be happy

There's something off about rushing to get to meditation class. What's the point of pressing and stressing in order to enter a state of oneness? So I arrive to class 20minutes late this morning, only to sit on my mat for 3 minutes, feeling the disappointment of entering in the middle deepen when I realize that meditation is actually over. And get this -- I actually start to cry. My pendulum swings between self pity and blame until I let it go when the yoga teacher reminds me that always needing to be right makes it hard to be happy.

what's in a name?

A kinder soul would say that I have a selective memory, but I'm thinking the truth is that I am losing my mind. The realization started with Facebook and my fumbled attempt to reconnect with old friends.

Face and book this: I can't remember who my friends were. I mean I remember Yvette who played the French horn and Fayne who I French kissed. But that's hardly enough information for a Facebook search engine.

Were last names absent from the first three decades of my life or have I lost them in a memory bank that went belly up with Wachovia and all of the other failed banks of this current financial crisis? This is my current crisis.

I have lived in 10 or 11 cities, with a richly textured tapestry of friends in each. But as the years fade, I find that the thread that stitches those times together has frayed. And if measured by the number of my friends on Facebook, I am staring down a narrow path.

So how should one's life be measured?

ode to odetta

If you can't fly, run. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. Any way you can make it baby, you keep on moving it on... - Odetta

The last time I saw Odetta, she shuffled across the floor, gingerly, with a unflappable determination as if an invisible chord was pulling her to a chair waiting at center stage. And then she opened her soul and started to sing with the same booming voice that I'd heard years before in Philadelphia and before that in Boston and before that in London and before that in Madison...it's a voice that comes deep from the belly of mother earth. That chord could well be an umbilical chord reaching back to something primal.

Odetta made harmony of discord. She marched with Martin Luther King in Selma. She performed for Kennedy in 1963 at the peak of her career. She didn't mind that people called her a folksinger, but she was so much more than that. She was the reason Bob Dylan sold his electric guitar and picked up an acoustic. She was a music historian who transcended musical form. She moved me.

Odetta wore a crystal at her third eye and had skin the color of chocolate that stretched, unwrinkled, across high cheekbones. She carried herself like royalty, poised and confident. She would sing and tell stories with an intensity only matched by her audience. Where ever I sat in the concert hall, I always had the feeling that I was sitting at the knee of a someone old and wise enough to speak the truth without fear.

Odetta died yesterday at 77 years of age. She'd been hoping to sing at Obama's inauguration. She will be singing in me forever.

If you can't walk, crawl. If you can't crawl, sing (my addition)...Anyway you can make it baby, you keep on moving it on.

Link to Odetta singing House of the Rising Sun
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aaya8jYZBO8&feature=related

love, laughter and gratitude

Gratitude comes as easily as laughter at a family gathering. No matter what the occassion, we laugh and eat and eat and laugh, ultimately not knowing whether our bellies ache from too many helpings or the side-splitting humor. We weave our way through many threads of conversation, most of it serious -- politics, the economy, international events. The inevitability of the turning leaves only the question of when. When will my brother or nephew turn a phrase that will have us doubled-over? When will my mother say something so utterly unexpected and shocking that we can't contain ourselves? How long will it be before my sister-in-law surrenders to snorting? No meal is complete without the snorting.

I am truly thankful for my family, for knowing that at every meal, they'll serve up a full course of laughter. All of it drizzled with love.

seven lessons from africa

With eight vaccination shots in my ass and a Lonely Planet book of East Africa in my hand, I boarded a flight for Kilimanjaro Airport in Arusha.

Day 2 of the journey brought me face to face with a lone male buffalo in the brush of a national forest. Lesson 1: If you meet a buffalo in the woods while your pants are dropped around your ankles, lie down and play dead. It's much less likely that you'll be impaled.

On day 4, I hiked 20 hours to meet a woman who poured me a brew of valarian root and quinine for my back injury. Along the way, I passed a grass hut flooded by screams of a girl who was undergoing a ceremonial initiation. Lesson 2: what some people call ceremonial initiation, others call genital mutilation.

Day 7, in the Serengeti, I watched a lion destroy my tent. Fortunately, I was not inside. Lesson 3: do not leave food in your tent, even if it's just a lemon.

Day 10 took me to the base of a mountain that the local villagers never climbed because they thought the smoke coming from the top was evidence that gods lived there. We climbed it, poli poli (translation: slowly, slowly), slipping on skree near the top. At its highest point, the surface flattened and crumbled when we walked across it, almost like the crusty top of a brownie when broken in half. Lesson 4: smoke might not be evidence of gods, but it could indicate an active volcano.

Our vehicle was stuck on day 12 trying to cross a flooded road, so we set up camp. At night, Hippos swarmed our tents. Lesson 5: make sure neighboring tents touch so that the formation looks like one large structure. Wild animals are less likely to attack a big structure than a small one.

The highlight of day 13 was ducking poisoned arrows. Lesson 6: don't travel past villagers who've had their cattle stolen by a rival village. If caught by a surprise attack, hit the decks because negotiation is not an option. (See lesson one)

On day 30, I stepped on a sea urchin off the island of Zanzibar, making walking impossible and pain unbearable. Lesson 7: sea urchin spikes are poisonous. Do not, I repeat, do not try to cut them out of your foot. Instead, cut a baby papaya and rub the juice over the wound. You'll be walking in no time.

the weight of hope

Have you heard that the weight of a soul is 21 grams? That's equivalent to the weight of five nickles in the palm of your hand.

What do other energies weigh? What is the weight of love?
What is the weight of potential? What is the weight of hope, or more importantly, what is the burden of hopelessness? Not just for the individual, but for the society?

We stand at the precipice of suffering and opportunity. It has been decades since the safety net has been this threadbare as we dive into a recession. One of every 100 black men are warehoused in prison -- locked in the basement -- as our President elect smashes a glass ceiling.

So let this not be the diet of our nation -- the loss of hope, opportunity and our collective souls.

Voting for Obama was a step. A big step. Now we need to stay fully engaged in our democracy and speak loudly for those still without voices. Racism is not over with the election of a black man. And fear and hatred trumps love with the rescinding of gay marriage in California and other anti-gay legislation in Arizona, Florida and Arkansas.

Will Rogers said, "Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there."

where do i begin?

...Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves...Do not...seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will...gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rainer Maria Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet, Letter No. 4


Where do I begin
when the sea and she comes crashing in
How can I still swim
when all the sands of time
are building castles in my mind