarrassed. Embarrassed by my lack of vision. By my completely inaccurate and biased statements. Disgusted that these events took place. Overwhelmed by knowing the details and feeling the pain of someone affected. Despondent about the future of humans. While I continually work at having more love for myself I have noticed a shrinking of my heart in relation to other people. I cannot forgive them their trespasses. And I fight to maintain my internal humanity toward "those people," and I feel as though I am losing the fight most days. I have become more and more conservative as I age. I have become less accepting and more of - just get up off your ass and fix it your life. Wait, isn't that what I have been saying to myself forever?!
The other night in the midst of a panic attack I put on Pema Chodron and right where my ipod picked it up was Pema discussing anxiety. Saying that her teacher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche had taught on fear and facing it and leaping into it. How he took things that were painful and seemed useless to us and turned them into positive teaching tools. Things like fear and boredom. That when we are afraid or feel the loss of solid ground we scramble to create ground. And in our process we may lash out or blame or become angry with others. And I had been doing a bit of that lately. So, it helps me to see that what I say or write has consequences. That if I am to really do the work of opening up myself and my heart then I cannot afford to close myself off to the basic humanness of everyone - but that does not mean forgiving every misdeed. Nor does it mean ignoring when someone has clearly lost their sense of humanness. Beating a 16 year old to death and then raping his sister - not a forgivable act. Not a human act. Not even the act of the beast. This is something darker and far deeper. And I will not accept, tolerate or forgive. Because the act was not done directly to me but close enough that I cannot ignore it. And it reminds me that in every time someone is hurt, abused or injured it is an affront to my humanness. One death is a tragedy, several a statistic? Time to wrap my head around the statistics.

Happy Birthday To Me - And a Challenge to You!

2011-07-04T08:51:00.005-05:00

I will be 40 this month and I am so excited!!! I've been talking about it forever. I feel like I have lived half my life already but I feel a shift happening. It is happening in the earth right beneath my feet. It's happening in my mind taking me to places and showing me things that I didn't know existed. And it's happening in my heart allowing me to love people and things I never thought possible. But mostly allowing me to forgive moments and events that I have held on to for far too long. And the most important part is that it has allowed me to forgive myself - or at least get on the road to forgiving myself. All the times when I felt I wasn't enough. All of the times I didn't show up for myself. All of the times I didn't live up to my "potential." What a horrible word "potential" it should be banned from the English language. We are not potential. Every moment of our lives we make decisions, we love, we live - and if we stopped thinking of ourselves as beings in search or on the march for our potential then we would be happy right where we are. We have nothing to get, nothing to reach for. We are perfect right here. I have tried to reach my potential ever since some misguided high school teacher wrote in a college recommendation that I had lots of it. Well, whatever he thought was my potential and what I thought was my potential were probably not the same polar opposites actually. And I probably exceeded his expectations but fell desperately short of my own. So I am taking that word out of my vocabulary and definitely not using it with my own kids. It sets up impossible goals even if you are only slightly damaged, meaning you have just a tiny bit of work to do on yourself. But when you feel you are riddled with holes that need to be filled - potential can become your arch-nemesis.

Potential is defined as: : existing in possibility : capable of development into actuality . Capable of development into actuality? Then what the hell are you right now? See where I am going with this? We are capable of becoming something. We are already bright, beautiful, full right here. Exist in this moment not in one that hasn't arrived yet. Just like my daughter always says - tomorrow never comes. It's the same way with potential.

But this is not what I wanted this post to be about. I want it to be about celebrating this month with me. And helping move forward through the next 40 years. So I am asking for a HUGE present from each of you. It is a challenge that may very well take you all month to complete but I am hoping that you will do it.
This is what I wrote as a Facebook status but it wouldn't post -- too long! I have been known to be verbose!

Today is the first of July! On the last day of this month I will be 40 years old! So I feel allowed to ask a favor of those who will do it. Send me 40 pieces of knowledge. They can be lessons you learned the hard way, or the easy way or the love way. They can be funny things you think I should know or how to heal a broken heart or make perfect scrambled eggs! What do you know? Share it with me. Each of you give me 40 gifts whether you know me well or not. At the end of the month I am going to publish it into a little book to keep with me and help get me through the next 40 years! Write me at facebook, here or @ keishakogan@gmail.com! You have all month, and I will remind you!

I am going to do the same thing. Write 40 pieces of knowledge. 40 things I "know for sure," to quote the guru Oprah (do you realize she is a guru - crazy!). Please do it - it's not just a gift to me but hopefully a gift to you as well! And if you know someone who knows me who doesn't read this blog or isn't on FB - send this to them. I want a HUGE book actually by the end of the month - truth be told.

I love each of you fiercely!

Keisha

Eat, Pray, Love and Navel Gazing

2011-06-27T16:24:00.007-05:00
Okay, I am a bit behind. I just saw the movie after reading the book months after it came out. I could have skipped the Italy part of the movie but was completely in love with the India - pray section. Partly because a secret desire of mine is to go to India, study with a guru and be silent and serene for weeks. But serenity begins within. So, I really don't have to go anywhere for that. What the movie did do for me, that the book didn't as much, was bring to clarity Elizabeth Gilbert's excessive navel-gazing and privilege. A successful career, money in the bank, no children and now no husband. She had no attachment to anything that walked on this earth so she could go and "find" herself. Which has always been the job of priviledged, mostly white, people. But then I had a thought: I come from some of the strongest stock of people in the history of this universe, anyway. Black people could have gone the way of the dinosaur, but we didn't. We adapted and survived and each generation works to improve upon the wonder of those who came before, well at least some of us do, and those of us who can work like hell to help those who can't yet. So I don't need to go anywhere to find myself. I am right here.

So, I will feed myself in my own kitchen. Pray on my own floor. And find love in my bathroom mirror. Let's start with the eating part. And I know some of you are sick to death of the myriad of blogs I have. Impossible to keep up with all the stuff going on in my life. I know. Better living through chemistry helps. And I tend to lock onto an idea and then see another bright and shiny thing and lock on to that. No longer. I have my kids this summer because we cannot afford to send them to camp in this expensive city, so I have picked up the recession camp blog. This blog, Nanda Mama will always be home base for me to come back and reflect and hopefully start a dialogue on some of the things that make me go --- hmmmm. But yes I am adding another blog to the list and it is entitled quite simply - Keisha-Eats. For years I have dabbled in healthy eating even before I went to IIN - Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Finding my health, healing my gut, soothing my soul, has been an eternal struggle. So I made the decision to give myself a couple of gifts this year. Nothing strenuous. Nothing outrageous and barely possible. And nothing expensive. I am going raw vegan, as best I can, for the summer. Cancer kicked my ass - no sense in lying about that. And even though I ended treatment three years ago this coming July, I am just now dealing with the fallout, the emotions, and the anger of having had to go through that particular life lesson. And the fog is finally starting to lift. I am a life learner. And also someone who feels that she has quite a few books in her to write. But still trying to figure out what it is I want to write about. What do I want to say? So many things. There are so many things I am interested in that I am hoping this time - this year - I am giving myself to center and come home to myself will clarify some things. So stick here if you want to hear my daily, weekly, monthly musings on life and whatever other piece of lint I pick out of my navel. Come to recession camp if you want to see how I get all four of us through the summer with nothing more than a metrocard. Or come on over to my newest venture Keisha-Eats, which will make it's premiere soon. Loving you all fiercely!

Be well

Ask and you shall receive....not always

2011-06-23T15:11:00.002-05:00

This post is specifically for Gen X-ers. If you were born before or after this moniker's designation keep it moving. Remember women when we were coming of age we were instructed to speak up - to ask for what we needed and wanted? That wasn't a complete statement. What should have come after that was "and be prepared for the person to give it or not." I think I missed that part of the conversation. So for the longest time I thought that when I asked someone for something because I had spoken up and used my voice that they were going to give it to me. But it is much more complicated than that. And today I had one of those moments when a lesson is not just an epiphany but it has become part of your personal ontology - it has been ingrained into your belief system.

I have every right to ask others for what I need and what I want. And they also have every right to say they cannot or worse yet, will not give it. But then there is a third part to this conversation - I then have the choice of accepting their answer and them as someone I want to keep in my life or let go of. HA!!! That lesson took years for me to get.

Each person is unique and has their own issues and we get to decide if we love them enough to put up with those issues. Love them, not like them or think they're cool, but love them enough. I have a male friend who is not the person I go to when I am in emotional crisis. He is horrible at being supportive and making me feel better. But in one specific instance I needed his support and I asked him to meet me as best he could. He couldn't do it. Big choice to make for me. After I assessed why I needed them to be there for me in a way they never had before, I decided that yes, I can keep them in my life because I love all the other ways they show up for me. And I knew - going in that he wasn't going to be able to fully show up for me - but he was the only person I could ask at that moment. And secretly I wanted to see if he could bend, even just a little. He can't. I tested him and now I know for sure. And he is still on the island.

There have been people that I have used this test with as a way to get rid of them. I ask them for something I need, they can't give it and they get voted off. It sounds harsh and cruel but it really is an important test for me. It allows me to see if I am keeping people around who feed and nourish me or if I am keeping them just because they have been there so long and they are comfortable. If I want comfort I'll buy uggs. If I want support I will keep friends who can give it. You know how the clutter gurus always say only keep things in your house that you absolutely love and give the other stuff away to someone else who could love it? That is what I am doing with the people in my life. Only keeping the ones I truly love - their light and dark sides. Their shadows and their brilliance. And I am urging you to do the same. Are their relationships that no longer serve you? Do you absolutely love them? Then let them go. And bless them and leave them to find someone who can truly appreciate their particular beauty.

I am so glad that this lesson no longer comes in snippets of light but that it is firmly a part of my world now. No need to be mean, just release. I thank Grace for this latest piece of wisdom.

Amen.

May cool winds fan your skirts
Keisha

Hotel California

2011-05-02T11:03:00.002-05:00
That song scares the crap out of me. Which is one of the reasons I have it on my playlist but with the prophet singing it. When I was little I would hide whenever I heard it. I felt as though demons were coming out of the song and coming to get me. As I got older I figured out that the song was about drug addiction. It made perfect sense then. My father was an addict as were ALL his friends, which is not unusual. I remember watching them all go in and out of recovery. And when most of them came out for good they had AIDS, thanks 80's. From 1985-1991, I was to attend more funerals than probably I would attend in my entire left. Friends just kept leaving. But there wasn't the same kind of love and recognition for these friends outside of their little family. The most sympathy went to hemophiliacs or those unfortunate to get tainted blood during a blood transfusion. The next were gay people or women who caught it from a gay man on the down low. Honestly gay men did not get a lot of support outside their community either. But if felt like the bottom of the barrel were those who had drug addictions. These people were just deviants. And they somehow deserved to suffer and to die.
I remember working as a candy striper at Mount Vernon hospital during the 80's. I worked on the oncology and geriatrics floor. And I remember one patient clearly who was on the geriatric floor. He had all kinds of health signage on his door. Where a face mask, wear latex gloves, wear full frontal paper gear, wear feet protectors. This was obviously before the hazmat suit because I am sure I would be decked out in that too, just to bring this man his lunch! Turns out he was a Catholic priest all of 40 years old. On the geriatric floor because he had AIDS. Didn't ask him how he got it - which was usually the first question when you told someone, or most likely it was found out, that you had AIDS. I didn't care. I wanted to know if anyone came to see him. No one. His parishonors were told that he had been transferred. The other priests didn't come to visit him or to pray for him. I visited him every day I worked there. And I would read to him (funnily enough not from the Bible). He would ask me about school and my family and what I did for fun. And I would ask him why he chose to be a priest. And why no one came to visit him. And then one day I came to see him carrying a copy of Plato's Republic, because I felt he should have to sit through it too since I was reading it for the third time at this point. And he was gone. The bed had been stripped. All the warning labels had been removed and the room smelled like that disgusting hospital sanitizer and bleach. I knew where he was. So, I asked the head nurse on the floor when his funeral was and she said she didn't know if he was having one. I checked the paper for his obituary - nothing. I went down to the morgue and asked what mortuary he had been sent to. And they told me he would be not be embalmed because few funeral directors would agree to do that. And they didn't know where he was buried he was picked up by the county. No mass. No last rights. No respect. I had a hard time with G-d after that but an even harder time with His emissaries. How could a person's life be given so little value? Back to Hotel California.
That song continues to haunt me because I think of addiction and how prevalent it is - and how easy it would be for me to become one - after all I have strong genes in that area. And to never escape. To constantly be at the mercy of a part of your brain that needs and you can only overcome the need through will. And I think about that last line - "You can check out any time you want but you can never leave." This idea of addiction is part of my previous post about mental illness. There is a certain cruelty to being trapped by your mind or your chemical make-up or your genetic make-up. And yea, I know you can overcome just about anything, but somethings feel like an uphill battle, a true war. Doesn't mean we don't do it - everyday. But like the priest buried alone with no mourners - it feels unfair. It is unfair. And it is also life.

Insanity

2011-04-27T13:13:00.003-05:00
Is technically doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. But this is not all there is to it. Mostly it is not conforming to the "normal" course of human events. It is being different. And I am guessing there are degrees between your eccentric Aunt Ruth who put her red lipstick on past the line of her lip and danced to an old victrola, and the Aunt Ruth who hears voices tell her that she is the Queen of Sheba. And none of these things seem to be a problem unless the person is a danger to themselves or others. Otherwise we ignore them and stigmatize them and make them feel as though they are less than or extremely other because they cannot take care of themselves without chemical assistance.
So are you weak because you take an aspirin for a headache? Are you a loser when you break out the antihistimines every Spring. Should you be shunned because your menstrual cramps cause you to miss work or even take naproxen sodium. Hmmm? Then why are there different rules for the people who live in mental anguish, which I will posit hurts more than any fucking menstrual cramps could possibly.
Throughout the course of my life I have experienced mental anguish, all of us have. But we somehow think we are better depending on the level of anguish. As an example, my father was an alcoholic and a drug addict. He used intravenous drugs. A friend of mine's mother is an alcoholic. She cannot get through the day without drinking as has had more than one embarrassing moment due to her alcoholism. I tried to talk to my friend about the pain of having an addict for a parent. She turned to me and said, "My mother is not nearly as bad as your father. She just drinks." Wow, you have missed the boat entirely haven't you. It's not about the drug of choice it is about the behavior that creates the need for the drug - whatever it is. So people who score crack on the street are worse than those suburban housewives who do oxycodone and wash it down with Jack Daniels while waiting to pick their kids up? Uh, no. The crack addict has less money and the suburban housewife has more. Economics is determining the nature of their drug habit and nothing else. Neither one is better than the other. The crackhead may have to give several blowjobs to get the money for her drugs - and the suburban housewife is going to have to in some way please her husband to get money for her drugs and I am willing to bet you that if the money from the husband dries up there will be stealing, lying and perhaps the alley blow job. The drug is the need not the method of getting it. What's the difference the alley versus the home in the cul-de-sac. Stop thinking you are better than anyone for any reason. We all have our addictions, our pain, our stories. None of us are better than another person's suffering.
You may wonder what prompted this post. I will tell you. Catherine Zeta-Jones. She is probably pretty sure that she is helping the cause of bipolar II and bringing a famous face to the pain and suffering, yet she does not claim the pain and the out right ugliness of the illness. She still positions herself as being better than the bipolar patient without health care. She goes to a spa, the person without insurance is lucky if they can get meds from the free clinic or if they can afford to be compliant. Catherine has help and people to take care of her kids to allow her time to rest off her melancholia. Some women have to raise children on their own and get out of bed no matter how they feel because there is work to be done, dinner to be made and a job to work. But this is what Zeta-Jones said about her bipolar disorder:
"Zeta-Jones herself has described her bouts with melancholy, telling The Sunday Times in the U.K. that "I'm lucky. ... But that's not to say I don't get down on myself. I try and stay positive, being negative isn't good for my personality. I don't just bring myself down, I bring everyone around me down. It's like a dark cloud, 'Uh oh, here we go', and I have to snap out of it."
I HAVE TO SNAP OUT OF IT?! Who the hell can do that? If it was possible to just snap out of depression or mania - everyone would be doing it and the pharmaceutical companies would be out of business. But Zeta-Jones is part of Hollywood royalty and has a presence to uphold. Carrie Fisher on the other hand said this:
"[Carrie]also revealed that several years ago she was diagnosed with bipolar II, has described the challenges of the mood swings that come with it.
A manic phase is not predictable," Fisher has said, according to USA Today. "The last time, I hacked off my hair, got a tattoo, and wanted to convert to Judaism."
She couldn't just snap out of it. She needed help and medicine and continued monitoring by her physicians. Apparently Zeta-Jones just needed a few days to rest and then get back to her fast paced world of acting with two movies coming up - and as she said to "snap out of it."

Statements like the ones by Zeta-Jones piss me off. I can understand her desire to be private about her personal anguish then be quiet. But do not present a disease which millions of people have as something that can be easily overcome if you have time to go to the spa. In that you do a disservice to those suffering and struggling to get up every morning. You would be better off shutting up rather than copping to the disease-du-jour.
Another bit of bullshit from this People magazine article, which excuse me, but the common people read, was this little inaccurate tid bit: "Perhaps most important, though, is that sufferers can – and many do – manage the disorder effectively, many times with various medications." Medicine is not the only thing that effectively manages bipolar disorder. It is controlled through regular sleep, healthy eating, reduction of stress (ha, like that is possible if you breathe), exercise, no caffeine, sugar or alcohol. Sounds like fun huh! But what is most interesting to me is that People seems to think that if you take your medication you will be good as new when John McManamy, an expert and sufferer of bipolar disorder has written:
"According to one study, 50 percent of us are not fully compliant with our mood stabilizer. According to another, patients go off their lithium on average after about six months." So, suck on that People magazine. Life is hard for everyone but for some reason money is the new decision maker in survival of the fittest. The more of it you have the better access to medical care and safety you have. That is how barbaric a society we live in. I stand grateful for my education - no money - but education because I can create access to health and medication and information. But to think that there is a difference between my issues and the man sleeping on the Central Park Bench or between the high as a kite mother at pick-up and the crack addict on her knees in an alley is to lie to myself. I am the same. There is no difference. And the more I realize that the closer I get to my humanity and the more grateful I become to be alive because it could always be so much worse.
My love to everyone who suffers, has or struggles with mental illness.
And those who love us.

When you want to do the right thing

2011-04-14T15:20:00.004-05:00

Have you ever - and be honest here - done something that you really want to do even though it might not be the best thing for you? When you aren't thinking with your head - as a matter of fact all reason has gone out the window and your heart is answering all your phone calls;and responding to your emails and sending your text messages. And you keep trying to get your rational mind back in charge of things. You will it to take control but it doesn't happen. You sit and meditate and make pros and cons lists and your heart keeps winning. Is it okay then to walk that road?

I think sometimes it is right to walk the road your heart has laid out for you. Because you can rationallize anything. Really you can. And when you think about what it is you want and where it is you want to be - life can be be fun and exciting and different all at the same time. But there is something about being a "grown up." And when you are trying to be a grown up you have to think about what is best for you. What gives you the best outlook and the best results and makes you look the most responsible. But maybe that is not where you are supposed to be. I believe that G-d kissed the place I am in my life right now. I believe that. But I often feel as though I am fighting with what G-d might actually want for me. Thinking that I know better and that I am rational in this moment, when what the moment really calls for is my for my heart to be open, that I am going to get the best result. Not true, no way no how.
I have a choice to make. And it is a choice I have been avoiding for quite sometime feeling that once I made the first choice there was no going back. There was no place to rest and no place to hide. I made that choice and I cannot, under any circumstances, change my mind. But that is not true. By virtue of my femaleness, to be base, and by my humanness to be broad, I can always change my mind. Always. And right now I am at the point when I want to flip a coin and let it decide for me. And then see if I keep doing best of out of three or best out of five if I don't get the answer I want. Ha ha. That will tell me the truth.
But for the time being I am going to wait until Mercury is out of retrograde and then make my decision. Make my decision based on where my heart and my head stands. I am sure I can get them to compromise with each other. We shall see....

Where you are right now

2011-04-06T15:34:00.002-05:00
The place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you
wherever your eyes and arms and heart can move
Against the earth and the sky,
the beloved has bowed there-
...
The beloved has bowed there knowing
You were coming…

~Hafiz

March is Ovah! I am so happy. Mercury is in retrograde and for some reason it is not causing me as much agita as it has in the past. Probably because I was ready for it. But this March has been better than any in a long time. It is usually my most depressed month where I reflect on my life, my losses, and lament the fact that its time for my yearly ct scan. Even though I am quite convinced that cancer is never coming back, that appointment still causes fear because - what if? This year I decided to live without the what if. I decided to honor the words of Hafiz (and some have attributed it to Rumi)to bow in the place that Grace has chosen for me. What I love about this particular translation of Hafiz is when it says "The beloved has bowed there knowing you were coming..." My name is Keisha and there have been many interpretations of what it means and where it comes from. It's Arabic, it's Hebrew, it's African - but they cannot locate one particular part of Africa. But the meanings are often very close meaning favorite or my personal choice - beloved.

I think about that section of the poem how the Beloved bowed where I am. I bowed where I am and chose this path. Everything I have done in my life prior to this breath was my choice. And Grace kissed my journey every step of the way. I can then take full ownership over my life. The wonderful and the challenging. I have often heard people say that they would not change a thing in their life because it would alter the place where they stand right now. I completely agree. While some parts of my life have been hard and painful I would not change them. And moreover, I made a choice to live it. I bowed and kissed every step of this path.

There are two folk stories that I love. One is an Islamic on and the other Jewish.
I cannot account for the truth of either of these stories just that they were each told to me by a Muslim and a Jewish person, respectfully. The Islamic story is that in the womb the baby is shown their entire life. The ups and downs the triumphs and pitfalls and they are asked if they chose their life. If they do they come forward into light and if they do not - their life ends with their no. There is a similar story in Judaism where there are a finite number of Jewish souls and before they are released from Heaven to come and be born of a woman they are shown their entire life. They are not given the choice to live or not. And right before their spirit falls to take its place in their mother's womb an angel of the Lord places his finger over the spirit's top lip and says "shhh, don't tell what you know." That accounts for the indentation in all of our upper lips. A reminder that we came from greatness and we choose to be here. But moreoever that we know perfection exists and our life is a journey to remember those two or three great images in whose presence our hearts first opened - Camus. Perhaps they were the images of an angel, or of our 10th birthday, or of our death. Who knows. But our being here is no accident. Either we chose or the Beloved chose for us, either way it is now up to us to make it the best ride ever. Every day. Even when it's hard.
March is over. Let the Spring begin.

And You Shall Be Love

2011-02-26T12:07:00.001-05:00

I have to come back to the previous post and work out some of my faulty logic. But before I do that, I have been thinking a lot about love. Such a beautiful thing - word, right? We all want it and we seek it and we acquire it and we lose it and some keep it. Valentine's Day, wedding anniversaries, babies being born, marriages. All of these events signify the love relationship. This year I got a lot of "Happy Valentine's Day" messages. I wasn't quite sure what to do with all of them. What does that mean that you want me to have a happy Monday? Or you want me to eat some chocolate? Or you want me to feel loved today? I particularly like the last one. So, yes I will feel loved today. Mind if I keep it for the coming days as well?

March is three days away. March 3rd will be the 20th anniversary of my father's death. And I never forget that day. I never forget where I was when I found out and how it sort of rolled over my and spilled down my back like the first moments in the shower or under a waterfall, should you be so lucky to stand beneath a waterfall! Now at the 20 year anniversary it is particularly difficult to see the day approach. Time should heal all wounds and make things easier to bare. But for me it just gets harder. Because I tend to think of all that was missed in the 20 years. Having my father walk me down the aisle (or through the hotel room to the terrace) on my wedding day. Being present when my children were born. Teaching my boys about football and baseball and telling them jokes and holding them on his knee and giving them pats, because: "Pats are very important." And I try not to live in regret or missed opportunity, especially with things I could not/can not prevent like death. But March is the month that I allow myself to wallow and to "harrow my own personal hell." It makes Aprils' showers a welcome baptism. Just like Jesus!

A few months ago I was diagnosed with ADHD. Now I know for a lot of people that is not a "real" thing. And as I went through school and succeeded in various ways I realized that not being able to concentrate, or prioritize or complete a simple task, was a character flaw. It could not possibly be something amiss with my brains firings. And it became a thing that caused me so much shame. I did not feel smart. So I must not be smart. And despite having a rather extreme form of ADHD I did manage to have some successes in school, partly because I had to develop my verbal and social skills to combat my inability to parse mental activities. The one place I did well was in theatre, as a director. I had stage managers, designers and assistants to help me with the details of a project so all I had to do was deal with the forest, leaving them the trees. And I loved my designers and stage managers who could pull what I couldn't say out of my quagmire of a brain. And yet, Grace would appear, often just long enough to give me a glimpse of how to fix something making the work okay. But my early work often lacked resolution or clarity at the end. And the end is the hardest part of creating a strong piece of theatre. So even there I was receiving the same critique over and over again - your piece has no ending Keisha. What do you want the audience to leave with? I couldn't make it to that point. And I didn't know how to fix it. I didn't know how to fix me. I also don't end relationships very well. I get tired of the tedium of dotting i's and crossing t's. And I just let things go and end however they will. Often not being able to do the rigorous work of making love last and of ending it with good feelings intact. So I stand eternally grateful to those who have loved me enough to stick around even when it was quite obvious that I had gone off the deep end a few times! And yes, I can laugh about it now!

Can I blame ADHD for this. Well, in a way and then again not at all. But what I can say is that I am angry. Angry at the amount of time it took this diagnosis to come to the fore. Angry at each and every teacher who didn't try to help me get through this challenge but rather wrote me off as not being that smart. And pissed as all hell at my parents for not expecting better from me after a time. And for settling on where I had gotten to and not on where they truly knew I should be. I never settled in a place. I always have berated myself for not doing better and not being more. I felt it in me - that I had never achieved and surpassed my potential. And I am made at myself for that. And now that I know that indeed there is something amiss with my brain firings, and that it can be helped, I want to jump ahead and start achieving all the things I have always wanted. But I am stuck in regret. Stuck in it deep. And I am pissed off. Wow, I am probably the angriest I have ever been in my life.

And I am discovering that anger is a useful emotion if it pushes us to work through it and get to a better place. And so this coming month of March when I am usually all sad for all the things I have lost I am instead going to focus on all that I have missed. All the ways I wanted my life to be but it wasn't. All of the moments I wanted to have but I didn't. And all of the things I wanted to accomplished by haven't. I am giving this month to myself as a gift. Time to work through my anger and my hate and my out and out fear.

So what do I regret? Missing the time with my father. Missing being able to truly engage in my studies. Missing being the academic scholar and world-shaker I always felt called to be. Missing living a BIG LIFE, instead of the smaller one I resigned myself to. Missing giving my children the home and the life and the love they so deserve. Missing the organization and the rigeur that would give me a sense of accomplishment. Missing my Tony, Emmy, Grammy, and Academy Awards. Being as completely unreasonable about how my life may have actually been. And then on March 31st, I will say good-bye to all my regrets in some kind of ceremony. And on April 1st I will await the rain to wash the remnants of my past of self- hate and recriminations good-bye.

I started this post talking about love and my father. And I end it thinking again about love and my father. My father lived his short life with many many regrets. And I know it was because he was trapped in the circumstances of his birth and the limitations of his mind and I feel that pain right now. My father was 44 when he died. I will be 40 this summer. And I refuse to enter that decade with the same recriminations my father died with. This is an opportunity to get off that particular wheel of life. To end the negative karma. So that my love and gratitude and completion is the gift I give future generations - it is my good karma passed on to my children and their children and....

Kahlil Ghibran wrote this:

* When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
p. 11
All these things shall love do unto you
that you may know the secrets of your heart,
and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life's heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only
love's peace and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing floor,
Into the seasonless world where you
shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,
and weep, but not all of your tears...For love is sufficient unto love.
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course. Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love's ecstasy; to return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

And I shall be love

in peace,
keisha

Photo Credit: Flickr best pictures of 2010

All You Need Is Love?

2011-02-14T13:40:00.002-05:00

Nice sentiment Beatles (and why am I quoting the Beatles so much? I think it's from living around the corner from John Lennon's apartment building!)
Today is Valentine's Day. I am not bitter at all - for the first time in probably my entire life! I have always tended to pick low maintenance partners so these holidays would come around, anniversaries would peak their heads and birthdays would come and go and I would be on the shallow end of the gift receiving pool. When I was younger I would often go out of my way to make Valentine's Day a big event. But no longer.
My friend Sherri had a great status update the other day that basically she was happy that Valentine's Day was coming. She, like so many of us, is in love with love. Can't argue with that!

There was a time when I would see all the facebook status updates dripping with love-laced honey and be angry and bitter. But today when I logged on I saw happy couples who have been together for years, and happy couples who had just gotten together ready to spend the rest of their lives that way. And I saw love of self and love of child and love of parents. Beautiful stuff. Because being bitter at another's happiness says nothing about them but rather volumes about you! And I am no longer bitter about my status in the world of love. I am rather happy with the fact that I have so much of it and in so many different ways!

One of the best things I ever did was pick Ilya as a father for the kids! He helped them make the best Valentine's this past weekend. Simple, yet, creative! They came home on Saturday so excited to share the fruits of their labor with me. And I even got a couple of Valentines myself from them. My favorite, not to pick favorites, was the one from Buddha. It was a heart that his sister had obviously cut out for him (it was symmetric) but the message written on it was purely his own - dictated to his sister's elegant hand. It said: "Happy Valentine's Day Mommy. You are beautiful!" I could hear exactly how he must have said it to his sister. Zachary's slight speech impediment makes "beautiful" sound like "bootiful." I heard it in my head and smiled as I read the folded heart.

I get grouchy sometimes and frustrated with all that is in my world. But I took that heart and put it in my wallet - which is usually always with me. So, if I need to be reminded of the love of today, I can take it out and see it up close. Yes, Valentine's Day is a contrived holiday created by the card, flower, and chocolate industries. We all know that. But it can be more than that. It can be an opportunity to remark not just on the amount of love you receive but on the quality of the love you receive. And to cherish that and hold it tight.

Happy Valentine's Day tribe!

in peace,
Keisha

Can I Get a Window Seat?

2011-01-29T17:18:00.004-05:00

In the midst of all the controversy about Erykah Badu's video for the Window Seat, from her last album (that's right I said album!), the lyrics of this song got completely lost. This song is my freaking anthem.

When Ilya and I first split I called a friend to tell her about the pain I was feeling and her immediate response was to berate me for needing "attention." And to basically, without the benefit of knowing me or my marriage that well, tell me that the break was my fault. Because I wanted too much attention. Oh yes. In the middle of my tears, I stopped and really listened to what was being said and I apologized. WTF? I apologized to this person taking me in the weakest moment of my life and knocking my down.

That moment came back to me recently when I was responding to a friend on Facebook. She asked her friends to write how they met her. I borrowed the same status a few days later. But I wrote to her: "I met you during Freshman Orientation at Lawrence when you asked for a standing ovation!" We had the usual orientation company come in to do icebreakers and team building activities. But the hallmark of this particular group was having people ask for "standing ovations" at any point in the sessions that they felt they needed one and we would all stand up and give them a standing ovation. My friend Summer did the same thing at our IIN graduation - go Summer!

And I realized something. This friend was asking me to get small in my pain. To not own that I was hurt and that I needed attention and it was fine to ask for it. I, by virtue of my place on the planet, deserve it. As women, we cannot ask each other to get small. Never. If anything we need to hold each other up and ask us to grow and get bigger and stronger. And we should aid each other in that growth. And if you can't do that then for G-d's sake be quiet!

The last two weeks I have been sick. It was a real physical illness that caused weakness, vomiting and all over body aches, caused by my mind presenting its pain somatically. I am good for that. I have been known to lose my voice, literally, when I am not expressing the things in my heart that must be said. So the complete collapse of me this past week was really linked to an incredible mental tiredness. My mind trying to keep all the balls up in the air and make it look effortless. I did what I thought I was supposed to. I got small and didn't ask for my standing ovation. After all I must have brought all this pain on myself through poor life choices. And I, for some reason, put on Erykah. I had been listening to Bag Lady and thinking about all the bags I was carrying around with me and my intense desire to drop those suckers off at the nearest goodwill. Perhaps someone else could use my self-doubt, anger, frustration, fear and loathing. Something sent me to New Amerykah Part II and Window Seat. And these lyrics hit me so truthfully -

So, presently i’m standing
Here right now
You’re so demanding
Tell me what u want from me
Concluding
Concentrating on my music , lover , and my babies
Makes me wanna ask the lady for a ticket outta town…
So can I get a window seat
Don’t want nobody next to me
I just want a ticket outta town
A look around
And a safe touch down

If anybody speak to Scotty
tell him beam me up!

Yes, I need that window seat. But she went on to say this:

But I need u to want me
Need you to miss me
I need your attention
I need you next me
I need someone to clap for me
I need your direction

But I need you to miss me
Need somebody come get me
Need your attention
Need your energy yes I do
Need someone to clap for me
Need your affection
Somebody say come back
Come back baby come back
I want u to need me

But can I get a window seat
Don’t want nobody next to me
I just want a ticket outta town
A look around
And a safe touch down…
I just need a chance to fly
A chance to cry
And a long
Bye bye..

Those needs are very real. And wanting that and searching for it - nothing wrong with it. Understanding, of course, that ultimately all of that love has to come from self. And sometimes, much like your kids, you just want someone to hold you and tell you it's gonna be okay. You know it probably won't fix anything but it will make you feel better in that moment when your heart is breaking. And you may be able to get up and keep it moving a little longer. That is the work of those who are in love with you - and remember for me that means anyone you are in a love relationship with. And we mothers, need that same love, since we give it all day long. And I can take care of my babies and my life and my work and still want/need that love and support. It does not make me weak or self-interested. It makes me a strong woman who asks for that which she cannot provide for herself. We don't have to be strong every second of every day. Sometimes we need a safe, soft place to fall.

So, I am going to get that window seat and go for my safe touchdown but I will be back asking for my standing ovation.

in peace tribe
keisha

Cherish, the moment

2011-01-11T19:02:00.006-05:00

Some of you know my almost obsessive love of all things Anna Deavere Smith. Last year her new play, "Let Me Down Easy" about the health care system and the power and resilience of the body, had it's longest run in NYC. I saw it three times. It is now at Arena Stage in D.C. and I am waffling about taking the Acela down there to see it again. Anna, like I know her, right, takes the words of people she interviews and re-creates them word for word onstage. Check her out here and here if you are not familiar, but you're my friend, so how could you NOT be familiar, right?!

Toward the end of the play "Let Me Down Easy" Anna portrays Rev. Peter Gomes, American preacher and Professor at Harvard's Divinity school. He speaks about being present in the moment when someone dies. And he advises us, his listeners, to "Cherish, the moment." I've heard Anna remark on this comment on Bill Moyers, that cherishing the moment may be a rather difficult thing for us to do in the moment of grief. We are not able to step outside ourselves and see this person's passing to another realm, or simply into eternal unconsciousness, as something we can cherish. Webster defines cherish as:
a : to hold dear : feel or show affection for
b : to keep or cultivate with care and affection : nurture
: to entertain or harbor in the mind deeply and resolutely .

I love the progression of time in this definition. We first hold the moment dear, we show and feel affection for it. Over time we keep it and cultivate it with care and affection until it is harbored deeply and resolutely in our mind. It is a part of us. The seamless tapestry that makes us who we are.

My life is a series of cherished moments. That is how I define myself and that is how I will remember myself at the moment of my passing. Moments. Snippets of film from the story of the life of Keisha. The ones that show up are the ones that I have held onto for my entire life. The moments I cherish. So when I stand in this moment and look back over my life, why is it that there are less than wonderful moments that show up? Do I cherish those too? Do I cherish loss and disease and death? Do I cherish betrayal and cruelty and violence? Do I cherish hatred and pain? I must because I have held them close to me and have harbored them deeply and resolutely in my mind. I have fed them a steady diet of attention so that they stay buried in there with the wonder. And I will not deny that those moments of despair have also molded me into the woman I am today. Either by getting through them and triumphing or reminding me that I still have work to do. But I no longer feel the need to "cherish" these moments, rather examine them.

Wouldn't it be lovely if we could click on bad memories and bad feelings and drag them into the trash? Yes, Steve Jobs get on that! And I am trying to make peace with those feelings. To sit with them and "feel the feelings." To stay in the uncomfortable. And you know what? It actually works. For years, I have made fun of psycho-babble. And I cannot speak for other directives, but this one, sitting with the bad, works. I had a moment that I was holding onto tightly. Because letting it go would mean letting the person go. And I wasn't ready to do that. So, no matter how painful the memories, I held on tightly, like my life depended on it. And it did, because it kept me in a state of anger and frustration. I cherished that moment. And it became more than I could hold onto. So, I sat. I let whatever feelings I had about it come and go. I cried and hit things. But I kept sitting. This took quite some time. In between I cooked, slept, took care of the kids, did laundry. But always made sure to come back and sit with this moment. And to not runaway from the feelings that came up or the way it made me feel in that moment. And I sat and sat and sat. And then the other day I no longer needed to sit. I thought of the moment and I was calm. It was just another moment in my personal history and definitely not one I would be seeing at the moment of my death.

Completely incredulous that this worked! And seeing the results has turned me into some kind of crazy-door-knocking-prosleytizer for sitting with the bad. And the moment no longer holds anger and frustration for me. I can see it as something that helped me grow and fight harder for my life.

I can still see and hear Anna in my head saying this line. I wish I could give you an audio version, right now but check out the Bill Moyers interview I linked above and you will see what I mean. The emphasis is on Cherish. To hold it dear, to nurture it and then harbor it deep within you. And even the painful moments can be turned into something useful, for why would we remember them if they weren't? Some things we remember and others slip away as if they never happened. I tend to think that if it stays with me, with all that is in my head, then it has some significance and I cannot just pretend it doesn't exist. It stayed to teach me some lesson.

Our lives are a series of moments. Some good, some bad, some - no emotional attachment whatsoever. But if it lives with you then cherish each and every one of them.

in peace tribe and may you be well
keisha

Photo Credit:The Faster Times.com
Anna Deavere Smith as the Rev. Peter Gomes in "Let Me Down Easy."

Love Me

2011-01-02T11:02:00.004-05:00
I am a very emotional person. And I cry easily - very easily. But not in front of other people. That takes time. My sister posted a song I adore on her Facebook page the other day - Addictive Love by BeBe & CeCe Winans. They are singing about their love for G-d for Jesus. And maybe it's because I was raised in a Baptist Church (and baptized there at the age of 7 - by choice)that this song wrings my heart and makes me so happy. I remember sitting in Fred Gaines' office and we were talking about the Gospel Choir at Lawrence. And he said he was listening to the lyrics of the songs and while they were singing to G-d they could have easily been singing to their child or parent or lover. And then the genius on my itunes account went and did it and played Seal's Love Divine. Waterworks. "Love can help me know my name."

Then the rainstorm came over me. And I felt my spirit break. I had lost all of my belief, you see. And I realized my mistake. I need love, love's divine, please forgive me now I see that I've been blind. Give me love, love can help me know my name. ~ Seal

I am so scared to write this post, my hands are shaking. Before I married Ilya I was a firm believer in a G-d with personalities traits and greatness that I could not comprehend. S/He listened to me and knew what I needed and interceded on my behalf. When I died I had some place to go - some place where I would fit in and I could call it my home. Ilya identified as an agnostic. He didn't know if G-d existed and didn't really care one way or the other. Over time that made more sense to me. Except the not-caring part. And when I was very sick I was okay with things ending. No more pain and suffering just loss of consciousness. We won't know anyway, right? What was more traumatic for me was the thought that I would be some place unable to hold those that I loved and be with them but to see them in their happy times but also in the bad times. To watch them suffering from afar unable to intercede. How cruel was this idea of heaven? Despite my desire to "see" certain people from my life again - I had to say that I don't think that is going to happen. But like today, I saw Fred briefly while listening to a love song.

And try as I might I cannot let go of the G-d part. I have never been a very logical person so why start now. I need to feel that there is something bigger than me that loves me perfectly, just as I am. I need that. People can and will disappoint you. We are imperfect, cruel and some of us malevolent. We go to church, meditate, climb mountains to conquer ourselves and become greater than that which chains us to the earth. When I was very young I would sit and ponder why I was here on earth. What was I supposed to do? What did G-d want from me? Then as I got older and I de-personalized G-d, changed his gender, made her a puff of smoke that my clinging to only caused suffering, wrote his name in another language, I never let G-d go. There must be something, someone out there who loves me as I am - no matter what, no matter the day or the hair style. Unconditionally. People cannot do that - and do not try to convince yourself that you can because you lose what love really is.

We re-negotiate the meaning of unconditional to mean so many different things. Well, no I can't allow you to do whatever you want, child, because I have to discipline you, keep you safe. Well, outside of playing in traffic which is how our ancestors learned and the strong survived, (but that is an entirely different post) whatever we ask of those we love - for whatever reason - is a condition. We tell ourselves it is not a condition of loving them - of course not. But it is. We have standards and requirements from those in our lives. Only makes sense it is our life after all and we should be able to control who enters and most importantly, who stays. And that is only human. It's alright.

But to be loved with no condition - by someone or something that stays with you your entire existence. Who will hold you and wipe your tears and remind you who you are deep-down when no one is looking. And I searched for that love. And looking for someone to save me. Studying every religion but never committing myself to any because all of their G-ds had requirements of me. And some of their gods actually worked against my happiness. Religion is still fascinating to me and allows me to go deeper into myself and see what is worth keeping and "with a breath of kindness blow the rest away."

"Ain't nobody gonna save you, Savior self." ~ Cree Summer

Really? All there is is me? Well, that's not going to do it because I am fucked up. I can't get my parents to do it? How about that boyfriend from 1996? NO ONE!!!
How could whoever created the universe do that to us? How could they just leave us here...to fend for ourselves. FUCK. YOU. GOD.

"For you alone you are the everything." ~ REM

But that's the thing. If a "who"ever created us, then yea, this thing called life is going to be pointless because people can be pointless and petty and well, people. I don't want my creator to be like me - only greater. But what if we were an accident? Particles collided.....
Then THAT makes us extraordinary! Really? We evolved from nothing? At one point all of us takes the trip of the universe - that's how we got here. We were nothing, and then we were small, and we grew and we learned - much like the earth - how to survive to equalize ourselves. We created institutions and dogma and Steve Jobs. We are amazing. From nothing.

Grace. That is what I call that within me which will not die, will not surrender and will not kill me. That which makes me stronger and bolder and greater than before. That which whispers in my ear during the darkness of night, which can be so long, and tells me, it's alright - we've seen the Sun before and it will return. That which not only allows me to evolve but demands it of me. I have a friend who I love very much. And my moments with her were some of the moments that I saw perfection most clearly. Not that she gave them to me - but she was my 100th angel on so many things. She is adopted and the name on her birth certificate when she was given to her new family, was Grace. I am reminded of the work it took to bring her here. To bring each of us here. And just like the earth we have evolved over time into truly beautiful and bright beings.

"In you that journey is." ~ Angels in America

Grace and I are still working on our relationship. And I am hoping that we will continue to do that until my last breath. That she will continue to remind me that I am loved. That I am able to survive because, well, I am here. And that everything I ever need I already have and anything I ain't got - well, I'll never need. Grace's job isn't to teach me how to balance my checkbook or work my ipad. Grace's job is to remind me of all it took to bring me here. To allow me to see, unconditionally, the perfection I am. Like I said, she and I still have work to do.

"All I want to do is just explain...why I feel the way I do, what a joy to share with you." ~Addictive Love, BeBe and CeCe

Many of you have said to me either in writing or in person that you read this blog. That it touches you at various points. And I am not asking you to tell me those things - because this is, despite all the "I"s in this post to the contrary,not about me. Really it isn't. And of course my ego loves hearing your responses, but it is not necessary any longer. All I want to know is that I am not alone. That there are others around me working it out. Especially when it is hard. And always when it is joyful. So just write "ditto." And I got you! Feel me?

"Terror is just a small thing. Get ready for the burning, the yearning, the praying, the wishing." ~ Cree Summer

I wish each of you Grace.

keisha

My Obligatory New Year's Post

2010-12-30T14:21:00.002-05:00
There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places had their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all

But of all these friends and lovers
There is no one compares with you
And these memories lose their meaning
When I think of love as something new
Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more

Though I know I'll never lose affection
For people and things that went before
I know I'll often stop and think about them
In my life I love you more
In my life I love you more
~ In My Life, The Beatles

I am not one for quoting Beatles' lyrics even though I love so many of their songs, sung by other people, but this one has been in my head for a bit. This post is about loss. 2010 was a difficult year. So many things up and went. And not that I didn't see them coming or even invite some of them in, but endings are hard no matter who you are.

I've always fancied myself as being good with change - but I am not. I fear it. I try to pretend it is great, fine, necessary, helping me evolve. But secretly I curl up into a ball and die a little every time. Often feeling overwhelmed but not able to heal myself at that moment so I "DO" whatever needs to get done and I put on a happy face. And I can only do that for so long, usually as long as I need to to get through the transition period, and then I fall. I retreat to bed, to writing, to sadness, to somewhere so I can heal a bit and then I attack the feelings and work through them. This process can be unproductive in real life and so I have back-burnered feelings of "change fear" and loss for decades! Because there is of course, laundry. And a lot of that is self-preservation because dealing with the pain at the moment would have been overwhelming and also utterly useless because I don't know what I am feeling immediately. What Kubler-Ross stage of grief I am in.

Right at this moment, with pretty much every loss I had this year, I am in a place of acceptance. Knowing full well that at any moment I can instantly be plunged back into anger. That is the risk of being alive and human. And I considered going through and enumerating my losses but I don't think there is any need for that. I have written and cried myself out on them. Suffice it to say that they did not kill me - so obviously they made me stronger.

I have been feeling optimistic about the coming year. Even though my personal new year and sequence of change, starts back in August, I think 2011 will be a good time. Initial fears of moving away and on are gone. I have settled into my new surroundings and am developing an action plan for the next step. And I am being honest with others and most importantly myself and the kids when things are not going well. And that is ultimately all we can do - the best we can in each moment.

Bits of melancholy still exist. And anger and frustration. But through all of that I remember that there is sun, there is warmth, there are chocolate chip cookies! So I am giving myself patience and affection this coming year. Gifts to me. And there is always the next second, the next breath to make another choice. Like right now - I am going to say good bye to you all and go and wash my dishes.

As always I wish you love, tribe.

Happy New Year!

in peace,
keisha

Draw Close and Know That I am G-d

2010-12-28T00:06:00.010-05:00

Last June I wrote a post about intimacy and my quest to have it in my life in a way that is meaningful and fulfilling. And Jessica responded to that post with an incredibly thoughtful comment, here is part of it: there is some spiritual practice in learning how to become very close to the other.

There is also always some skein of self wrapped up in the other, a self that appears only when the other is present, even in our imagination.

Oh, my mind and heart have been walking circles around this one for months now. Finally seeing a glimpse of clarity today. That is the way enlightenment works, I am told. It comes in glimpses and snatches of clarity. Never all at once. And certainly never staying permanently because of course there is laundry.

But building intimacy IS a spiritual practice. It does require you to go and meet yourself and trust in something greater than your eyes can glimpse all at once. And even those of us who claim to not hold true to a G-d or any spiritual practice - we do this. We open our hearts to another, to an idea, to a path of life. We let G-d in we just call it something else. And that is fine. Not trying to convince the atheists that there is a G-d in their ontology because they love their children or their work (I am looking at you Karen Carr).

This is the moment where I whip out a definition from Wikipedia. We in academia do that - we look for other people's thoughts to back up our own. Perhaps if enough people have had the same thought then ours is legitimate. Not going to do it. I am going to stand firm on my own definition of spirituality - a connecting, communing, fellowship with something outside of or within ourselves that requires us to trust or believe without proof in it and in possibility. Now, that also sounds like faith and I posit that those two things cannot exist without each other. Intrinsic parts of the other's definition.

Where did all the "deepness" suddenly come from you may ask? Well my obligatory New Year's Post will be about good-byes. I can't help it. But on the road to good-bye I started thinking about all the ways and moments I have said hello. When you are at the end of things it is hard to remember the good times, the giddy times, the lack of sleep staying up all night talking times, and love times. When you go through darkness it is hard to remember if the light exists. You have to work at it. Be conscious of saying to yourself every moment - there is light - I know I have seen it. You start to believe that you have never seen the sun and not only that but that there is no sun. You believe that you will never be happy again. That you will never feel love again - and that maybe, just maybe, you never felt it in the first place. Your mind plays tricks on you. That is when you must go past your mind into some place deeper. Some place quieter and some place that won't lie to you. That is when you have to trust. To believe in something that you CANNOT see in this one moment. I will be happy again - because I was happy before. I will see the sun again - because I know it exists, I have seen it before, I have felt its warmth. That is when you have to draw close and know that you are G-d - that you are creating your personal reality right at that moment - and it can be "heaven" or it can be "hell."

This last year has been difficult for a lot of people that I know and love. Me included! I realized it most clearly when I re-read my Facebook status updates from the last year. Separately - not too bad. Collectively - overwhelmingly sad. And I was quite sure that I would never see the sun again on many days. This day included. But I know joy.

My wedding day when I arrived beside Ilya with tears in my eyes and he reached in his pocket and said, "Here, I got you some tissues because I thought you might cry." And proceeded to dry my tears.
The moment I found out about each of my pregnancies
The birth of each child
My first professional directing review
The first time I taught a class
The first student who said, "Thank you."
When someone I deeply respected said to me: "Keisha you are a good director, but you are a gifted teacher."
Every time my kid's make a joke or someone tells me what extraordinary souls they are
Sharing a joke with my sister
Looking at the strength and beauty of my mother
Listening to music
Being warm

So many moments - we all have them. And some are huge and some are so tiny. Our beginnings. Our joy. And for someone like me who searches for highs and liminality and ecstasy in her living - it is important to remember these moments. I must keep them up front and close so that when the bad stuff shows up I am reminded that yes, "This too shall pass."

So, thank you Jessica. There is some spiritual practice in learning to be close to the other. To take the risk of looking foolish. To say what you feel and how you feel it. In my previous post on intimacy I said I wanted to know how to have that kind of intimacy. And I recognized that I would have to take the steps toward the other and not just stand there waiting for them to recognize me. We all play the game of what is appropriate and how should we act. Well, my resolution that I have been working on since my birthday (my New Year) is to live my life with reckless love. To let people know, in real time, with realness, that I love them. That I care for them and that I want to hear their heartbeat. They may get it. They may run away screaming. But I will have said it and meant it. To have more love in my life and more moments where I see that if I am G-d, I am going to have to be G-dlike (and I am thinking mostly Gospel of John, New Testament G-d with some Psalms thrown in there!)

Seeking out the best moments and the best interactions for when I am my best self. And yes, all of this is incredibly selfish and self-interested. In an effort to save what is left of myself I am going to try something new - loving. There will be regret and pain and the inevitable - well, that sucked. But I see the coming evolution as my time to go after what it is I say I want. To really embrace my spiritual practice and to live my life without fear.

The next post will be my obligatory New Year's Post and because I have to I will reflect on all that I lost this past year. And there was so much that I lost. But in an effort to pick myself up like Humpty Dumpty could not be, I am going to smooth my heart down and get on with it. Join me on the other side, or just be an interested observer.

in peace tribe,
keisha

title from a poem by Jessica Fenlon.

Oh, the Indigo Girls!

2010-12-14T14:57:00.007-05:00

I think perhaps my most profound Facebook status update EVER was this:
Anything worth saying has already been said by the Indigo Girls.
I stand by that statement.

A few years ago I had cancer. I don't have cancer anymore but I kept taking some of the medications that I began during that illness. And I realized a couple of weeks ago that it was time to move on. The one medication left with me from those days is Paxil, an anti-anxiety medication. I took a lot of meds during the hardest parts of the time, mostly pain and anti-nausea meds as well as some anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds and mood stabilizers - also known in my CA circle as: No-more-crazy-housewife-medication. But about a year after getting through cancer, and still physically recovering from the chemotherapy, surgery and radiation, my lovely husband and I decide to get a divorce. Now one might think, that is probably not the right time to go off of those anti-medications. And you would be right. My psychiatrist at the time was adamant that I stay on the meds to help ease the transition from being married to being separated. She was probably right. But one night in the middle of all of this I forgot to take the Paxil. And then I forgot again and then I forgot again and then all hell broke loose. I was nauseous, dizzy, in pain and crying uncontrollably. I hadn't been that crazy before I took the medicines. Ilya lovingly went to the internet and told me that I had "Paxil withdrawal", WTF? For real? Withdrawal symptoms from the medication that was supposed to make me feel less anxious. I was so sick that I vowed NEVER to forget to take Paxil again.

Well, that didn't last and I again forgot to take the Paxil since it was the only medication I was taking along with my "vitamins" it was easy to forget. And then the withdrawal. I felt chained, literally, to this medication. Like it was it or me. And it was winning by a long shot! Well, last month I went to refill the-ole Paxil prescription and the pharmacist told me it was $90. Ummm, excuse me? Yes, your husband's insurance has changed and the medication price has gone up as a result. Hmmm, let me see, feed my kids or take the Paxil? I got the Paxil because I was so terrified of the results of not taking it. Afraid of the medication that was supposed to make me feel better. I stopped taking the Paxil two weeks ago after reading up (on the internet, of course) about how long the side effects would last and even how long it would take me to gradually come off of it (3 months, by the way, which translates to $270). So, I just stopped taking it. Told my doctors and didn't let them talk me out of it. Yup, I am dizzy, nauseous, and constantly crying. And then this morning I woke up a little less dizzy, a little less sad and I remembered the Indigo Girls:

up on the watershed
standing at the fork in the road
you can stand there and agonize
till your agony's your heaviest load
you'll never fly as the crow flies
get used to a country mile
when you're learning to face
the path at your pace
every choice is worth your while

stepping on a crack
breaking up and looking back
til every tree limb overhead just seems to sit and wait
til every step you take becomes a twist of fate
~ Watershed

This has always been one of my favorite songs - and anyone who knew me at Lawrence freshman year knew every word to this song whether they liked it or not! But my (and I cannot pick one, it would be like picking a favorite child, which I can only do on certain days!) favorite lyric is this:

Every five years or so I look back on my life and have a good laugh

Remembering one of the next lines:
But ending up where I started again makes me wanna stand still.

Not this time.

And I realized another thing, so much has changed. So much of my life is not the same as I tried to sing this song the way I did when I was 20 and my voice cracked and gave out on me, reminding me that yea, I don't have that vocal chord anymore. But would I change the Keisha standing here in all of her bruised, saggy, cut, hurt, joyful, triumphant-glory for the Keisha of 20 years ago? No. Simply. This one is so incredibly beautiful.

When you're learning to face the path at your pace, every choice is worth your while.

Thanks Amy and Emily.

For Kare O' the Mountains

2010-12-09T12:23:00.003-05:00

i love you
i love you
i love you

This is about the darkness that surrounds us and finding light in the midst of it. I can often find less than concrete things to hold onto when I am sad. Ideas. Concepts. The stuff of four years of liberal arts college. But in the midst of that four years of college-ing I met someone who altered my perception. Who altered my world view. If only she knew.

When I first met Karen I did not like her. Stop, I have already told her this truth. I was young, she was young and we were both hard-headed and convinced that our world view was the "truth." Learning later the true relativity of truth brought us together. Karen and I bumped heads in a Religious Studies class. A moment that escaped her but stuck in my craw for over 20 years, seriously. But Grace is brilliant in Its existence. That moment stuck with me. Why, there were a whole bunch of people I didn't get a long with in college whose names and faces I have long since forgotten. Not Karen. Somewhere in the future we were to meet again and Grace would soften my heart and open my eyes enough to embrace my love of this extraordinary woman.

Facebook - yes, of course. Karen and I somehow got reconnected and found verisimilitude. And along with her she brought a reconnection with other loves from my past and people I had managed to walk past for four years and never really "see." Thank you Grace.

This post is about the darkness. The winter is hard on all of us who live in the northern hemisphere, perhaps even those who live in the southern hemisphere but I don't know any of them personally! We get dark and somber and miss the sun and are not quite sure what to do to keep our spirits up and our outlook positive. Even our food gets heavier. Our bodies somehow crumple up underneath darkness' weight and we hide ourselves beneath coats, hoodies, blankets, bad moods and depression. It helps to keep a light in the window to welcome our true selves back home. Karen is my light this winter. I think of the 20+ years that I was without her wisdom, her smile, her warmth, her lessons, her courage, her. And I am hopeful that I can make it through the next three months. Look at the gift given to me after all that time.
Life brings us all that we need when we need it. And I hold onto this trope with Kare's face on the outside of it this winter.

She has amazed me with her courage. Going home again and finding herself and her love and then going forward and accomplishing the thing she thought at one point she could not. We are stronger than we know. So, here is an exercise for us this winter, loves. Find something you adore or someone who brings you joy, someone who's journey shows you strength and movement through the dark and put their face on your winter. Allow them to lift you up when you can't do it for yourself.

If I may be so bold and selfish I am going to allow Karen to hold me up this winter.
And as I started this post, i love you.

be well tribe.

in peace
keisha

Happiness Is.....

2010-11-30T05:38:00.000-05:00
An elusive butterfly, according to Henry David Thoreau. Something that is worked at and not a gift of the gods, according to Bertrand Russell. And Anything and everything at all, that's loved by you, according to Charlie Brown.

They are all correct and incorrect at the same time, the joys of being human. I know someone that whenever I speak to them after the initial "How are you?" they say "FANTASTIC!" Really? Fantastic! All the time, whenever I speak with you? Is it me making you so happy or are you just one of those permanently happy people? Doing drugs? Delusional? You should not be Fantastic, things should and do suck, right?

Well, yes they do. Life has a way of sucking the joy right out of you sometimes, even more so when there wasn't that much there to being with. Most mental health care professionals posit that you have a finite happiness quotient. Happiness is hereditary. So if you come from chronically unhappy parents, guess what? You're liable to be miserable your entire life. That's when free will and self-help books kick in because of course, you can do something about this and not always with drugs, usually with sticking fucking post-its on your mirrors with pithy sayings like: "I am somebody!" "Happiness is a choice." "Today is the first day of the rest of my life." Yeah, how's that working for you?

I am an optimistic person, for the most part, especially when surrounded by pessimism, I tend to go to my happy place. But at the core of me, at the root and at my foundation, unhappy. When I stop and get still peace is not all its cracked up to be. I am one of those chronically dramatic people who seeks excitement, adventure and spectacle. Being a theatre artist it comes to me by training and being a Leo it comes to me by birth. But, know what? I am not happy in those highly dramatic moments either. So who is right? What does happiness consist of?

I think, ultimately that it is a series of moments, events and decisions that create happiness. And I am also going to choose to believe that we can live there every second of every day if we chose, not overlooking the sadness or the drama or the pain, rather invitiing all those things in for tea. Life can be so harsh a great deal of the time. And all we (and I am speaking royally here) have is well, yea, our reaction to it.

So Happiness is.....I'm going with Charlie Brown on this one.

in peace

Fall On Me

2010-11-01T19:56:00.001-05:00

Tell the sky and tell the sky fall on me. ~ REM

I want the sky to fall on me. To smother me with stars and milky ways and galaxies. To cushion me with clouds and water me with rain. And blanket me with night until I wake and find out it was all a dream.

Life is good right now. It is hard at the same time. I enjoy being in the place where I can see that things are not perfect, not even close, but that my life is so much better than it was two years ago or even better than the homeless person who camps out on our corner with his dog. He sits there twice a week reading Nietzsche. As if he needed more backup for nihilism. A part of me wants to grab a cardboard box and sit down next to him and ask him about his life. What did he do when he was five and how did he get there. But I know myself. I am the girl who's mother would take her wallet every time we went to 125th Street because she knew I would give money to every crackhead and alcoholic who asked. It is in my nature. Now I try to look compassionately as I walk past but don't offer money and definitely don't sit down and strike up a conversation. My father would have. And would have walked away not feeling guilty for not having done more.

My son is my father incarnate. He has no fear and no walls. He finds people fascinating and they in return adore him up close and from afar. People literally stop on the streets to stare at him. He has that glow. I can take no credit for the light inside of him or the joy he brings other people, especially me and his father. I can just smile and be grateful that I have been chosen to usher this great soul through this part of his life. Hopefully staying out of his way long enough to keep the light intact. Smothering is a great hazard in the parenting biz.

And I am one of those people who looks for the highs in life. It had me misdiagnosed as bipolar for a moment there. I am not bipolar. I am an adventure seeker. An edge walker. A theatre artist. I was grateful for the doctor who saw that. That I work in waves. I attack a project and see it to its logical conclusion and then I hibernate for awhile. Leos do that. They seek the Sun and they seek their lair. They need the red hotness of the Sun, for they are the Sun. But they are also a fixed sign and they need stability and tradition and dare I say it, routine. It took me 39 years to realize that that is my routine. The burning energy and then the retreat. It works for me. I have been in a rather long state of hibernation. Taking some time to smooth my heart down. But now I feel the Sun calling me to dance in her rays. I want the sky to fall on me.

New projects are dancing in front of me. New energy is filling me up. New thoughts and ideas as well as new friends and adventures. My life today looks completely different than it did one year ago. And I realized that as I watched my son who was known as the Mayor of South Orange walk down Columbus Avenue and be called by his name by more than one shop owner. He is himself, wherever he is. He lets his light shine always. He can't help it. So, who am I to not join his parade.

Buy the sky and sell the sky and lift your arms up to the sky
And ask the sky and ask the sky
Fall on me.

My 100th Post!!!!

2010-09-04T16:48:00.004-05:00
Wow! 100 posts. Why is that something to mark? Don't know, maybe its the symmetry of the number. I have so much to say and I think it is fitting that this post be a sort of re-cap of the last couple of years. Because the more things change the more they stay the same.

Ever have so much to get done that you cannot even prioritize them? If you have children or a family that depends on you then your priorities tend to follow their immediate needs. But one thing I have always said and written about hear ad nauseum is that if Mama, or whoever is the head of the tribe, is not happy then no one is happy. This time of the year is the end of the year for me. I work very much on a lunar calendar and I embrace the fall as the beginning of the new year. Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Samhain (the Witch's New Year) all give me an opportunity to leave summer (my least favorite season) behind me and to begin again. This transformation often begins on my birthday - July 31st - which is also the eve of Lammas or the Midsummer in the Witch's world. I identify as so many different traditions and none at all.

Much the way March is a month of deep introspection and my own harrowing of hell, September is a time of beginnings. I am intricately linked to the beginning of the school year. I belong in an academic setting. It is where I feel most alive. Where life is idealized and anything can be tried. So this fall, having no class to teach or to take has filled me with a bit of melancholy. I satisfy that desire to learn and to know by embarking upon many different plans. One or two of them manage to last the entire year and some of them keep coming back year after year having not been fulfilled. Waiting thinking, "Maybe THIS is the year she will get to me." Those orphaned dreams tend to be the ones that directly correspond to my well-being and my personal and spiritual growth. Not this year. All those orphaned dreams are being brought into my home and given refuge. My kids are not first this time. My ex-husband is not first. Cancer is not first. My friends aren't even first. I am. That is my New Year's Resolution.

One other habit I have is to discuss my big plans for myself and publish them for all the world to see. And then when I don't accomplish them I feel like a fraud and a failure. I am a private person by nature but I have decided to keep these wishes and dreams to myself this time. They are my own sweet secrets and pleasures. Perhaps you will see the results of them should you pass me in the grocery store. Or perhaps you won't. It doesn't matter anymore. My joy is not based upon the approval of others any longer. It is based upon the approval of me. What brings me joy. What makes me delirious. What makes my toes curl. All those things done in the name of pleasure and personal growth will be mine. Let your imaginations run wild with that one - mine has.

As always I bid you peace, my tribe, I love you more than can ever be written or expressed. And know that the fact that I can do any of these things, whatever they are, is because you all have been the very best parts of holding me up all these years. Time to love me as much as you do.

in peace

I have missed you

2010-08-10T12:10:00.002-05:00
Tribe! It has been two months since I last wrote to you. Thank you for the emails, the notes, the birthday wishes and the love you have sent my way. Moving has been an exercise in patience, grace and faith. It is not over yet. Turning 39 two weeks ago has been an exercise in acceptance and trust. It has been a true awakening these last two months. As most of you know we moved to the NYC! Me and the kids packed up the minivan (truth be told we are not completely out of the Jersey house yet)and took our show on the road. We moved into the heart of the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Filled with everything I love - cupcake shops, farmer's markets and lots of places to express my latent Judaism :)! What you all may not know is that Ilya lives two flights up. Yes, you read that correctly. We moved into the same building. Why you may ask? I asked myself the exact same question. For the kids, of course. It is convenient to have him two flights up for children handover on the weekends. It is convenient to send one of them upstairs when I just can't take it anymore (truth be told, that doesn't happen very often, even though I often can't take it anymore!). But most of all it allows me the opportunity to separate safely and with good feelings intact. I do, resist the urge to call often the way I did when we were still married. I do make the decisions on my own, call the super, fix the problems. And I love it. When you are in a marriage for a while you can forget that you can take care of yourself and that you have in fact been doing it all along. Grateful for that reminder that I am in fact capable. We all need that reminder from time to time.
So where I in my life at the moment? Well, still unemployed. Still writing and working on the makings of a book with my sister-friend minkgirl, if only in my mind! Still planning to go back for my PhD. Working on job applications, my application to interfaith seminary this fall, and doing all of it with as much grace as I can muster. Which lately feels like a lot. Dearly looking forward to the fall when the kids are in school and my time during the day will be filled with work and yoga. This is not a particularly deep post. Those will come in time :)! Think of this more as a hello and a warm hug after time apart. I take you with me tribe. Always.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing.

in peace,
keisha

My Mind on Repeat.....Intimacy

2010-06-02T07:25:00.007-05:00

I recently sent a friend, we'll call them Jazz, an email with almost this exact title. Things resonate with me for a long time. My friend Karen asked how I approach my blog and I told her that I often end up writing about something that has been circling my head for awhile. I walk around with it for a bit, both consciously and unconsciously, turning it over until it bears fruit.

Jazz and I have an email relationship. We write each other and share ideas and thoughts and musings on life along with music recommendations. Those emails are often the better part of my week. And that interaction allowed me to realize - or perhaps re-member something about myself: I express myself best from a distance.

This blog and those emails have given me an extraordinary opportunity. To really go inside and meet myself. I am not often able to have the witty comeback in person and often feel that my real time connections lack depth because they are either brief hellos while picking up children or passings in the aisles of Trader Joe's. And I long for the "C"onversation. Big C. The talks about life and love and loss and all the other things those of us with too much education and a bit of money in the bank are fortunate enough to be able to think about. And I have often felt at odds with this privilege in my life. I am from a culture typically more focused on survival than on reflecting on the quality of that survival. So, being able to think, at length, about my existence has created a kind of cognitive dissonance inside me. Does it make me a better, more evolved person? Or does it make me a self-involved, self-indulged person?

What I do know is that my upbringing, and its focus on survival, has made me the kind of person who has a difficult time telling another person in real time, with any realness, that I love them and need them and find them to be simply extraordinary. I have learned to tell other people about the strengths of my loves - not telling them or showing them how much they mean to me. And my writings have allowed me to write what pains and fears lurk inside me in a way I may not be able to say to another person without that distance. Anna Deavere Smith was asked what she gets from doing interviews with people and then re-telling their story. And she said this:
"My microphone and my ear create the necessary distance to get close to someone."
I get that. So much. While I want to be close to people my fears and expectations stop me from doing that. When I want to tell someone: "I love you and want to hold you and listen to your heartbeat, thank you for being alive," there is a barrier that stops me because they might think I am "in love" with them or that worse yet, that I want to have a "Relationship" with them, when really I just want to hear their heartbeat. Intimacy. Still working on having that in my life in a way that is satisfying and meaningful.

This is what Jazz wrote in an email to me recently that sparked this post:
....In the modern world we have a lot of time and energy to worry about who does and doesn't love us. In a traditional subsistence culture you're pretty busy trying to stay alive, and in the remaining time you're either fornicating or fighting, often for the same reason. I find it interesting that in a lot of African American musics (blues, soul) the response to failed love is more about taking action--getting revenge, movin' on--than moping. I'm sure there are exceptions.

So there is where I stand, straddling the line between my culture and education - working to bring them together and to create a tribe in real time that embraces me and my desires. More stones on my path.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace tribe

Failure

2010-05-28T07:55:00.004-05:00
A word I have never been able to embrace. Sometimes it's necessary to fail to grow, right?

I am getting a divorce. I think we all know about this. And like a magnet I am drawing more people in the middle or post-divorce into my cipher. I may be doing it unconsciously, but I don't believe in coincidence. I need these folks in my tribe. But one of the things I have heard repeatedly from those in the divorce category is the word "failure." Before that I hadn't thought of having failed at my marriage. Now, don't get me wrong I am not one of those people who took marriage lightly. I didn't get married to get divorced if it "didn't work out." I am not that frivolous. But what I was unprepared for was the work - the nature of the work - that goes into making a relationship live and work. But that is a conversation for my therapist.

Failure. I avoid this word at all costs. I often feel inadequate in my daily life. Constantly looking around me and comparing my strengths and faults to those doing the "same" job. Mothering, teaching, being a woman.....always comparing. Feeling stuck and incapable of improving. Wondering why I keep making the same mistakes over and over again. But a failure?! That's pretty harsh. So, what did I do - I went to the dictionary to get the full and true definition of this word:
Main Entry: fail·ure
Pronunciation: \ˈfāl-yər\
Function: noun
Etymology: alteration of earlier failer, from Anglo-French, from Old French faillir to fail
Date: 1643
1 a : omission of occurrence or performance; specifically : a failing to perform a duty or expected action b (1) : a state of inability to perform a normal function — compare heart failure (2) : an abrupt cessation of normal functioning c : a fracturing or giving way under stress
2 a : lack of success b : a failing in business : bankruptcy
3 a : a falling short : deficiency b : deterioration, decay
4 : one that has failed

And I settled on the first definition - a failing to perform a duty or expected action. Expected action. The example is paying your rent. Well, yea I get that. Rent is a finite thing that can be measured and expected empirically. But marriage? What is it that is expected of me in my marriage? Everyone is different. And I began to see that I had to measure myself by my understanding of what I was or was not supposed to bring to my partnership. Yea, I failed at some of it. I am not the easiest person to get along with much less live with. And while I have a great many bad habits that have improved I think when you become unhappy with a person it's far easier to see the bad habits that didn't improve. And the final answer is whether or not I feel I lived up to my commitments or not. Some I did, some I didn't. So, yea I guess I did fail.

And I don't shirk the responsibility for that. And I have a chance to look at those things and make new decisions. And I am trying to incorporate that stigma attached to divorce and "failure." Those are not my stigmas. I failed to meet other people's expectations - and all I can do about that is apologize and vow to do better. But there is a lot of life left for me. And a lot of opportunities to make different choices with the information I have now. So, today, anyway, I embrace my failures in the hopes that they will make me a better person, woman, mother maybe even wife someday - but I doubt it :)!

Do me a favor, kay? Reflect on your failures today. Invite them in and thank them for all they taught you and all the ways they have made you the brilliantly beautiful and resilient person you are today. I am hugging you long distance and thanking you for being part of the very best reflections I have.

we are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace tribe,
Keisha

I can't get there from here.......

2010-04-29T16:46:00.007-05:00
Tears for Fears. I loved them in high school. Even though they were mortal enemies with my other favorite group: Wham!. How to fit bubble-gum pop, with a gorgeously gay lead singer into the same musical world as the brooding, dark and existential duo from Tears for Fears? Well, my music tastes pretty much sums up my entire life and personality - diametrically opposed to each other with more facets than the most perfectly cut diamond. But there has been a song lyric in my head for the last few days that seems to sum up how I feel lately. Reality is finally settling in and making for one very unhappy woman.

"Between the searching and the need to work it out, I stopped believing everything would be alright. Broken, we are broken." Tears for Fears.

They do write a catchy and melancholy little ditty don't they? I am in that in-between place where I have to make changes in my life. But most of the changes I need to make are dependent upon other people and a bad economy and a questionable use of my many skills. I need a job that pays more than my fun teaching gig. I need to decide where to move my family - do we stay in our very expensive town or do we take our show to Broadway? Do I give away everything I own or keep it or try to sell it? And where is my personal assistant to do all of that thinking for me? And that's how I feel. I feel broken. I feel as though there are pieces of me scattered all over the place and I can see them but I can't pick them up much less fit them back together again. And I am standing right there - on the edge of that cliff wanting to jump off and say - you know what life is just one big bowl of suck. It doesn't get better - and there are no happy endings. It's just day after day of the same shit.....but you know me better than that - and I know me better than that.

So, even in the middle of this dark time I am able to see down the road. There is a little town a ways away, with sun and trees and rolling hills. But between me and it is a valley filled with rocks and spiders and dark clouds. I can see the lovely town, I know it's there and it's real. But I can't get there from here without going through the valley. And it sucks knowing that. It sucks knowing that you can't skip over the bad stuff.

I want to catch a plane or flag down a passing motorist on this road. I want a break. But nobody can do this work for me and it's no longer just me - so drowning my sorrows in booze and smokes isn't going to work either. Ahhh, my twenties! Children make you grow up in a way you don't always want to. And disaster makes you want to crawl back to a time when you were being taken care of and housed and fed - but you still snuck out on Saturday nights to do what you want. There's no sneaking out. There's no taking off. It's a 24 hour gig this mommy thing. And honestly, it sucks. But that's the part of growing up that they don't tell you about - the sacrifice and the pain and the swirling vortex of suck!

And I never want to be the person who writes wah-wah posts. But this is one of them. And I feel like I am due. It'll be okay. I can see the town. I know it's there. And I have no idea how long it is going to take me to get there. But I will get there. And I will have this post to remind me of how far I came to get there. But in the meantime, tribe, know that this thing I am in - sucks - a lot!

we are blessed - today I am missing the blessing - but it will be back soon....

Does Discipline Equal Love - bell hooks response #1

2010-04-27T18:41:00.007-05:00

News Flash: I am black. Which means, usually, that I was raised in a black family. It just so happens that I was raised in a typical black family of the 70's. First generation northerner. My grandmother was born in the south and lived through share cropping and jim crow and then moved north to get married and have her children. But the south came with them when they migrated north as did the ancient adage and practice of children being seen but not heard. But it was more than that.

I was an inquisitive child. Always asking questions, the way children do. But that was frowned upon in my family. I was constantly being quieted and told I talk too much. I was discouraged from asking questions and seen as a nuisance if I persisted. To this day my relatives still refer to me as "the child who didn't know when to keep her mouth shut." WTF? My family showed they cared in the way I am sure they had to in the south - they verbally abused us. We were told to "stay in our place" and to "not question our elders." And I am sure that this type of training was of particular use to young black men in the south who could be found swinging from the nearest magnolia if they didn't avert their eyes in the presence of a white woman. But that wasn't the reality I was living in in the north - I mean I was a freed negro. But the elders of the family held sway and controlled how things were done and so that same type of discipline - down to picking my own switch - continued through my childhood.

Being seen and not heard, however, backfired. I was privy to all kinds of "adult" conversations. I heard things I didn't quite understand and things I understood all too well. With my mouth shut my eyes and ears were open and I, more often than not, copied the behavior rather than the words. But a few things happened to me recently that made me think about my use of language and the way I "discipline" my children.

Up until recently - the last 10 years or so- I had incredibly violent language. And I didn't realize it was violent until I stopped to listen to what I was really saying. I had incorporated my upbringing into my daily living and it was an uncomfortable realization. But the other day I saw a young black mother with her two children crossing the street. She was pulling the youngest to get across before the light changed, even though I am pretty sure the cars were not going to run her over. And I saw her getting more and more frustrated with her youngest child who had at this point begun to cry. And the mother turned on her child and screamed (and I am not kidding here, she screamed) into that little face: "SHUT UP BEFORE I GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT!" And there is was - my 100th angel arriving in my presence. I have heard that sentence said to me more often than I care to remember. As if being publicly humiliated and dragged across a street WASN'T something to cry about. It made me cry. And I cried for the little spirit that was crushed that day in the street. And I cried for the little me who had also gotten her spirit stamped on at an early age. And then they came: the hot angry tears of remorse when I realized that I had at some point in my life said the same thing to my children. OUCH! I am not proud of admitting this but it is true. I have told my children to shut up and I have told them I would give them something to cry about and I use threats to get results. And I am searching for a better way to raise my kids. And I realize that in times of frustration and fear we revert to our training and mine was verbally abusive.

bell hooks talked about this in her interview with my friend Nathalie. She said that in the black community we discourage inquisition by children. And when we do that we silence them and instill in them the belief that asking questions is wrong. That to question is wrong. We, as a people, cannot afford to be silent and not ask questions. Of our educators, our politicians, our government, our service providers, our food suppliers. And this type of silencing keeps us, as a people, enslaved. There is a lot of "old school" folks out there who think that talking with your kids and asking them questions is weak. That we are elevating our children to the level of "adult." That they don't know their place. Well, aren't these all the same things said about black people back in the day? We were seen as children who needed to be reminded of our place. And we cannot afford to pass that misconception on to our children. They must question - everything - including us. As uncomfortable as it may be.

So, does discipline equal love? I think it depends on what you mean by discipline. Here is the Merriam-Webster definition of discipline:
1 : punishment
2 obsolete : instruction
3 : a field of study
4 : training that corrects, molds, or perfects the mental faculties or moral character
5 a : control gained by enforcing obedience or order b : orderly or prescribed conduct or pattern of behavior c : self-control
6 : a rule or system of rules governing conduct or activity

And I love, ironically, how the first definition is punishment. But then it is instruction and training that corrects or molds. And that is a huge responsibility - molding a young character. What kind of people do we want to create? People who are afraid to question authority and who feel disenfranchised? Or strong, compassionate, inquisitive people? I am going with the latter. And I am working every day on disciplining myself first - loving myself first so I have something of worth to give my children.

we are blessed may we recognize the blessing

photo: Leonard John Matthews

next installment in the bell hooks response: the black woman's body - stay tuned

No Shame in My Game

2010-04-14T12:16:00.004-05:00

My house has been infected with lice. I hate bugs. All kinds of bugs, but especially ones that live on your body and bite you and suck your blood - parasites. I don't like them with 6 legs or with 2. I think there is a huge learning curve when dealing with lice. If you haven't been through it before you don't realize how insidious they are and that they can withstand all kinds of apocalyptic pesticides - much like Keith Richards. So usually someone more familiar with what lice looks like points them out to you. And then you do whatever google tells you to do to get rid of them. But what if they come back? Or they spread? Then you realize that you didn't attack it with everything in your arsenal. That you might have been lazy and need to be more diligent in both recognizing and eradicating the parasite.

The lice was more than an apt metaphor (and in fact we have been infected with lice) it clues me into something I recently needed to realize about my present state of affairs. I hold on to things that are not useful or good for me and don't use everything in my arsenal to eradicate it. And there has been shame in my game because of it. I live in the suburbs. I like it here. You can't really walk anywhere of any substance but the schools are good and there are parks and fun mommy groups. And if you go to the right places you can run into all kinds of people on a daily basis. But it's a rather plastic place to live for the most part. The conversation at the playground tends to revolve around the superficial and there are cliques of parents on those playgrounds much like I am sure there are at recess. I don't talk to a lot of people. I usually hang out in my car until the last possible moment and then I go and pick up my son. It saves me uncomfortable silences and pebble kicking. I find that I can't do it any longer. I can't do the suburban thing. My house is trying to kill me and I am a slave to my car even opening a checking account at a particular bank because they have a drive-through ATM.

I miss connecting with people. In real time. Talking with them and figuring things out and really engaging in large questions. I am a snooty intellectual. There I said it. And I claim that moniker today. My name is Keisha and I am a snooty intellectual. I love my kids but I don't want my every waking moment to surround their comings and goings. I am grateful for a house but I don't want to spend every second cleaning it. And I am so happy to be healthy and here but I don't want to constantly lament the state of my body. I want to be free. Free from convention and expectation placed on me by - me. I have to eradicate the shame. Of not taking perfect care of my kids. Of not always washing the dishes (more often than not) of not exercising regularly. Of being me. There is a lot to love about myself but I have spent so much time trying to fix me that I haven't owned the true things. So, in this next evolution I will work on that. Work on releasing the shame because it is not mine to carry.

in peace

photo: horizontalintegration

Between here and eternity

2010-04-11T19:28:00.006-05:00

Why do I make lists instead of getting up and doing things? I can think myself into inaction like no one else I know. I went by a good friend's blog today just to see if she had posted anything in the last year - and wonders - she had. And it reminded me of the conversation we have been having all of our adult lives. How do we make our way in the world? What do we do when our ambition and passion meet our children and commitments? How do we get it all done when there are only 24 hours in every day and we can no longer function with less than 7 hours sleep? I spend a great deal of my time running on fumes. And it does not produce my best work - but something gets done. And I have resigned myself to the fact that I cannot have everything I want when I want it. But I still want it.

I am not a feminist. And I don't know if there is a word for what I am. I.AM.SO.DISAPPOINTED.IN.FEMINISM. And I am disappointed in the women who continue to tout it's purpose and strength without acknowledging that it is built by women of privilege. Privilege of opportunity, possibly money but definitely skin color. I am not a feminist. If feels as though there was never a place for me in their number. And so I went, like all conscious-college-educated-black-women to Alice Walker. Womanist. That's what I am. It's the 90's and I am feeling my political and sexual power. I am a womanist. I identify with the woman of me while simultaneously acknowledging that my gender is socially constructed; and that the personal is political. I coalesce with white women but don't get too close because they can't really understand what I am going through. But then I grow up and have kids. And I am not angry with every man in my cypher so I choose to be married and build a family. And I am not disgusted with my biology rather marvel at what my body has the fortitude and ancient knowledge to do - completely unassisted. So what am I now?
I engage in the "mommy wars" and breastfeed my babies in public and I boycott every chain store and company that makes life harder for us mothers, even going as far as not buying ANYTHING made in China. That sucked.

Now I am here. Almost 40. In the process of a divorce. Unemployed and raising three children. What am I now? Well, according to the census, because I am the head of the household, black and female and a mother - I am a statistic.

In the black community it is considered the ultimate insult to call somebody out of their name. And lately I have been thinking about what it is I want to be called. Who am I? I know, that sounds like the beginning of some really bad beat poem from the 60's. But I am not going anywhere to find myself. I am just reflecting on the fact that I am quite possibly all of those things. And none of them at the same time. And I am trying to figure out how to be in the world. How to present myself in the world. I am writing lists and journal entries all in an effort to figure out who to present on a daily basis. And wondering what would happen if I just got up and let the day happen. If I did some things that made me happy, and some things that need to get done and a few things I hate doing but are my responsibility. Then go to bed and get up and do it all over again. When I was little I always thought I was destined for greatness. And as I aged and made my choices and greatness did not appear, I began to get disappointed in myself. Not able to see the brilliance in the choices I had made and the people I had helped. Not valuing the little things. Always searching, always making lists. There is greatness in every step we take. And we can have it all - and when we look back at our lives just before our exit we will see each of those moments. Why wait for that day?

My sista-friend Minkgirl had this to say:
I am saying a prayer for myself and for all the other super-charged women I know that we can balance not just work and family, but joy and despair. There is much that is overwhelming, distracting, disturbing, and downright depressing about the lives we are living. And there is much that is joyful, beautiful, sweet, hopeful, and hysterically funny.

Amen.

Pimping the Jewish Hood

2010-04-01T09:11:00.005-05:00

I got this email yesterday from a friend:
"Dearest Keisha, I loved your latest blog post and I know how you feel. Much the same way when I see myself in my mid-thirties unable to find a Jewish husband. I look at non-Jewish women married to Jewish men and it makes me shake all over. I think about how my ancestry is being erased in a single moment..."

Oh my. Did I mention my husband is Jewish? She was kind enough not to call me out specifically as someone responsible for erasing her ancestry. But I felt that sting too. I am reminded of that quote from Bulworth (yea, I watched it): "All we need is a voluntary, free-spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction. Everybody just gotta keep ****in' everybody 'til they're all the same color."

I don't think I like that idea. This is an uncomfortable thing to admit but I think about my kids and who their partners will be. And it would bother me if my sons chose a woman who did not resemble me. It would bother me if my grandchildren looked less and less like me until there was no distinction in race. And I know that that is the ideal for some people. But not for me. Our differences need to be seen and acknowledged before they can go away. And turning everyone into beige would not solve that problem.

But back to my friend. I get her point completely. Judaism is carried through the mother. And when you turn away from a Jewish woman you turn away from having Jewish children and a Jewish home. That hurts her. And even more it hurts, in her opinion, the continuation of her people. She ended her email with this line: "I just wish they would stop pimping the Jews." Woah, I suddenly felt like J-Lo when she finished dating P-Diddy or Puffy or whatever the hell his name was at the time. She got accused of Pimping the Black Hood to advance her career.

I wrote her back: "I got you. And I thank you for not calling me out in particular, although your email relates to me directly. And I acknowledge your pain and I get feeling erased." That's all I could say. Much the same way no one can say anything to me to make things better, just air it out and acknowledge it's there. The work is just beginning tribe, get your boots on!

photo: naranjalady

My Colored Contradictions

2010-03-30T17:23:00.008-05:00

I said I wasn't going to respond to J ill Scott's op-ed in Essence magazine this week. I said it and I meant it. But then I did what I try so hard not to do, I got caught up in it and allowed my empathic self to get immersed in my feelings of hurt, anger and betrayal from my own past. Now I have no intentions of this blog being one big confessional but what I have learned from the comments here and on Facebook, and the private emails, is that I often dare to say some of the things we all think and feel but don't write about. And that is a confession I am willing to make publicly. For the truly intense and personal things I can always go around the corner to the Catholic church if I feel the need to have my soul cleansed, nine years in Catholic school I know how to do it - "Bless me father, for I have sinned, it's been five minutes since my last confession."

Let me start this post with a story. I was standing outside one beautiful Spring afternoon with three phenomenal women. Smart, beautiful, progressive and all white. One of them showed a picture of her boyfriend, prefacing the display of his visage by saying, "He's 45 but could pass for 30 ALL DAY," I was eager to see this man. And then I saw the picture - he was black. I winced. I did. Me standing there, married, at that time for 7 years to a white man. I winced. I felt that the wince was an internal one - one not visible to the eyes outside the "race," but she immediately turned to me and said, "Do you hate me?" This caught me off guard. Her honesty, her awareness that this relationship might actually affect me, me who had NO chance of dating that man. And I turned to her and said, "I smarted for a second, but no I don't hate you. Love who you will." And I meant that. And I would love for my wince to have come immediately from a history lesson of black women as mammies and work-horses and single black women blamed for emasculating our men when in actuality it was the white power structure that cut their balls off and pimped out our uterus while killing our seed. I have that - firmly in my DNA. But I winced because I had a more personal response. I thought of the all the black men in my personal history who I loved who did not love me back. I thought of all the black men who stepped over me: an able, beautiful and brilliant woman, to get to the blonde on my left. That was the pain behind that wince. And that was not a pain I wanted to hold onto, nor a pain I wanted to have hold me back.
And I admit - it seems ridiculous for me, a black woman who has been in interracial relationships, married outside my ethnicity and have multiracial children, to wince. But I did. I don't anymore. I feel the pain, often of not belonging fully in any community because of my relationship choices, but I don't wince.

I think of how my best friend, years ago, had a bit of trepidation in her voice when telling me that she was dating a black man. I felt, then, that I had the right to be righteously indignant about her choice. She was far more sensitive than another white friend who told me that the black man she was dating was about as "black as I was." I knew that wasn't going to last - her relationship or our friendship and neither did. But my BFF knows me, she knows my soul and she knew how I felt even though it wasn't a fight she ever had with me, because I think she also knew it was not a fight worth having. Does it still sting when I see a black man with a white woman in particular, yea it does. And not because I think they don't have the right to be together - of course they do. In this world take love where you can find it. It just brings back to the front of my eyes my personal pain and my love/hate affair with the black men from my past. And it is one of my 100 angels showing up to tell me to get my own affairs in order. To clean up my own house first. Is this topic so much bigger than I could ever fully address here? Of course it is but I felt I would not be honest if I didn't tell you these stories. They are the makings of me. A beautiful, brilliant and flawed sister of the yam - working on my self recovery.

in peace,
keisha

Over the Hills and Far Away.......

2010-03-21T20:15:00.009-05:00

This is where I am when I am staring off into space. It happens less now then when I was a girl. But I believe in daydreaming. I think it's healthy and gives our ideas wings. But this is also the title of my favorite Led Zeppelin song (#7 on the playlist). And I have been thinking about it a lot lately. Playing it over and over again and being transported to a different time in my life - high school. Ahhh, high school. The most awkward and emotionally painful time of my life. And I have learned, of most people's lives. That is the time when we develop our sense of personal currency. What are we worth in the world? And what must we do/use to get what we want in the world?

I went to boarding school for high school. And I think adding "predominantly white" in front of boarding school is redundant for the 80's and probably for now as well. And I know I have written how going there saved my life in so many ways. But that revelation came with time. What I most starkly remember about high school is feeling invisible. I wasn't used to this because I had come from a place where I was quite visible and felt capable. And then I went somewhere where I felt I was not seen - as either a person or a girl. It was a weird, kind of out of body experience. Leaving high school and going to college was a huge shock because once there, even though I was in Appleton, Wisconsin I was immediately visible and quite aware that I had somehow, despite my best efforts, transformed from a girl into a woman. A transition I am not sure I was ready for.

The other day I was visiting with a Mama-friend and we were talking about the girls of today. She joked that her idea of risque was wearing a white shirt so her bra strap would show through the shirt! And that she learned this particular move in college. I had to laugh. I totally understood what she was talking about. I learned my best moves in college and some of them I am just now perfecting! And I am raising a young woman. She has a fearless fashion sense. The original inquiring mind and she is bold and adventurous and poetic and beautiful. She has also disengaged from her body - at the age of nine. I know the look, I did the same thing. But there are marked differences between me and my daughter and I am highly conscious of not projecting my childhood issues onto her. Of speaking with her and asking questions and encouraging open dialogue. But just like me when I was her age she has decided that below her neck does not serve her purposes in the world. She has decided that her currency is her mind and her voice (she sings - like I did).

A move I did learn before adulthood is that parents lead by example. I remember far more about my parents' deeds than anything they ever said to me. And I have been working on reclaiming my body not just for myself but for my daughter. I don't trust my body. I don't trust she is going to be there for me when I need her. And I don't fully believe that she can, at this point in her existence and with all she's been through, bounce back. But what I believe really doesn't matter. There is evidence to the contrary. And what I say really doesn't matter. It's all about what I do. So, all of the work I do getting myself together, loving and trusting myself is about so much more than how it makes me feel. And since I chose not to die but to live for my kids, better to make it some really great living! Little eyes are watching....

Existential Crisis

2010-03-19T09:01:00.005-05:00

Don't worry that is just a fancy word for the fact that being a human sucks sometimes, especially when we realize that being a human sucks sometimes. I have to say that I am so much better at processing difficulties in my life. And sometimes I just need to stop speaking and go underground to really work through some issues and pains that are surfacing - and I will be coming back to this point again later when I start my response to bell hook's interview with my friend Nathalie. bell spoke about how she wanted to be silent six days ago when her mother died. And people were pissed off about that. People didn't like the fact that they did not have immediate access to her. And then she said: I am sure people don't expect to get in touch with Cornell West immediately. Amen, bell. I bet they don't.

March is a difficult month for me. It always has been. And sometimes I can catch myself ahead of time and get prepared for it and this year I tried to do that but it didn't work completely. I was unkind and abrupt with those in my cipher and with established relationships you can do that occasionally, but with seedling relationships, you may have to deal with the fall-out of not being trusted again. Or having to earn back your trust. Okay. I take that.

The beginning of March is all about death and loss for me. My father died 19 years ago, March 3rd. My friend Leah's birthday, who died from leukemia, is March 15th and the anniversary of the death of a dear friend is also March 15th (yea, I know - The Ides of March. F-ing Romans!). And also at the beginning of March I received news that my Hierophant was ending treatment for his pancreatic cancer. All around me was loss - of people, of relationships, of intimacy, of feeling loved in the world. And I am one of those people who values her virtual tribe but really needs live people close to her. And I was missing my far-flung friends and the intimacy you can only get from actually seeing someone's eyes when you speak to them. Life sucked last week. And the thought of it now still makes me cry.

And my spirit needed to make it's annual trek to the underworld to excavate those feelings and to harrow my personal hell. I find it highly un-coincidental that I go through this purging during Lent - right before Passover and Easter. My own personal desert (Merriam's secondary and tertiary definitions of desert: 2 archaic : a wild uninhabited and uncultivated tract 3 : a desolate or forbidding area ).
And I am considering putting this time on my calender, not so it can be avoided but so I can better prepare for it next year. I think I need this time to renew myself and get ready for Spring.

What was the hardest part of this time was when I looked at myself and actually felt guilty for being alive. I felt guilty for surviving cancer. I wasn't supposed to survive. I had lost so much to cancer and I didn't understand why me? Because I have 3 children? Because I am young? Because there are still things I haven't done with my life? All of these things are true of those I've lost and so many more. It doesn't make sense. And it's not supposed to. These are the moments when I long for and desire to cling to a religious ideology because then I don't have to figure this out for myself - it is prescribed for me. But luckily this time is short-lived. Usually a week or so. And then I come out on the other side with relationship tending to do. Lesson learned. Next year the first two weeks of March will be spirit-tending time. And time to be more gentle with myself and those around me. I don't think, however, that I want to give up this time. I don't want to avoid experiencing this pain. It makes me more alive on the other side of it. It also feels like what butterflies do before they emerge from their cocoon. They slough off the old and emerge beautiful and ready to take flight. And over time the pain will erode until there is just me.

I accept my existential crisis and am grateful to have figured out that it is real. Grateful to be here to feel the pain.

in peace and past the sky
keisha

photo: MG Bolts

The Tree of Life

2010-03-17T08:56:00.003-05:00

The "sefirot" are the energy points that make up the soul and fill our being. They are called the Tree of Life and are depicted as an upside down tree with its roots planted in heaven.....symboliz[ing] the energy rooted in the Creator, whose thoughts and feelings are expressions of our mind & heart and create... the story of our life.

Those of you who are close to me know that I think I am Jewish. The rabbi I used to study with, Rabbi Cohen, told me he thought I had a Jewish soul. Flattered. That has to be legitimate coming from a rabbi, right? I must really have a Jewish soul. A need to belong, to have a well-defined tribe, brought me to Judaism. That and my belief when I was a child, that despite being baptized Baptist and going to Catholic School, that I most identified with the Hasidim of Boro Park. But the interesting thing - I didn't identify with the women walking steps behind their men pushing baby strollers and sporting ripe bellies. I identified with the men walking and arguing and swaying back and forth in prayer. I identified with the scholar. And then Yentl came out - why Barbra why? I was hooked. Planning to cut my hair and grow a beard and go to yeshiva. One thing - I am not Jewish. And despite my best efforts I could not convert. There was too much I had to accept to belong. World views and beliefs I had taken the time to craft. I was not giving that up. And I would not make irreperable decisions for my children. Their journey to Grace needs to be their own. And I couldn't go there. But, if I may be so bold, I still think I have a Jewish soul and a Buddhist soul (do Buddhist's have souls?)and a Christian, Rastafari, Hindu soul. What does that mean to me?

I am proud of the work I have done in life to create an ontology that includes things greater than me where respect for others is a given and not a suggestion. Where the weak are put first until such a thing no longer exists. And where the only thing that serves as currency is love. Naive. Working on getting more people to jump on that bandwagon. But what does really resonate with me is the image of the tree. The tree of life. I have a friend creating a tattoo for me. A piece of art I have envisioned in my mind since I was very little. A tree that grows into a woman. Have you ever read "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein? I hate that book. There is a beautiful tree who speaks in what I can only assume is a mother's voice (I don't recall if Silverstein was bold enough to use the feminine pronoun for the tree), and sacrifices herself for the boy who grew up in her shade. She gives him her apples to sell to make money, she gives him her leaves to sit beneath for shade, she has him cut her limbs down to make a boat, and when there is nothing left but a stump she tells him to sit on her and rest until he dies. WTF? I hate that book. What did the boy ever do for the tree? She should have taught him to stand on his own two feet and get a damn job. But no, in true sacrificing mother mode she gives the boy everything she has, without so much as a phone call or a card. Not this Mama.

My tattoo - it is of a tree who turns into a beautiful woman with her hands/limbs stretched up. There are representations of my children throughout the tree. The "fruit" as it were, but not attached to the tree rather resting on or near the tree with a definite independent spirit and life of their own. This Mama knows how to circle her children keeping them close but giving them enough space to grow and become their own person.

"Whose thoughts and feelings are expressions of our mind & heart," the Creator, Prime Mover, G-d, Bob Marley, whatever you chose to call the architect. We are expressions of that greatness, that power that breathed the world into being. We are individual pictures released into the world. As we each are expressions of the ones who created us. And the Creator does not sacrifice itself for our existence and neither should we for another. The Ashanti say that if we stand tall it is because we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors - on their shoulders, not on their dust after we have trampled them into the ground. All of that is to say - do not sacrifice who you are - your light, your fire for anyone or anything. The world is a better place because you dare to be who you are. Ashe.

So Unsexy

2010-03-16T20:28:00.006-05:00

I can feel so unsexy for someone so beautiful
So unloved for someone so fine
I can feel so boring for someone so interesting
So ignorant for someone of sound mind

On my next birthday I will be 39. There I said it. And last week I looked at a picture of me from college. Why did I do that? There was a time in my life when I was not just cute but hot. Seriously. I have witnesses. And this is not about growing old it's about growing OLD. You are as old as you feel. And lately I feel ancient. I have the total Mom thing going on right down to the jeans that are too big for me, well that's kind of a good thing. Where did my groove go?

When I had my daughter I stopped wearing heels. When I had my first son I stopped wearing skirts and when I had my last son I stopped wearing make-up. It was all too much work. I used to be the girl who could get asked to a formal at 4pm and have something to wear and be ready by 5pm. Well now - I need a good week to prepare for any kind of outing. And that was a wake-up call for me. Mom is not synonymous with dowdy. And it really isn't too much work.

Transforming into a mother was a huge step for me. I felt that I was "supposed" to show up a certain way. That I really had to give everything I had and some stuff I had to borrow to my kids - all the time. And that was probably true during labor but after that - they are independent from me. And there are other people who can and will love and care for them as well as I do. I don't need to be onstage all the time. And it is okay to take care of myself. In fact, it's mandatory.

There are au pairs and nannies in our town. Lots of them. I live in that kind of town. And they are all young and nubile and foreign with tight asses. I hate them, each and every one of them. But what I dislike more is my reflection in them. I am never going to be 20 again (20 was a particularly good year!). But when I think of all that I have gained in life since 20, I don't want to go back. I would not trade what I know now about life for what I had back then and didn't know. And this post is about self-esteem. Get it, hold onto it and use it. It's hard for us, Mamas. We feel tired and overworked and overwhelmed. And last week was a particularly difficult week for my psyche. But what I did to get out of that was shop. I went to the MAC counter - which used to be my favorite place. I bought new make-up and I sat there and listened to a young beautiful girl tell me how she wished she had my skin while she applied very little foundation to my face! But it wasn't her compliments that brought back my swagger it was my reflection in the mirror after putting on the lipstick. My lips have always been my best feature. Lipstick applied and my face lit up. My eyes seem to unsink from my head and a smile came to those rouged bows.

So, I am putting the sexy back in my life. And that means putting me first. And taking care of me and doing my best to be fabulous, for myself, most of the time. I know those of you who feel the same way. It is easy to get stuck. So, spring is here. Get unstuck. You can do it. Meet me at the MAC counter if you doubt it!

photo:Alice Marie

It's Not About....

2010-03-13T17:13:00.014-05:00

I went to the doctor, I went to the mountains
I looked to the children, I drank from the fountain
There's more than one answer to these questions
pointing me in crooked line
The less I seek my source for some definitive
The closer I am to fine.

Song lyrics - the poetry of my life. I can quote so many different songs and I am sure there is a line for every occasion. This one from the Indigo Girls has been swirling around my head for a couple of days now. I do not consider myself to be a scientist or a logician, if anything I am more of a chaos-lover. At least in my immediate surroundings. But when my life gets overwhelming and almost out of control I turn into someone who looks for definition. Someone who looks for order. And I will bend my will to create it.

My friend K strikes again. I know you are reading this Kar and I love you for hearing my cries into the ether. She sent my horoscope again last week. It was a sucky week for me. And in an effort "to smooth my heart down, long enough for the world to come around," I turned my brain inside out. This is what my horoscope said:

Leo July 21–August 22
You will be thinking of new endeavors, challenges, and how to best use resources. Notice intuition and perception are very strong at this time. If you tune in quietly within you’ll know who is thinking of and loving you. Concern about resources continues. However, in the long run this concern will evaporate. Did you expect something that didn’t occur? Is there disappointment?

Now I am not sure if reading this made me create new endeavors and challenges or if they were already in the works. But I am grateful for the opportunity. Do you spin a story in your head? Do you turn situations over and over again trying to figure out if what just happened really happened? And do you blame yourself when things don't go the way you want? I used to do these things - all the time. This past week I got a reminder of something - It's not about me! What an incredibly freeing thing to be reminded of. It's not about me? Really, I am NOT the center of the universe? Ahhhhh. It set me free. It's not about me. When I have challenges with other people their choices are not about me. The only thing I control is how I respond to it. The only thing I can control is how long I hold on to the moment.

This post is a less sexy follow-up to the Open Heart post. It is the day to day of opening your heart. It is the day to day of living in the world with other people. Most of my friends who read this blog are women. And I know we tend to be more emotional (although that category is by no means ours alone!). And we tend to discuss and turn over situations until we understand them. So if that is you and you want a little help moving through that today - here is more genius that my friend Kar sent me. As always I love you.

in peace
keisha

photo:Cinnamon Girl (I am thinking about changing my name to this - Love it!)

An Open Heart

2010-03-11T08:51:00.005-05:00

That's supposed to be a good thing, right? Having an open heart. Letting people in and embracing life. I don't do it very often, because it is hard for me. I mean really in, where I allow myself to have feelings for them and not just allow them to have feelings for me. I am always focused on the ending. When that thing or person goes - what is left with me? Usually pain and sadness. I don't like those things. But I mean, who does? This is a recurring theme in my posts. How to strike that balance between being open to receive and protecting your heart. I don't know if there is one. I think you have to be fearless in love. And at the same time one of the things I do really well is give to other people - but I have kept a small protective bubble around myself, so people can get only so close and then I shut down. And all my bad habits come out. I unconsciously start pushing that person away. Some people can take it for a few minutes and some people can take it for years.

But that was my quest a.c. (after cancer) to be better at opening my heart because in true cliche form life is short and shouldn't we have as much love as possible in our life? My BFF (yes, I am really a 12 year-old girl!) and I have been talking about being an empath - someone who opens themselves up to the energies of other people and beings. I am a human empath. Always have been. I can tell when people are in pain and I take in that pain so hopefully it is easier for them to carry. I knew the moment my paternal grandmother died, even though my father didn't find out for another 2 days. And when I consciously take in others' pain, like in the case of my friend Mary, then I can have a safe place to put it. But when it happens by accident - wow, the results can be disruptive to say the least. In an effort to keep that pain at bay I don't watch the news anymore. I don't watch celebrity culture anymore. And I don't see movies like "Precious" and "Hurt Locker." I know what evil lurks in human hearts and I don't need to consciously remind myself of that. And I don't need to walk around with that in my system. But when it happens with a human in the world, it is harder.

Boundaries have always been difficult for me to create, that is definitely the result of being a child of an addict. There aren't clear boundaries in that life. So learning how to set "healthy" boundaries when you have amassed so many bad habits in that respect, is work. Uncomfortable work. Your resolve weakens, because wouldn't it just be easier to do what you have always done? Of course it would. But then how do you evolve? And isn't evolve/evolution my favorite word?

So, I am doing the difficult work of creating a boundary now. And sticking with that decision. Keeping in mind that this ache is temporary. And it will pass. I have a ring that reminds me that this is true - "This Too Shall Pass." And I will come out on the other side of this a stronger, taller woman. I would like to share part of an email with one of my other Mamas -

Me: "How long does it suck?"
Carol: "Oh, it sucks for a long time, but the triggers become fewer. Listen to Pema Chodren, that's the best idea. Love you and know you will be OK. I know my girl, she's a rocker. Ma"

We are all rockers. We can do this thing called life. Not always with grace and no bruises. But we must know we will be OK. I will. And I love you and open my heart to you today.

in peace

photo: Baily Hollen

The Food of Love

2010-03-03T09:42:00.003-05:00

Nothing tells the story of my mood better. The last couple of days Hedwig & The Angry Inch's Midnight Radio and Origin of Love have been in heavy rotation up in the cut. Beautiful music - but that's my watch it girl, you're standing close to the end of the cliff - music. That and Sade - and she's been in heavy rotation too. Why? Not particularly depressing music. Sade sings about love, quite well actually. And Midnight Radio is about loving who you are even if you are a "misfit or a loser, you know you're spinning to your rock and roll - lift up your hands!"
I think it's because of the first time I heard these songs - the place I was then.

I have always been a very feeling person. As a Leo and a theatre person, I am prone to the dramatic. In my recent years I have worked on keeping the drama on the stage and out of my life, but it creeps in in little ways. Ways that if I am not careful I will miss. It creeps in through my music. It says - hey, I'm not feeling too great today so I am going to let Hedwig do my talking for me. Music has been the way I've communicated with myself and the outside world for quite some time. And I don't see that changing much.

Lately I have begun expanding my music. Listening to singers that I love sing songs I haven't heard them sing before. Lovely. And I think about how I am feeling emotionally now as I bring these new songs into my life. What memories will be ingrained on these songs 10 years from now? Happy, scared, fascinated, hopeful? Probably a bit of each. Much like smell, music can take me anywhere I want to go. And right now I want to be some place warm and sunny where I am young and vibrant and anything is possible; and the future is a distant memory. Where love ruled my life and all that I surveyed. And if I go to that music I know I will be in that place.

we are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace
keisha

photo:vuejadays

Let Your Freak Flag Fly

2010-02-11T11:22:00.006-05:00

Do you think we are programmed to be the way we are or is it training, exposure and DNA -and by that I mean habitually watching our parents perfect a move? "Two roads diverged in a wood and I took the one less traveled by and that has made all the difference."

Facebook strikes again. Lately I have had the extreme joy of reconnecting with people from elementary school. Seriously, I mean people I met when I was five years-old! People I spent nine years of my life with. And there is so much from that time that I had forgotten and so love being reminded of. My past flashes across my eyes like the last moments before death - bits and pieces, smiles and tears. All in the hopes of remembering a life. Who would I be right now if I had stayed in New York at the age of fourteen? I left home and went to boarding school. It felt like the right thing to do at the time - it saved my life in so many ways. And yet, it turned me into a person who is really different from her extended family and from the people she knew when she was a girl.

Some of the questions I ask myself: would I still go to church? Would I still believe in a personal G-d? Would I have a different job or career? And is it even worth it to ponder these things? It feels like it's worth it in that it reminds me of the person I was and what I valued when I was young. I think I was always an unabashed progressive, never happy to fall neatly into a box but willing to stand in one while my vote was being counted. My friends are all over the globe and just down the street from me. And I have no one person, save for my sister, who can recall the best memories from my entire life instead of in 4 year increments. And all that is to say that I am rare and diverse. I can fit into so many places and have so many experiences to recall. Does that make me any less authentic? Is there some me that needs to show up everywhere and is always constant in her behavior and speech?

There was a white girl in college who told me that she was more black than me. Pissed me off. Because I realized that she equated being "black" with a kind of speech and walk and dress and music and food. I equated being black with being my mother's child, with having a very conscious understanding of racism and recognizing when I was being followed around a store. I equated it with trips to the south and family lore and being reminded that in my mother's lifetime my relatives could not share a bathroom with white people. With men who looked like my father and my sons swinging from trees and with the amazing hope of surviving the brutality of the Atlantic Ocean to stand on the shores of the diaspora and sing that note called blue, called jazz, called salsa, called reggae.

John Mayer recently (in what I am sure was a drug-induced spill of the tongue) told Playboy magazine that he had a "hood pass." That he was able to say words like "nigga" (I don't even say that word) but that his penis was a white supremacist. He didn't open himself up to being interesting to black women. What?! I don't really care who he has sex with - that is his choice but a hood pass? His penis is a white supremacist? Not funny. And it made me start thinking seriously about the issues of identity, culture and stereotype.

One of the reasons I stood up and cheered and talked back to the television during Obama's 2004 speech at the Democratic National Convention was because of this sentence: "children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." Amen. As my grandmother would say, "I was called everything except a child of G-d!" when I was growing up. "Not black enough," "Oreo," "White girl," and even the dreaded "N" word. But it was all in an effort to define my identity. To put me in a box that I don't think I ever lived in. I think I came to this planet hard-wired to be the girl that I am. The diverse, crazy, compassionate woman that I am.

Identity is so hard. But as I see 40 coming around the corner I am getting more and more comfortable with the many sides of me. And I am loving them and giving them each an equal voice in my head instead of constantly warring with them. It feels good. And it reminds me to keep my game tight for the next evolution. So all the parts of this girl - the professor, the mama, the motorcycle rider, the good coffee and wine-drinking, tattoo brandishing, minivan driving, soul food munching, grits cooking, trash-talkin, sista is letting her freak flag fly. And if you send yours up the flagpole I promise to salute.

we are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace,
keisha

credit to whom credit is due: Thank you Robert Frost for The Road Not Taken and the allusion to the "note called blue," from Elizabeth Alexander's Poem Absence.
Ashe.

Today is the first day......And today....And today...

2010-01-28T08:20:00.006-05:00

I beg you, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, 1903; in Letters to a Young Poet

My friend K sent me something lovely yesterday, my horoscope. It said:
Leo July 21–August 22
You become more and more aware that you’re working with powerful forces this week. They’re not only cosmic forces but people around you will be acting them out. This is an extraordinary piece of information … to know that people in our environments act out planetary motion. Observe all work realities this especially this week. Remember also that from loss comes profound new life.

People in my personal cipher have been going in, up and through it lately. There is no denying that now is a time for serious personal growth for so many - those who are ready and willing (and some not so willing!) to do the hard painful work. Those of us who barely made it out of 2009 are being confronted with our quest - get it together baby. What?! Where is my lottery win, my all expense paid vacation, my date with Will Smith? Don't I get something for making it through last year fairly sane? Yes, you get the great joy of continuing in your evolution. I feel ripped off.

A friend and I used to say that "ignorance is bliss" but the fact that we know that makes us too aware to ever be blissful. Yea, dealing in philosophical syllogisms was our version of fun in high school. But there is some truth to that statement but also a huge gift in it too. Because we experience pain we can really know joy. Someone told me that living in joy was as simple as changing your mind. Really? That seemed awfully naive to me - just change your mind? Then why isn't everyone living in joy? Because it is a lot of work. A lot of work. And requires constant vigilance. And it takes a long time - you don't see the results as quickly as you do working out. Being on the low end of the patience spectrum I always wanted things to happen as soon as possible if not before. I lose interest in routine, constant prepartion and what I perceived to be the drudgery of every day life. And mastering those things felt like a huge waste of time. But they are foundation choices that give me somewhere to go. And I have been struggling with this same issue my entire life. This is my Galileo moment - my "get it right this lifetime" lesson.

I've started re-reading old journals so I can see that I have gotten better in this one aspect of my personal growth. I have made major strides. And there is still a long road to go. I have been really hard on myself most of my life - as I am sure a great many women are. And now I think that the best way to keep moving through my evolution is to be more gentle with myself. To accept those things I don't love about myself and those things I cannot change immediately. To live them openly and fully and not push them out of my mind. And with time I, we will all live our way into the answers.

And if I'm crying while I write these words

2010-01-07T11:05:00.003-05:00
is it absurd of is it just me? - Tears for Fears

Yesterday I found an old friend on Facebook. First I found him on classmates.com and then something said check out facebook. He has an incredibly common name so searching for him previously had yielded no responses. But now he is friends with a common friend and has a picture posted. It is definitely him. And it doesn't look as though he visits his site too often so it may be awhile before I get a response. Or I might not get a response at all.

After the last 20 years of my life I feel almost like I need to be in a twelve-step program for my transgressions of youth and stupidity. The people I didn't understand and value. The situations where I put my interests above those of others. The times when I took more than I even considered giving much less gave. I feel the need to make amends. But what I have realized is that most people don't remember the things that you remember. Your bone of contention with someone is usually not their bone of contention with you, if in fact they even have one. So I am loathe to bring up past sad moments when I reconnect with an old friend. If I would like to rekindle my friendship with them I ask them if they have anything they are still upset with me about, or any questions from our collective past that they would like cleared up. If they have a past pain then we can work through that and I can apologize. I don't know if it does anyone any good to bring up things they are no longer angry about - why so you can feel better and they can get angry all over again? I find making amends to be more about the person you are asking forgiveness from than making yourself feel better. That still feels awfully selfish. It's about you feeling better not healing a rift. So, I clear up my hurts away from the person.

Recently I contacted a person I was friends with in High School. I called this person to get them to come to our reunion. They were less than enthusiastic when speaking to me. My initial thought was - "Don't you have caller i.d. If you didn't want to speak with me why did you answer the phone?" But then I realized that maybe that's what they wanted. Was to speak to me and act uninterested or even cold. And that's okay. I am really learning and accepting the fact that I cannot take the actions of other people personally. And I have always wanted to be one of those people who kept friends from elementary school through each and every job I've ever held. But I am not that girl. Maintaining the few close relationships I have now is a lot of work and I am not doing the best at those. It is even that much more daunting to think about maintaining relationships with people even more dispersed. And that is my process. That is my choice. So I do my best to treat everyone with respect and attention when I am with them or they are in my virtual cipher. Just taking it all one day at a time.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Keisha

My Obligatory New Year's Post

2010-01-01T08:13:00.004-05:00

Good Morning Loves!
I think I was "supposed" to spend the entire week cleaning my house and cooking scrumptious meals and getting ready to enter the new year with all the things I want to manifest in my life - done. That's not happening. The house is a wreck, there are dishes to be washed and I think we had Panera for dinner last night. But what is in intact and markedly different is my children. They are happy. They are not fighting with each other and they have spent a significant amount of time with me and Ilya this week. Being pampered, cared for and paid attention to. That more than tops the list - that is the list. Have a wonderful year, dear hearts. Know that it starts with a wonderful day, hour, second.

What follows is something I read on twitter this morning. It is from Esthero (Oh, how I love her) and was written by a friend of hers called Jimi Dava. I know him - in my bones. This story is my story. And I realize all of our stories.

Respect
Nanda Mama aka Keisha

Dava in Hollywood: Episode XIII : “The Phoenix”
on this last night of 2009 we find our hero typing away on his laptop….
and this is what he writes….

a distance great i have traveled to deliver this message to you, to present you with this little gift of me.
take it for what its worth. its one size fits all.

its very difficult for me to ask for help, even harder for me to accept it.

i cant remember the precise where, or when i was taught this lesson, but to me, asking for help meant that I wasn’t good enough, that i was weak and lacking, it meant that alone i was not sufficient, to me it meant that i was in need.
and that to me, was, unacceptable.

asking for help always raised the volume of the voices inside of me that have tried to defeat me, and so to quiet the screaming i sentenced myself into the cage of silence, where no one, not even i
could hear me cry out for some help.

So i learned how to keep things in, how to hide and hold that which pained me most, i learned how to put on appearances for the sake of others and for the the light under which i chose to bathe.
fueled by the weakness i saw in my father, i became what i wanted him to always be. STRENGTH.

but, looking back now, i wonder how well it has served me. in some ways, in ways that will always remain upright and steadfast, it has kept me alive, and in other ways, i see today that it’s killing me.

I was conditioned at a very young age to be a “man” looking back now, i think i was conditioned to be “the man”
but what does it mean to be the man?

perhaps it means just to be, a man, to be able to suffer the consequence of your ignorance, to be able to stand up when you have been knocked down, and not feel the shame of the fall but rather the pride of the rise. perhaps its the understanding that we you and I are not perfect, and within the search for our innate and intimate perfection we must accept the fact that though we are godlike, god we are not. perhaps being a man, the man, any man, is to be able to look around you and trust that you are surrounded by the same. The same greatness that we seek within must be appreciated and allowed to thrive in others. And perhaps to be able to trust the fact that you too, like I, am capable of greatness is
the true mark of a man, THE MAN.

For inside of this misunderstood and poorly translated man, lives a soul that wants nothing but to love you, and wants nothing but your love. and that scares the living shit out of me to admit, because that would mean that i have to trust you, and perhaps even more frightening, that i have to trust myself. it means that i need you, and your help. and that again, is very hard for me accept.

I have been so afraid to reveal my weakness and my faults, my vulnerability and my pain, because i thought you wouldn’t like me anymore. i thought you would judge me, i thought you’d find out that i wasnt worth fighting for.
I tried to be what i thought you wanted, rather needed me to be. because i think all i ever wanted was your acceptance, even if i rejected my innermost self in the process.

Growing up i was always ashamed of where i came from, being different, being Georgian in a world brand new, being called a “communist” by the children of democracy, being a Jew in a secular world, being the son of drug addicted gangster, having fucked up teeth, being skinny…. for the ideas of our self perfection seemed to exist within me before i was ever taught the definition of the word.

Today, i realize that the greatness in me, you and us, lies in the fact that we have withstood and overcome many of the preconceived notions that we have carried for way too long, i realize that strength comes from facing your weakness and not blinking away. I realize that being different is the greatest attribute we are blessed with. and so today i celebrate the strange peculiar me that has come this far down a road more or less traveled and i say to you i am ready, ready to ask for your help, and i might just accept it his time around.

So today, on this last day of a year i wish i could forget, and yet this will be a year i will always remember, i shed the cloth of my insecurity and ignite the flame of my rebirth, and stand before to see who the fuck i am and perhaps may i reflect you too.

so i am asking you…..

I am asking you kindly dearly and sincerely to help me, help me live a better life.

I am asking for deeper connections, i am asking for the contact of our eyes, i am asking for the shedding of our collective fears to touch each other and to be touched back.

I am asking you to rise with me from the ashes of this fire.

I am asking you to wake up with me, i am asking you to walk shoulder to shoulder with me, i am asking you for your hand and i’m offering you mine.

I am asking you to dream, your dream, and to help me achieve mine.

I am asking you to let go of our regrets, to release our egos and to allow us to penetrate deeper into ourselves so ultimately we can know each other.

I am asking you to help me share my knowledge and ask you to teach me yours.

I am asking you to help me be more present, i am asking you to help me speak more truth.

I am asking you to rise and live your life the way you have always wanted to, i am asking you to be my heroes, i am asking you to lead me with your examples.

I am asking you to help me forgive myself, and i am asking you to allow yourselves and I the ability to ask for help.

I am asking you for your help to help me love you more.

I am asking you for inspiration.

I am asking you to teach me how to be a man…

thank you for letting me speak to you.

I see you. all of you.

2010….. here we come.

Happy New Year…

love dava.

photo: Christina Cohn

The First Pancake - For my MamaFriends

2009-12-31T09:14:00.007-05:00

Okay, I don't usually discriminate in terms of who I write my posts to. They are for anyone who wants to read them. And that is also true of this one. But this one, on the last day of one of the worst years of my life (and after 2007-2008 that is saying ALOT!) is especially for my MamaFriends out there. A little uplift for the year that passed and the one to come.

After I gave birth to Max (the second baby) I developed a theory - that the first baby, while she may have more clothes and pictures of her, is the first pancake. You use up all your ridiculous, obsessive, please-wash-your-hands-before-holding my baby energy. Especially if you fancy yourself an Alpha-Female leaving the work world to stay home and be fulfilled by motherhood (insert tongue in cheek or spit coffee on monitor). I was so obsessed with "The Vivi" (yes, I called her that in utero!) that I sent a detailed two-page letter of instructions with her to my mother's house when she stayed away from us for one night when she was 5 weeks old. My mother is a seasoned mother of two and a nurse! I actually wrote down what to do if she coughed or woke up in the middle of the night. Meanwhile I forgot to take my breast pump with me to the hotel and spent the entire night in utter agony! My mother was appropriately kind and just smiled at me while I left her apartment. She then called one of her best friends to laugh about me. I get it. I deserved it.

When making pancakes, even if you heat the skillet until water droplets dance you will probably turn it prematurely or flip it too carefully causing the batter to splatter and stick to the side of the pan. It happens. Hyper-vigilance. That can often lead you to make some intense decisions regarding that precious first pancake. More often than not it makes its way to the garbage or you give it to your husband or dog to eat. They become responsible for absorbing the joy and gooey goodness of the first pancake. You, the pancake-maker, are often too traumatized by your perceived failure to enjoy what the pancake has to offer.

I made pancakes on this beautifully snowy last day of 2009. And the first pancake was perfection. Golden brown and fluffy. I was enchanted, lovingly bathed it in vegan butter and put it in the oven to warm. As time went on - I had to finish the pancake batter - the pancakes were not as pretty and some of them got a little burnt. Not enough to put in the garbage (I do have two boys) but enough to think - wow, I didn't pay ANY attention to them did I? And today is when the first pancake theory expanded.

I have jokingly said that we will open a 529 for our children's college fund or their therapy. It seemed almost inevitable that no matter what I did as a parent they would need help when they got older. But that is not necessarily true. Here I am at the end of 2009, a year supposedly filled with hope and Yes-we-canitis and I cannot wait for midnight to roll around here on the east coast. I no longer abdicate, to history, the raising of my children; especially my beautiful-first pancake. Just because I needed therapy (lots and lots of therapy) doesn't mean that my children will need it. And just because I rebelled against my parents and could not communicate with them or anyone for quite some time does not mean that that is the fate of my children. And just because my first born is a girl does not mean that we are "doomed" to the complicated mother/daughter drama. All of these scenarios become true if I take my eye off the pan. If I allow them to burn through my inattention. Oh, I am not going back to the hypervigilance of those first heady-new-baby days rather settling into the comfortable rhythm of an experienced Mama. Keeping at least one eye on the pancake at all times! Well, most of the time :)!

Happy New Year

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Keisha

photos:teri_tu

So long and thanks for all the fish.

2009-12-30T22:17:00.005-05:00

Ever feel like just bailing? I mean getting up and walking out on your life? Leaving the job, the house or apartment, the responsibilities and hitting the open road? I have been mentally feeding my wanderlust lately. It has made me restless. That lets me know I am on the verge of something really big. Mary, one of the travelers in Eric Overmyer's play "On the Verge" ends the play by asking "what's next?" She decides that she doesn't know, so much adventure ahead of her but she knows she is "on the verge." There is something incredibly sublime and frustrating about feeling on the verge of something. You need patience to ride that wave and allow the new to be born. Patient is one thing I have never really been. And rather than live in that discomfort of not knowing - I would rather bail. That has to be easier right?

I think I am learning, however, that when I get these feelings the best thing to do is to get still and stand. Wherever I am. In the middle of whatever it is. Ugh! But my feet want to move. It's uncomfortable. It is unsteady, uncertain and definitely not safe. My skin is crawling and there are clearly ants living beneath my epidermis. I find myself talking, out loud, to myself just to have sound to allay the disquiet. But what of the dolphins as they ascend much like the Virgin Mary, off the earth? They tell the doomed earthlings in Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "So long and thanks for all the fish." Why don't they warn them or try to save them instead of leaving them to their doom?

Because they have to save themselves. And that's how I feel lately. That I have to save myself. I am the only one who can. But from what? From the annoyance of not knowing what is next? Yes. So today I literally stretched my body into uncomfortable positions and starting breathing. And the ants stopped marching and the voices stopped nagging. That entire time that I was stretching and breathing inside my world was silent. Ahhhh. Is it really that simple? Yes it is. I am no longer lamenting it taking me 38 years to get certain lessons. There are people who have had 38 lifetimes and are still working on their lessons. 38 years I can take. So to the disquiet, the discomfort and the annoyance for today I say: So long and thanks for all the fish.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

photo:Kalandrakas

p.s. I thank Ilya for giving me that book to read one day. It is true almost everything can be accomplished with a towel. Don't forget it.

Longing.....

2009-12-21T09:40:00.013-05:00

Doing the dishes is a place where I get a lot of ideas. I spend a fair amount of time doing dishes (but not nearly enough). My husband tells me that he hasn't read too many blogs like mine. There is spell checking here and complete sentences and thoughts. That's because it takes me a long time to write these posts. I think about them for a few days before I commit to writing and publishing. Mostly because I want to work through the entire thought before I put it down and also because I am sensitive to criticism. Today I want to write about obsession, transference and projection and presence/charisma.

I think at many times in my life I have been guilty of all of these things. Sometimes at the same time! And I am writing about this in hopes that somewhere out there is someone who does the same thing. Someone who feels the same way so I am not alone in what Freud perceives to be psychosis! (I know, f@#k Freud!)

Obesssion:: "a persistent disturbing preoccupation with an often unreasonable idea or feeling." Wow. I don't think my obsessions are unreasonable. I mean I could really marry Will Smith, right? But that is not one of my obsessions, any longer. It is often around an idea and sometimes a person. Once after a rather unfortunate and painful breakup in college my friend Anna remarked that I said that person's name more than I said the word "the." She was obviously tired of hearing me talk about that person and that situation. I immediately stopped. I didn't stop thinking about the situation or the person, and I didn't stop mulling over the "what ifs" in my head. But I did stop talking about it out loud. I am not sure when that obsession ended, it took awhile. But it did end. In the meantime I learned some really valuable lessons about being in a relationship and communicating with people. I learned a lot about how I processed and expressed intimacy. And in the end it felt as though the "obsession" was good for me, it helped me work through some internal issues. But at the same time it was my WORST semester in college. I blew off my responsibilities and rarely went to class, relying instead on my charisma to get me through the semester.

Obsession can also be a great avoidance measure. Right now I am coming to the end of a rather time-consuming and expensive obsession - the work of Anna Deavere Smith. I could probably say that the obsession extends to her as well. I have read everything I can about her. Watched several videos and seen her play "Let Me Down Easy" three times. In the process of this unearthing I have learned so much about me and how I make art and what moves me. I have found my inspiration again. But at the same time I have avoided finishing job applications and have used this obsession to block other rather important tasks, like grieving the illness of a friend. I tell myself that I AM grieving because this person shares my almost twenty-year love of Anna. Or is that an excuse?

Transference and Projection: They are pretty much the same thing. You take your feelings and transfer them to someone else or project them onto someone else. I have been thinking about all the people I transfer my feelings to. My children, my husband, past romances - especially those that ended badly, professors, teachers, friends, therapists (wow, that's a post in itself!). I am never quite sure that things I am experiencing, with regards to other people, are actually how I feel about them or if it's just my issue. One of my many Mamas told me that if I had a problem with someone I should check myself first. So I tend to do a thorough excavation of my feelings when I first meet someone. And I am usually pretty good at telling in the first seconds of meeting someone whether or not we will get along. And as I have gotten older I tend to trust that feeling more and move on if I feel that this relationship is not going to yield any healthy fruit. The people who have gotten entire documentaries projected onto their person are few - but they exist. And I appreciate their being there for me to play out the movie of my life. I don't necessarily think that that's a bad or negative thing. It's just a thing.

And the last greedy shark swimming around my undisciplined mind is Presence, something I call charisma. That thing that draws your eye to a person. That thing that makes you want to get to know them, get to love them. I don't think there is universal presence. Bill Clinton has so much presence but I know a few Republicans who would disagree. So I want to posit that presence, charisma is subjective. It is another thing that comes through our eye and excites and fascinates us. The people we think have presence are also the people we find attractive - are drawn to. And I am trying to unravel how that happens too. What is it in me that finds distinguished professor-types charismatic? Or that draws me to motorcycles and people with tattoos. Is it that that is what I want to be? Or is it that that person is what I want to have?

I know that most of this can be perceived as psycho-babble and some of you stopped reading at Will Smith, but I am really trying to make sense of these issues because I think they are going to unlock the central theme to this piece of theatre I am working on. I wrote about it earlier in my post on intimacy. How do we get close to someone? And why is it that we want to be close to a certain someone? Anna Deavere Smith writes in Letters to a Young Artist, that presence is feeling that that person (the object of your gaze) is right next to you because you long to have them there. Long to have them there. So I am trying to get to the root of the longing, the root of the craving. Ground zero of our passions. What do you think?

Photo:Freud's Couch - Wikipedia

Kiss Me

2009-12-04T12:40:00.004-05:00

Alla That's All Right But,
Somebody come and carry me into a seven day kiss
Somebody come and carry me into a seven day kiss
Somebody come and carry me into a seven day kiss
I don't need no historical, no national, no family bliss
I need an absolutely one to one seven day kiss.
- Sweet Honey in the Rock

There is some kiss we want with out whole lives.
- Rumi

The two most intimate things a person can ever do, in my opinion, is to feed someone and to kiss someone. We as Americans don't take our food seriously. We don't think that feeding someone is a sacred act, but that which you have prepared is going into someone's body to nourish them and sustain them. What could be more personal than that? Kissing is something else all together.

We think of a kiss as two lips touching a part of another's body. But in Merriam-Webster's dictionary the secondary definition of "kiss" is "to touch gently or lightly" and "to come in gentle contact." Nothing about lips in that definition.

Three weeks before my college graduation my answering machine played the above verse of the Sweet Honey song, after asking for the seven day kiss, I said into the machine: "If that is you or you want to give me a job, leave a message." Did I really want someone to literally kiss me for seven day - no. I wanted someone or something to touch me gently for seven days, seven weeks, seven years. I wanted to be inspired.

I am working on a project about intimacy. And I am thinking a lot about food and kissing. And I am thinking about the attention we pay to each. None actually. How are we intimate with other people? How do we connect with them? How do we feed them and kiss them and how do they kiss and feed us? Intimacy, I am learning is very difficult to define and even harder to attain. It is magic. You know it when you see it. And you know when you are lacking it but are not always sure how to get it. I am still working on it. In the loud, busy, constantly moving world we live in how do we make human contact?

Let me know your thoughts. Kiss me.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

keisha

photo by: Chris Spira

Camus

2009-11-30T08:51:00.005-05:00

those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

I have been thinking about this quote, and so many other things for a few weeks now. I am reconnecting with the divinity inside of me that is wider than raising my children and the PTA. I love the image of you being a house with many rooms in which to keep things. Those of you who have seen my house know that there is usually a lot of clutter. And you need to sift through a bunch of junk to find the truly useful and meaningful. I have started doing that with our house. Our living room even has our couch, lovingly bathed in red corduroy IN it as opposed to propped up in a corner on the front porch! I have a place to sit on Sunday and read the New York Times with coffee and orange juice and yell at Meet the Press. And these are no small things. They have given my everyday reality enough roots so that I can open myself up to the other rooms and unearth what is hiding.

Enough metaphor. My artistic side has been hiding, hidden for quite some time. I had delusions of Mothering grandeur when I first started this parent gig. I was going to cloth diaper my children, read to them, bathe them in lavender oil and respond to their every need with love, calm and rapt attention. Okay, I will pause here while my mother-friends clean up the coffee with too many sugars that they just spit onto their computer monitor or keyboard. Done? Okay, resuming. My heart, my mind, my chakras (a wink at ADS) are opening up. And it is luscious and overwhelming. Remember my post about desiring to live in the liminal - to live and feel each moment in sacred space? Cannot do it. Not possible. There is laundry and pick ups and playdates. And there can be years (for me 10)of just getting through the day. ART - takes a backseat.

I used to find it incredibly pretentious when people referred to themselves as "artists." Really? Who the hell are you? And now I realize that it takes a great deal of courage to admit, out loud, that you want to make the world a more beautiful place. That you are essentially an idealist which in mainstream parlance equals naive. You paint a huge target on yourself to receive ridicule and to be taken advantage of. It's a brave and bold move. And I always hated when people did it because I was not feeling particularly "artistic" for a good deal of my life. Jealousy really at their opportunity. But that is not fair. And I remember that being an artist means infusing your life with beauty. Ah.

Back to Camus. I have recently remembered all the images, touches, and sounds in whose presence my heart first opened up. There are so many. And remembering them has been lovely and painful. And so worth it. Think about this today - when do you remember your heart first opening up? You may find that there have been so many times and I hope each one of them causes you to smile. I tend to feel things very deeply when I allow myself to feel them, so it has been an intense couple of weeks. We Leos never do anything small. And my 100 Angels have rallied around me to bring me into the next part of my life. Filled with conscious beauty, discipline and dare I say it - art? Join me there.

My Hierophant - Upright and Reversed

2009-11-20T17:50:00.006-05:00

I have mourned the death of my father over and over again. In small ways and in big ways. It might have been easier on me if I had mourned him fully when he first died but that was highly inconvenient. I hold onto grief and let it out when I can no longer hold it in anymore. And it is always inconvenient. But not this time. I am in mourning right now and it hurts - bad. Someone I love very much is sick and it is not easy for them but it is even harder on me. I know talk about selfish. When I was sick I was really worried about other people. I wanted them to be comforted and cared for because I knew my cancer really hurt them and made them feel lost and out of control. I remember a good friend crying in my presence after I told her of my diagnosis. She got angry with herself and said that I shouldn't be comforting her. But yes, I should have been comforting her. Because she was probably sad about me but ultimately she was sad about her own mortality and looking at the fact that she would have to live if I died and she would have to go through a lot of pain when and if that happened. No one signs up for the kind of pain. And I have spent the better part of my life keeping real emotion, real feeling at bay. But I can't keep it back - not with this person.

My love of my hierophant is deep and abiding. I met him right after my own father died and he immediately became the father I always wished I had. I haven't seen him in years and I have missed that connection with him but getting back in touch has been difficult. It has required me to come to grips with his mortality. And it has required me to lose my father again. I realize that the older I get the more people will leave my life. And I am also too old to postpone these feelings.

I watched two minutes of Oprah the other day. Oprah was interviewing Kate Hudson. I stopped the DVR long enough to hear an actually interesting conversation. Oprah asked Kate what Joy meant to her. She said that the one thing she learned from her mother was to live every emotion - fully. That means the sad things too. To go into them and live there. I've said before that I am afraid of those emotions because I may not be able to come back from there. But the more often I make the trip the easier the return trip will be. Ideally. And I have to believe that - have faith in that. I don't have faith in much and I believe even less.

Yet, here I am. And here I will stay. It is up to me how the next evolution will be spent. And like a foot that has fallen asleep, it hurts coming back to life. I think even more when that thing is your soul.

in peace

It's America - Dammit!

2009-10-11T17:27:00.003-05:00

I am a liberal. Most liberals have nothing on me! I am also a black woman in America. But liberals can really get on my fucking nerves. I am not a monolith in my opinion, life or art. I have so many sides to me it would blind you if I released the facets. Yet, if I vote for a certain party then I am somehow supposed to believe everything and agree with everything that party or the representative of that party does. I do not. I am entitled to have a difference of opinion. It is my right. This past weekend something happened that made me come out of blog retirement. The President, my President, won the Nobel Peace Prize. I believe the first words out of my mouth were: "Wow, Congratulations!" And it was not said in a sarcastic tone. My next thought was "how did this happen?" I know a bit about the workings of the Peace Prize (although it took my friend Dave to point out the the peace prize is awarded by a Norwegian panel and not a Swedish one). I know that the deadline for nominations is February 1st and I know that our President took office January 20th. That gave him roughly two weeks as President before he was nominated. Hmmmmm. That seemed like a small amount of time to have exacted much change.

What Rachel Maddow and my additional research so clearly pointed out is that the Peace Prize is not always given for accomplishments. It is often given for the effort and in this case the promise to improve America's profile in the world and to build alliances with the Muslim world. That is laudable - definitely. But when I responded that I felt that he hadn't done enough to get the award all hell broke loose on Facebook. Somehow everyone who disagreed with this decision was lumped in with Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh. What?! I do not have to think this was a good idea just because President Obama is a Democrat or because I voted for him. And I can think he is a good President and support him without falling all over myself about this award. We are a nation of free-thinkers and I think liberals should be allowed to have a difference of opinion just like conservatives. I fought against being a monolithic black person (oh, you can't talk about black people's dirty laundry in public - or around white people). I am me, always. And I fight against being lumped in with all the liberals. And if my fellow liberals cannot respect my, apparently, G-d given right to dissent, then I think we are in a hell of a lot of trouble. I respect your rights. Respect mine and don't assume I am negative or sarcastic or a hater just because I disagree with you.

It's America dammit. If you fight for it -- fight for all of it!

in peace

And so it goes

2009-09-14T13:19:00.004-05:00

I haven't been here for awhile and I think that has really affected my mood. I miss having this quasi-private forum to vent and bounce around ideas. When they stay in my head they get cloudy and persistent. And that's where this post is going. I think, it is time for me to say good-bye to blogging, at least for the time. I have found that it is a good way for me to stop doing what needs to be done. Like the U2 song says: "She's running to stand still."

But as I learned most recently praying with your feet is so much more important. I have prayed with my head and my heart for a long time without moving the prayer down to the earth. They stay "up there" in ethereal land. Now it is time to feel the earth instead of hovering over it. I will miss this - maybe, but it's time for something new.

And so with joy I say:

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing
until we meet again

Nanda Mama

photo:moshing

I went to a Megachurch last night

2009-08-05T00:25:00.006-05:00

The church was huge. And even though I was there with over 5000 of my fellow worshippers, it felt small and intimate. The pastor was charismatic, beautiful and dangerous. Donned in black he took us through the stages of grief and levels of ecstasy. We were different when we left than when we entered. Wiser, older, enlightened? From my seat I could see so many different people who also came to worship and be transformed. There were the couples who had been married for a long time. The best friends since high school, usually a girl and a guy and the guy is now comfortably gay and fully open. There were the outcasts cloaked in black and today's version of the teeny-bopper with their hand held electronic devices and pink platform shoes. There were the people on first dates trying to figure out if this other person was someone they wanted to spend more time with or at least have sex with. And then there were the people like me being transported back to a time when we were more innocent in our despair. What were we all doing there? We were probably there for the same reason everyone goes to church - to feel part of something larger than ourselves. To touch the infinite - just for a moment.

The sermon went on for over two hours with ebbs and flows and call and response. We all knew when to stand up and scream or sit down and reflect. Each of us had a different word or phrase that caused us to close our eyes, lift up our hands and silently testify. The Great Reverend took us through so many phases of life, taught us so many moral lessons about birth and death and pain and sex. About oppression and religion and suicide. We swayed and clapped and stamped our feet and had a good - hell, a great cry. We forgave wrongs and woke up old pains. We stood still and broke down. And in the end we said good-bye and went back to our ordinary lives.

The charismatic one in black walked away but left the scent of earth and passion in his wake. We stood there frozen, mesmerized. Had we really just gone there? And was it over so soon? We were drunk and shocked when the bright lights came back on. Dream over, liminality ended. But for those two hours we got to glimpse the infinite and to reach out and touch faith.

Photo: Master and Servant

And so it begins

2009-07-31T22:38:00.000-05:00
my year of spirit and health. Meet me there.

You Say It's Your Birthday?

2009-07-31T11:05:00.004-05:00

Happy Birthday to Me! Yea, I said it. I am over pretending to be humble and diminutive about my existence. Woo Hoo, Keisha is on the planet! That is a much better way for me to live my life. As I got older I really thought that birthdays would take up less importance in my world. After all, I wasn't a child anymore so there were no parties or presents to be excited about. But I am excited. And I plan to celebrate because me being alive is a good thing. As is your being alive. And it is not just because I faked out death (several times - you ever see me drive on the highway?!)it's because I am not an accident. None of us are. I may not have a firm grip on how and why we all came to be here but I am pretty sure that us being here is a blessing. So party like a rock star today. And think about all the things that bring joy into your life. Here is my list:

My kids
Vivian: She is the kindest, most gentle soul ever. She takes great care of me and her brothers and her daddy. Her heart is too big for her chest so it gets beat up sometimes when it meets the outside world. And I hope she never builds a barrier around it because the love she gives should only get bigger.
Max: Oh he makes me laugh and shout and throw things. He is my greatest challenge in patience. He has definitely been here before and wants everyone to know that. You see his light across a crowded room.
Buddha: So smooshy! Buddha and I are still getting to know each other. And everyday I am more and more in love with what I learn. He teaches me how to be silent and to enjoy my own company. And how to circle the ones I love - keeping them close and giving them space at the same time.

My husband: There aren't enough words!

Flowers, music, Bono, Tom Jones, minivans, silence, prayer, nature, friends, time, the color red, orange, malas, toys, books, kindles, lavender, lilacs, apples, Saving Grace, Tony Shalhoub, Sacha Baron Cohen, reggae, Bob Marley, the sky, rain, hammocks, peace the list could go on ad infinitum. Write one for yourself and have a happy birthday!

we are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

The Grass Is Always Greener - Really?

2009-07-28T17:11:00.003-05:00

I think from the outside of most people's lives things can look pretty good. When we view other people through our own prisms we unconsciously (or maybe not) pick people who don't appear to have the same problems we have at the moment. Like, I pick people whose cars are clean and their children seem well-behaved. Because messy cars and ill-behaved children are my achilles heel (along with many others). But I realized a long time ago that if I take their clean car and well-behaved children I have to take their pain in the neck mother-in-law or recurrent yeast infections. I don't want that.

We want to pick and choose from other people's lives. To create and combine our perfect existence without any problems or difficulties. Now that sounds nice. But every lawn has weeds. And if they don't have weeds then the drugs they're giving that lawn is not worth the cancer in later years! Ya feel me? I have spent too much time coveting other people's perceived realities. I stopped doing that but was still dissatisfied with my own life. No longer.

Princess V asked me the other day if I would play Clue with her. I told her I was tired and that I would play tomorrow. She said, "There is no tomorrow, Mommy. You told me tomorrow never comes it is always today." Oh, a moment I will appreciate when she is 20 but right then I just wanted to rest. Needless to say we played Clue and I thought about having my own words thrown back in my face. It is always today. This is the moment I get to make a change. This is the time for things to happen. Even if I have to wait on other people sometimes that doesn't mean that I stop moving toward freedom. My life is as green as I see it. Anybody got a pair of green-tinted glasses I can have?

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

photo: Brian.Neudorff

Ch ch ch ch changes

2009-07-26T08:13:00.002-05:00
Okay. I have looked over this schedule and plan several times and some adjustments and caveats need to be made.
1. I am going to switch black beans with bitter greens. Not because black beans raw is a problem (although it is a definite challenge for 30 days) but because bitter greens should have been in the spring. Dandelion and mustard are early spring greens.
2. August 3rd I am going to see Depeche Mode, so that is a different artist allowed day. And in October I am going to see U2. So obviously I get to listen to U2 that day - those tickets were too fricken hard to get!
3. This blog is about a lot of stuff but I don't think I want it to be exclusively about post about this project. So I am going to start a new blog (I like starting blogs) just for posts about this topic. No need to sign up unless you want to. I will add a link from here to there on August 1st.

****** Oh and if you have an aversion to cursing and questionable female descriptions - don't listen to the playlist past Aretha. I had to put some Dr. Dre and Snoop Dog on. So you may want to turn it off and not play it around your kids! :)!******

we are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

The Schedule

2009-07-24T08:25:00.008-05:00

I had a good time working on this last night. This was a complete surprise since I put the choices into an envelope and picked at random.

AUGUST
Religion - ZORASTRIANISM
Activity - STRENGTH TRAINING
Food to release - NON ORGANIC FOODS
Practice - ROSARY
Music - ANGELIQUE KIDJO
New Food - CHIA SEEDS
Poet - SYLVIA PLATH
Thoughts: Yea! Sylvia Plath while it is still daylight until 9pm! That makes my winter a little more manageable. And it's nice to have organic eating only be during the summer. I will miss listening to The Script when I log onto this blog.

SEPTEMBER
Religion - Esoteric Judaism (Kabbalah and Gemitraya)
Practice - Sitting Meditation
Activity - Yoga
Food to Release - Sugar
New Food Habit - Apples
Music - Joni Mitchell
Poet - Gertrude Stein
Thought: This is a good month! Esoteric Judaism during the time of the High Holidays and we always go apple picking on Rosh Hoshanah! Macintosh are in season in September and that is my favorite apple.

October
Religion - Candomble
Practice - ital eating (the eating of observant Rastafarians)
Activity - 10,000 steps
Food to Release - Caffeine
New Food Habit - bitter greens
Music - Esperanza Spaulding
Poet - Shakespeare
Thoughts: I am in Wisconsin for my BFF's birthday so I am SO glad that I don't have to give up sugar this month! She makes the best pie ever!

November
Religion - Kemetic Reconstructionism
Practice - Fasting during daylight hours
Activity - Video Tapes
Food to Release - Chocolate
New Food Habit - Parsley
Music - Frank Zappa
Poet - John Milton
Thoughts: Alright - fasting during November. The sun is only up for 4 hours a day anyway!

December
Religion - Ba'hai
Practice - Observe Shabbos
Activity - Hiking (!)
Food to Release - Solid Food - everything must be liquid or drinkable through a straw
New Food Habit - Spirulina
Music - Everlast
Poet - Niman Nawwab
Thoughts: Hiking in December. I'll be going up and down hills and going to the South Mountain Reservation! Correction: Yes I will be juice feasting all day. If that is the one thing I cannot have all month then that is the way it is. I am excited because I always eat too much during the December holidays! And there is no way I am going to puree a latke!

January
Religion - Hinduism
Practice - Celebrate a sabbat or esbat
Activity - Swimming
Food to Release - Dairy
New Food Habit - Oranges
Music - Babatunde Olatunji
Poet - Yehuda Amichai
Thoughts: Swimming every day in winter may be difficult because I have to go to the gym to do it. I am going to commit myself to doing it, even if I have to get up early. And there is no sabbat or esbat in January, so this month will be preparation for Imbolc which is February 1st.

February
Religion - Native American Traditions
Practice - New form or divination
Activity - Pilates
Food to Release - Cooked Food
New Food Habit - Black Beans
Music - 2 Pac
Poet - Gwendolyn Brooks
Thoughts: This month should be interesting.

March
Religion - Islam
Practice - Chanting w/mala
Activity - Dancing!
Food to Release - Grains
New Food Habit - Maca
Music - Sinead O'Connor
Poet - Sonia Sanchez
Thoughts: Dancing to Sinead O'Connor? Can it be done, of course it can! I may make an allowance for the dancing section if I choose to use dance video tapes (of which I have many!)

April
Religion - Gnosticism
Practice - Acknowledging moon cycles through ritual
Activity - Walking
Food to Release - Wheat
New Food Habit - Fennel
Music - Annie Humphrey
Poet - John Keats
Thoughts: Spring is the best time to read Keats and to observe the moon, you can actually be outside for that!

May
Religion - Jainism
Practice - Consumer Blackout
Activity - Biking
Food to Release - Meat
New Food Habit - Beets
Music - Peter Tosh
Poet - Pablo Neruda
Thoughts: Ah, beets. That may be really hard for me. Consumer blackout means that I cannot spend any money - either real (cash) or virtual (credit cards or online) for the month of May. I will have to plan because I know there are birthdays in the month. Not to mention food purchases. And having Ilya be my "shabbos goy" is not acceptable!

June
Religion - Rastafarianism
Practice - Ancestor Reverence through altar and feeding
Activity - Trampolining
Food to Release - Fermented foods
New Food Habit - Wheatgrass
Music - Walela
Poet - Rumi
Thoughts: Rumi in June! This month Ilya and I will be married for 10 years, what a wonderful way to celebrate. We will be growing our own wheatgrass.

July
Religion - Catholic Saints and Mystics
Practice - Jain rituals of eating
Activity - Running
Food to Release - Pre-made food
New Food Habit - Acai
Music - Rickie Lee Jones
Poet - Octavio Paz
Thoughts: Catholic Saints, I have been looking forward to this one. And I am glad we got Jain rituals during the summer so much easier to be a vegetarian in these months. I had an extra musician - Sarah Vaughn. So, I put her and Rickie back in the envelope and Sarah got picked. But then I made an executive decision to go with Rickie Lee because so much of Sarah's music are covers - and I have heard the songs if not with her styling. But I know nothing of Rickie Lee, so she won!

So, there you have it. Probably my longest post evah'. Hopefully you will join in, or at least you will when you come to read this blog because the music will have changed. My pledges to myself:
1. That I will make every effort to meet these goals every month.
2. That I will look upon them as a privilege and an opportunity to spend time with and for myself.
3. That I will chronicle these events through writings (on this blog and in my personal journal), photos and video.
4. And that I will make every effort to let you know how it is going.

We are blessed may we recognize the bleesing

in peace

Photo:Villi.Ingi

The List

2009-07-23T20:19:00.002-05:00
I made the lists. It was harder than I thought it would be because my tastes are so varied and there are so many things I want to learn and experience. And I will make the choices randomly, with the exception of the foods I want to incorporate because some of them have to be seasonal choices so they are freshest and taste best.
The categories
I. I will study/research one spiritual tradition, or an aspect of a larger religious tradition a month
Catholic Saints and Mystics
Esoteric Judiasm
Hinduism
Ba'hai
Zorastrianism
Rastafarianism
Kemetic Reconstructionist
Gnosticism
Islam – Sunni/Shia/Sufi
Jainism
Native American Religions and Spirituality
Candomble
Notes: This is obviously in addition to all the I am studying in school, so it will not be the only religious texts I will be reading.

II I will practice one meditative or healing ritual every day
sitting meditation
Ital eating
Rosary
Chanting w/mala
Fasting during daylight
Ancestor recognition – altar and feeding
Observe shabbos fully
Celebrate the shabbat or esbat of the month
Acknowledge the moon cycles through ritual
Jain rituals and eating – vegetarianism w/certain foods left out
Consumer blackout/not buying anything
Learning a new form of divination

III Practicing one form of physical activity a month
walking
swinging (on a swing)
hiking
biking
yoga
strength training
10,000 stepping
running
trampolining
pilates
dancing
I can, of course, do something in addition to these exercises but I must do them every day for at least 15 minutes.

IV Reading the work of one poet per month
Sonia Sanchez
Shakespeare
Pablo Neruda
Rumi
John Keats
Sylvia Plath
Gwendolyn Brooks
John Milton
Yehuda Amichai
Octavio Paz
Gertrude Stein
Nimah Nawwab
Poems are easier than whole books. This way I can read a poem a day. And there is nothing to say that I cannot repeat a poem if I really want to comprehend it.

V Listening to only one musical artist - to the exclusion of all others
Everlast
Walela
Rickie Lee Jones
Sinead O'Connor
Peter Tosh
Esperanza Spaulding
Angelique Kidjo
Babtunde Olatunji
Frank Zappa
Sarah Vaughn
Joni Mitchel
Annie Humphrey
2 Pac
These are artists I have had a longing to know better. What a perfect opportunity. Expect my playlist on this blog to change monthly!

VI Adding one healthy food to my diet
bitter greens quinoa
fennel chia seeds
oranges spirulina
black beans maca
beets apples
parsley wheatgrass
Oh. I have added food that I am not that fond of like beets. I have to say that any form of consumption of these foods is acceptable, including juicing and dehydration. It must be in the most natural state and not from a can (in the instance of black beans). Wheatgrass will be kept for the spring.

VII Releasing one unhealthy food from my diet
meat
sugar
caffeine
dairy
nothing cooked
nothing pre-made/pre-cooked
wheat
grains
chocolate
nothing that isn't organic
only things that can be drunk through a straw
nothing fermented (soy sauce, vinegar, mushrooms, miso)
Hopefully this will help me release some horrid food addictions.

I am so looking forward to this. As a theatre director I can do anything for 30 days. After that my resolve for change wanes - I don't have the longest attention span. And why would I do something like this when there is so much change on the horizon? Well, this I can prepare and predict. This is my touchstone, my rock. I know that for one month I will only be listening to one artist and reading one poet. I like that certainty in a day that can carry so much change that I often feel as though I am not really here rather observing this fast-moving person.
I like having some place to plant my feet even when the earth beneath me is moving.

we are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace and with love to Mar.

Vision Quest

2009-07-23T13:22:00.003-05:00

Oh I love my friend Mary. I have written here about her before. She is presently recovering from another surgery - her "takedown" surgery. I am thinking of her and holding her close. And in honor of her I made my usual sojourn to her blog Papergirl. I went back to read about her Art/Lifeproject. For a year she is embarking on a plan to do a series of things every month. Eat one particular food, wear one color - only, listen to only one kind of artist, read only one author, explore only one filmmaker, exclude one food. She is focused and tenacious that Mary. And she has inspired me. She is turning 30 and I am turning 38. I am also beginning graduate school (which will end around my 40th birthday) and hopefully preparing to move my family to a new home and a new set of possibilities.

I want to support Mary and honestly, I think her idea is beautiful and amazing. While my interest is not in melding art and life together it is in opening myself to health and spirit. So, the criteria will be different. My goals are different. I plan to post here about these changes - there are so many. Now, I can hear a lot of you saying: why are you putting more things on your plate? Ultimately I think I am taking more things off my plate. Removing temptations and habits and helping me focus on my own health and personal enlightenment. Mary had a very exhaustive list of what she wanted to do and the things which fell into each category. Mine is much smaller. Mostly I am planning to focus on my physical health, my food intake and my spiritual awareness. I would love to add things like reading only one author for the entire month - but I don't think I will have the additional time to read while working and going to school. I am going to list the categories and I would love it if you all added your suggestions.
Physical Activity - to be done every day for 30 days
Eliminate One Food
Add One New Healthy Food Habit
Reading at least one thing about a different religion or spiritual tradition - the religion remains the same for the entire 30 days - every day for 30 days (can be as brief as a wikipedia entry)
Incorporating a healing technique from the tradition of the month
And my favorite: listening to only one musician for the entire month (this is going to kill my kids!)

So please send your suggestions. Suggest artists, foods, physical activities, send questions. Get involved. I look forward to hearing from you.
This year of vision questing begins August 1st - the day after my 38th birthday!

My Mamas

2009-07-18T19:23:00.005-05:00

I had a very wise therapist tell me once, that no one woman could be everything to a child. As the child grows they will find other people to fill in the missing pieces and create a tribal mother - a multi-faceted mother. I always liked that idea, especially because it freed me from being angry at my own mother for all the ways I felt she had not fulfilled my needs. She did the job she was sent here to do and as the Ashanti say: "the child chooses the mother" so she did the job my soul needed her to do. It also released any guilt, and let's face it jealousy, I might experience when my own children sought out other mothers to nurture and feed them.

As I have grown I have widened my mother circle. Some I know in real-time, others have loved me through the pages of their words. Some of them are older than me and some younger. All of them have helped shape and create the woman I am today. And if I stand tall, it is "because I stand on the shoulders of my ancestors" those of blood and those of spirit.

Even though it is not mother's day, tomorrow is the birthday of one of my many Mamas. She is my mamasita, who is in no way small. The space she takes up in the world is large and noticeable. She takes no static. She has given me the gift of laughter, compassion, the absence of should, the freedom to curse and be myself at all times. Her love comes with only one condition, that I give it back. And I do with joy. This Mama and I are also joined by cancer. Me before her. And I count it a great gift to have been available for her through her journey as she was for me through mine. My love for her is boundless and my gratitude without measure.

Tomorrow is her birthday. And I say - Happy Birthday Mama, Norma. I love you deeply.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

Why I am Angry With Elizabeth Edwards

2009-07-14T13:43:00.005-05:00
I know, this is old news, but I JUST saw the Oprah episode where she was on discussing her new book and the infidelity of her husband John Edwards; who I was planning to vote for for awhile. Then I realized he was a bit smarmy long before the "scandal." I am not upset with Elizabeth because she stayed with John. I am also not upset that in the interview she seemed to be in either deep denial or lying the way she kept looking at the ceiling and searching for an answer. What I am angry about is this statement, that whether the child is John's or not does not affect her life. What the hell?! I cannot believe she said that. I also cannot believe that someone who would want to protect and forgive their spouse for not giving them the ONE thing they asked for shouldn't care about another life. Should care about a life that might be partly her husband. I don't think I could remain married to a man who did not live up to his responsibilities. What makes her and her children so different and more deserving than this woman's child? If in fact the child is John's. Because she is married to him?

Now let me back up. I am not usually interested in the goings-on of politicians. But I liked John Edwards and I believed in his message. And I don't really care if he was unfaithful or not. But what moved me about his campaign promises was his commitment to poverty and uplifting people in poverty and that includes, implicitly single-parent homes. Now I know the woman he was having an affair with can probably afford to raise this baby on her own. And that she is probably a single mother by choice. I get that. What I don't get is how, even if you are not going to marry the other mother of your child you wouldn't be responsible for their presence on the planet? What kind of baby daddy are you? I don't know all that happened behind the scenes. And I definitely don't know if a paternity test was given, but come on. Really? You're not going to find out and take responsibility? And if you do decide to be responsible for this other life your wife will not be affected by it? It won't impact Elizabeth's life? She is lying. You cannot in one sentence say that you think women should treat other women with respect by not interfering with their marriages and then say - well, the life of that women and her child will not affect me. I like Elizabeth Edwards. Really I do. But I am pissed as hell with her right now. And maybe since the original airing of this interview she has changed her position some. But right at this moment, having just come from watching it, I am disappointed at the level of her denial and lack of care for the life of a child, no matter who their father is.

Just my thoughts!

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing!

in peace

The Middle Places

2009-07-12T14:43:00.003-05:00

I have written a lot about being in the middle place. Waiting. And I know I have also written about how I am not good at it. Once again I find myself in that place. Waiting. Decisions need to be made and since I am a grown-up now (perish the thought!) I don't make them by myself any longer. There is something wonderfully beautiful about having your life depend on others and something outrageously annoying about it too.

I like to stick with somethings long past the expiration date. Hanging on to old habits and old people even when they have obviously become toxic for me. And then there are opportunities that arise that I quickly discard, perhaps noticing how healthy they could actually make me. In light of my last post I am contemplating surrender. Letting go of those things that don't serve me anymore. And most importantly not giving a damn about what other people think about it. I hold myself hostage a lot.

My family is standing at a crossroads. One road is the one we have been on for years. It is familiar and can ultimately be damaging. Another road - well I can't really see it for all the overgrowth. And I think Frost wrote about this already. It is dark and scary that way. There are more people depending on me and so that makes the safe choices look more appealing. But it feels as though this time, and at this particular crossroads we know better. We are better equipped to get through the forestry. Or is that wishful thinking? How do you know you aren't making the same mistakes over and over again?

Photo:InNotOf's

Surrender

2009-06-23T19:08:00.004-05:00

SURRENDER
Function:verb
Inflected Form(s):
sur·ren·dered; sur·ren·der·ing Listen to the pronunciation of surrendering \-d(ə-)riŋ\
Etymology: Middle English surrendren, from surrendre, noun
Date: 15th century

transitive verb1 a: to yield to the power, control, or possession of another upon compulsion or demand b: to give up completely or agree to forgo especially in favor of another2 a: to give (oneself) up into the power of another especially as a prisoner b: to give (oneself) over to something (as an influence)intransitive verb: to give oneself up into the power of another : yield
synonyms see relinquish

source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Self-help gurus and religion-brokers always talk about surrender. Let go and Let God. What the hell does that mean? I like details, especially when they help me not do something. And when I give it up where does it go? Are there people out there who actually want to pick up my shit and take it home with them? Maybe use it as an ottoman or end table? Maybe it means that I should get out of my own way. That is also another ambiguous phrase. Ultimately it probably means to stop overanalyzing everything. Just get up in the morning and do what has to get down. But really is an unexamined life worth living?

I talk a great deal about surrender and I am now in the place where I want to know how to actually do it. And it may take me getting comfortable with the fact that I can't throw out my issues like the trash and have it be gone - for good. Even that trash is going to come back to haunt me in terms of global warming and landfill issues. So, then I think, hmmm, this analogy is not too far off. How do I not have the trash come back to haunt me? I become more mindful of creating it in a way that it can be used as compost or simply disintegrate. Letting go of backed up stuff from my childhood is like going green. It takes some research. Getting some new more energy-efficient tools and then being sure to use them.

So what can be in my greening my past toolkit? Hmmm. An ecofriendly world view. I need to cultivate an attitude of unity and connectedness with my environment. That means forgiving those who have hurt me. Saying good-bye to toxic people and situations. Embracing happiness and optimism over their antonyms.
Recycle and Reuse. Taking those things that work and re-tooling them into something positive. Starting small with plastics maybe or the fact that I keep a neat linen closet. Taking those small things and repurposing them into a clean car and a neat closet. One thing at a time.
Composting. Those things I am done with? Throwing them in a bucket and turning them over with sun, heat and air to turn it into something rich and useful. And doing the same with myself. Getting out, getting air and exercise and turning those things in myself that challenge me into opportunity for gold. Now, before I strain this analogy (or am I too late?)I am working on surrender. I think I wrote that I am not sure how G-d fits into my ontology. I am still working on that one. Perhaps that is why I am going back to graduate school for religious studies. To finish exploring those big questions. So when I let something go I am not sure where it goes. But I am beginning to think that it doesn't matter where it goes as long as it leaves me, right? And that there is really no reason to hold onto anything that doesn't serve me, including empty eggshells. There is no tidy conclusion for this post. I am still mulling this one over and trying to get comfortable with this truth: I may never know fully - Anything.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Photo: E-pic

"It's called Friendship,

2009-06-11T15:59:00.004-05:00

ya' know: poor people's therapy." I heard this line on a rerun of Without a Trace and I laughed. Probably because of the actor's delivery which was appropriately sarcastic and because it's true! My earliest friends have mostly become social workers and therapists. I wonder if that is a coincidence or if even at that age I knew I needed help :)! But friendship is therapy, especially for women. Not sure what guys do when they get together. My husband swears that men bond around activity - doing, making or building something. I wouldn't know. Me and my friends bond around food. And if it has been an extremely stressful week, around alcohol. So it is not surprising that over breakfast this morning a friend shared some truly illuminating insights. I was blown over having realized that my 100th Angel in my quest for cracking this particular life nut had arrived.

The life nut - me and my true issue with food. I've known long before Oprah that my weight is not about the food but about the comfort food has always given me. When I was young and feeling neglected and isolated I would eat. Food was a comfort to me and since my life has been so difficult I deserved to indulge that comfort whenever I wanted. I deserved to feel better. My friend told me that she has an inner rebel. A little person inside her who doesn't want to go with convention. Who wants to buck the rules and wants to do what she wants to do - because she deserves it. I got that so clearly. Whenever I go on a new life path I last for a short period of time and then my little rebel who apparently speaks with a bullhorn, shows up and tells me that I am smart, sassy and perfectly capable of taking care of this issue on my own. I don't need no stinkin' help. And me and the little rebel jump ship. What's the definition of crazy - doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome? Well, when it comes to me and food, I am crazy! Truly certifiable. What makes me think I can do this on my own? I haven't done a great job in the last 37 years! That is not to disparage me, because at some things I am brilliant, and at this, not so much.

What really stopped me in my tracks was when my friend said: "do what works." So simple. Of course! Do what works. Does me guesstimating how much I've eaten work? Does my not exercising work? Does my not eating at all work? NO! None of these things work. What does work is my planning my food so I keep my blood sugar level and making sure I eat balanced meals with few to no processed foods. What works is for me to workout - strenuously and to sweat. What works is for me to get enough sleep so I can get up leisurely in the morning and not rush through my routine so I don't have time to eat. Those things work. Yet, I continue to stop doing them. So, what to do about my little rebel?

Well, she is a lot like me and does not respond to harshness. She is, I have come to realize, the main character in a section of a play I wrote called "Blue Cohosh." She is "The Little Girl with the Patent Leather Shoes"

There is a girl I know
younger than me, smaller than me
with black patent leather shoes that reflect Up
she sits in the corner without making a sound
without disturbing the air in the room

The poem goes on to talk about how Vega, the main character, takes up so much space. How she can't even breathe without making noise. And she wants this child to teach her how to be invisible. Maybe she should yell at her. Maybe ignore her. She decides to invite the little girl for tea.

That's what I am going to do with my little rebel. Invite her in. Ask her to be my friend. Make her know she is loved and give her some tea. So that she becomes one with the tribe instead of in opposition to it. Gotta go, kettle's whistling.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Photo:Candy Pop (I love that name!)

Love is.....

2009-06-09T09:54:00.009-05:00

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
I Corinthians 13:1-13

This has always been one of my favorite bible verse, next to "Jesus wept," which I tend to say now instead of cursing. I learned that verse by heart when I was young and had to recite it in church. I did not think of all it might mean to me in my life. And of how it distilled the meaning of life into a few lines. The Bible is an amazing work of art.

This post is about love and the uses of the word and its accompanying prepositions. In our collective speech there seems to be a big difference between loving someone and being "in love" with someone. As far as I am concerned there isn't a difference. The word police have co-opted the word "love" to mean so many different things. There is romantic love and parental love and platonic love and and and....
There is only one kind of love. It is when you respect another, care for another and show up for another. I am in love with so many people. For me, that means that we share that love - we are in it together. I am in love with my children, my old man (I love 70's phraseology!), my mother, my mamas, my friends, my sister. I am in it with them. We love each other and we share in the taking care of each other.

Why write this post? Well, tomorrow is the shared birthday of two of my greatest loves. My sister and my husband. I love the way Geminis are in my life. They are no nonsense, straight to the point, generous, impatient, brilliant, funny, sarcastic and lovely. A bit about each of my favorite Geminis.

My sister was born when I was five years old and NO ONE was happier than me. I wanted to take care of her and hold her and make sure she was safe. She did not feel as lovingly toward me. She hated being doted on by me. She refused to hold my hand in public and she made fun of me and got me in trouble all the time. But I loved her from the moment she breathed. I was in love with her - still am. Last year when I was very sick I did something very difficult. I picked up the phone and asked my sister for help. I asked her to come and take care of me because I couldn't do it myself. There wasn't even a pause before she pulled out her calendar and told me when she could be there. My sister and I don't have a mushy relationship. In fact, I get a hug a year, on special occasions, or when she lets her guard down and I steal one. It is a joke between us. But hugging and smooshing doesn't make love. Being there makes love. And she is there for me like few others.

My husband was born five years before my sister. He is the one Grace picked for me from half a world away. Hubby is not effusive in his love either. I have to remind him to kiss me or hold my hand, and to quote my friend M:
"If I was married to a normal man, I would go crazy. [my husband] lovingly ridicules me at every opportunity, and I am charmed. Once in a blue moon, he treats me like an ordinary girl and tells me I’m beautiful and how in love with me he is, and that is the longest, most painful day of my year."
So true. Yet, he is exactly who I need in my life to keep me grounded and supported. After nine years of marriage he has grown weary of my go-to excuses and calls me on my shit time after time. Gotta love that in anyone! Quiet as it's kept nothing makes me happier than to be challenged. Everything - my thoughts, opinions, stupid actions - all of it. It makes me grow. And I am more fully myself for having been married to this man.

Love is. Powerful. Simple. Amazing. And all there is. Tell me who you are in love with. I want to know the joy in your life. Here is mine. Happy Birthday to my loves.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

Photo: neuza teixeira

The Little Things

2009-06-08T16:55:00.004-05:00

There is a song by India.Arie called "The Little Things." I have been thinking about the little things after my last post. Thinking about periods, even commas, as opposed to exclamation points. I think it very telling that my grammar has always been exceptional but I have no idea how to properly use commas. Or am I reading too much into things? Little things. Take this moment for instance. After an actually fun trip to Target and Whole Foods with all three of my children, we came home and made pizza for dinner. I was planning a huge Mexican buffet but time got away from me and I only had 40 minutes to make dinner and get them ready for a trip to the gym. Not enough time for Mexican. When I walked in the door unsure of what I was going to actually make, there on the range top was the pizza dough I had taken out of the freezer this morning. In the back of my head I heard my husband's voice from the day before - "oh, this is pizza sauce, I thought it was salsa." Two down, one to go. In the refrigerator, almost hiding, organic mozzarella. The kids dive in and start adding "exotic" ingredients: leftover meatballs, herbs (that's green right?!), strawberries - uh, let's wait on that one. Pizza goes in the oven, done in 10 minutes. They are now all outside. So instead of the Mexican feast planned in my mind, they are eating Italian and dining al fresco! From where I sit, I can see them in the backyard eating and talking and playing and helping each other. This moment will last me a long time.

It's the little things for me today. I worked out. With a trainer. He kicked my butt. But yet it was easier than past workouts. I got used to the hard work and looked forward to the burn. I ate a healthy lunch. Kept my caffeine intake low and had a tiny nap with my 4 year old. All of those things helped me feel better and appreciate the day more. My husband will be home soon. 6:12 on the dot - every day. And his dinner is made. Are there dirty dishes in the sink? You bet! Could the kitchen floor use a good scrub? Absolutely! Do I care and am I spiraling into my "shoulds?" Absolutely not. For this moment life is wonderful. I am considering getting "live this moment" tattooed onto my forearm. It works better than a post-it!

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

Photo: Nanda Mama

Longing

2009-06-07T10:10:00.005-05:00

Everyone is in a different place in their life. I find that I spend a great deal of time, by that I mean too much, thinking about changing places with someone else. Mostly it's my friends who are running races and losing weight and facing their life's demons head on. It's about reading avant garde literature and listening to opera on my ipod (yes, that is about you Tennessee Mary). It is about being someone I think I should be. And then mi secondo mama's voice enters my head (in concert with the voices of several other "mamas" I've had in my life) telling me to ixnay the word "should." I chose to do something. Or in the words of the supreme guru, Yoda, "Do or do not. There is no try." I guess SG would say there is no "should" either. Life is a series of choices. Decisions. Often just periods - no exclamation points.

I remember asking a friend who does not believe there is a G-d, how she got up every morning. Why she got up every morning. She said very simply, because she is alive. Wow. Why isn't that reason enough for some of us, but that I mean the royal we. Me. I got up because G-d was willing me to. As I changed my perspective and became more ambivalent about G-d's actual existence and more interested in Her/His good works it became harder to get up every morning. As if the new truth I was living had sucked the life force out of me. But that is not the case. In fact it is more personal than G-d. It is me.

I have a difficult time reconciling the fact that I cannot do everything. I feel I "should" be able to do everything. And the truth that I cannot paralyzes me. It takes away my gratitude and joy. Now my more astute readers are saying - wow, Keisha sounds depressed. Well, yeah I am. Have been most of my life. Nanda Mama, is a hope. Someone to whom I aspire. She is hard to keep a hold of. I am very good at being her in public. Really good at being her on the phone. But once I get home and close the door she seems to disappear. I have written a lot about needing excitement and newness and adventure. My middle name should be wanderlust. That gives my life purpose. Not really, it just gives my life feet. And it keeps me from hanging out in the uncomfortable. Well, I am firmly rooted in my life here, where I am. External circumstances keep me from moving away - which is a great gift. My feet need to stay here to take care of my three kids and my husband and ultimately myself. My work now is to heal - so many things. And to revel in the freedom and the time I have to do that. And honestly, I am not liking all the things I am finding out about myself. And I am also not trying to change them right now. Just observe. Learn. I will be 38 years old next month and I plan to celebrate that birthday with a great deal of fanfare. Being alive is a great reason for celebration!

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Photo: Azli Jamil

Look Up

2009-05-07T15:06:00.005-05:00

My last post was about being disappointed. Well, I ended up getting U2 tickets and I was suddenly okay. Not really. My husband tells me that I constantly make up a new thing that will make me instantly happy. If only the house were finished. If only all the laundry was done. If only, if only. So much living in the future has kept me from living in this moment and looking around at what I actually do have. A few interesting things happened to me recently that I wanted to share with you.

I was driving my son to school this morning having already dropped off Princess V. I was mentally lamenting the fact that we do not yet have a contractor to work on the first floor of our house. Tumbling the various scenarios of an undone house around in my head. Trying to find a comfortable spot to lay the blame, you know, some place far away from me. Then I started thinking about how I really want my washer and dryer upstairs so I don't have to walk downstairs to the basement to do it. That's why it never gets done because the washer and dryer are so far away!!! And then Grace whispered in my ear: "Look up." There across the street were two young Peruvian women with a baby stroller and a toddler. They had stopped on the corner to re-shuffle the three enormous bags of laundry they were carrying while ensuring the safety of the children. One sack went on the top of the stroller and the other two - well, one was on top of the one ladies' head and the second on her shoulder, leaving her with no empty hands to hold the toddler's hand as they crossed a busy street. I saw her mouth move: "stay close to me" to the toddler. Lesson learned.

The other day I was sitting in my suburban mobile - that's a minivan for the uninitiated - waiting for my daughter outside one of her many lessons. Again lamenting the horrible state of my life. I am so tired, I am annoyed with my kids, my life is so hard. When again Grace whispered, "Look up." And there she was. A woman who looked like your average mom walked out of a store with a plastic bag, she ducked behind the dumpster I was sitting in front off and pulled out a small bottle of wine from a 4-pack, cracked it open and downed it in a matter of seconds. She then threw the bottle and the cardboard case that the 4-pack came in, into the dumpster, wiped her mouth and got into her suburban mobile. Probably also waiting to pick up her child. As I watched her in her car I saw her tilt her head back a few more times. When it was time to go and get my daughter I walked past her window about to knock and ask her if she was alright, if she needed anything; and I saw her with her head down and tears streaming down her face. Instead I prayed for her safe journey home.

I spend so much time in my life looking down or inward or away that I forget to look up and see what is around me. This post is not about feeling better because other people's lives are harder. This post is about recognizing how hard everyone's journey is. We all struggle. We all hurt. Knowing that makes me feel less alone. Remembering that I am linked to everyone keeps me from spiraling downward in my own private Idaho. My love to those women struggling through their lives today. And my gratitude to Grace for today's lesson. When in doubt, Look up.

Photo:Shutterhack

Disappointment

2009-03-30T09:35:00.005-05:00

I don't handle it well. This morning I got online to get U2 tickets. I was on at exactly 10am when they went on sale and got two tickets in my queue. As I was trying to sign out and pay for them; Ticketmaster would not put me through to the end payment process when I tried to edit my credit card information. And time was running out. When I tried to get back to the pay screen I got bumped off the system. And now here I sit - show sold out and I am pissed. I mean I actually cried. Was it because I was not going to see Bono up close (and these seats were pretty good!)? No. It was because I had something that was supposed to be mine and then I didn't have it anymore. It was gone. I expected it. Felt entitled to it. And now it is gone. I am not one to get upset over not getting concert tickets. That's not my style. But lately I have gotten more and more upset when things don't go my way. I feel that they should. I should get the few little things I ask for. Hasn't life been hard enough without such a disappointment?

My four-year old even tried to make me feel better (he has the chicken pox, mind you and should be being comforted by his mother and not the other way around) by hugging me, stroking my head (the way I do to him) and telling me that it was okay. That there were probably other people who didn't get concert tickets either. But I just kept crying and hitting the keyboard saying over and over again that "I couldn't believe it!"

I went to a Morrissey concert recently and I felt great during and after it. There was a collective excitement that I got to be apart of. It was like creating theatre again. That feeling of sitting in the dark watching great creations with other people and sharing a collective experience. Euphoria. Excitement. Unity. A toxin-free high. And then it was over. Couldn't re-live that experience anymore and I had to go back to the laundry and the dieting and the drudgery of my life.

And I realized that this disappoinment over U2 tickets is exactly the same thing. I have been on a concert binge lately. Getting tickets for everything to try and re-live that Morrissey experience. I want to feel alive, again - like in my late teens and twenties. There I go chasing that dragon again. But aren't concerts better than pizza or coca-cola? Only marginally. I got a message today about myself - that I need to be engaged in life. I need to participate and contribute to feel alive. I need to have meaningful work - something that gets me out of bed every morning besides taking my kids to school. That is what this concert addiction is about. That is why I was disappointed about U2 tickets - because I wanted something to look forward to. Something to - give my life meaning? Well, that sucks. Bono, no matter how well he sings (and he sings like a freakin' angel) cannot be the reason I get up everyday. My own internal fire got dampened. And now it is time to reignite it. My life has very little passion and I am a person who thrives on passion. So my disappointment is not over U2 but over my life. Sometimes it's better to blame ticketmaster!

My son just came downstairs and said: "Mama, you stopped crying! I knew you would let it go." Out of the mouth of babes.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

Keisha

photo by: JesApe

Beware the Ides of March - For Marty / On Leah

2009-03-21T10:20:00.006-05:00

Julius Caesar was assassinated on March 15th - according to Roman Lore. He was told by a seer to "beware the ides of March" a phrase made part of the common lexicon by Shakespeare - where all good lines come from (yes I did just end a sentence with a preposition - the Bard would be proud)! This year I did not beware the ides of March and it snuck up and bit me on the tuchas. It was a bitter-sweet-bitter day for me. The funeral of a loved family member - Marty Bressler and the birthday of a dead friend - Leah Ryan. On the surface Marty and Leah were not at all alike. Marty a strong, tall, striking man in his late 70's. A lawyer, devoted husband and caregiver to his late wife Rosalind who battled with brain cancer for over 15 years, a father, community activist, staunch Democrat and liberal (okay they are starting to look more similar,) life enthusiast, drinker of scotch with fruit and as I learned at his service - a harmonica player. Leah was in her 40's. A tall, strikingly beautiful, independent spirit. A writer of all things sardonic, witty and thought-provoking. Generous to a fault, a great cook and a woman whose laugh was infectious. I can still see the way she would tilt her head slightly with her mouth open enough so you could see her entire tongue move in rhythm with her sound. A tall figure often dressed in black or animal print but with a heart of hope and breadth that awed me. I love Marty and Leah. I am a better person for having held them and argued with them and known them. Both of them were dear to me and both of them died from leukemia. And both of them stood up and took control over their death by ending their treatments.

In Judaism it is considered inappropriate to mourn too long for the dead. A year for those close to you. My mourning of Leah is coming to an end just as my mourning of Marty has begun. I will end saying Kaddish for Leah very soon and I have just begun it for Marty. Neither of them were blood relatives. Neither of them were immediate family. But both of them are dear to me. Marty a grandfather and Leah a sister. In life and in death I will think of them always with a metaphoric scotch with fruit and a head held back in laughter.

Beware the Ides of March.

How long till my soul gets it right?

2009-03-04T15:51:00.009-05:00

Reincarnation. I am really wondering if that is a real thing. Awhile ago I did a thorough excavation of my preconceived afterlife notions. I think it had to do with meeting and marrying my husband, a firm agnostic who hates labels. Ilya doesn't know if there is a G-d and it doesn't keep him up at night either. He also believes that when you die that's all folks. No chariots, no clouds, no celestial choirs. But there is also no hell and people gnawing on your brain if you were ever mean to your Mother-in-law!

I came to, what I thought were, some pretty creative conclusions about life and death and the afterlife. I believe that there is no heaven or hell. That you die and that is it. But I also firmly believe in the idea of reincarnation. The coming back and living your life over and over until you've cleared up your karma and you "got it right." My interpretation of reincarnation and karma is a bit different. "I" did not come back. The things that I needed to correct or erase or do over would keep happening through my future generations. If I was messy and I didn't get over it or try to work through it in this life then one or two or all of my kids would be messy and it would be their challenge in their life to work through. But my "messiness" would get reincarnated and through it so would I. That is inevitable, isn't it? That we get passed on to our future generations not just through genetics but through nature. For example, my father always patted our backs when he hugged us. He called hugs "pats" and he would say "pats are very important!" All of my children pat when they hug. Now, I could be unconsciously patting them on the back instead of holding and squeezing, and that's why they do it. For whatever reason, they pat and their children will also pat and so on and so on. That's a good trait to pass on.

But what about addiction? When they say it "runs in families." That means it stays there until someone learns the lesson and releases it. Their addiction karma is cleared and that trait does not reincarnate in their offspring? I always thought that would be a good thing. But my father was challenged by alcohol and drugs - and I am not. But I cannot put down sugar. Coincidence? I don't think so.

Lately these things have been causing me agita because I spend more time trying to excavate and extinguish all that I perceive to be bad habits. At what point do your flaws become quirky personality traits? Where is that dividing line? I have a perfectionist's mentality without creating the same results. It haunts me. It makes me feel bad about myself. It sets an impossible bar for me, my children and all those unfortunate enough to come in contact with me that day. And it seems to be the work of women, especially mothers.

Today in the car I was listening to Galileo by the Indigo Girls. Emily asks this question in her lyric:
How long till my soul gets it right
can any human being ever reach that kind of light
I call on the resting soul of galileo
king of night vision, king of insight

Can we ever? We humans are interesting work.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

Photo: Mobile Hamish

Boobies!

2009-02-22T12:21:00.009-05:00

That is what my eldest son says when he needs to be comforted. I breastfed all three of my children and my Max was the hardest to wean fully. We did wean him, when I was pregnant with Buddha and then after three months of relentless asking, begging, crying and pleading - I let him nurse again. He was immensely grateful but never got over being told that boobies were over. He likes to cuddle me and put his head there for comfort. Breasts are important. Not their size or their shape - just them. They comfort, they feed and the nourish and they need to be taken care of.

There is a history of breast cancer in my family. Luckily I do not bear any of the genetic markers for it but I run the risk of having it later in life for several reasons. I have had one great aunt diagnosed with breast cancer who underwent a full mastectomy and one who died from it. My own maternal grandmother died at the age of 49 so we don't know how her direct line would have affected my mom, my sister and me. But at an early age I paid attention to my breasts and their health. I had them reduced at 27, nursed my children and had my first mammogram last year.

I am better today but still think every day about secondary cancers from the one I had. And I want like hell for cancer to eradicated in my lifetime. I think it can be. And I think the onus is more on prevention and education than on cures - but until we can get our American culture to see that planning ahead is pivotal, then we are left with research and cures. Chemotherapy is an amazing thing. Oncologists are amazing people. And I will never again sneer at traditional western medicine. None of it is perfect yet it is getting better. So to that end I decided to dedicate myself to healing the breasts of this world and joined the Susan G. Komen - 3 Day Walk for Breast Cancer. In October, I am walking 60 miles over 3 days in Philadelphia. Doing my small part to heal the breasts of the world. And hopefully laying a path should my breasts need additional help in the future.
I will be posting more about my preparations for this walk along with my preparations for the triathlon I am doing in September. And I will definitely ask you to do your part. I plan to raise $3000.00 for breast cancer and I know you are going to help me. Because all of us got here through a womb and a breast, whether we ate from it, laid on it or covered it with our tears - breasts have raised and nourished us. It is the least we can do.

Serenity Now

2009-02-20T08:11:00.009-05:00

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
-Serenity Prayer

That is the serenity prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous. I have spent a fair amount of my time in self-help meetings. Beginning at an early age I went to them to deal with my father's many addictions. So I know it by heart, along with how to share without over-sharing and how to yell "Hello" to someone after they introduce themselves. I know these rituals the same way I know the Catholic Mass by heart and can sing my high school's "unofficial" school song. Practice makes perfect. Years and years of repetition will ingrain something in your head, heart and psyche. But there is one thing I didn't learn from all that time in "the rooms" reciting the serenity prayer - it was how to summon serenity as quickly as I summoned the words.

You would think it would be a kind of incantation like "Abracadabra!" Rabbit from hat - Serenity from me. Doesn't work that way. Know how I know? I've been praying silently and out loud for awhile now and I still can't manage to calm myself down with my children. All kinds of prayers: "Lord, help me." "Jesus wept." and my personal favorite - "Don't let me kill this kid!" Now before you call DYFS (and I think it bears saying that my Aunt is the director of Child Protective Services in Westchester - so I know the drill)my children can bring out the very best and the very worst in me. And I am practicing mindfulness and taking deep breathes and then my daughter will slam the door or talk back or roll her eyes one too many times and I see myself from outside myself. And the me standing there is blinking out. Literally she is gone - screaming, manically following the child from room to room and seeing all manner of physical retribution in her mind's eye. I know the neighbors can hear me. I am having an out of body experience. One that I am probably going to feel bad about when I regain consciousness. Why?!

Sometimes I really wish there was an audience to my parenting at all times, then I would behave better. It doesn't matter if I create an audience I know they aren't really there. So pretending doesn't work. There is something encoded in my DNA - probably in the collective maternal DNA - that has the scream gene. Some of us can fight nature and some of us can't. I fall on the latter end of the spectrum. And I feel badly about this. My mother was a screamer. And I often hear her and realize that I sound just like her. What's harder is that I hear my eight year old and she sounds just like me. I can fend off extreme guilt for only so long and then I have to do something about my behavior. Like stop yelling.

It is so hard. Yelling is cathartic. It gets the impurities out, sort of like an emotional facial. And since my vocal chord surgeries I don't really yell that loud. But yea, rationalization (see, I told you I've been to alot of self help meetings). So do I have a solution for this situation? Not really. I am practicing being in the moment. I am practicing having the prayers trigger a physical response in me other than blind fury. And I am carving out more time where I am child-free. I know I really need to have meaningful work outside of raising my children and that is a guilt bridge I haven't crossed yet - too busy standing on the side of it wondering how far down is the jump. All of these things are a process. So to all the Mamas out there here's my shout out for the day - commiserate or feel better about yourself. But I know I am not alone.

We are blessed may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

photo by: oddsock

Feed Me

2009-02-17T17:46:00.004-05:00

There is nothing more intimate than feeding someone. Food, that is. My first relationship with my children (after carrying them) was feeding them. I breastfed all of my kids - but that's not what this post is about. It's about the intimacy of food. Preparing food that someone then ingests and uses to power their body - what?! I admit that sometimes I do not feed my children very good food. Back in the day we did run through a drive-through or two or three. But not any longer. And this post is also not about the "right" way to feed your family and yourself - it's just about feeding.

When my daughter was very little she would hum or purr when she nursed. She was really enjoying the experience of eating. As she got older she would hum when she ate something she liked - but it was usually only something homemade - preferably by me. She would sit and be transformed while eating as though she was soaking in the love that went into the food while it was being prepared. Have you ever noticed that when you are annoyed, tired or angry dinner does not come out well, even if it is your go-to meal? We put ourselves in our food and then we give it to other people to eat. I have a secret - I don't eat at other people's homes unless I know them - well. And there are a handful of people I will actually allow to cook for me. Food is that sacred to me. So, I started thinking why is it that I am overweight and have been most of my life? Why is it that I will eat mass-produced crap? If food is sacred. I realized, quite sadly, that I am not sacred to me. That I did not connect or value or love my body. And I was therefore really comfortable giving it crap because ultimately I thought that is what it deserved.

Recently, a silent prayer I launched into the atmosphere became real. I re-met and connected with some amazing women. All at the same time we decided to take care of ourselves. We joined Weight Watchers. We joined a health club. We signed up for a triathlon. We aligned ourselves with ourselves and made us a priority. All of us are mothers, most of us have three. So carving that time out for ourselves really took a lot of reprogramming. I watch them feed themselves with time and exercise and attention and even yummy smelling lotions and potions and I am inspired. I have air and life breathed into me. And I once again see the power of asking for what it is I want.

Don't get me wrong - getting to the gym (even though it is heavenly) is hard to do. And eating healthfully is still a challenge for me, no matter how sacred I think food is, I still have the tapes telling me that I am not sacred. But I know that this path will get easier to walk if I stick with it and I tell my mind to shut up and allow what I know to be real to lead the way.

This post is about food - and the many ways it shows up in our lives. Feed yourself something wonderful today!

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Here it is

2009-02-15T09:13:00.003-05:00

You have asked, so now I deliver. Here is my graduate school essay. I know there are probably commas that shouldn't be there and run on sentences and maybe even a dangling participle or two (whatever that is). Sorry for not taking more of you up on that offer to edit - but I got tired. But it is done and as we said at Iowa - done is good.

I am fortunate to have had a very eclectic upbringing. I was raised in a Baptist family and attended Catholic school for nine years. I was the only non-Catholic in my graduating class and I graduated with the highest grade in religion. I spent weekends with my family visiting my Episcopalian paternal grandmother in Brooklyn. She lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant on the border of Crown Heights - the headquarters for the Lubavitcher Hasidim. My weekends were spent watching the throngs of black-clad men walking to and from shul. Friday afternoons were particularly interesting because I got to watch the women bustle to and from the shops making preparations for Shabbos. My closest cousin is a Buddhist and taught me to chant when I was three years old. And when I was ten, another cousin returned from eleven years in Haiti. She taught me to have reverence for my ancestors and to seek their counsel in times of crisis. I went to boarding school for high school and studied Dante's Inferno (still one of my favorite books) and read the Bible for the first time as a work of literature and not as a road map for life. This time in Massachusetts allowed me to ask tough questions of myself, my beliefs and my God.

My undergraduate degree was in Religious Studies and Theatre. I chose theatre because I love to create sacred space where people can enter, be transformed and leave. My obsession with the liminal led me to theatre when I could not decide which path to take after college. I considered the seminary after high school but I needed to do my own investigation of truth. I needed to find out what I believed and how I wanted to live my life.

That journey sent me down many roads, through Christianity and Catholicism – the home of my primary eduation. The Baptist Church where I chose to be baptized at the age of seven and where I remained faithfully until college. Then through Wicca where I understood the presence of God in everything. My desire to understand the religions of my ancestors led me to study Ifa and Santeria. My long abiding love and respect for Jewish tradition and ritual led me to explore Judaism. The desire to have my children in a spiritual community led me to Unitarianism.

All the time one thing has remained constant: there is but one Creator in my ontology. I have found my own path to Grace, what I call the Prime Mover, the Architect or God. I am in a place of peace with my understanding of Grace in the world. I acknowledge the divinity of Jesus while acknowledging the divinity in all of Grace's creations. I listen to Bob Marley with spiritual awakening and light the candles of Chanukah while bringing in our Christmas tree and Yule log. Some might say that this makes me a dabbler, not a true walker on a spiritual path. I diasagree. I have forged my own path in the wilderness of loss and confusion. I am comfortable taking what works for me from different traditions and creating a spiritual life for my family. I do not believe that to belong to a tradition you have to abandon your values and your personal truth. The things I believe are fundamental to me, and cannot exist in the same space as a dogma that insists that I act differently. I have sought an academic program that presupposes the existence of God but does not insist that I share it's specific beliefs to achieve a Master's Degree.

I have a MFA in directing from the University of Iowa. And even though that degree is in a different field I feel that theatre and religion are intimately connected. I have always been drawn to works that explore questions of belief and help make sense of our world. My thesis in graduate school was a collaborative piece titled “God's Mother.” In the workshop phase, this piece was a riff on Abraham's Sacrifice of Isaac or The Binding of Isaac. I wanted to explore Kierkegaard's Knight of Faith versus his Knight of Infinite Resignation from Fear and Trembling. The workshops explored what if Abraham hadn't heard the voice of God and didn't recognize the ram? What if he killed his son? What would Sarah say?

My idea, then and still, was to explore the line between ecstatic vision and mental anguish – suffering. The question – What would Sarah say?, led me to explore her story as the mother of Isaac. The play became about Sarah, Hagar and Mary and their relationships with each other, historically and with their “famous” sons. What is it like to give birth to the founder of a religion? That is what the play asked. The play had a life outside of academia receiving performances in New York and Chicago.

My undergraduate thesis, which earned me magna cum laude upon graduation, was another play entitled “In Search of Eve” and it detailed the hypothetical conversation Eve had with herself before and after she ate “the apple.” All things being equal, and with all information and consequences at her disposal would Eve make the same choice? My work as a director has always been to do what the great Anne Bogart suggested which is “to put the questions onstage.” And my questions have always been of a theological nature.

The major theological dilemma I face is the one I have sought to answer through my own personal investigation of truth: the question of suffering and the treatment of death. I have suffered before I realized that suffering was a choice. I do not completely agree with Buddhism, in the most simple sense, that all suffering comes from attachment to the world and we will eliminate our suffering when we eliminate all attachment. I love my children, my husband, my family. And my attachment to them gives my life meaning. I do not suffer because of them I achieve joy and peace (and let's face it – anger and frustration) because of them. If I choose not to accept their death as inevitable I will suffer. If I choose to wallow in the negative, I will also suffer.

Last year I was diagnosed with a very rare cancer. There were very few doctors familiar with the treatment or able to give me any kind of prognosis. I sought out the best doctors and did my own personal research to learn everything I could about this cancer and I made preparations in the event of my death. I learned something through that work. It was not depressing for me to think about my death. It was not hard to plan my funeral or my burial arrangements. What was hard was thinking about the future of my three children and husband without me. What floored me, each and every time, was their lives without me and the fact that they would be sad if I died. That proms, weddings and births would occur and I would be missed. I clearly understood how I could suffer in that moment; if I attached myself to their pain; if I stayed in that moment.

I chose to walk out of that moment and acknowledged that pain is a part of life. They would experience it and there was not a lot I could do to keep them from all of it. They needed it to grow. That released me from the suffering. I did not lose my attachment to them - I lost my attachment to something I could not predict or stop or change. What I could control was my ability to prepare them, to let them know I loved them and would continue to love them and that I would fight to get well.

My longing to make sense of the world has led me down many paths academically and professionally. I am a theatre director, a professor, a holistic health counselor, a mother, a wife and an artist. I love all these jobs and have not felt that any of them have wasted my time. They have all laid stones on my path.

I love to teach. I get joy and insight from it. I learn so much from my students and I get excited every time they figure out a problem or are able to do something they never thought possible – like standing before a room of people and giving a speech.

Being a holistic health counselor speaks directly to my desire to take care of people by helping them take care of themselves. Michael Pollan is a hero of mine and my focus on the ethics of food creation, consumption and access will always be at the top of my agenda. I find this lack of access to healthy, clean and safe food to be a moral issue. I believe that the study of religion, food and theatre are not mutually exclusive. All of them contribute to the quality of a person's life. And helping people have a great quality of life is as important to me as helping them have a good death.

Vocationally I feel that I am called to the chaplaincy. I plan to receive interfaith ordination and to work as a hospice chaplain. It feels as though all of my work and paths have led me to help ease the transition for people who are dying and to comfort the people left behind. Academically, I plan to pursue a PhD in Religious Studies, with a focus in Ethics. I want to continue to teach at the college level. And I plan to continue my work with creating access to healthy food for people living in poverty and urban areas especially women and children.

Today, I stand on the other side of cancer. But the lessons of that particular battle are not lost on me. And if it gave me anything it was clarity about my future. And if it took anything away it was the fear of going after it.

Photo: Linda Cronin

For Mary

2009-02-10T16:04:00.006-05:00

This is Mary. Mary Fons. Mary Fons-Misetic. She's been married since I saw her last. I love Mary. I first met her in graduate school when I was lucky enough to cast her in a production of Top Girls. And then I got to cast her again and again. She is talented - and that is no small compliment. More importantly she uses her talent to make things better for people. When I knew Mary she was quirky and funny and still coming into the comfort of her own skin. When I see and hear of her now she is there - in her skin and comfortable being there, although lately the inside of her skin is a painful place to be. Mary's been sick. She's been in and out of hospitals. She's had major - major surgeries. And she's carried on without a colon - come on people - no colon?! Through all of that she has managed to keep her spirits up and her attitude right. There is something I read on her blog Papergirl the other day that stood out to me. When she was going through another day of off the charts pain she said she wished she would die. And then she regretted having said that, lest the universe make good on her statement. There is something I wanted to write to Mary and to all of us out there who have wanted to die at one time or another.

It's okay. The universe - despite the people making money to tell you differently - is not a literal, unimaginative entity. It get's subtlety. It gets sub-text and most importantly it gets sarcasm. But what the universe gets and sees better than anyone or anything is our heart. At that moment when you said I wish I would die, the universe heard this: "This is pain I don't want anymore take it away. Take it away right now. Put me someplace without pain." Because that is what you said, that is what you wanted. It is coming, my love. It is on the way. It has been ordered by you. So many of us want to take away the pain of those we love. I want to take Mary's pain - so badly. I had a friend who would tell me to call her when I had to worry. She would worry for me. So, to my friends out there who have something they can't bare, send it to me for awhile. I'll hold it for you. And if you can't, know that I am loving you and holding you up out here. Holding a place without pain just for you.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

I love you, Mar

Little Plastic Castles

2009-02-10T15:32:00.003-05:00

They say goldfish have no memory I guess their lives are much like mine And the little plastic castle is a surprise every time
-Ani DiFranco

It is amazing to me what I remember and what I forget. But I never forget a kindness. And there is one tiny moment from my past that I've held onto for over 20 years. In high school I was in the musical Pippin. It was a happy moment because I was one of the youngest cast members and that year was a tour year - we spent Spring Break in England performing at various schools. It was a boon to get in. I worked hard. Learned the choreography. Sang my heart out. Mastered the make-up and the costume changes. And even managed to secure a line! But there was one scene that stressed me out. Every performance. The seduction of Pippin. I was never a skinny girl. Always a heavy girl. And while I am smart and funny and talented, I went to school with skinny girls - very skinny girls. So the seduction scene stressed me out. I had to lie on a box and undulate. And I did this after one of the skinnier of the skinny girls had grapes plucked from her bathing suit. I was in a corset and genie pants. More coverage that way. This scene always made me sweat but no more so than one performance at an all boy's school in England. I was off stage waiting for the grape girl to get plucked and I heard the raucous, construction site-like calls of the boys in the audience. I was next. And I remember the box getting pushed onto the stage and there I was undulating and the crowd went silent. Chirp Chirp Chirp. Now I have left out the fact that the grape girl was not just shapely she was blond - but truly I don't think that had anything to do with it. I think it was that she wasn't fat. I was mortified and I am quite sure that tears came to my eyes. And then it happened. Pippin. He pulled me off the box and grabbed me, as was his staging. And then he did something special. He pulled me very close to him and put his hand in the small of my back and hugged me. He made me look at him and he sang right to me. And I forgot that I wasn't the grape girl. I felt wonderful being me. And I remembered that I could sing and dance and be funny. In that moment he held me and saw me and did something he didn't need to do - he made me feel better. It was his birthday the other day - Pippin, and I felt the need to go back and listen to the soundtrack and remember his kindness. And as I wrote happy birthday on his face book page, I also wrote silently - thank you, for the day that you saw my soul.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

Photo by Lachlan

I would NOT die for you

2009-02-07T01:52:00.011-05:00

A strange comment. I have heard people say that they would die for their children. I know people, and if I tell you who they are then they would have to kill you, who would die for our President. Back in the days when drama permeated my life and I lived a rather high-strung soap-opera existence, saying that I would die for someone was the ultimate in fake love. It somehow meant that my love was deep, enduring and willing to be snuffed out for their benefit. Bullshit.
This week I celebrated a very wonderful anniversary. First let me say that anniversaries are not huge in our little family. Hubby and I jokingly forget the exact date we were married (we originally planned the 26th and then got bumped because some other people had a sentimental attachment to that date). We were in fact married June 25th. That day usually comes and goes with little fanfare. Our birthdays are equally low-key, although we do try to make more of an effort where the children are concerned. My excuse, er, explanation for this personal phenomenon was that we sought the sanctity in every day - so we didn't need constructed events to appreciate each other or to give each other gifts. But that was a bunch of new-agey crap. Mostly these days just snuck up on me and I wasn't organized. There was always a gift or two but never a huge blowout. But something changed this week. February 5th to be exact.
One year ago on that day it was Super Tuesday in the most hotly contested Democratic primary in a generation. And one year ago that day I had life saving cancer surgery.

I remember the moments leading up to that day so clearly. The fear, the excitement, the uncertainty. I had no way to prepare for the other side of that day so I just let my expectations go. But deep down I knew I would be alright, I knew I would do everything possible, and so would my surgeons, to make sure I lived. In the days leading up to this event I planned my funeral. And I had a great time doing it. I approached it like any theatrical event. My objective - to make sure the audience had a wonderful time. That there was a catharsis, that they entered sad, bereaved even, but that they were transformed in that sacred time and liminal space. That it was beautiful and bewitching to all the senses. And that no one was inconvenienced.

I wrote in an earlier post about my death that what scared me the most was the pain I would leave behind. The people who would miss me. The graduations, weddings, births and promotions that would go on without me. And that hopefully there would be a little whisper of me loving them still there in those moments. But in the moment when I needed to decide to live or die I chose to live for my children, for my husband for my grandchildren. Because there was no other way to make their lives better. My kids would not be better off without me. And they probably would never get over it. Once diagnosed, even though it went against my first holistic thoughts, I decided to go full on conventional medicine. I did the chemotherapy that literally felt like it's job - it was poisoning me - for an entire week every single time. I had the tumor resection and the subsequent 3 vocal chord surgeries. I traded in my melodic, resonant teaching voice for one that squeaks and sometimes loses breath. I did the radiation, even after vomiting several times from fear of the machine and falling asleep at the wheel while driving home from the hospital, and months and months of not being able to eat or climb the stairs without assistance. And even on the days when it felt easier to just go to sleep and stay there, I got up everyday. Because I love my children so I will not die for them, but I will live for them, over and over and over again if I have to.
I thank Grace for allowing me to stand here cancer-free. And even after all I've been through when asked if I would do it again I immediately say yes. Because this life will be lived by me but it will be lived for my children. And lest you get it twisted - my happiness, my health and my wholeness makes my children better people. It gives them a silent example of all that is possible. And all a mother will do for her children: she will dare to take care of herself.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing

in peace
keisha

To my girls

2009-01-26T12:39:00.001-05:00

Anger

2009-01-06T18:36:00.011-05:00
I am angry. And am trying really hard not to be (that picture is helping!). I always fancied myself a strong communicator, but apparently I am not. And when I am misunderstood or ignored I get angry - no pissed. It seems easy, this communication thing. Case in point: I recently had the opportunity to spend time with a couple who has been married longer than me and my husband. There is no pretense about them. They say what they mean and the other believes it and moves on. No filter of: "what does that really mean?"
I grew up in a family that didn't really "say" a whole lot of anything but meant so many different things. I got that gene. Often I think I am being crystal clear and then I see this bewildered look on the other person's face. How to say what I mean? It probably starts with knowing what I mean.

I think mixed messages come from lack of clarity in our desire. At this one moment in time I am angry. I assumed that someone would do something because I assumed that I had made my wishes clear. Apparently I did not. And I am angry with that person. But why? Was I really cryptic? Or was that person just not listening? Did I not follow through? Or is this just an attempt to get me to do the work - I always take over botched jobs because I can do it better myself?

I don't know what I want most of the time. It often looks as though I do. I am very good at appearing in control and "with it." But I don't know how to be happy. I don't know how to stand up for myself and I don't know what it is I want. The Ba'hai faith encourages an independent investigation of truth. Do the work. Find out what you want and what you believe. I am in the midst of that investigation and attempting to get comfortable with imbalance and searching. My revelation today was that I often look decisive and on point because I can make quick decisions. But those decisions are often made quickly so I don't have to be in a place of uncertainty. A place of chaos. At least my choices are made....period. It is unpleasant to live like that. Not many people really like change or imbalance. And I realize that I avoid it at all costs. So now I am angry. Because I didn't communicate my needs because I didn't know what they were and I expected someone else to figure it out for me.

A friend suggested I breathe or rant through this anger. Whichever one worked for me. I have done both. That was my rant which allowed me to breathe.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing

in peace

photo: Virgipix

Reading the Fine Print

2009-01-05T19:27:00.003-05:00

G-d is in the details. I believe this. The Devil can be there too, however. I was finally getting the packets ready for my recommenders for graduate school - you know those forms that you agree to waive the right to see but hope that most of the people will send you a copy anyway! And there in almost infinitesimal script are the words: "Academic writing sample blah blah blah 25 pages." WHAT! 25 frickin' pages?! I haven't written anything that long since the last grad school adventure and even then I think it was only 20 after you used acceptable margins. So I call the office of admissions (26 days until they are due) and I ask if I can send in parts of my thesis. No. It has to have been written in the last 5 years. That paper was written in 1999. So not only do I have to write those damnable essays I have to write a 25 page paper.

What is the lesson here? Pay attention. Especially to the fine print.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Pink Cadillac

2009-01-03T23:31:00.011-05:00
They say Eve tempted Adam with an apple
But man I ain't going for that
I know it was her pink Cadillac

I have been having dreams of adventures lately. Long highways. Wind blowing in my short hair. Or better yet, me in some fitted, polka-dot, flirty dress from the 50's. Hair neatly held under a silk scarf that crosses purposefully around my neck, with my Max Factor Red Velvet lipstick and Lana Turner sunglasses. Do you know about Nancy? Now that might sound like a non-sequitor but really it isn't. I have, for a while now, believed that I have been here before. My last incarnation was Nancy, a bored California housewife in the 40's and 50's who had a penchant for smoking and drinking bourbon and soda with an umbrella in it. Now before you send me off to the loony bin, let me explain.

We all, everyone of us, has some alter ego. Nancy revealed herself to me after my first child was born. I was having a hard time with motherhood. I expected a lot from myself. In a word: perfection. That was back when I thought perfection was attainable because I listened to other people tell me it was, even though they were FAR from achieving it themselves. I don't like deceptive people in helping roles. So I tell the truth about how difficult my journey has been and most importantly how it still can be. This truthsaying allows you to either commiserate or feel better about yourself! Now what does this have to do with Nancy? Well, Nancy showed up when I was thinking about being perfect and how far from the mark I had fallen. On the surface Nancy was perfect. Her home was immaculate, her children (one boy and one girl) well-behaved, her husband successful and handsome, her wardrobe spectacular! Nancy had no worries. But for some reason every night after her perfectly prepared dinner was cleaned up and her children were doing their homework and her husband had retired to the den, she got out the bourbon, a lovely high ball glass and the umbrellas and walked out to the patio, sat down by the pool and drank and drank and drank. And then she would wash and put away her glass. Smooth her hair mindlessly with her hand and walk to her bedroom where she would dress for sleep in some lovely negligee and go to bed.
On July 29, 1961 Nancy drowned in her perfect swimming pool. No one found her till morning when there was no breakfast.

The 50's are more than a metaphor for me. And so is Nancy. She is real. And that is a decade in my personal evolution. And like two sides of one coin, part is lovely and the other tragic. Nancy represents the tragic party but she also represents the lovely party. What is still a part of me, a part I have hidden for so long, is the fabulous, glamorous part. Driving down Ventura Highway in a convertible. A pink Cadillac, maybe. See, I want it all. I will embrace the darkness of life if I get to wear fabulously red matte lipstick and drive a Cadillac. I am realizing that life is too short if we are loving every day and too long if we are not. I want a short life. I want to jump out of planes, surf in Costa Rica, swim with manatees (seriously I love manatees!), scuba dive in Eilat, Israel, climb a mountain in India, chat with a sherpa, ride a (preferably my own!) Harley Davidson Heritage Softail Classic down Ventura Highway (now known as Ventura Freeway - doesn't have the same ring!). And every girl's gotta start somewhere, so it's with the Pink Cadillac - seen above (really that is a Pink Cadillac Eldorado Beach Cruiser). Even if it's only to town to Eden Gourmet. I promise to make it an adventure.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing

in peace

Why?

2009-01-01T10:09:00.006-05:00

I used to hate this word. Primarily because it forced me to go into places I wasn't ready to excavate. But that has changed. The other day a fellow facebooker wrote the following as their status:
is pondering what gives one group of people the power of life and death over another group of people?
I wrote something to the effect that sadly and simply they think they have it. To which alot of other people responded that it is not a simple thought. That it is a complex thing. I have a tendency to over-simplify, that is true. But I really wanted to work through this question in my head. I do, honestly think though that the first reason is simple: they believe they have it. I would change think to believe. The reasons why they hold this belief is where the complexity comes in. God, money, status, greed, faith. The list of whys is endless. But the foundation is a belief - in someting - that elevates them to G-d.
after sparking interesting debate, the original poster responded this way:
Wow! Seems like I opened a Pandora's box. I post was referring to the problem in the middle east. I don't know all the specifics and don;t have the answers but when I read and hear about bombings, killings and people being denied a home land I can't help but wonder why. Not just the middle east but historically we can look at Apartheid SA, Bosnia, Sudan and the list goes on. Why are human beings so cruel and what gives us the right to be? We are God's creation but I don;t know if we are his intention sometimes.

I can almost understand how these moments in our collective and brutal human history get started. What is so incomprehensible to me is how they continue even when reason and love step in. People get entrenched in their beliefs. This is how it has always been. If we let go of the old and painful what will we replace it with? If we change....
Obviously the issues of the Middle East, the Sudan, Bosnia, Darfur are so much deeper than I could ever address here, and it bares stating that all it takes is for us to change our minds. To try the unknown. And maybe let go of a belief that does not serve us anymore. No one has the right to take another's life. We as "rational" beings justify "when" it is acceptable to do so. As soon as that rule is on the books it is open season. Because we humans can rationally justify anything. We devalued life a long time ago and coming back from that may be almost impossible. We do need to cultivate a culture of life. A respect for the living (and no I don't want to get into a pro and anti-choice debate here, but that is definitely part of it).

Honestly, I don't understand it either. Especially since part of my family presently lives in areas of violence - the Middle East, poverty, illness, hopelessness - I want an answer to this question too. And I guess, like everything else I will have to change myself and hold life and people in a place of value. And hope that, for now, it is enough.

We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing

in peace

photo: velvetart

My Obligatory New Year's Post

2009-01-01T09:36:00.011-05:00

And here it is.....
Most of these posts are things that have been on my mind and I need a way to get them out and have them make some kind of sense. In a houseful of three brilliant, but still immature children, it is difficult to have these conversations with them. My husband would disagree. But I notice that children internalize our anger, frustration and yes, sadly, depression. So, in an effort to delay therapy, I have decided to write it here.
My thoughts lately have turned to being blessed. Remember a few years ago when it was in vogue to sign your emails with: Peace and blessings? I did it, most of the people I know did at one time or another. Then Namaste was de rigueur in email sign offs, whether or not you practiced yoga. About two years ago I decided to think about how I wanted to say good-bye in my emails. I know how notoriously convoluted email speak can be. And how often you are trying to say one thing but it comes out as something completely different leaving the reader offended or even sad. So, I decided that I wanted to leave my emails with a note to say: "hey, written communication is limited, so please forgive anything I might have said that might have offended you." But more than covering my own ass, I wanted to let people know that truly deeply inside I was writing from a place of love - otherwise I would definitely let them know that I wasn't. So, "in peace" was born. This is how I sign my emails and most of these blog posts. And it will probably stay that way, if for no other reason than to cover my ass. But another thought has been rattling around my brain lately. The thought about being blessed.

In the last year, I have had a lot of time to reflect on being blessed. I have suffered (and I choose my word carefully here) various forms of depression and illness throughout my short life. First by being anti-pharmaceutical, then by thinking that it was my lot in life to suffer (that was the playwright phase) then by over-embracing "better living through chemistry," then a near-fatal tango with cancer and finally through loss of hope. I suffered. Sometimes willingly and other times not so willingly. And during that entire time I kept going. I stayed alive. Granted the quality of said life might have been questionable, but I was here. That was my blessing. I lived through it and was given the opportunity to reflect. We are blessed everyday. Sometimes in the smallest of ways.

I wanted to remind myself of that, with everything I did, said or wrote. And that made me think of how I would change my good-byes in my emails and blog posts. With a simple reminder to allow Grace to show up for you. She's there, loving you and holding you up. However you define Her. Let Her do Her job.
Welcome to 2009!

My new good-bye:
We are blessed, may we recognize the blessing.

in peace

Time, Why you punish me?

2008-12-29T07:47:00.006-05:00

I've been thinking about the passage of time. This Spring is my 20th high school reunion. 20 years?! Remember when 20 was old? And as we end this old year and begin a new one I wonder: "What have I been doing for 20 years?" Certainly a great deal, but it doesn't always feel as though a lot was accomplished. I hate getting nostalgic. Pulling out the old pictures and old music and adding a Parisesque rose-colored hue to my memories. Some of the things from high school sucked, as did some of the people. That's a hard time for everyone. Do we forgive the mean bullies from that time period who have friended us on Facebook because they now have spouses and children? Shouldn't they know the discomfort and pain they caused you back when your self-esteem and ego were brand-spanking new? Yup, I am one of those people who remember the bad things and don't really remember the good things. I am one of those people who can recall, with crystal clarity (at least according to myself) exactly where I was standing and what I was wearing when the initial slight was given. And I never remember the positive impact that I had on people, even if they told me.

Facebook. A strange place for longing to be created. But it has been. I miss the rose-colored times of my youth. I miss being free and able to stay out late at night and partay! I miss stupid location jokes and the luxury of time. And then I snap out of it and think, those times were no better than these times. This is the moment to make a happy memory. And this is the moment to look past petty memories (and actions, don't forget the actions!) of the past. I'm going to my 20th high school reunion and plan to see the people there in that moment and not through a kaleidescope from 1989!

Enjoy the passage of time.

Photo by: ToniVC

Enough

2008-12-27T12:13:00.004-05:00

When is it ever? When am I ever? I have had! I simultaneously hate and love the word "enough." It makes me think of being full and done. It also reminds me that I may not be full or done. The English language mystifies me.

How did this post make it to the light? I was sitting in the bathroom, yes the place where many a magical idea arises, and also the only place where I have relative peace, and I once again began lamenting not writing my entrance essays. I am paralyzed by the fact that I am not going to get in to any graduate program. My solution to this dilemma is to postpone writing my essays and hopefully it will be too late to send them. The truth is that I need to confront the fear of rejection. The fear of being overwhelmed. The fear of not being enough. It's not a truth. There are very few of those. Just my own private Idaho where I get lost in a tangle of negative 8-track looped thoughts and memories.

But I will chose to write those essays, and confront my clutter and constantly stop the 8-track loop and play something more positive. It is just so damn hard.

I have had enough of fear. Enough.

Photo by: Madgirl

Erran Baron Cohen -

2008-12-20T12:37:00.001-05:00

This is my family - all the divergent parts in one music video. Even down to the breakdancing Hasid (MAX!).

in peace