5 Years & 6 Beginnings... Part Five

January 2008 was a hard mid-winter.

I was homeless again after being blind sided by the guy I was subleasing from when he re-rented the place out from under me, packed up his stuff, and moved back to England. That all happened, over the holidays, in the last three weeks of the year.

In the rain.

I began the year setting up my office in a little room behind a friend's house. It was a major help to have a place to work even if I didn't have a guaranteed place to sleep.

As for sleeping... I was moving around a lot. I spent time on the couch of one friend (it was a pretty comfy couch, I must say) and in the "Little House" behind the home of another friend. This was particularly helpful, as it held some good memories from the months after Katrina when he and his wife offered me the place for a few weeks to settle in, recuperate, and find my bearings. Returning to The Little House was a true comfort and my friends were patient, kind, understanding and unbelievably helpful.

As it turned out... I was also staying fairly frequently at the home of a new friend, an unexpected, down from heaven, out of the blue, blessing of a friend... confidant... and lover. If it weren't for the fact that she had dropped into my life back at the end of the summer of 07 (right after the second anniversary of Katrina by the way) I don't know if I would have made it through the unexpected chaos that was thrust upon me as 2007 came to a close.

She walked into my life right at the crux point of the back and forth, give and take battle of my bi-coastal relationship with New Orleans. We met during the summer, when I was completely sure that I was not interested in being involved with anyone. I wasn't looking, I wasn't interested, and I thought that might be the way I would feel for the rest of my life. I was also sure that my life was fated to play out, eventually, in The Crescent City. I had attempted to move there more permanently back in the spring (having moved out of my San Francisco loft/office) but had found it necessary to move back to California in the early summer.

By mid-summer, I was meeting with an old old friend regarding the possibility of doing new work together, and this question (and its still unresolved conclusion) had thrown a new instrument into the mix of my already strangely mixed up life.

I wanted to kick my life back into gear, but I still didn't have any good idea about how, or where, or why to do it.

On August 5, 2007, two years to the day that I had moved there the first time, I returned to New Orleans with all intentions of staying... Within ten days I was on the last flight out from Louis Armstrong Airport bound for California with the hope of getting my computer fixed (it had crashed on me over the weekend and I couldn't get it fixed in still post-Katrina New Orleans). As I headed west for the last time (I have still not been back in New Orleans) I was sure that I would be back in a matter of days or weeks.

By the time I landed on the west coast I was less sure about that decision... and then the bottom fell out of all of it.

With the second anniversary of Katrina I went into a strange silence that led me to question almost everything that I had been desperately trying to patch together since my life had been blown apart two years before. One very clear thing stood out beyond all others. It was, once again, time to take on a serious change in my life and that entailed more than where I lived; it involved my work, my home, and my state of mind. The conclusion that I came to was that I needed to draw back in, let things settle even more, and find the still deeper ground and center that had eluded me for so long.

And then... my life was transformed in an instant (well... a weekend) and all of my separatist plans, individualistic intentions, and calculating singularities were tossed over. I was suddenly, and surprisingly, in love.

The rest of 2007 was pretty much a blur with concerts to attend, my daughter to cheer, walks to walk, books to read and a new life forming all around me,

Beyond all that... in the world outside my little bubble, new hope was rising like the bright sun in the east.

Despite a collection of lingering questions, not the least of which being where the hell am I going to live, on January 1, 2008, I felt like I was emerging from a cocoon.