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.

5 Years & 6 Beginnings... Part Four

January 1, 2007 found me running Stinson Beach in the sunshine and cold. In comparison to the previous three beginnings, it was a particularly good one.

By the end of 2006 I had come back to Petaluma and begun subletting part of a house just outside of town. This arrangement was extremely centering to me and I spent a lot of time simply lying or sitting in my room, petting the cat, and smiling out at the big tree that filled the view from my bedroom window. It was a settling and grounding experience that I was lucky to have fallen into after wandering about like The Lost Dutchman for most of 2006.

In general, 2006 was a recovery year. I spent most of the first six months in New Orleans, desperately trying to make a life there, and evacuating every once in a while back to my office in San Francisco to sit and have lunch with Jennifer, drop in at Grace or Glide to pick up a small modicum of sanity. By summertime I had pretty much reached the limit of my staying power and I drifted, with deep reluctance, back to California on a semi-permanent basis.

That summer I also dropped in on the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America, a group I had been involved with at their inception 20 years earlier, but which I had not visited since 1989. I spent that week in Atlanta speaking about Katrina, along with some of my friends and heros from Churches Supporting Churches and visiting with old friends I hadn't seen or heard from in a very very long time. It was a cathartic, and restorative, experience and one of the things I discovered was how much comfort I gained from meeting up with and sharing moments with folks who had ben through the same thing I had been through.

In the fall, I had another opportunity to meet up with CSC friends when we gave a presentation at Defiance College in Ohio. At that point, I had been back in Petaluma for several months and while I was experiencing the aforementioned comfort and quiet as healthful, I was also longing to be with people who understood what I had been (and was still going) through. My friends from CSC were those folks. When we would see each other we would smile, and hug, and hold each other like long lost relations. It was another aspect of the life of 2006 that brought me back to health.

There had been some rough points that fall as well. I had my car, and my computer, stolen in San Francisco in October, and the new computer I bought to replace it blew up on me right at the end of the year. About that same time, my brain blew up on me as well, and by January 1 I was still struggling through coping with all the residue (physical, personal, and practical) that my occassional seizures force me to deal with.

What I missed most at the beginning of 2007 was any sense that I had an actual life. I was definitely in a restorative mode. Like a cat that gets into a fight, I was hunkered down, licking my wounds, and trying to assemble the details of the past 18 months into a cohesive personal narrative that made sense and had a through line.

On that beach that morning in the sun, I felt like I was coming back to wholeness.

I was moving up from the underworld and had returned to a sort of zero point. I was getting better... But things were still going to take some time.

I was definitely NOT expecting the changes that were lying in wait on the far horizon.

Three Kings Night... An Epiphanic Interlude

I truly love the Christmas season... but by that, I mean exactly what I said. I am NOT a fan of the shopping season between the Macy's Parade (though I love the parade itself, and Thanksgiving is definitely my favorite holiday) and December 23rd.

I love and believe in Advent. Many of those who know me at least a little bit think this means that I am some sort of a religious freak who can't get passed my past as a Baptist preacher (though... of course... Baptists in general have no quarter for a season like Advent). For me, the thing about Advent is the antici... PATION. The four weeks spent waiting for the creation to be fulfilled, the time spent thinking on who and what we might be, we could be, we... CAN be. There is an exquisite aesthetic to taking the darkest time of the year and going inward rather than jumping around in a shopping frenzy in malls and stores with jingle bells blathering out of every little tin speaker.

But when Christmas comes... I want to take the time to let it seep into my bones, trickle down to my toes and then blast up through my head in a celebration of how absolutely wonderful it is to be alive. I like it to take a long time.

THERE ARE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS.

And then comes Epiphany... The day The Wise Guys arrive with the presents... and then turn around and skip out on the government surveillance program. The radical nature of extending Christmas for nearly two weeks beyond what the capitalist structure wants us to engage in, and thereby breaking it out of the standard model of greed, and craziness, and tension and into a new world of sharing and talking, and eating and drinking and laughing... THIS is the subversive nature of Christmas. This is why it's more than Santa... more than Rudolph... and even more than the Baby Jesus.

This is why it's so deeply important... and so damn much fun.

So last night, for Epiphany, I decided to celebrate with friends in the true chaos of the season, for Epiphany is not only the day The Magi arrive... in New Orleans, it's also the start of Carnival. It's the time for craziness, for openness, for life breaking through the dismal mundanity of the day to day. It's the time to have a hell of a party - with your family (that's my daughter as Jailhouse Elvis by the way), friends, neighbors, loved ones and acquaintances - on a TUESDAY night!

It's the perfect time for The King... or more accurately, THREE Kings!

It's the time to go home by another way,

Five Years & Six Beginnings... Part Three

To understand where I was on January 1, 2006 one has to start five months earlier during the last few days before I packed up, threw away, or left behind all of my worldly possessions and headed off into the sunrise for New Orleans on August 5, 2005.

[Ex]Partner showed up in the house a day early, seemingly for the purpose of messing with my mind (or perhaps hers) and she did a good job of it, but despite the amorous state of confusion we acted out that afternoon, I was still on the plane the next morning.

Friday Night August 5, 2005 I was on Frenchmen Street with friends old and new, listening to music, sweltering in the heat, and generally feeling like I was HOME. The feeling continued throughout that first weekend, when, despite the overwhelming August heat I enthusiastically joined the summertime trumpet summit known as Satchmo Fest. This feeling continued the next night, and the next, and into my first full, real week...

In fact, it lasted for three weeks, and I was on track. In that short span, I had contacted a whole collection of new work contacts, had begun work on two large projects and was well on my way to reconnecting to people I wanted to work with on my film project. I had even launched a project that I had been struggling to get off the ground for nearly ten years. August 2005 was the very best month (personally, financially, and creatively) I had experienced in years. This move was starting to look like the very best thing I could possibly have done with my life.

And then Katrina crossed into The Gulf.

The next five months were spent on the road. Two days in Hattiesburg Mississippi with ex-partner and family, two weeks with my parents in Murphy, NC and a month back in California before finally being able to return to New Orleans (though not to my apartment).

As most people already know... I was one of the lucky ones.

For the rest of 2005 I slid back and forth between the semi-vacant apartment of a friend in New Orleans, the couches and floors of friends around San Francisco and Petaluma, and the floor of my newly acquired "office" space (a vacant warehouse room South of Market in San Francisco).

And that brings us to January 31, 2005 and the night I spent in San Francisco's North Beach with a bunch of displaced New Orleans musicians. They played... I ate... we sang... and drank... and drank, and I wound up dancing through Union Square like Gene Kelly at 1:30 in the morning.

It was a truly joyful and exhilarating way to begin 2006. It was also more than a little bit manic and a whole lot depressing. Lying alone (who would have joined me!?) on the floor of my warehouse "office," I regularly barred the passageway downstairs so that the rats I could hear scurrying below would not come up the stairs and nibble on my toes (I still don't know if rats can climb like that, but I was not about to see if I could find out). In New Orleans, their cousins would frequently scurry across the courtyard of the apartment complex where I was staying and jump into the toxic pool water for a swim. While I had a Whole Foods Market nearby the office in San Francisco (where I regularly picked up a pretty serviceable version of Gumbo), most stores in New Orleans were still shuttered at the end of 2005 and predicting where I was going to track down my next meal sometimes meant guessing the corner where The Salvation Army truck was going to deliver hamburgers.

I was VERY glad to be rid of 2005... but I did not have a clue about what I was going to do next. Actually, that's not really true. I had some very good ideas about what I was going to do next.

They were all wrong.