New Definitions of Meditation

Take one

So I just got finished reading my sister's blog over at Life as I know it about one of many revelations she's had since attending Oprah's "Live The Life You Want" trailblazer tour. She's the one who challenged me to blog everyday in September and I have to say that I am so proud of the both of us for sticking to it every single day this month. It has meant so much to me to have her be a kind of co-blogging friend. In ways she may not be aware of she pushes me, motivates  and holds me accountable simply by being her best self which is by the way, a freaking amazing self.

In her latest entry she talks about Mark Nepo, a poet who toured with Oprah and his emphasis of the importance of being still in meditation and how that meditation need not only be the practice of sitting in silence but anything that brings your spirit fully into the present moment. Wow! So creation can be meditation. Journaling can be meditation. People watching can be mediation.

A few weeks ago I was at lunch in the park, which is where I try to be every single day. I generally eat lunch alone and for the most part I always have. As I mentioned before, it's really important for me to get my alone time in, because for me, it's never really like being alone. I need it to check in with myself, to enjoy things, discover things, observe or even just be in my feelings for a bit. But I need it. Whenever I make a date to have lunch with a co-worker I understand that I have to give all that up and be present with someone else, so I'm always very careful about who I'm having lunch with, if it's only one person I try to gauge what the energy is like. I like to give people what I think they need and often that requires being a good listener which I do well.

But getting back to meditation. I was at lunch one day a few weeks ago and it occurred to me that sitting in silence for long stretches of time without talking is something that I do almost everyday. True, I may be reading, writing, listening to music or a podcast and of course eating but there are often times when I'm doing nothing but sitting in silence and watching. Watching people, children, babies, birds, feeling the sun on my face and the wind on my skin. I'm very aware that this hour is a time when I get to just do me and I really appreciate it. It's rare that I pack a lot of errands into that hour and when I do I always miss that quiet time of just nothing special but everything special. It occurred to me then, can't this be as much like meditation as setting my iPhone timer to 15 minutes, and sitting cross-legged not moving and observing my breath?

Years ago I read a small book called "The Knitting Sutra: Craft as Spiritual Practice" in which the author, while coping with a broken arm, came to recognize the repetitive act of knitting as prayer/meditation and explored the practice in different cultures. Sutra is Sanskrit for prayer. I liked this idea very much since knitting and crocheting are very meditative for me. When I'm doing it, I lose time and a sense of my self in the traditional ego based way we are all familiar with. All I am is making, is doing. And it's a wonderful feeling that I think women are perhaps more readily able to access because, as my co-blogging friend also mentions in her entry, women are more connected to our hearts. And it's true, we're always made to feel like we are weak because of it, that we should hide our vulnerabilities and operate from our heads 100% of the time, the way that most men are conditioned to. But therein lies the key to our purpose. So it's no wonder that so many of us feel so cut off and disconnected from our true purpose. We have been conditioned to believe that heart based activity is of less or no value when compared with head based activity.

Feminine qualities are for the most part undervalued and diminished in the realm of mainstream ideas about success. And we cannot be our best selves when we're not even being our true selves. Where women are concerned, this journey has to start first from knowing what it means to truly love ourselves, support your own needs and then support and encourage one another to lead the lives we're meant to live instead of being each others greatest competition and or obstacles. There is room for us all at the table. But the truth only matters when you believe it.

Animal Farm

My husband petting a cow

Well actually it was called an Animal Sanctuary. I just like saying Animal Farm because of the George Orwell book. Apparently the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary is much more humane than either the book or apparently most farms. It was a place that was recommended to me to visit during our weekend there. My husband loves animals so I knew he would enjoy it. I had this whole idyllic, Charlotte’s Web image in my head the whole time but our tour guide was very plain about the fact that he was going to tell us about all the animals there but that he would also tell us horrific things that would possibly make us, uncomfortable, sad and or angry and depressed.

YAAAAY!!!

Let’s just say this. I’m a vegetarian who was raised vegan and after that tour I was feeling sorry for carnivores. I mean the things you have to do to manage and rationalize your contribution to the regulated murder and torture of animals while you watch them grazing is something I really struggle with. Apparently, we’re not even supposed to drink the milk of goats or cows because of the way in which they are treated. Listen, I’m not preaching at all. I’m just saying what I heard. I eat something with cow’s milk in it probably every day and I never think about the shitty, awful horrific conditions of the thousands of farmed cows while I’m eating it. After this tour I thought I would. Oh man. Morrissey hates me. Oh well.

I will say that the first most immediate reaction I had to the animal sanctuary is just how huge these animals were. I mean huge! Cows walking around in their grazing patches could probably hurt you by accident if you  got in the way of their swatting tails. They are gigantic. But they are also very humbling in their large slow stature and the one we engaged with was clearly used to people and relatively interested in us. There were kids there, college students, older people and the sun was beaming like crazy. It smelled like farm which wasn't bad but you have to really surrender yourself. There’s poop in animal pens. You’re not getting away from it.

The pig house was so clean! I mean I approached the pigs with so much trepidation, not only because of the whole dirty pig stigma (I mean they are pigs) but because these pigs were humongous! As we approached the pig barn, I was amazed not only by how clean it was but the fact that it actually smelled nice. This sanctuary is really fully functional and really well looked after by staff and volunteers. That being said, I had no interest in petting or touching pigs. I kept a safe distance. I will say that while we were checking out the sheep across the way, we could hear the pigs going crazy during feeding time and I was totally freaked out by how human they sounded. It was a bit alarming and the guide was like “Don’t worry. They’re just pumped for feeding time.” Okay.

There was no baaing by the way

My favorite animals were the sheep and goats. You don’t know wool until your fingers are deep in sheep back. I mean it’s hard not to love sheep. I realize that it’s all romantic idyllic conditioning but seeing the sheep was just so normal to me. It was so easy to be around them.  The only question I asked during the tour because I love to work with yarn is whether it was possible to shear sheep without hurting them and being brutal to them which is often the case apparently. He said it was but that it was not often the practice. He tended to tell us the all the worst stories about the ways in which food, milk and wool were taken from farm animals. I and I’m sure many of us on the tour were  looking for ways in which we could perhaps get what we feel we needed from animal without feeling like horrible people, though no one actually said it. This one young girl was wearing a black t-shirt which read Vegan. Under that was a list of things about non-violence. But she didn't say anything, didn’t preach or ask questions I can recall.

Here’s the thing. Whenever a city gal like me is on a drive through rural New York or America and I see cows, horses, or goats grazing on some farm, I get a warm fuzzy feeling inside that has zero to do with reality. These animals are not pets. They are property, being fed, breed and or injected to produce for someone’s livelihood. Can’t I even keep the sweet image of dairy maids in my head? I mean I was brainwashed like every other child in America and I was home schooled and vegan! My mom used to kill the chickens they raised with her bare hands when she was a girl. That’s a lot to process; how what we like to believe or have been conditioned to believe has no place in actual reality. But there is an even deeper question here, a question of morality mostly and of just how much violence and torture if any with regards to livestock is manageable.  My husband and I talked about it afterwards and he was making the argument that the tour guide obviously had an agenda because he didn't talk about the fact that even eating plants and plant based food requires the killing of plants.

I haven’t really formed an opinion on that as yet. I do know that people need to eat in order to live and if we can’t eat plants, we’re definitely screwed. I mean we’ve been eating plants since the beginning.  So there is something to human life and the sustaining of life in general through a natural food chain but I feel like there has to be some balance there and I haven’t quite figured out what that means yet. 

Trust me, rectangle

I’ll tell you what I do know. Goats have rectangle pupils . They are rectangle and vertical. I stared at enough goats at the sanctuary and noticed this and I have no idea why this fascinates me but it does. I know more about how the cat eye works having had a cat for years as a girl. And I think that cat’s eyes are more accurately represented in popular culture than perhaps any other animal. But I think that vertical rectangle pupil in Goats are something I missed when mom was reading us “Billy Goat’s Gruff.” 

Ever present

Lavender calms the mind and eases stress and tension

Sometimes going away, even for short while really does gives me the distance I need to detach from useless energy. I’m always a little sad when I have to return to the “world” but I guess I wouldn’t appreciate the respite if there was nothing to retreat from.

I really am kind of a ridiculously private person. I don’t know where I get that from but I always feel way more energized after I’ve had sometime away where I’m able to be quiet and just listen to the silence of nature and watch the night stars. Saturday night the stars in Woodstock were just incredible! There were so many of them! My husband and I stood outside just looking up at them in total awe.

The really crazy thing about looking at stars is that it’s like time travel. You are looking at light that has taken millions of years to reach the human eye. I mean what the f*ck! Can you even really comprehend that? I shine a light somewhere in the galaxy and millions of years later someone sees it? Huh?

I can’t wrap my mind around it even now. Its just makes me realize how much more there is to this life, this universe than we will ever know, and how thankful I am to be able to cut off all the noise of my internal dialogue, all the chatter of external dialogue and tune in to something that is ever present. It is that ever-present quality that is at the core of what I seek most often in life. When I am able to connect to it I feel so much relief and contentment. It cannot be likened to happiness, which is more momentous and fleeting. It is simply a feeling that all the things I obsess over, think about, worry about, stress about, don’t really matter and are not really real essentially. They are dwarfed by the presence of something, which is eternally within reach and accessible to anyone should they wish to connect with it. No one has a monopoly over it. It belongs to us all.

Woodstock Weekend

This house has a lot of class. I mean D. has a really great interior eye. It’s personal but generous. It invites you in. Everything just emanates a sense of comfort and familiarity. There are mirrors placed tastefully in the right places. There’s a room on the second floor that just pours out the light reflected from the small window because the room is painted a light yellow. It’s soft, not overwhelming. It bathes you in light. It’s very soothing.

And the day bed outside across from that room? I am all about a day bed. I love the lounge quality of it. It’s a great touch. The master bedroom in the attic has a deeper mood. The back wall is a deep blue while the side walls are light blue and the floor is this thick smooth amazing wood. There is a rectangle skylight above the bed. The light that comes through just illuminates the blueness inside. There is an old chest at the foot of the bed, a sitting chair and a rocking chair and a lamp sitting on a wide African drum. It’s brilliant, simple, cozy yet intelligent.

It makes me think of how I might decorate a house for other people to stay in. How would I construct the mood of each room? What is my idea of comfort and peace? I really do like the idea of collections and things in sets of two and three.  Like old rusty keys or sea shells or what have you. Collections tell a story about the owner. D. loves art, history, craft, colors, music, design, culture and food. But she doesn’t shove it down your throat. Nothing is laid on thick. There is still space for you to be you. Or that’s how I feel any way. But I’m biased. I’m very partial to D. and pretty familiar with the things she is partial to.

There is a rain stick on the main floor by the entrance in the living room that just dematerializes me when I turn it over. It just sounds like so much more than rain! This level of relaxation should be accessible at will. It really makes a difference.  Everyone deserves that opportunity. Imagine how different the world would be if we could release our anxiety at the exact time we most needed it?

Everybody writes a poem

AT the very end of every Open Expression in Harlem, our host, my friend Cece reads the group poem aloud to the audience. The theme is different every month. It's usually a line like "If you really love me..." This line is written at the top of a piece of lined paper that gets passed around the entire room so that anyone who wants may contribute a line; those people who didn't sign up for open mic at the door, those who said they didn't have anything to read that night or those who have never read in front of an audience before.

And I have to say that nine times out of ten, the group poem, when Cece reads it back to us, is amazing. Collectively, each line represents the whole in a surprisingly cohesive sounding way. I've never heard a bad one. And in the end people are not only cheering for the feature poet but also for their own own unique collaboration together. It costs nothing. All you have to do is show up, listen and participate. It always inspires and awes me, the love, magic and generosity that flows from Open Expression and I'm honored to have been apart of it from the very beginning.

It's a place where I feel I can be comfortable being myself around a bunch of friends and strangers, people who get to see me exercise a muscle that I used to work out about 90% of the time. It's like returning to an art form that I used to identify with in a very serious way. I guess I still do, although I no longer harbor the same romantic aspirations I once had of being a poet, who supports herself with poetry alone.

Still I think it would be erroneous of me to say that poetry does not still support me in many ways. I've just begun to explore a broader version of it in the years since I left the safety of being supported as a full time student. I still love to watch spoken word poetry performed in the way in which it is most traditionally known, mixed with music and instruments, improvisational and or formatted. It is so very close to something ancient and universal as a form of communications between peoples about issues both political, and personal.  It is a report straight from the village, straight from the mouths of generations, live and direct. It's a prayer and a song. It's one of the very few soul connections I experience that requires me to engage willingly with the energy of others and I am eternally thankful for it. The opportunity to put down my technological devices, look up from all the blinding screens and participate in life should happen way more often than this.

Check in

There is a lot going on right now. The first episode of the latest season of Scandal aired tonight. I missed it because I as too busy checking in with my life at Open Expression. Yes, that will be a poem I write. Wow, did I just open with a rhyme?

Yes, well I meet old and new people I really appreciate whenever I'm at Open Expression in Harlem. Had a lovely sister give me really heartfelt encouragement about my work. And we're getting out of town for a bit this weekend for a little retreat from the buzz and crush of city life. I need that kind of refuge at least three times a month. Yes, that would be my ideal life. Three weekends a month in an upstate retreat, writing, meditating, "satelliting."

Jeter just played his last game ever and won it for the Yankees. Now I don't watch baseball at all butI know how incredible his contribution to the game has been. And my husband (ding ding ding!) is super happy and psyched about it so that makes me really happy.

We're all packed and ready. I couldn't get out of the office fast enough today. I'm exhausted and just looking forward to sleeping in a different bed. I get excited about that kind of thing. I like hotels, and not just the fancy ones, even the mid level ones. And B&Bs. Don't get me started. There's one in Hyde Park we're very fond of.

So I'll be reporting from said retreat by tomorrow.

Thank you Jewish Holidays. 

How's Married Life?

I have heard this question so many times since we got married in June and I never really know what to say to people. I mean I want to be like, “It’s great! It’s changed everything!” or “I don’t know. it’s getting a bit rough lately.” Well not the latter but at least something more definitive than “Well we’ve been together over nine years so… it’s not really that different.” LOL! But it’s true!

 I think the only part I can readily comment on is addressing him as my husband to other people. That kinds cracks me up, not because I don’t take it seriously but because it always sounds like something other people say. It also makes me feel old. And we’re just not the most “old” couple. I mean we’re just us. Am I different now that I’m a wife? I don’t think so but there are things that I’m doing just in terms of being a better more conscious partner that I suppose can be attributed to my commitment to being a better partner. But that word, wife…I don’t know. For myself, I tend to regard it from afar with a bit of skepticism. I’m still inching up to what it means to me to be a wife outside of the socially defined parameters of it that most of us are familiar with. I do believe there are things a wife should do for a husband as part of their vows but I guess I’m kind of private about that stuff. It’s different than the stuff you do just because you’re being a nice person. Whoa. That just unlocked something I haven’t thought about too much. Excuse me while I process that.

Married life is great. But here’s the thing. I’m not sure if it’s great because I’m married or because I’m married to exactly who I want, because in that case, I’d be happy either way. Married life might be different for me if I was with with someone I couldn't be my fullest self around. So I’ll just say that I’m probably not aware of the additional layer of identity marriage has applied to me with regards to how others see me as yet because I tend to be pretty private.  I don't walk around announcing to everyone that they should now address me by my married name. That was never my thing. And I'm not judging ladies whose thing it is.

Wife is a journey. Get it?

Ain't I clever?

Blast from the past from the future

Incidentally, because I'm into comedy, I came across the stand-up routine of the son of a high school classmate of mine this morning on youtube and I'm sitting here just totally tripping off of both his resemblance to and yet distinct generational departure from his dad. I mean forget about how old this may or may not make both of us feel. This guy is a whole other person, totally separate from his father, a man who I knew in his youth. In fact, he is the same age now as his father was when I knew him in high school! WHAAAT????

And he's doing five and ten minute sets at the Comedy Cellar. I am so proud watching him and so in awe of the way in which he (unconsciously or not) represents so many of the qualities I remember in his dad. Great sense of humor, timing, dry wit, sarcasm, cultural references and irreverence.

It's weird!!!!!

I guess I should mention that the only reason I'm not naming names or posting links is because I had a bad falling out with his dad years ago and have no desire to reconnect so that's that.

There was a lot he shared with me about his son during the times when were still in communication with one another and I remember so much of it. I think that men have a very unique relationship to parenthood, particularly men of color which is not something discussed very often in popular media at all. My classmate had a lot of issues, both in his own life and with raising his son as a single father while he was still a very young man himself. But I think that he likes son. I know that he was scared for him. Every parent of a young black man is probably scared all the time for their sons. I know that he brought him up with a lot of the same Black Pride, know your history mentality that his own father instilled in him and I can see that in his routine as well. It's trippy! Can you understand that we were the age his son is now (15 or 16?) when were friends? What happened to the time?

I also know that my classmate has a daughter who is also the spitting image of him. He showed me a picture of her once. So cute! Oh God! I'm becoming that person who checks on the kids of my friends and ex friends! UGH! I also get teary eyed watching kids stumble around on the lawn at Bryant park during lunch. Guess I better pop out a baby soon. LOL!

...no seriously.

The one I love

"An exercise in trust."

I love movies.

At the spur of the moment I can watch a movie that looks interesting at any time of the day just because of the power its storyline and or cast of characters holds for me.

Occasionally I will spend time in bed just watching trailers on my Trailers app. It’s one of my favorite things to do. I can star all the films I like that I want to see and prioritize the order in which I want to watch them when they hit theaters.

Around midnight last night I decided to watch “The One I Love” a film I've been trying on and off to watch with my husband for over a month now. No pressure. I knew I wanted to see it but I was just kind of waiting for him.

“Honey, did you still wanna watch that movie?”

“What movie?”

“That one, the trailer I showed you, remember?”

*blank stare*

“The one I love.”

Silence.

“The one with the guy from the Mindy Project, Mark Duplass. I showed you the trailer. You just forgot about it.”

At this point my husband has drifted away into the kitchen or the next room. He thinks I’m being vague. We have had this exchange like two times already. It's available to rent on iTunes so rent it and decide it’s safe for me to watch it alone.

Don’t watch this movie alone if you can help it. And if you do, don’t watch it at midnight.  It’s scary. It scared me. That’s not to say I didn't like it. But the creep factor is complex and hard to categorize which is what you desperately want to do with movies as a matter of general conditioning, particularly if you’re an American viewer.

The trailer kind of reads like a romantic comedy but I know Duplass’ work (“Safety not Guaranteed” another weird ass movie) and I knew the film was more layered than that. I’m pretty smart about reading movie trailers and I even knew what the “twist” was before it happened. I was just curious to see how it would be executed.  And ummmm…. yeah, it’s just way too on the nose for me. It’s up there with “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” and “Prelude to a Kiss” and maybe even “Solaris” three other of my favorite films about testing the limits of how well you think you know the person you love. I’ll leave it at that. There is a weirdness that occurs when the questionably supernatural or metaphysical enters the realm of constructed special situation “normalcy” in these films that really kind of freaks me out in a way I like. It appeals to my love of the absurd, ironic and cerebral.  But I have to say that this film actually scared me. Like I didn't want to get up to pee in the middle of the night scared. Because it just really plays with the ideas of what you love about a person and what choices you would make if given the opportunity to escape from the things about that person you find you cannot handle in a way I have never seen before. It raises questions all over the place.  I don’t want to spoil it. I don’t think I can. If I tried to explain it, it would just be more confusing but I think that’s really the gist of it.

There is, by the way, no horror(not traditionally), no gore, no monsters or threat of monsters no gratuitous violence or explosions of any kind in this film. It’s just not necessary. 

Ankara Emrgence

This wrap skirt just grabbed me!

Today I am posting an audio blog from my Soundcloud account because I just had too much going on in my head and I felt like talking rather than writing because I just felt like my fingers would be to slow to catch up to my thoughts today. My thoughts are about the emergence of Ankara print design in New York. Above is a wrap skirt I bought on 125 in Harlem just a stones throw from where I live. And I have also included links below to a few places and people I mention in my voice blog rambling.

And here is my soundblog! Welcome to my voice! LOL!

Ankara Emergence: SoundBlog

http://plussizeprincess.com/
http://www.oceansandrivers.com/
https://www.etsy.com/shop/DemestiksNewYork
https://www.etsy.com/shop/whatisyourACCENT


This is super interesting:
http://museorigins.net/the-origin-of-ankara/

What weekends are for,,,

About 10 of us were at Fat Cat last night. We drank, played ping pong, talked, laughed, even ate a few slices of pizza together afterward. It was a really nice night. We played, not really knowing what were doing or really even keeping score. We we just enjoyed each other's company.

I have to say it was a successful afterwork outing and that it's nice to be able to hang out with people you really like and respect and comfortably take the edge off. It's a nice feeling when people make the effort to get together and have fun.

This afternoon a friend of mine, my husband and I took a walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, something we'd been planning to do for months. It was an amazing day for it, clear, warm and with a nice breeze blowing on and off throughout the day. There was all this really sweet, inspiring and sentimental graffiti written on the bridge and even though I joked that it was way too enthusiastic to be good graffiti, I was actually kind of moved by it. The Brooklyn Bridge is a marvel. I'm so proud to have been born in Brooklyn.

I really have nothing bad to say. I'm experimenting with blogging about just being happy because there are times when I'm glad to report that I'm not judging, cataloging, worrying, panicking, or being cynical, suspicious or insecure. I'm just enjoying, enjoying fun, enjoying people, enjoying life.

That's what weekends are for.

Strategic Rage

This morning I attended a forum: "FROM PROTEST TO POLICY: POLICING IN COMMUNITIES OF COLOR" with the Reverend Al Sharpton. Although I find that I cannot readily agree that the response of rioting as a reaction to the Michael Brown incident in Ferguson was useless, I do agree with Sharpton that any rage that is expressed as a reaction to injustice should be channeled in a strategic way if at all possible. The issue of who is entitled to rage or whose "strategic" rage gets responded to in this country is another story.

Black men are made to feel like monstruous threats whether they assert themselves or not. In affect they are seen as threats because they exist.  I am not a Black man but I am married to one and I have heard him recount stories of being approached, pulled over and harassed by cops. I cannot say for sure whether or not It would easy for me to respond to these situations in a calm manner. My husband has been a witness to my temper in way I'm pretty certain no one else has. It's not pretty.

I have a deluded sense of entitlement when it comes to what I feel I can get away with doing in public and do not take very kindly to being held to rules I consider petty which restrict that deluded sense of entitlement. I get that from my mom, a notorious rebel and rule breaker in her family. I still walk between train cars on the MTA. Never been pulled aside by cops for it. Never been pulled aside or handled by cops for anything for that matter. Do you understand?

However, as men of color, when you are treated from very young as a group whose potential contribution to society is limited to low paying undervalued positions, and as someone who is not intelligent enough to do better than drug dealer or gang banger, it is simply a matter of time before the pot will boil over, simply a matter of a series of inevitable systematical events both external and internal that lead to the possibility of looting and rioting and store windows being shattered, fires being started. It starts with slavery and continues to this day.

With regard to strategic rage, I think that there needs to be more work around undoing the violence that incites the rage in the first place before we can start talking about strategic rage on the part of people of color. This may be a reactionary comment because I have not yet learned how to sufficiently channel or diffuse my own rage and anger about a range of issues but I feel like asking Black and Brown men to be strategic about their rage is just.... to put it nicely, an uninformed request

The law of cause and effect with regard to the ways in which policy brutality is met with equal or surpassed violence from those who are oppressed by it seem to be in perfect order as far as I'm concerned. To apply this example globally, well...okay I won't go there now, but let's just say that when you attack innocent and unarmed people and or nations mercilessly, you got an ass whoopin coming to you that no strategy can curtail. These are the circumstances that have been created. These are the conditions we live in. People of color don't all have the luxury of benefiting from systemic racism and it's violence and then turning around and saying that those who are oppressed and brutalized by it need to back the fuck down and take it "strategically." So shit will hit the fan as it should and as is subject to by the laws of cause and effect.

I was watching Ken Burn's "The Roosevelts" last night and just found myself rapt with fascination over the documentation of the Great Depression and the ways in which Roosevelt unlike any other American President before him was able to connect with Americans, gain their trust and implement some programs and policy that seemed to really make a difference in the lives of Americans whose lives were devastated by the Depression. Now it's not to say that all the Americans who could identify as White or "non-black" were in total harmony with one another but they did benefit for the most part from these policy and program implementations, and when a majority of people who find are able to be relieved from the ravages of destitute poverty there is a sense of unity and camaraderie  that is uplifting and energetic, inspiring and just plain incredible to witness. The NRA parade was a perfect example of that.

And then there was the footage of the Black families and narratives of their written pleas to President Roosevelt for help and the torrent of resistance he was met with in his cabinet when trying to implement anti lynching laws into the Constitution. And my heart just dropped. Because they were Americans. But they were not treated as Americans. And it made me feel inexplicably helpless. Because this is still happening now. Red lining, racial profiling, lynching...

Rage has it's place.

Journal Nerd

I used to have a stationary and journal addiction that got a little out of control.  I would buy tons of stationary I never had the opportunity to use (nobody puts pen to paper anymore) and I would buy a journal, start writing in it, forget it or get bored with it, find and buy another one I like and repeat that process a few more times. One day I just had to stop altogether. No matter how pretty or smart the stationary, no matter how bohemian and inspirational the journal, I couldn't buy it. I had to use what I had.

Which brings me to the journal I have now which is not the type of journal I would ever normally feel inspired by and yet I write in it almost every day lately. It's not Bohemian, or themed or cute. And what you might ask do I write about in a journal that I don't blog about here?

Lots of things. You know, life. It's very different than blogging or typing on a screen. It's not for anyone but me. it's like...reading books. You have to focus. You can't do anything else when you're writing on paper but write. You can't do anything else when you read but read. I guess some people are dexterous enough to knit or maybe do the dishes or iron while they read but the focus is still primarily on reading. And when you're writing in your journal there really is no multi-tasking possible. It requires your full attention.

It's a very good thing to be able to give any one thing or person your full attention in a world like the one we live in now where using up every spare minute of your time to cram in as many errands and projects and notes and calls and emails and transactions and viewings as possible. We do and do like nobody's business. Being is rare. Reflecting simply for oneself. Does that happen anymore? Or is everything a blog/vlog or Facebook status?

It's good to seek privacy sometimes in a world like this, a world in which there essentially is no privacy at all. The smart phone, your eternal companion knows where you are at all times.

So I've been pleased to notice how much I've even wanted to write in my journal lately. I think I lost a kind of trust in it for years. It stopped really meaning anything to me. I lost the meaning of writing just for myself. I stopped needing it. But I need it again. It's important.

Baby Choreography

When I watched this video last night it took me right back to the places in "The Conscious Parent" which explain how children have the ability to raise you and teach you as much as you parent them.

In the two years this girl has been alive you can see clearly that she listens to music often and has observed dance, both in the studio and on television. She has applied timing, improvisation, rhythm and a pure joy of simply moving her body.



I watched this twice in a row on Facebook where you hear the music she's dancing to is actually "Chandelier" by Sia. I was squealing with laughter. It made my night. 

Self Empowerment and Self Sabotage: Project Runway

So I've been watching season 12 of Project Runway, one the few "Reality" television shows that I love because it involves watching designers really flesh out their process and promote or discover their signature aesthetic or voice and then put it all on the runway.

I've noticed something watching this time around that I hadn't really noticed before.

If you're lucky, there is something that you love to do that you also do really well and it's very empowering to have that validated and fed, inspired and praised.. But many of us, (me included) don't so so well being challenged, opposed or critiqued. And PR is a great place to see how various personalities react to this.

What I love love love about Tim Gunn's critiques season that I didn't notice before is that he encourages each designer to stay true to their voice and their aesthetic if they have one, regardless of the fear of what the judges might say or or being sent home.

It's easiest for to talk about the designers who I love the most. Dom Streater constructs designs that place bold prints together with an expertise that is truly amazing. She does it like she was born to. Where others are scared and feel that mixing bold prints is risky, she can see nothing else but the ways in which they speak to one another in her designs. She is playful and bold and you can see that her clothes make her very happy and that happiness is contagious. Her energy is friendly, encouraging, funny, loving and giving. Bradon McDonald is someone who seems to intuit his designs from some other realm. He has gotten stressed out on occasion about execution but never about his vision. His designs look like they come from another dimension. they are ambitious and uncompromising. I really admire that.

Helen Castillo is a designer  I had time watching because although she is a good designer, when she received not so good critiques from Tim, she crumbled. She was the hardest critic of herself and she would literally become paralyzed and unable to continue. She fixated on being sent home and could see nothing else.

*sigh*

It's hard for to watch Helen I guess it's because I can relate. When I have a vision for something I want to make and the execution is perhaps more difficult than I imagine I can end up scraping everything and just become a puddle of sulky, self sabotaging self doubts that no one wants to witness. I mean it's just a big "I suck" fest. So what I'm saying is that the behavior we can't stand to see in others is often what we hate to see in ourselves or confront in ourselves and we can measure the way we treat ourselves in those situations by the way we treat others. Every time I see Helen come down on herself I want to fast forward. I get really sick of seeing it over and over again. I would rather see Dom and Bradon who do amazing work that I love and never seem to have paralyzing self doubts or take criticism to mean that they should just give up.

*sigh*

But there I go judging and editing. Helen's reaction to criticism is the reality I know well and instead of being compassionate, I choose to avoid it and move on to more pleasant things. That doesn't mean it goes away.

Making things that you love, anything, whether it be something hand crafted or mind crafted is a labor of love, blood, sweat and tears. It takes more than just talent but also more than just determination. It takes passion, discipline, risk, time management, planning, vision and most of all belief in yourself and an allowance to let yourself make mistakes without letting those mistakes define you as a failure. One of the things that usually gets to us is comparisons, comparing ourselves to others and or comparing what we've done to what we are now doing. Staying fresh and present is not always easy. But when you can find your own way to stay in the zone that inspires your creativity the most, you have to nurture it.

When I can, I try to just get myself in a place where I expect nothing but am receptive to all (usually in nature) and just see what happens. But when I'm not doing that I realize I need to ease up on Helens of the world and essentially on the Helen in me. 

Words on Rice

I remember years ago when I was in high school and the very first MTV Real World aired. When I tell you loved that show! Omigod! I have the entire season on DVD.  And I actually watch it occasionally. I cried when it was over. I was so in!

There is an episode that aired in which Julie, one of the youngest housemates from the South gets into an altercation with the then, young writer/poet, Kevin Powell. According to her he was verbally abusive when she picked up the house line while he was on the phone with someone regarding a potential job and was rude to him about being on the phone for so long. After that she alleges that he confronted her with more verbally abusive words, threatened to throw a candlestick at her and then left the apartment angrily, slamming the door.  We will never really know what happened. It was all hearsay. What we do witness is the infamously heated argument between Kevin and Julie out on the street on Prince and Broadway, an argument I have watched many times and gone back and forth on in my opinions about what both of them communicated to one another.  I understood Julie’s reality as a woman. I have in the years since, become more empathetic towards Kevin’s reality as a black man. No matter what happened, I always liked Kevin. He is a writer, a poet, as was I at the time and I loved learning about him and where he came from. But reality television gives you very little reality.

Years later while I was in college I got the opportunity to work on the autograph staff of the Book Expo and met Kevin Powell at his table for the first time. He was promoting the release of his first book “Keepin it Real” and I was excited and proud for him. At the same time it’s seems, I learned through a friend that Kevin had beaten on a woman she knew.  I was in total disbelief. I didn't want to believe it. I could not reconcile what I learned with what I thought I knew are wanted to believe about Kevin who was for me a hero of sorts. Sometime later he came out to the public about the fact that he had committed DV against a woman he was involved with. He wrote a public apology in a letter published in Essence. It took me years to forgive him in my heart. And then years ago, because I still like Kevin and support his political and charity work, I actually read “Keepin it Real.” 

The nature of life is that it happens. And to severely understate the matter, life for Black men raised by single black women is hard for everyone involved. There is no excuse for domestic violence but there are reasons and Kevin is candid as hell about the details of his upbringing and the reasons that My cumulatively lead to his regrettable violent behavior towards women in the past and I had to give him credit for that. He laid it on the line. It was a good hard read and I really admired his candor and vulnerability. It could not have been an easy thing to do. But he got help. He got counseling. He is now one the biggest advocates not only of education, Black youth, the arts and more but also the prevention of domestic violence against women and young girls. Who better to be an advocate against DV?

As I strive to grow and be a more conscious human being, I realize that punishment in and of itself, really only treats a small percentage of any problem. People are not born angry, abusive, racist, or sexist. They learn it. And they can unlearn it. Of course they have to want to. But it also doesn’t hurt to have a system in place that is also genuinely concerned with rehabilitation not just prosecution, incarceration and death penalties. In fact, it can only HELP.

My immediate reaction to seeing the video of Rice beat his then fiancée in an elevator was very similar to the moment I learned that Kevin had committed domestic violence.  I could not believe what I was seeing. I wanted to unsee it. It is horrible. And initially it may have even sated by horror to hear that he was suspended. But then my sister over at Life as I know it wrote and entry expressing a very honest and unpopular view that she didn’t see how firing him would help the matter. And I stepped back and thought, wait a minute. Right, what happens now? How does this help him not to hurt his wife or even his daughter again?

You know what drug addicts usually do when a close friend of theirs dies from and overdose? They do more drugs. To a sober person this may seem illogical but in the mind of the addict to makes perfect sense. They do drugs to escape pain and what is more painful than dealing with the death of a loved one? No matter that the way you escape the pain may lead to death as well.

If I heard a man beating on his wife in the apartment above me, my response would not be to find out where he worked and get him fired. I’ll tell you that much.  How many assistants has Naomi Campbell abused now? She’s still walking the runway and doing print work. She did community service. She got help, counseling, therapy.

A lot of people may think that if the NFL had allowed Rice to continue to play after this unfortunate incident, it would be like a reward for being violently abusive, and that he would be getting away with this crime. A job is what you do to support yourself and or your family. If you’re lucky you love it and do it well. If you’re good at that job, you deserve that job.  If you’re good at the job of being a football player and suck at the job of being a good husband and or father, those two things in my opinion should be addressed separately. That’s just how I feel.

Bye bye summer

Mirror Fence: Alyson Shotz for Storm King

So I left the charger for my Macbook upstate by mistake so I have to manage my time here wisely.
My husband and I spent most of the afternoon strolling through Storm King upstate, using my rented fixed prime lens for the last time before I send it back tomorrow and kind of ushering in the first signs of Fall weather.

There was one particular installation I wanted to see, Mirror Fence by an Alyson Shotz. As we approached it, there several other people there taking photos of themselves in the mirror of course. It occurred to me as I began to the same how interesting it is the way some people react to reflective art installations or even that you would sit and spend time with anything that reflects a distorted version of yourself. A little vain I guess. Not that I have a problem with that. The mirror fence does a lot of interesting things. It slices up reality. Okay let me bring it back to speaking English. The mirror fences takes a reflection of nature and slices through nature. It's like an optical illusion. Okay still not speaking English and my battery is down to less than half.

I enjoyed it. That's the best I can do right now. LOL! Hopefully I explain more this week. 

Loved then, love now...

Today's entry will be a list, a list of the things that were important to me or grabbed my attention as a child that are still important to me now. What brought this about? Well I was thinking recently that one of the reasons why I seem to be able to always remain connected to play, creation, inspiration and a love of learning and discovery is that a lot of the simple things that I cared about as a little girl are still the things I care about now.


-Spotting a blimp in the sky

-Sky writing

-Clouds and the shapes they make

-Watching people fly kites

-Bubbles and making bubbles

-Cats

-Art and museums

-Flowers and nature

-Being barefoot whenever possible

-Eating with my hands and not utensils

-Dreaming and day dreaming

-Dolls

-Doodling

-Balloons

-Reading

-Construction vehicles (cranes still make me think of industrial dinosaurs and I always stop and stare at them)

Think about it. Think about the stuff that consistently grabbed your attention or that you cared about as a kid. Do you still care about those things or have you left it all in the past as you grew older? How has your interest in them changed and evolved? I won't presume to know any of the things that captured the imagination of most people as children because all childhoods are different but these are things I cared about and or noticed as a girl which honestly have not changed much now that I'm an adult.




-

Progress in photoland

Central Park Conservancy

So my fixed prime lens rental is due to be shipped back on Monday and I'm already feeling sad about it. This is by the way after I extended the rental earlier this week. I just wasn't ready to let it go. At least now I know that I have to buy one in October because I just cannot live without it. It's just so good. It validates my vision by leaps and bounds.

I have two flickr accounts. On of them I get faves and comments on and follows all the time. It makes me feel great, very connected, very supported, very belonging to a photo community but these are not my, how shall I say, primarily serious, technical, subject assigned photos. Those images are in my other flickr account. And I have to say that the activity on that flickr account has been like tumble weed rolling through a desert for years. LOL! I get no love there, very little comments or critiques. And there have been periods of time when I really don't contribute much to it. But when I do, It's pretty specific stuff. And lately, since I've had the fixed prime lens, I've been putting up work that I really like there and getting more views by people whose work I really like. That means a lot to me.

Flickr, since it was sold to it's present shareholder has gone through a lot of annoying changes but it is still one of the best image banks and showcases for amateur and professional photography in the world.  Discovering it is what made me take photography seriously as a craft for the first time back in 2008. I saw regular people who were not Avedon or Arbus or Steiglitz doing extraordinary things. I was transported and inspired by the composition, and manipulation of shapes, colors and light in ways I never had been before. It was like discovering one day that I understood a language that had been spoken around me since I was a baby, yet never really listened to until then.

So I have a nice weekend planned to spend with my lens for the last time. But in October I need to own that lens outright. My Nikon was starting to collect dust for a while there and this lens just brought it back to life. I was picking it up nearly every day and just shooting. My cell phone camera took a back seat and I pulled out the big guns once again. It felt so nice. Oh God! Fall is coming! Can you even imagine how amazing the turning colors will be? Okay, I'm geeking out now. Need to get back to work. Have an amazing weekend.

XXX

I remember...

I know I should be writing about more topical current events such as Rice, Pistorius and Obama's announcement of the counter strike on Isis and 9/11. I guess I just feel like thousands of others are already writing, tweeting, Facebooking about that stuff. What do I have to say that's really so different?

-Rice needs helps no more punishment

-Pistorius got away with murder

-Obama has to strike back with military force or else his approval rating would hit rock bottom

There.

I remember where I was on 9/11. I was in my bed in the house in the Bronx where I grew up. I heard my mother and brother talking in the hall outside in shocked tones and then my mother cam in my room and told me to turn on the news. I couldn't believe what I was seeing and it took me a while to understand what was going on. The weather was perfect that day. Perfect, blue sky. Perfect. I was off from work that day and I remember opening the door and looking outside in disbelief of how calm it was, how peaceful in my Bronx neighborhood. But on the television, the towers were falling one by one. People were jumping to their deaths out of windows and there was a layer of toxic dust over everything within miles of the targeted site. It was truly surreal.

I cannot imagine what it was like to witness such a tragedy but I can't help feeling like the tragedies that followed were just as horrible and polarizing as the attack itself. Muslims and Black and Brown people with turbans were now looked at as terrorists, stopped in the streets, tortured beaten and killed, made to succumb to humiliating airport strip searches and put on no fly lists. I know a man who was thrown to the ground, beaten and threatened by a cop because he mistaked the pendant of Haile Selassie on his neck as Sadam Hussein. Yeah, that's what happens when you're black and have black friends. Those are the kind of stories you hear all the time. And post 9/11 everyone was suddenly either an American Patriot or an enemy of the state. It was scary. Freedom of speech and expression as promised by our constitution was a joke.

For these reasons, Bill Maher was fired from his show "Politically Incorrect" for suggesting that the men who flew their planes into the towers were heroes. I guess you can only be so "Politically Incorrect" until...

The whitest most middle American chicks ever, The Dixie Chicks were nearly burned at the stake through character defamation in response to lyrics protesting the Invasion of Iraq that followed. That's when I knew that I lived in a country that could at any moment turn into the America of the 1940s when Japanese Americans were put into interment camps after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Black and Brown people born in America are not entitled to the same rights as Americans who identify as whites, never have been. We are not protected from tragedy, not compensated for it or supported by America while we are in it. This is why I cannot fault Obama for his decisions right now. He is not protected just because he is the President and he is certainly not supported. Black men and women have to do much of what they do just to stay alive and save face. The challenges and the daily internal struggle they experience internally as a result of racism for the most part, are of no interest to anyone in so far as addressing, finding solutions, having honest discussions and confronting the ugly truths that support the need for racism to thrive in America.

*sigh* Now I'm just depressing myself.

I don't want to come off as cold and unconcerned about the terrible tragedy of 9/11. There is no question that it has scarred this nation indelibly. But the tragedy has not yet ended nor did it begin with 9/11.

That's what I remember. That's what I know.

Silence Report

I just sat in silence for 15 minutes straight. I did not pressure myself into defining it as meditation. I just sat still.

My mind is noisy as hell! I mean there is so much chatter and layers of dialogue and media flying around. At around what seemed like 10 or 12 minutes I desperately just wanted to open my mouth. And then I had this thought about how language is very divisive. Not communication but language. It doesn't have to be but that is the way in which so many of us employ it, to set apart, to catalogue, to compare, rate and judge. Language works best when it is used simply to communicate and nothing more but I think we would be surprised to know on average just how many of us are flapping our lips daily and communicating not a thing.

Pure communication is a rare and beautiful thing. When you experience it, you're all in, not distracted, not deflective, not evasive, not fragmented. You're connected. We're connected all the time but there's too much noise going on in your mind for us to see this truth.

What's beyond all the noise in our minds? What are we afraid of?

Only the unknown.

I'm making this a part of my daily practice. 

Male Energy

Francis (my husband) and Cris

When I got home yesterday the long awaited disc containing the professional photos from our wedding had finally arrived, photos I have looked at many times already by now and which I look forward to looking at hundreds of time again.  I am constantly moved by the tiny beautiful, funny and endearing moments captured in the prep photos of myself, the bridesmaids, flower girls, my mother and mother in law and all the women in the bridal party. But when I see the prep photos of the men in the grooms suite I am always just so touched at the ways in which they are captured taking care of one another and helping each other out. My husband has always been one of the few men I've ever known who truly values his friendships with his male friends and family members and I have always loved that about him. And for the most part I've also always really loved his friends and family members male and female alike. There are a few that I've known for a long time, since the day he and I met and others that he's made friends with along the way. His friends really care about him and it shows in the way they show up for him. It's a wonderful to see given the reputation may men have for being flaky, insensitive and non-committal and let's not mention dispelling the heaps of negative stereotypes about Black men, that they are mostly violent, lazy, irresponsible and jobless.

Derrick (Best Man) and Francis

It's not often we really celebrate the more loving side of men, black men in particular, towards one another. In the months leading up to my wedding I committed to collecting only images of Black and of color people getting married on my wedding pinterest board which meant I was restricted mostly to Munaluchi bride which was really fine since they have a prolific feed of "Real Wedding" images and and Engagement Sessions to look at and sort through. It was such a wonderful thing to be able to see black men and women getting married, to read their stories and to follow the narrative of their wedding day through thoughtful and inspiring images. Men may be very different creatures from women but their capacity for love, nurturing and support is great. In Black men this is a quality which is severely underestimated and underrepresented by American culture. I am thankful to have been raised by one of the most supportive and nurturing Black men I know, my dad, to have an equally loving, hilarious and supportive brother and to be married to a man who encompasses all of those qualities and more. 

Wrinkles, Lines and thickness

Balloon Venus: Jeff Koons

I just read a short article on MBG posted by a good friend on Facebook about a young woman who just turned 33 and is happy to be "Single and Poor."

Please note, I have an unconventional background and upbringing so I often relate to things like getting older as a woman in odd and unconventional ways.

I have been familiar with the indicators of age in women as seen through media for as long as I could understand language. The first gray hairs, crows feet (I think of Maddie Hayes in Moonlighting and her aging ex-model journey into the career of private detective) lines and wrinkles. I'm well aware of the signs. But I have never looked for them or been paranoid about them. I don't remember how old I was when I noticed my first gray hair and I never made an occasion of it. They were there and I just kind of went along with life. Of course I don't have them now because they're colored. HA!

When I read this article the "wrinkles and lines" line popped out at me and joined a heap of other similar or identical observations women have made about aging in magazines, movies, television conversation, etc. It occurred to me once again that I've never checked my reflection for any of these things and definitely not when I was 33. But then again, when I was 33, I was in a steady committed relationship and engaged to be married.

I was having dinner with a good friend, her partner and her mother this weekend. She asked me how married life was and said she wished my husband had a brother she could set up with her daughter because she loves my husband so much. I was amazed. Her daughter is gorgeous, accomplished, gainfully employed, funny, smart, all pluses in my mind. I asked all sorts of questions, what was she looking for in a man, what did she like, how old was she. Her grandmother said she was "getting up there." She is 33 years old. I sort of laughed because I wanted to believe that she was joking but the more I've thought about it since and after reading this article I'm starting to realize that for women, particularly unattached young women, 33 is old! And I know that the pool of available suitable men in your 30s start to vary in restrictive ways across cultural lines in very different ways.

Now when I say I don't check for wrinkles and lines, that doesn't mean I'm not obsessive about other parts of my body. I'm an ex-skinny chick in a body that is presently thicker and heavier than what I'm used to and comfortable with and it's a constant challenge for me. I have to come up with strategic ways to get the voice of the weight scale out of my mind. I no longer eat things I love with total abandon the way I did in college. I am mostly always worried about what I put in my mouth is doing to me. But that hasn't so much to do with aging as just general appearance and confidence level. Would I be checking for wrinkles and lines if I was single? Maybe. It makes sense that age becomes more of an issue for women when they are single and looking because we're freaking youth obsessed and feel like we have to look eternally 20ish to pull the right guys or any guy in some cases

I was having this conversation last night with my Soul Sister over at Life as I know it  about the negative reactions among black men to the leaked images of Jill Scott's naked body as she was photographing herself in her bathroom mirror. I was frankly shocked because I think she looks sexy as hell and it's always been my impression that Black men love sisters with some roundness, thickness and voluptuousity (yeah I made that up) so I was surprised and disappointed to read that they were coming down so hard on her body type because she didn't fit a standard more ascribed mostly to the bodies of white women. When the hell did that happen? *SIGH*

To me, roundness is feminine and bountiful and sustained extreme skinniness is a deprivation. That's just me. I also feel like our obsession with youth is a constant set up for failure because youth by default does not last. The only youth that lasts lives in the spirit of how we live, think and act. But the visual indicators of youth are what sell as an idea. And again, in a capitalist society, what sells is what gets attention. So we have women going under the knife, getting botox, implants and plastic surgery to stop the hands of time and create a mask. We have beautiful, thick, round, voluptuous beautiful woman who walk around thinking they need to fit a size 2 before they can pick their heads up and walk proudly and the ones who do walk proudly and live out line are seen as exceptions. As women, our bodies change because they are supposed to. We accommodate so many changes and transformations within our bodies that it's like we live several lifetimes in one.

I'm no shining example of acceptance of all of these changes. It's always a adjustment when our bodies change from one form to another. But I do believe the essence of beauty lies in energy and attitude and the way which we represent these things in our appearance. Even when I was a beanpole I was not confident about the way I looked. In my pre-teens, I was awkward and deflective about my body at best. If I got the body I thought I wanted tomorrow, it would be yet another adjustment, that's why healthy change. especially with regards to our bodies happens in increments not instantaneously. It's also why babies don't go from age 1 to 15 overnight. Think of the trauma that would involve for everyone.But we're in an age when self inflicted trauma has become a daily pastime. More on that later. 

Funny Lady

Tracee proudly displays her Obama boobie

Have I ever mentioned how much I like to laugh? Maybe. But have I ever mentioned how much I love funny women? Do you know how hard it is for women to be funny in public on purpose? I really admire women who are unafraid to look silly or goofy or awkward and who do so on purpose to lighten the mood or make a point all while making people howl in gut busting laughter.

I for one am always aware at how I reign my clown in around my female friends. It's like a reflex. Women must not make funny faces, burp, making unpleasant noises, do impressions or unattractive contortions, especially not on purpose! Not that I was raised that way. My dad was the guy who I could be my funniest around. He was always doing hilarious things in public, telling funny stories in  or creating funny situations. In fact he was the parent who was able to get on our level when my brother and I when were kids and sort of relate to our juvenile sensibilities. I would goof around when he took pictures of me all the time. In fact there are a few shots he took of me in my crib laughing uncontrollably. He said he walked up to my crib one day and I was just laughing and laughing. He doesn't know why. I certainly don't remember but like I said, I love to laugh. Tickling was my favorite thing for a while when I was around seven or eight.

When I first met my husband and we used to stay up late at night on the phone together we would intermittently have lengthy burping contests. It cracked us up. I would say it was an age thing and that we were young and silly but I was in my late 20s when we met to there goes that defense. LOL! I just have a naturally silly and sometimes hysterical nature about me which I tend to hold back around women because you know they kinda give you that look like "Oh my gah. What is wrong with you?" Judgement. I don't need it.

But I was watching Tracee Ellis Ross on youtube last month and I have to say, she is bonkers. She is bonkers and doesn't give a fuck. It's just natural part of her personality that she's not afraid to let out and it's just such a relief to me to see a woman who could easily rest on her sex appeal and socially appropriate physical beauty, or just being the daughter of the iconic Diana Ross,  just be silly and make fun of herself. Taking yourself too seriously sets you up really badly for criticism particularly if you're someone in the public eye. Besides I think laughter is very sexy and very endearing and connective. When it's genuine It breaks up tension and releases bad energy. And when women make funny it can really take the edge off the pressures of society to be all perfect and proper all the time. Usually when I feel I'm in a position where I have to come off that way, what I'm really dying to do is laugh. Life is too short and I'm not perfect. I prioritize silliness.

Loc Swatches and The New Old me

 

 I got 9/4 the loc clipped to the top

So today I had my hair colored at the place I go to in Brooklyn. I’ve been contemplating it for a long time and I’d never had it done professionally before. I used to do it myself in high school and in college. That’s really bad for your hair in the long run at least for locs anyway so don’t do it. SEEK A PROFESSIONAL.

So anyway, when I came in and sat down to wait I asked one of the stylists if they do hair color and she went to the back of the salon and brought back a hair color swatch sample. It’s the kind most women are used to seeing. Short snatches of straight synthetic hair in a range of different colors tacked to a white board. It was folded up into three sections and as I looked at the last section with the deeper shades I saw two loc swathes! Like real locs. Like somebody sacrificed one loc each to give examples of how these colors would look on locs! I was elated. Yes it was just two but I didn’t expect any! One of the locs was exactly the color I wanted, a deep but vibrant golden coppery color. Oh I just looked at that loc and touched it and held it in the light and smiled.  Can we have more loc swatches in New York City Natural hair salons please? Am I late on this? Are there more?

Okay so part two of this journey is realizing definitively for the first time that I’m really not into my hair when it first gets done. I appreciate the job that is done. I praise the chair of every African woman on 125^th street that braided Kankelon into my head. But I like my new hair and hairstyles to get a little lived in before I’m really comfortable.

In college I had a friend, a guy who had amazing locs who used to call me “Rasta Baby.” My hair was wild and fluffy and dyed golden blonde by me and I just remember loving how I looked and never thinking about tightening up my roots so much that you could see my scalp. I washed it, greased it, and twisted with no particular frequency and I just was very comfortable. But then I did go to Bard College. That probably would not have gone over well at Howard University. Hmmm…(Filing that away for later)

When my hair was done being washed and rinsed the stylist told me to look in the mirror at the color. I had heard them oohing and ahhing over it while my head was still in the sink. When I looked in the mirror I saw a reflection of someone from ten years ago. And I beamed at myself. But I knew it was me in the mirror, not her. But I recognized that look so well, that wild “Rasta Baby” look and I liked it.

When I left the salon about five hours later with the same style I usually get (I’m still working on being imaginative and daring at the salon.) I looked in the mirror and saw the color of my wild days in a conservative, neat and perfectly coifed context. And it’s weird. It’s like when Freddie blew her hair out on  “A Different World.” You don’t understand how it hurt me when that happened. I lived for Freddie’s wild, light colored hair that matched her equally charismatic, artsy, alternative attitude. 

But I didn’t freak out about it. That’s something that’s come easier to me with age at least in regards to my hair. I may not always be pleased with it but I can find a way to make it work. I had to put it up because it’s just to hot out right not for me to stand it any other way. But when it starts get a little wear and when I take it down and experiment I’m sure I’ll be able to strike a nice balance between “Rasta Baby” and present day me who I am just as fond of.