665-670 AD.
The work which sits at the top of Rita Mae Brown’s Reading List is a short poem, written in almost completely unintelligible Old English. Oh wait. I think I recognize one word: ‘his.’
I like this translation and original offered up by A.Z. Foreman.
Bonus: He reads the original aloud!
She wrote one. I have been looking at it for years.
The thought occurred to me: it might be time to embark upon it.
Virginia Woolf wrote that a woman needs ‘a room of one’s own.’
True.
And this morning it seems that the window I’m looking through – at that idea – is more along the lines of:
We all need ‘a culture of one’s own.’
That, and this quote of F. Scott Fitzgerald, from “The Crack Up,” published in Esquire in 1936:
“…[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
These things were clouds in the blue sky of my mind this morning as I came up again upon my origin story. Big, white, puffy, brilliantly glowing ones. In a Wyoming sky.
Owl in flight.
According to Jill Townsend-Sorel, the owl protects from sudden death. The owl showed up for me in Jill’s Animal Guides workshop, and I’ve been seeing it before or around 7 am on my morning meadow walks. In a sense, moving on from this old career in the film world is a moving away from the trail of sudden near-deaths on set that were happening the last three consecutive years of that career.
After stumbling upon the delightful Erin Morgenstern, inspiration led me here to record the moment. It has been a long while since any moments have been recorded, here or anywhere, by me.
Some numbers:
just one year after relocating to Ojai from New Orleans
eleven months after the first Kundalini Yoga class and teacher training untangled my perspective
and ten months since diving in to manage two local businesses
the path continues to roll out before me like a big, fluffy red carpet.
In five days,
1. The Income Tax Course begins in Santa Barbara. It meets three times a week, from 9am to noon, MWF, until November 14th. After which I will be able to work preparing taxes in the state of California, beginning January 2012.
2. The first class in the master’s degree with a focus on accounting begins.
The prospect of building a career as an accountant brings the excitement I once felt in imagining a film career before I ever set foot on set. Only this excitement is grounded in contentment at the life I love already, daily.
Spending quality time with the cats.
Mornings working on translation and developing an online first year Italian course at Farmer & the Cook.
*Life is grand.
My cousin Marlo has just announced that she is leaving her Organizing business behind in order to transition to a simpler, greener life of abundance. That takes so much courage! Her words have inspired me to mark a similar divergence I am making in my own life path.
I’ve loved my life as a camera assistant. I am very, very grateful to all the gifts which have manifested in the past decade as my family and friends have supported the crazy lifestyle which has been the result of that dream.
Now the dream has changed.. like Marlo, I don’t really know where I’m heading just yet, and I am enjoying the process of discovery as it unfolds, minute by minute.
This afternoon as I was in the Swan River Yoga studio here in New Orleans, I felt gratitude shining through me. It was so strong and so tangible. I’m a little sheepish to be writing about it right now, actually. But I am sharing it anyway and welcoming gratitude and a spirit of thanks into my new life. So many amazing occurrances have come about since I made the decision to remain in New Orleans, about a month ago, it is almost as though I have come through the rabbit hole, and am living in a whole new wonderful world. I had no idea it existed, and am surprised every day that it does!
Of course with Thanksgiving coming up, it makes sense that gratitude is rising to the surface, don’t you think?
I am grateful that Fay, the woman I was renting my apartment from, was kind and strong and generous when she saw me standing in the road next to my UHaul after I moved out of her apartment. She offered me her guest room to live in until I figured out how I could stay in New Orleans even though I had no job prospects and no money, my car and cats were (and are) still in Los Angeles, because when push came to shove, I could not bear to leave this city. Fay and her friends have become my family in the past month, and my life is so much greater than it has ever been. I have energy for myself and for others, where before I always felt I was just treading water trying to keep my sanity in a crazy world, all alone.
Fay’s friend, and now my friend Annette, told her friend Laura about me, and Laura hired me as a part-time seasonal bookseller at Barnes and Noble, where I am now working four hours a week (Monday night closing shift). I love this job. I love the people, and I love being surrounded by books. And one day, if they decide to keep me past the holidays, I will receive benefits, even if I am still a part-time employee. Thank you Annette and Laura and Fay!
Fay recommended me as a caregiver to the agency which provides care for her mother. So I am now preparing dinner for her mother Geraldine every evening from 5.30 or 6 pm onward. Geraldine was born the same year as my Grandma Polly (1921), and while dinner is cooking and then later, when we eat, we watch the weather channel, or a good movie like The Wizard of Oz, and reminisce about her youth and married life. Thank you Fay, Joseph, Miss Arnelle, and Geraldine! I love this job.
Katrina and Carmelo hired me to work as a barista at their gelateria on Magazine Street a few shifts every week: La Divina Gelateria. They are very active in the community, make all their gelati from scratch, and are wonderful people to work with. This is simply another wonderful environment with fascinating, kind people to work with. Thank you, Katrina and Carmelo!
Language Trainers hired me to tutor Italian on a 30 hour contract to a student here in New Orleans. He is a quick study, and today we had a magnificent lesson! I also have a few other private Italian conversation students, and I would like to build this business tutoring Italian, as I began to do last year.
I’ve also decided to do a work-study with Swan River Yoga here in New Orleans. I was cleaning the Magazine Street Shala this afternoon in exchange for a yoga class, as I will be doing every week. We have been communicating about this for about a month now, and finally today Michele left me my own key to the Shala, and I became a member of the community! I will be completing the Swan River Teacher Training next year, and hope to be asked to teach at the new teaching facility they will be opening in Mid-City next year. Yoga has been my practice for over ten years now, but I have been keeping it contained since my environment has not been very accepting of the spiritual side of life. Now I am letting it come into the open.
I also began an online homeopathy study course with Sheri Nakken, which has been my dream since January 2008. I am thrilled to have the opportunity to explore this modality while living in New Orleans, which such an inspired and experienced teacher and homeopath, now especially when I am opening up to all the ways I can contribute to my community here, although I am making very little money.
My dream now is more personal than it has been in a long while. My dream is to help people grow into their heart and soul’s potential in today’s world, where we need all the faith and support we can create. And what I’m finding is that the more I give, the more I can give.
What a change from a life in film!
My mother is visiting for the holidays. This is great! Besides the fact that I love spending time with her, and with my dad, and the rest of my family and friends, I am also an activist when it comes to New Orleans. New Orleans usually gets such a bad rap in the national media. I love any opportunity to share with people why I have fallen so hard for this city.
There are so many reasons for this. The most obvious one might be that this sensual city shares a multitude of elements with the love of my life, the one I’ve been most adamant and passionate about, since I first experienced it as a junior in high school. Yes, New Orleans has quite a lot in common with Italy.
Two of those elements are food and culture: would either of those spectacular places be what they are without them? And, at this time of year, the tradition of the Reveillon menu is an important part of New Orleans culture. Reveillon, traditionally, is a very late-night many-course meal which takes place after midnight, in the wee morning hours of Christmas day. And New Orleans, oh how it loves excess and decadence, is a place where, if it’s good to have one Reveillon dinner, it’s even better to have a few. So throughout the month of December, restaurants around town have their own special Reveillon menus.
This is great for two reasons: my mother loves to dine out, and, although I consider myself a local, having moved here nearly two years ago now (two Mardi Gras ago, actually), I’ve not yet had the privilege of ensconcing myself within the inner social circle which invites recent transplants to the city to home-cooked, authentic Reveillon dinners.
So tonight my mom and I went to Commander’s Palace for their take on Reveillon dinner.
It was grand. It was wonderful. Mom and I both enjoyed it.
And it was sooooooo not macro.
I haven’t decided whether Reveillon is on the yin end of the spectrum or the yang. I can say that the portions weren’t all that large (compared with, say, to Jacques-Imo’s). However, my body is not digesting it as easily as it does with my macro meals. As a matter of fact, it seems to be pouting, and on strike. An hour after we left the restaurant, I’m still feeling full, rather than energized. Though, generally speaking, I’m still considerably more energized, on a day-to-day basis, than I would have been had I not had the advantages of eating macro most of the time. I realize I’ve accumulated the benefits of eating macro over the past four or five months. But my body feels like it is still expanding. Does this mean Reveillon is an expansive force, rather than a contracting one? Ha.
I would like to say, for the record, that I do not feel guilty. I feel happy. We had a nice time. We had good conversation. Experiences mean more to us than material things, so I feel very good about making the decision, and the effort, to dine out with my mom.
Also, as an added benefit of the macrobiotic lifestyle, I have also learned to trust in balance. Whereas before, I might have freaked out by now, and felt guilty for having gone off my ‘diet’ (a word which, I’ve been told, means only ‘way of eating’ in the original Greek), and vowed to some samurai version of chaste food-worshipping discipline, I find I feel at peace. Despite my blooming middle. Despite the fact that I will, most likely, not sleep as well tonight as I usually do, when what I eat aligns with my macro path. Being on the macro path means, it turns out, that I don’t need to freak out about eating things tonight which would never be served at the Kushi Institute.
Tomorrow is a new day, with no mistakes in it…. (yet). Ha..
I am sipping on warm apple juice, after a soothing meal of nabe and wheatberries. The pool lies in my immediate future. The sky is blue and wide, wide open, in that thin Fall way that happens down against the Gulf the way that New Orleans is, closer to the Equator than Los Angeles, or even San Diego.
I’ve come to understand better, in the last few months, what it is that I’m supposed to be doing. My career as a camera assistant in the film industry is fun, glamorous, and lucrative, leaving me with more than enough time off to travel and to dream. And yet I still was left with a feeling of something missing from my life.
I’ll come to explain that better. But for now, I’ve succumbed to writing again. I’ve also started eating macrobiotically. And I see that the answer that I gave the AFS officer, when I was fifteen years old and was applying to study abroad for a year in Italy, remains the same. To the question, ‘What do you see as your role in the international arena?’ I replied: ‘I am a bridge between worlds.’
I start a new feature on Tuesday. I don’t expect it to be easy, but I’ve decided my role will be to be a bridge. A bridge between green and experienced crew members. A bridge between 2nd Unit and 1st Unit camera departments. A bridge between camera department and the rest of the crew. A bridge between Los Angeles and local crew. A bridge between French and American crew. A bridge between local people and film crew.
On a film set the hours are long, the stress is high, and people have a tendency to feel underappreciated, and isolated, from one another. My aim, for the next several weeks, is to combat that tendency in myself, and support a feeling that we’re all in this together.
I always knew that one day
I would take this road but yesterday
I did not know today
Would be the day.
– Nagarjuna
A valiant attempt at taking a walk during the warmest part of the day. Ten minutes outside at ten degrees below zero is enough. Back to the fire, deep in The Left Hand of Darkness.
Heart of a Cat 
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