Groundhog Day!

With the return of February 2nd, we once again "celebrate" Ground Hog Day, that time when we all wait to find out if that big rodent in Pennsylvania saw his shadow. This morning, evidently, he did, while also declaring the Pittsburgh Steelers to be world champions. I guess Punxatawny Phil keeps a tv down there in his hole.

My favorite part of Groundhog Day is the annual reminder of the film of the same name with Bill Murray and Andie McDowell. It's a classic early 90s goofball comedy, but better than most of that particular genre because it serves to remind us of the fact that we make our lives by the way we pay attention... or don't. In the film, Bill Murray repeats Groundhog Day over and over, until he first begins to realize what's happening and then finally learns the lesson he most needs to understand.

This also plugs into my return to a new 40 day plan. After bailing on my last plan, just before the new year, I've been floating along in search of focus and direction. The simple fact is that I do better when I have a plan. My various natural tendencies to distraction, and my perpetual flirtation with new ideas and intriguing projects, are all more creatively and productively channeled when I set myself up a structure to channel my flailing imagination.


So, here we go again. With Phil's prediction of 6 more weeks of winter, I am choosing to take on my own Groundhog Day discipline with a new six weeks of attention to the details of my life. My own sort of repeat it until you get it right discipline, running from now to the Ides of March.

In the meantime, just remember... Don't Drive Angry!!!

5 Years & 6 Beginnings... Part Six

Just after midnight January 1, 2009: Sitting on the couch at Karen's with a bottle of champagne. We had just gotten back from "up the hill" where we attended a party with some old friends, some new friends, and a few people new to us both. We left shortly before midnight intending to spend the strike of midnight together and alone.

A rather uneventful evening if you look at the surface elements.

But it's the river flowing underneath that image that reveals the most about where my life stands five years on from that night of 03/04, alone in the living room of the little house on Dana, just a short 5 blocks from where Karen and I were standing with champagne under mistletoe at midnight.

The biggest difference is probably the smallest leap. I LIVE here now!

That simple reality is something that I never thought I would accept and/or admit to, but here I am living enthusiastically and more or less contentedly in my own little loft apartment (a long and wonderful story in and of itself) above a garage next to a beautiful garden with buddha statues and a magnificent live oak tree. We live (myself, the tree, and my terrific landlords) at the corner of B and Fair, and that is becoming, as the former owner of the house - Petaluma's first woman mayor, Helen Putnam - used to say, "my motto."

My life has indeed become (and is becoming) fair, not in the sense of mediocre, but in the sense of soft and lovely and delightful.

I fell in love with my new residence the first time I walked into the garden, and I waited in homeless limbo (on friend's couches, at Karen's place, and in "The Little House") for several months for the apartment to become ready to live in (I am it's first actual resident). I moved in during the first week of April, just days before my DDD got married in San Francisco, and between these two nearly simultaneous events, I experienced a deep and engaging sense of life beginning anew.

My growing collection of old and new friends threw me a fabulous house warming party that was organized by Karen, who commiserated with Joe to fool me more completely than I had ever been fooled before.

I also began a lot of new work, much of it in the writing that I have worked hard for much of my adult life to turn into gainful employment. I engaged my new presence in Petaluma by volunteering to co-chair the city's renewed Riverfest Celebration (and I have recently proven what a glutton for punishment I am by volunteering to chair the event for this year!), and by joining the unlikely amalgamation of people that make up Moose Lodge #475. Almost daily, I continue seeking to find ways to involve myself on the ground, in the place where I live.

And then there was the election. This amazing year of challenge and struggle and ultimate triumph when we as a country and a people, individually and collectively, discovered that... truly... WE are the ones we've been waiting for.

I also seem to have discovered that, I am the one I've been waiting for.

On top of it all... through the kindness, patience, insight, creativity and beauty of this surprising person who has come to share my life these days - in ups and downs and back and forths, with soft kisses and deep hugs, through lots of laughter and a few difficult arguments - I found my way back to love.

Indeed... There Is No Fifth Destination.

Still Speechless... Most Hopeful... Completely Committed!

I really don't have anything to say that can equal this photo. I spent the entirety of yesterday staring at the TV, afraid that if I turned it off, I would wake up and it would all have been a dream.

I'm better today... and I just made a new volunteer commitment that I've been pondering for months. Time to get to work.

More tomorrow.

Happy New Year!

This is a video that documents and commemorates the New Year's morning murder of Oscar Grant by BART police.

I have been simply speechless since I first heard about this, but getting this from the CAPE Blog, I had to put it up.

You can sign a petition to California AG Jerry Brown, or you can join a rally on Wednesday, but somehow... there's only one response.

You must DO SOMETHING.

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.