Waiting for a Miracle... Still

It has been one hell of a crazy week! The most extreme aspect being last Thursday and Friday as I shoved my poor aging body and mind through 40 hours without sleep in order to finish up some of the immediately necessary work, get on the plane, get to New Orleans and go hear Donald Harrison (among others) at about hour 38.

Now that I've gotten a bit of sleep, and I'm starting to settle in with the urgent work on this side of the continent I am gradually beginning to feel like my head is coming back to my body.

The weekend was, as any festival - even in 100 degree heat - in New Orleans always is, one unbelievable moment after another. It was another opportunity to remind myself why I was first attracted to this precarious city and why I keep returning. By mid-morning Monday I was already facing full into the basic reality of New Orleans in 2007. Three weeks away from the SECOND anniversary of Katrina and the failure of the Federal Levee System around New Orleans, the city is still clopping along like an old tour horse with bad feet. Sure the Quarter is jumpin' and during the weekend you could be forgiven if, as a visitor, you thought that everything is back to normal.

Well... it's not.... by a long shot.

• Two-thirds of the city remains broken down and largely empty (I spent part of my weekend with the folks from Churches Supporting Churches who are working hard to bring back many of the churches (mostly African-American) in town so that the community can find a center and truly begin to rebuild.

• Eleven people were shot over the weekend.

• I still have to wait 25 minutes on average for a bus to anywhere (on a system that claims to be running buses every 12 minutes) in the city... let's not even talk about "evacuation plans."

• It took me two hours and three trips (including one this morning) to finally get a check cashed at the bank it was drawn on.

• They just pointed out in the Times-Picayune that four local bridges crossing our now famous bodies of water - bridges that must be crossed in order to escape another storm - are below the safety level of the bridge that collapsed in Minnesota last week. My friend Mary emphatically proclaims that there will not be another storm, and I promised not to dispute her, but...

• Oh yeah... Who Dat Say Dey Gonna Beat Dem Saints!? Pittsburgh evidently.

So... I was particularly captured by the Storypeople story (above) that came in my mailbox this morning.

The fact remains... in the midst of everything, that it really is important to keep looking for the miracles. After that story about flight, I will, at least for tomorrow morning, feel differently about the military hellicopters that still fly overhead every morning just as I am getting out of bed.

Even when it just seems like all you're doing is waiting for them, the miracles that sustain you for just that little bit longer seem to pop up just in time.

Falling Up!

I get these little motivational emails in my box every morning; an admittedly lame way of giving myself a little shot of emotional adrenaline to get the day started. Sometimes it provides a nice little reflection... other times it serves the task I have really set for it, namely creating a synchronistic event that might work to shake up my psyche and break loose some sort of creative energy.

This morning was one of the moments when it did the later.

The message this morning went like this: "It's not the dazzling voice that makes a singer, Thom. Nor clever stories that make a writer. And it's not piles of money that make a tycoon.

It's having a dream and wanting to live it so greatly, that one would rather move with it, and "fail," than succeed in another realm."

The thing is... it coincides with a quote from JFK that I heard on the ABC show "Brothers & Sisters" last night. Calista Flockhart's character, Kitty Walker, corrects her boss (played by Rob Lowe) when he misquotes Kennedy.

The quote is: "Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly."

After two years of working on these blogs and the attendant life experience (the good, the bad, and the ugly) they represent, I am standing right now in a place where I feel the most important in my life is to clarify that thing that I am willing to fail at in order to succeed and to take on the task.

There is a poster from the New York School of Art that sits in the entry way of Perry's Restaurant on Union Street in San Francisco that has captured my imagination since the first time I saw it. As I remember it, it's an image of a black and white zebra casting a rainbow colored shadow (sort of the opposite of what I have here, but it was the only one I could track down).

This image (and its accompanying phrase) have haunted me since the first day I saw it, nearly 30 years ago.

To Be Good Is Not Enough When You Dream Of Being Great.

It's taken me that 30 years (and especially the last two). But I think I'm ready now...

Ready to risk failing miserably in order to achieve greatly.

Talk... Talk... Talk...

So, tonight CNN (and lovely Anderson Cooper) will be giving the Democratic candidates the opportnity to debate questions submitted by geek obsessed watchers through YouTube.

So, as a sort of experiment of my own, I've decided to join the insanity by blogging my own reactions to the debate on Washington's Cousin. So... if you're interested make a click over there and let's see how this goes.

That's what friends are for...

In the post I wrote last week (yeah... I apologize... very lax of me... no proper discipline here... sorry) I included a tune by Bruce Cockburn that means a lot to me these days because the single thing that has gotten me through the hard times, down times, strange times of the last two years is a small group of friends who lie scattered all over the country. There are three (in New England, Colorado and Los Angeles) whom I have known for 25 - 30 years and who know me as well as anyone on the planet, and in some cases, better than I know myself.

One of those friends is visiting me this week from New England. We are trying to catch up on thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams and we are discussing the possibility of doing some work together when we get to the end of this week of reconnection. It's a strange dynamic and I don't know at this point where it will go. What I do know, from just the few hours we've been together, is that, as always, Zach is as much a part of me as I am a part of myself.

There are a few other, more recent friends - in New Orleans, in Petaluma, in England - who have moved with me through my life and who put up with my bullshit like real troupers and who share their lives with me in a way that makes moving through life on the planet easier, more comfortable, and more endearing. These are people with whom I don't have the kind of history I have with my oldest friends, but they are people who I think, and hope, will be with me for the rest of this journey of my life.

The presence of Zach in my house and heart this week has me thinking, gratefully, about all of these people. I really don't think I would survive without y'all. I'm sure that I wouldn't want to.

You gotta have friends!

Live Earth Retro 1

Okay okay.... I haven't been doing a very good job with my "I will write every day" resolution but part of the reason for that is that there has been so much else going on in the world this past week that all I have time for is trying to make up for the time I've lost. Between the fact that the Fourth of July in the U.S.A. is a lost day (even if, like me, you spend most of it working) and the fact that the entire day I planned on spending doing work on Saturday instead got consumed by my obsessively watching Live Earth on something between four (as seen above with Melissa Etheridge, Snoop Dogg, UB40, and Sarah Brightman simultaneously breaking global and temporal barriers) and nine (the total number of different concerts) screens on my computer for 12 hours (with an additional 2 hours given over to watching the late night recap) I have spent all the rest of my available time sitting in front of my computer and battering out new work in the hope of pulling in rent, making up for clients who haven't paid me, and just generally covering my ass.

In any case... If you missed the Live Earth shows you really need to spend some time at the website where they are running lots of interesting song selections and lots of appropriate pro-earth propaganda.

The last time I spent an entire day watching world wide concerts was Live Aid back in 1985 and it proved the precursor to a HUGE burst of creative production that began with a music project only a month later, an ongoing production relationship that lasted for nearly ten years and resulted in the best production work of my life (so far), the increase of some wonderful long term relationships, the greater development of some others (y'all know who you are) as well as my first published writing and, ultimately, the 17 year relationship that still defines my life despite the fact that it met its demise over two years ago.

Some part of me, at nearly every minute of that 14 hours, hoped and longed that maybe this would not only be a day of breakthrough for the planet, but another day of breakthrough for me.