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deep hanging out
May 2008 
tell me that you'll open your eyes
evelyn
In the Snow Patrol video for "Open Your Eyes" below,
...the viewer’s P.O.V. is that of a driver racing through Paris at dawn, recklessly running red lights and generally cruising through the streets (sometimes the wrong way down one-ways) without ever once stopping — except at the very end. Legend has it that director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman), who licensed the film to Snow Patrol, shot it in one take without getting a permit, and was arrested after its first screening.
Set to Snow Patrol’s pensive, anthemic music, it’s exhilarating, eerie, dreamlike. - via Fred, from Very Short List
I adore Paris. I adore dawn. This time of year feels like the dawn of the year, the advent of spring. The New Orleans Mardi Gras was adopted from the festival in Paris.
Yes, it's Mardi Gras today.
No, I'm not in New Orleans.
I witness that thought, "I should be in New Orleans" (it appears to have an annoying perky voice) squeaking.
"All this feels strange and untrue." ("When you argue with reality you lose - but only 100 percent of the time," I hear Katie purr.) So no I should not be in New Orleans evidenced by the simple fact that I am not in New Orleans. Rather I am in San Jose. The geisha like purple magnolias, white and pink plum blossoms, dripping branches of cherry blossoms and lavender are blooming. And I'm here writing this.
New Orleans isn't a matter of if. Simply when. Possibly it's the next full moon. The video project inspiration is gelling with a working title, "Rhyme and No Reason." Rather than a quick trip to Nola, it appears I will be languidly getting to know this voodoo mistress of a city and its peopling while entertaining with tea at my parlour in a shotgun in Marigny (Law of Attraction at work here ;-)).
Tom Piazza, a New Orleans music writer, says that in New Orleans they "participate in life as it unfolds." Life is "lived to the hilt."
"The French Quarter is the last quarter of Bohemia - a place in love with life," wrote Tom Williams, later changing his name to Tennessee after a bus deposited yet another soul passionate for the literary. Historian Louis Powell says Nola became the literary capital of the South because it was "where you could expatriate without going to Paris."
I can feel it's time to be utterly reckless this Dawn. I have a stationary box collaged with postcards of Paris scribbled: "Paris... en flanant ." In French, flanant means to roam aimlessly, to hang out deeply, to sashay, to slowly lounge, to wander like a pilgrim, like a lover that is.
"The lover knows much more about absolute good and universal beauty than any logician or theologian, unless the latter, too be lovers in disguise." - George Santayana, The Life of Reason
So I will be in New Orleans...en flanant, shortly, and not a moment too soon or a moment too late. I mentioned that my fortune cookie the other day after the hot and sour soup and tea were cleared away read: ”Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” At the same neighborhood dumpling nook, yesterday's cookie reads: "Do what you can with what you have, where you are." Eternal fortune cookie advice for life, eh?
Still I can feel it's time to be utterly reckless this Dawn. And not only in my imagination. I have a whimsical way of living in the imaginal and arriving at the same lessons, yet sometimes you know it's a go in the real world. I wrote this piece, 'What is Your Genius?' (below, very end) in mid-December based on a desire to accompany Wyatt across the country on his way to Nola. It was looking like he could not make it in one shot, and he was kicking the idea of heading to San Diego and cutting across the country from there.
The whole thing intrigued me as a soul, as a writer, and I mentioned I wanted to tag along. On Dec 6th, he writes from the Palo Alto library:
Have you ever traversed this fine country of ours without reservations?What a fine question. Without reservations? Have I done anything without reservations? A cruise through this world without stopping, without reservation and gleefully greeting the rising sun in its full glory. Yes, it's high time to live life to the depths.
And open my eyes.
Private heart, my genius is polka-dotted napkins that pulse. I see awake trees, tables, chairs, almond-honey soap dishes, fishes, children with two pink bows in their hair while their mother on the bus nods 'si, una muchachita' glances. I see souls not the scraggly torn black t-shirt hanging from Wyatt's arm as he picks himself and his tin cup up from University Avenue gathering his guitar. My genius is seeing time as a single point of light, merging into the black man playing harmonica at Lytton Plaza and purple, gold, green Mardi Gras beads hanging from his tin can.
My genius is seeing the invisible tendrils that connect us like the way I-10 ribbons across the bottom of the United States through Tucson, then El Paso, then Austin, Houston until we reach Nola and finally arrive at the once-flooded Ninth Ward. My genius is that I made that journey with Wyatt in ten days and learnt how to write poetry and songs on the street for our keep, and never had to leave my imagination for a single step, a single hitchhiked ride, a single trucker who stopped to listen to the tale. I have done it in my vision, and the lessons, the epiphanies, the stories are ingested, are kneaded into the bread of life. The staff of life.
I can picture the people in Texas looking forlorn as they walk down main street with their Christmas packages past the light poles decorated with silver tinsel until they pass by our placard and stop to chat:
"What's Your Dream -
We'll Tell You Ours"And so they stop to talk heart-to-heart and they too won't notice that the edges of the grey jacket are frayed. They'll see Wyatt's peacock blue eyes, peacock blue skies.
And I have never left my home, I have never travelled after all across the country with Wyatt.
This pilgrimage in the end is a vertical one. And that vertical plunge is a free fall into grace.
My genius is I hold a mirror to your genius by glimpsing your untarnished unfrayed untorn soul.
Access: Public
We can do what we like anywhere …
You'll make it to New Orleans when the time is right. And Evelyn? I've been struggling with the need to be elsewhere, too … my heart is hundreds of miles from here and it's hard to keep bringing it back home and reminding it that my ribs are not a cage but a necessity. It's another humbling lesson in presence.
So you're being a wonderful mirror.
Thank you.
Ah Siona, thank you, how did I miss those clear song lines? I guess it is about opening my eyes.
Every minute from this minute now
We can do what we like anywhere
Wow, I found this amazing explanation of Mardi Gras from Priestess Miriam of the New Orleans Voodoo Spiritual Temple (and love her vision of inner/outer peace: ”The House that is set in Peace will flow forth in Peace.)
I particularly resonated with ”The Carnival, the Revel is ever Now.”
And elsewhere on the site: ”Behind living and dreaming lies the most important thing, waking up,” by late Priest Oswan Chamani.
“Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) is the high point of Carnival followed by the quiet of Ash Wednesday. It is good to remember that Carnival literally means “Farewell to Flesh” (Carnis= LATIN: “flesh” and vale= LATIN: “farewell”). Carnival is a celebration of great excess. It is a time when the flesh and all of the material pleasures that it apprehends are set ablaze in the passion of the moment. The fat, so to speak, is in the fire and one is left with the ashes on Wednesday.
Carnival is usually only thought of in terms of external events and happenings. But the most important of events are internal. Carnival and The Mardi Gras are both external and internal events. Carnival, to be most effective, must take place within the Self as well as on the streets. As the Flesh is pushed to its limits through the pleasures of the streets, so must the Self be stretched to its limits through a willed violation of its “I am THIS/ I am not THAT.” Only then can the Flesh and the Self join together and burn brightly enough to produce the Ashes from which Spirit will rise, renewed as the Phoenix…
In Carnival the World erupts in cascading delight. Bodies give themselves to the revel and in so doing open their spirits to the sweet touch of revelation. Masked faces twist in the abandonment of self. Behind the great mask of Carnival, the small masks worn in the everyday world disappear. Sacred time touches all action, as clocks round their regular twelve, twelve, twelve with unnoticed precision. The Carnival, the Revel is ever Now.
A primary attribute of Carnival is release. This release is definitely not from the World. The World, together with all the marvelous experiences it offers, is a part of liberation. The release is from a vile smallness to a more complete awareness of our ways and states of being.
There is no growth; we are ever complete. What increases is awareness, the ability to focus one's attention and to appreciate that in the final, formal elegance of maya (illusion) the ultimate beauty of spirit is revealed.”
on going somewhere without reservations….
almost so long ago now, I traveled with my friend farland to iceland and, yes, we had to make plane reservations, but when we arrived in iceland we were completely random for 1 month, hitchhiking, hiking and camping in our little tent in the far north summer.
and it was magic and I longed for it for long after I'd returned home to my heavily scheduled life. and I still long for it sometimes, but it's such a sweet longing and I know in my heart of hearts that I will go back north someday and travel in that way again.
and I love that description of mardi gras which I knew exactly nothing about.
Oh, I'm pretty sure Wyatt meant totally without reservations. No holding back. A leap into the great Unknown.
I've travelled my fair share all over the world without plans, but I always had money in my pocket. Money was my backup. The most life-altering pilgrimage I had in my life was when I boarded a flight to Bangkok knowing full well I probably only had enough money to last me half the length of the trip. I started to learn about grace and the benevolence of the universe that time round, yet somehow I can convince myself that people are just kinder in Asia than America.
I was a bit freaked out thinking about going across the fiercely independent USA in winter without money.
It's a longer story, but Wyatt was on the streets of San Francisco Bay Area playing guitar to earn money to get back to Nola when we met. I didn't have even a quarter to hand him, I was that broke myself. I'd managed to scrounge up enough change for bus fare to go to a networking meeting where I thought I could have some possibilities for future work that day.
Anyhow, a few years ago I told my husband as we were having our last dialogue before I agreed to yes to his request for a divorce that I didn't know the answer to Einstein's question (Einstein said that the most important question that a human being can ask themselves is if the universe is friendly) but I was going to live as if the answer is Yes. He hesitated for a long time before he said that he could see how that could work for me, but he couldn't live that way.
Even though I was sad, that's when I knew the divorce was inevitable.
So I talked myself into thinking that I'd just be a liability for Wyatt. At least he can play songs for his keep.
And, so, since I am being so honest right now, I think too there was a part of me that knew I could really like Wyatt a lot and I wasn't willing to explore that since I had my own agenda and my own plans in the Bay Area and I didn't want to rock that boat.
And so maybe it makes sense when I say that for Lent I am giving up holding back ;-)
According to dictionary: reservation n. The act of reserving; a keeping back or withholding. Something that is kept back or withheld.
Evelyn? The comment above this, about how for Lent you're giving up holding back, just about made my heart burst from joy and pride and this deep, deep knowledge of rightness.
I don't have more words than that.
But YES.