Friday: Lowered Expectations

You got to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince.

As I wrote in my muse this morning, I had a friend who collected frogs. She had glass frogs, wood frogs, green frogs, metal frogs and about as many different shapes and sizes of frogs that one could imagine. I asked her one day, why do you collect frogs? She looked at me and laughed and said: I got my first frog when the fellow I thought was my Prince Charming turned out to be a frog. Then every time I would have a break up with one of my perceived dream lovers, I would buy another frog. That woman had at least 30 frogs. Now that takes a lot of kissing of a lot of frogs. She was still single but ever optimistic that one of those frogs was going to turn into her Prince Charming.

I learned a lot from this woman but mostly I learned about how we set ourselves up in about every situation in life. Basically she did not want to be in a long-term relationship and by focusing on obtaining the impossible she is going to end up a very lonely person with a big frog collection.

It is so easy in life to create a thought pattern about how we want something so perfect that it is impossible to achieve. We never really have to face the reality of dealing with what we want to avoid if we keep up the illusion that what we want some how does exist and keep chasing after the impossible dream in quixotic manner. It is easier to tilt a few windmills rather than face the dragons that we truly fear.

Before I retired from Ohio University, I knew a professor in the English Department. He had been writing the definitive book about Shelley. He worked for twenty years on this project. He finally completed it, had the manuscript neatly typed up, placed in a box and headed to the train station to take his bible of Shelley to his publisher. As he waited for the train, he was truly in a panic. He turned around with his boxed up manuscript and went home. When people asked what happened, he said it just isn’t perfect yet. Three months later he killed himself.

When one is not happy with life and with the events surrounding one perhaps the one thing one needs to do is to lower one’s expectations about perfection. I am a total believer in lowered expectations. If when I wrote I could not publish or submit a manuscript or article if I did not accept the fact that it would never be perfect in my mind. I also had to accept the fact that no matter how perfect it was in my eyes, some people would just think it stinks. So I just go slashing and burning my way through the art of writing and enjoying the process. Now I have to admit that I would dearly love to have a few books on the New York Times best seller list. I would love to be on Oprah waxing pedantic about my philosophies of life and sell a million copies of my books. It could happen and it might even happen. But, in the mean time I have lowered my expectations and I enjoy just being a writer.

Also, I have learned that kissing frogs can sometimes be fun.

Monday: Doctor, we have to quit meeting like this!

Through the pain and the morphine, my humor still came to my rescue as I looked up at my doctor in the emergency room where I had again returned damaged and distraught.


It has just been a few days since I had been taking a friend for a ride in my new car when another driver ran us off the road. As we careened off the street barely missing a tree we smashed head long into a house that was not ready to get out of the way. My face crashed into the steering wheel and I felt instant and excruciating pain. Time slowed down and it was like I was also an observer as well as a participant in these moments of intensity. I remember seeing the police officer picking up a blood soaked notebook and placing it on the gurney with me. I thought that was strange but later I realized how important it was.


In the emergency room every one was busy taking care of me but not really talking to me. I remember darkness and then I was again floating over the scene again an observer as they placed a shunt inside my mouth to drain the fluids building up in my face. I was later sent home where my mother was to nurse and care for me.


She knew how looking at my ugliness would bother me so she had covered up the mirror in my bedroom with a towel. I just lie in my bed and realized that life as I had known it was over. I was used to being beautiful. I was used to people looking at me in admiration and not in horror. As the nurses at the hospital advised mother applied cold compresses to my face. They did not seem to help. I would reach over and take another morphine pill thinking that maybe it would help the pain go away. It did not. It just helped me detach a bit from it. And I could not cry out. I could only hurt.


I smelled the strangest smell. It was sweet and sickening. It smelled like I imagined death and purification would smell. I reached up and felt my face. I could feel this oozing damp wetness coming from a hole in my face. I passed out and the next thing I knew I was in the hospital looking up again at my doctor.


The shunt in my face had closed up because the nurse had given mother the wrong directions on care. I had developed gangrene in my face and it had burst open. That was the smell that had nauseated me and filled me with fear. That was the pain that would not stop. This time I was admitted to the hospital. As I lie there in delirium I could hear and see the dead walking through the building. I felt the person in the next room die and leave his body. I was living in a place that was supposed to bring hope and all I could feel was pain, desperation and death.


When I returned home my face was bandaged and I looked for the entire world like some kind of mummy.


I could not believe it. I had never learned to drive until about six weeks ago. I had finally bought my first car and the first payment was not due until about 3 weeks after my accident. Some crazy thought about how if you get thrown off a horse you have to get back on kept going through my head. So I went out to my rental car and took a drive.


While with bravado I wore by bandages as a badge of courage, I was devastated. All vanity was washed away by the blood that had covered the accident. I was no longer beautiful. In fact, I was scarred and ugly. What is funny I had always taken my looks for granted. My mother often warned me of the shallowness of vanity. Well now I realized that beauty truly was only skin deep but ugliness went all the way to the bone – my jaw bone.


About three months later, I had plastic surgery but I looked different. To this day I feel marked by this moment and I will often put my hand up to my scar and feel the time when I went from being lovely to being disfigured. As I age, the plastic surgery starts to sag and I can feel the ugliness trying to return and I wonder isn’t it enough to be scarred by and accident and now my youth is disfigured by time. Logic laughs at my insane obsession with my loss but the reality shows every time I look in the mirror. While my life and experiences have taught me compassion for others, sometimes, when I am tired and I look at my disfigurement it is hard to have compassion for me.

Friday: Do you have a dream?

"If you have a great ambition, take as big a step as possible in the direction of fulfilling it. The step may only be a tiny one, but trust that it may be the largest one possible for now." --Mildred McAfee

Do you have a dream?


A dream that sounds too wonderful to be possible?


All great accomplishment starts with a dream followed by action. It is sometimes scary to risk taking that first step. However, it is better to take that first step toward accomplishment than to live in a world of forgotten dreams.


Maybe you have forgotten your dreams because of being caught in the day to day world of survival. If you are feeling a bit low, stressed out, or just downright unhappy, it may be that you have lost touch with that inner dream -- that sense of purpose.


All is not lost… It is just that sometimes the dreams get put on the back burner until a later time in life when we are able to begin to take those first steps to achieving that which is our special talent.


When I was 18, I went to college but I quit after a year and got married, had children, and worked. I still felt that something was missing. So at age 30 something I went back to college.
I was absolutely terrified. My hands shook when I first asked a professor to sign an add slip so I could join her class. I started out easy. I went to a local community college and took four courses. It was frightening at first but then it became a real joy. I learned a lot -- mostly about myself.


I learned that I could do mathematics -- till that time I couldn't do basic arithmetic without a calculator but I discovered the magic behind mathematics.


I learned that I could give speeches.


I learned that I could express my opinions in writing and be appreciated.


After that first semester I transferred schools and went on to obtain two degrees in four years plus some advance graduate work.


All because I remembered my dream and risked taking those first four classes.

"Regret is an appalling waste of energy; you can't build on it; it's only good for wallowing in." --Katherine Mansfield

Thursday: Yes No Maybe

It isn’t so much that my life is spinning out of control; it is more like how do I take control. I hate those times when one has to make decisions. Sometimes the smallest decisions can throw me into a tizzy as my mind begins to ruminate and consider all the options – minutia can stop me dead in my tracks.


I wonder if will whether I say yes or no have a major impact on my life. I feel frozen and it is like I am caught between being pulled back and being pulled forward. There I am again; stuck in the middle of mental chaos and I don’t like it.


But then finally I say the hell with this and just decide to decide and when I decide I am caught again into the whirlwind of confusion. Well did I make the right decision? What will happen if I made the wrong decision? Maybe, I had better change my mind. This can cause sleepless nights and fitful days as I lay paralyzed and struck by the probabilities and possibilities.


OK! Stop! This is driving me crazy which can be a very short trip anyway.


What do I really want from life? What chance do I have of succeeding? If I do succeed will it make me happy? If I fail, how will I cope with it? What is the worse thing that can happen?


My God! Stop thinking and just do it.


Easy for you to say, sometimes the smallest decisions can totally change one’s life. And you think that is no little responsibility? You are as nuts as me.


OK! So go ahead and piss or get off the pot!


I am getting really pissed off!


What will people think of me if I say no? What will other people think of me if I say yes? Who the hell cares what other people think. It is what I think.


Now if I just knew what I really think about this question I could get it under control.


It is true; God is a comedian with an audience that refuses to laugh. And the truth is that when I give up my need to control the uncontrollable, order will return.


I give up! I have made up my mind.


Next life, I definitely am not coming back as a Libra.

Use This Line

Kids are just get worse and worse every year. And the rage that we find on the road is just intolerable. You should hear the way that my son talks. I just don’t go to movies or listen to TV anymore; the language is out of hand. And do you believe those religious weirdoes? First thing you know we will all be talking like shock jocks, having gay marriages, and, God forbid, we could have a pagan devil worshipper for president. We have to draw the line somewhere.


But where do we draw the line?


I was talking with my niece Janice last spring as she came to visit from California. She was totally devastated because her husband’s mother, who has Alzheimer, had taken to swearing like a sailor. As Janice said, you would not believe that this sweet, religious woman even if she were totally insane, would ever use THAT kind of language.


Is swearing just bad manners? Is it a lack of education? Is it mental illness? Is it a constitutional right? Is it an affront to good and moral people?


What makes one word good and one word bad? What makes one behavior acceptable and another unacceptable? What makes one love good and another evil? Or is it a hard-wired behavior of the brain?


Perhaps the line we draw and the one that we use is a line drawn in the sand. The sands shift as time and knowledge shifts. Thus our line of acceptable versus unacceptable must also shift as we gain more knowledge, more wisdom, more tolerance and greater scientific, spiritual and social understanding.


What is verboten today will be forgotten tomorrow because the line that we use is grey with various shades of black and white blending and shifting and moving and creating a kaleidoscope of diversity in recognition.


As for me the line that I choose to use is do what thy will as long thy do no harm to self or others.


Afterward: Almost Before We Spoke, We Swore
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/20/science/20curs.html?pagewanted=1&th&emc=th
Born Gay: How Biology May Drive Orientation
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002340883_gayscience19m.html
Some Theories on the Origination of Religion
http://www.religioustolerance.org/rel_theory1.htm

Monday: Moon Meditations

I awoke at three this morning called by my muse. As I walked from my house to my office outside the darkness was illuminated by the brilliance of the moon. Pure existence was my meditation.



Last night I joined friends in what is called a rolling meditation. Each of us in our own time zone but at 8 pm focused on the power of the feminine divine as expressed by the moon. While this was part of a full moon meditation each phase of the moon brings the metaphor of our growth and development as spiritual beings. Also, each sign that the moon is in has inherent in it archetypes of magic that can touch our spirits and our souls.



It really doesn’t matter what time we choose to do our meditation because time is not a constraint to the divine. Time is just what we use to mark our journey through life and ways to coordinate meeting for tea or getting on the bus to go to work. In an infinite reality all time is one so whenever you choose to do your meditation, we invite you to join us as a collective of Light Workers who choose to connect with our higher power and to manifest the divine in our lives.



Today the moon is beginning to wane as it travels through Aries and moving toward its quarter phase and then its new phase then to its waxing quarter phase and then to the full moon again. Thirteen moon cycles to lead us to understanding and to exist in a perpetual state of grace.



Aries represents the divine warrior. Under this energy we are able to confront our demons and our issues and emerge victorious. It is the seed that is the great I AM.



Taurus represents the divine mother earth. Under this energy we can replenish the soil of life in which we nurture ourselves and our children. It is the seed that says I HAVE.



Gemini represents the human ability to communicate. Under this energy we can heal from words that have hurt us or others. It is the seed that says I THINK.



Cancer is the wellspring of human emotions. It is mother’s reproductive energy. Under this energy we can touch our deepest feelings. It is the seed that says I FEEL.



Leo is the leader and creator of order. It represents our physical body and our ability to play. Under this energy we can release our inner child. It is the seed that says I WILL.



Virgo is the healer, often the wounded healer. It represents our service to others and our willingness to face our pain and grow. It can give us the gift of detachment. It is the seed that says I ANALYZE and I SERVE.



Libra is the energy of Venus as an active energy. It allows us to love ourselves as we love others. It is energy that we can use to harmonize our lives. It is the seed that says I BALANCE.



Scorpio is the energy of rebirth and renewal. It is the energy to go into the dark night of the soul and discovery the epiphany that is our journey. It is the seed that says I TRANSFORM.



Sagittarius is the energy of adventure, philosophy and spirituality. It is the energy to reveal the mystic union of human and the divine. It is the seed that says I SEE.



Capricorn is the energy to persist and work toward goals. It is the energy to discover what boundaries are good for us and which ones must be torn down. It is the seed that says I USE.



Aquarius is the energy of universal love, unique expression and chaos. It is the energy that allows us to transmute chaos into order. It is the butterfly that creates a rainstorm thousands of miles away. It is our clarion call. It is the seed that says I KNOW.



Pisces is the energy of the unseen and the supernatural. This is the path to our spiritual awakening. It is the illusion that overcomes confusion to see the face of God/dess. It is the seed that says I BELIEVE.



For more on keywords and the signs go to: http://dellhoroscope.com/learn/
For moon phases go to http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/vphase.html

Friday: Memories: The Story Telling Mind.

Creating our lives is a constant reconstruction and creation of memories, making new ones and reinventing old ones. Within our minds we are all story tellers constantly sculpting the story of who we are and how we became who we are. Facts have little to do with the truth as we create it in our minds. An old axiom says something to the effect that a person becomes whom he/she thinks about all day long.


We all think about our lives. Sometimes we dramatize trauma and sometimes we minimize trauma. If we are optimists we will make it better. If we are pessimists we will make it better. We go through each day looking for events and ideas that prove the reality that we have constructed is true. And, what is interesting we often tend to ignore or minimize the events or thoughts that negate our perceived reality about self and the world.


There are themes to each of our lives that represent the story that we are creating about who we are and how we became who we are. Some of us are heroes. Some of us are survivors. Some of us are victors. Some of us are just darn clueless. Every person has a story. Our stories drive our lives and help us take sometimes unrelated events and a state of chaos and create order on our reality so that we can perceive ourselves as one and whole and fluid in our experience. We take discreet events and put them together in a story board of our lives. When the discrete events do not fit together in the actual time line of facts, we will rearrange the events in our mind to fit our own sense of unfolding reality.


There are consensus markers that we use to hook our stories onto and create a sense of congruency with society. Some of these are huge catastrophes like wars, assassinations, a cataclysmic act of Mother Nature such as a hurricane that kills thousands, and so forth. Some of these are happy events shared in common with close friends and family such as weddings, vacations, birth of a baby, or moving to a new home. But in between the markers are the events that weave the color into our personal stories.


While it would almost be impossible to convince the majority of people that their lives are a fantasy that they have reconstructed from their perception of reality, the only truth that usually lies in a memory is that we take a few facts and weave them into a new reality every time we think about the past. We embellish. We dramatize. We think we are being factual when we are probably being fractal.


For those who are living life in discomfort and not achieving the contentment that they would like in the present, reconstructing the past and retelling our stories in ways that enhance our lives can be extremely healing and enriching.


The next time an event happens in the present watch what memories are evoked and see what behaviors are being reinforced. What descriptors do you use to express your emotions concerning the event and what descriptors do you use to describe you? How are you using the past to shape your present? And more importantly, how are you combining the past with the present to create your future?


Remember, it is your story. You can tell it anyway you want. Why not make it fun, interesting, and empowering?

Thursday: Flat Tire

I can’t imagine anything more horrible than a flat tire. First, I don’t do tires. I seldom do cars. And fixing a flat tire sounds too much like manual labor. And like I tell my husband Mark, manual labor begins with MAN. I do not know what in a day and age like this of scientific invention and desires for financial rewards that someone has not invented a tire that would not go flat.


Duh! Of course, I know why it has not been invented. It would mean a tire probably would not have to be replaced as quickly if at all. The Firestone estate lies behind my property. I would not be able to watch their horses run so freely through the pasture if it were not for rubber and air. So I guess there is some value in having to buy new tires at least for those who sell them.


Of course, there is that wonderful product called Fix-A-Flat. When a tire goes flat my husband goes to the trunk of the car, opens it, removes a can, sticks a thing in the thing that in the tire and inflates it. The only problem with that is it doesn’t last very long and you have to go get your tire fixed or buy another one. Only you can’t just buy one tire, you have to buy two or they will be out of balance and wear out sooner. At least that is what my husband tells me to justify charges on the credit card. This just doesn’t seem to make any sense to me because then he explains you have to rotate the tires and have them balanced every so many miles that you drive them so that you get better gas mileage and your tires last longer and you have less chance of getting a flat. Another charge on the credit card justified to prevent a flat tire interrupting one’s life. The final charge that put me over the edge was when he said the real thing that he needed was a tire inflator that would plug into the cigarette lighter port in the dashboard.


Well winter is upon us and from what Mark tells me he will have to be checking the tires more often because when the temperature drops drastically there is an increased probability of the tires loosing air which could lead to another flat tire.


I think I will just have another cup of coffee and keep on writing while he scurries down to the gas station and checks the air pressure on the tires and puts a hundred dollars worth of gas in the tank. We would not want to have to waste all that precious gas keeping me warm in the car while he fixes another flat tire.

Wednesday: Like A Virgin

I was always amused when one would fill out forms in days gone by when it asked for one’s maiden name. I wondered why it didn’t say virgin name.



In the charge of the triple goddess one honors the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. It seems that all of society has thought that these were the three roles of womankind. I can be virginal at my mother’s side and at my father’s table until I am given unto marriage and take on the mother’s role. And after my use is done, I am the shriveled crone with no value left except to sit in a rocking chair and perhaps hold a grandchild on my knee.


My value and the value of all women through time have been our reproductive qualities.


But times they are a changing because of the work of some amazing women who refused the bondages of society. Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in 1916 and promptly went to jail for thirty days after the clinic was closed. In 1965, the year of the birth of my first son, the first law was passed making it legal for married women to obtain birth control legally. On September 6, 1966, eight days before her 87th birthday Margaret Sanger died. Her life, her battle, and her warrior nature freed millions and millions of women to make choices and take control of their bodies, their reproductive rights, and to seek greater and greater strides toward equality.



In 1965 I was as naïve as the proverbial maiden. I did not have a clue about birth control as my mother, like many of her generation, had never discussed sex with me or how I could protect myself. I just knew that good girls said no and bad girls said yes. I think that is the true concept of the maiden – she just says NO. Well what a legacy that was to woman kind. She is taught to say no to her passions until it becomes a habit and then to say yes when she is in a situation that society approves. My grandmother and millions of grandmothers before her were killed early through the drive of the society to reproduce. Those who were lucky enough to survive long enough to be crones and that was about the age of 50 or so, were devalued because they were no longer good breeding stock.



The Maiden, The Mother, The Crone are no longer the mantle that I choose to wear or to have my daughters or granddaughters wear. The times they are a changing and as new roles are offered to us to be creatives, to be business executives and professionals of all sorts, to be captains of our own destiny. Our freedom from the maiden’s curse has been won through the works of women like Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Martha Stewart, Oprah Winfrey, and more.

Romance novels may idealize me
Prince Charming and Taming Unicorns
But for me spin me tales of Hillary, O’Connor, and Rice.
I like it when good girls are no longer nice.
Sex in the City, Madonna, and Chaka Kahn
The Goddess in me chooses her identity.

Tuesday: The Years to Come

When one is six, it seems the next hour will never come. When you are twelve it seems that the next day will never come. When you are sixteen you wonder if Friday night will ever arrive. When you are twenty-one, it seems that everything and every moment you live is a harbinger of your future. When you are thirty-five, you begin to recognize that time is moving a bit faster. At fifty, you wonder if you are still climbing up the hill and time is pushing you up further or are you at the pentacle of your life and it will unceremoniously push you over the edge. At sixty, you hope and pray that time slows down. At seventy, you realize that the years to come are not going to be as full of possibilities as those that have passed. At about 80, you sort of sigh and wonder where all the time has gone. And at 90, you wonder will there be days, months or years to come.


While we use time to mark our journey through life, our perceptions change over the years. As I would take care of my mother (Life with Mother: A Journey of Love, Death and Rebirth) when she entered her mid-nineties she said that she was going to live to a hundred. She started to say she was 95 and ½ and then 96 and ½ and 98 and ½ than she began to say that she was going on one hundred. She had a dream that she would be a Shmucker Jelly Jar Pen Up on one of the morning TV shows. She never made it.


In the years to come, I will follow the example of my mother. I will survive the bad times and I will enjoy the good. I will hope that when I die that I had more good than bad. At sixty one and ½ I have realized that life is short. One has to think fast.

http://lifewithmother.com

Sunday: With every joy there is a sorrow.

There are times when we feel that life is slipping into a dark cave and we are trying very hard to find a handhold that will keep us in the light. But grasp as we might the joy keeps slipping through our fingers and we are drawn further and further away from it.


It is the comedy and tragedies of life that when we are in joy we worry about when it will end and when we are in sorrow we worry about when it will go away. Ever since I can remember the advent of what I call the New Age (and always with a smile on my face) presented a mantra that always repeated this chorus: Be here now! This almost seems to be the ultimate Zen of Life.


This morning I awoke and my mind would not leave me alone. It just had to go there. I said, hey Myriam, I have been there and done that. But Ms. Myriam would not listen she had to drag me down memory lane to painful issues so I realized that I can try and fight it or I could give in to these thoughts that needed to be healed.


It is all about being a mother and my sense of loneliness that my children and I do not have the fantasy relationship that I thought we would have someday. Some people are so lucky that they have moderately dysfunctional families where there are a few buttons implanted to keep one within a family norm but when one has mental illness in one’s families the buttons all seem to be bigger than life.


My son Jimmy who lived in New Orleans and is now a refugee in Texas with my granddaughter Joliet, his wife and Joliet’s mother is a drug addict. I want to figure it out. I want to blame me. I want to blame his mental illness. I want to blame my ex-mother-in-law the wacko from hell. I want to blame God or Goddess or Mother Nature. I am so into the blame game now but the truth is I am pointing fingers to keep from feeling the deep, deep sorrow that breaks my heart and stifles me from rising from that cave of depression into the light of joy.


The recent events in New Orleans has not only flooded the Old City, but has flooded my mind with images of people that I met and knew there. I have realized today that each one of those lost souls that I met also had a mother. Many of those mothers are probably feeling the same sorrow that I am feeling as I look at how easy it is to loose a child perhaps to an act of nature but often to just the circumstances of life which can be the rampant drug abuse in our community, the increasing rise in diagnosed mental illness, and the social pressures that are changing us at an accelerated pace.


I think rather than lost souls, the folks I am remembering are wounded souls. Perhaps we are all wounded and the magnitude of recent events are a clarion call that it is now time to heal ourselves individually and collectively so that we can finally climb out that deep pit that has kept us from becoming the manifestation of good that was planted within with our birth.

Friday is Play Day

Sometimes we feel like we are just tired and flat. It is then that we need to realize that we are on overload. Time to play and get some fun out of life.


It is easy to forget to give ourselves permission to enjoy life. I don't know why. I do like the cliche about freeing our inner child to play... My inner-child definitely wants to play and that is exactly what I am going to do.

How are you going to play today?

As I quoted Tolstoy this morning: If you want to be happy, be.

So don't worry, BE happy and play.

http://yahoogroups.com/group/myriamsmuse for daily inspiration, fun, joy, and some time profound thoughts.

Do you know what it means to lose New Orleans

Normally I write my muse myself, but today I thought this was too powerful not to share with you. Please, if you would like to read my reflections on New Orleans and the people I knew and loved there go to http://maytorena.blogspot.com




Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans? 07:32 PM CDT on Saturday, September 3, 2005 Anne Rice



What do people really know about New Orleans? Do they take away with them an awareness that it has always been not only a great white metropolis but also a great black city, a city where African-Americans have come together again and again to form the strongest African-American culture in the land? The first literary magazine ever published in Louisiana was the work of black men, French-speaking poets and writers who brought together their work in three issues of a little book called L'Album Littéraire. That was in the 1840's, and by that time the city had a prosperous class of free black artisans, sculptors, businessmen, property owners, skilled laborers in all fields. Thousands of slaves lived on their own in the city, too, making a living at various jobs, and sending home a few dollars to their owners in the country at the end of the month. This is not to diminish the horror of the slave market in the middle of the famous St. Louis Hotel, or the injustice of the slave labor on plantations from one end of the state to the other. It is merely to say that it was never all "have or have not" in this strange and beautiful city.



Later in the 19th century, as the Irish immigrants poured in by the thousands, filling the holds of ships that had emptied their cargoes of cotton in Liverpool, and as the German and Italian immigrants soon followed, a vital and complex culture emerged. Huge churches went up to serve the great faith of the city's European-born Catholics; convents and schools and orphanages were built for the newly arrived and the struggling; the city expanded in all directions with new neighborhoods of large, graceful houses, or areas of more humble cottages, even the smallest of which, with their floor-length shutters and deep-pitched roofs, possessed an undeniable Caribbean charm. Through this all, black culture never declined in Louisiana. In fact, New Orleans became home to blacks in a way, perhaps, that few other American cities have ever been. Dillard University and Xavier University became two of the most outstanding black colleges in America; and once the battles of desegregation had been won, black New Orleanians entered all levels of life, building a visible middle class that is absent in far too many Western and Northern American cities to this day. The influence of blacks on the music of the city and the nation is too immense and too well known to be described. It was black musicians coming down to New Orleans for work who nicknamed the city "the Big Easy" because it was a place where they could always find a job. But it's not fair to the nature of New Orleans to think of jazz and the blues as the poor man's music, or the music of the oppressed.



Something else was going on in New Orleans. The living was good there. The clock ticked more slowly; people laughed more easily; people kissed; people loved; there was joy. Which is why so many New Orleanians, black and white, never went north. They didn't want to leave a place where they felt at home in neighborhoods that dated back centuries; they didn't want to leave families whose rounds of weddings, births and funerals had become the fabric of their lives. They didn't want to leave a city where tolerance had always been able to outweigh prejudice, where patience had always been able to outweigh rage. They didn't want to leave a place that was theirs. And so New Orleans prospered, slowly, unevenly, but surely - home to Protestants and Catholics, including the Irish parading through the old neighborhood on St. Patrick's Day as they hand out cabbages and potatoes and onions to the eager crowds; including the Italians, with their lavish St. Joseph's altars spread out with cakes and cookies in homes and restaurants and churches every March; including the uptown traditionalists who seek to preserve the peace and beauty of the Garden District; including the Germans with their clubs and traditions; including the black population playing an ever increasing role in the city's civic affairs.




Now nature has done what the Civil War couldn't do. Nature has done what the labor riots of the 1920's couldn't do. Nature had done what "modern life" with its relentless pursuit of efficiency couldn't do. It has done what racism couldn't do, and what segregation couldn't do either. Nature has laid the city waste - with a scope that brings to mind the end of Pompeii. I share this history for a reason - and to answer questions that have arisen these last few days. Almost as soon as the cameras began panning over the rooftops, and the helicopters began chopping free those trapped in their attics, a chorus of voices rose. "Why didn't they leave?" people asked both on and off camera. "Why did they stay there when they knew a storm was coming?" One reporter even asked me, "Why do people live in such a place?" Then as conditions became unbearable, the looters took to the streets. Windows were smashed, jewelry snatched, stores broken open, water and food and televisions carried out by fierce and uninhibited crowds. Now the voices grew even louder. How could these thieves loot and pillage in a time of such crisis? How could people shoot one another? Because the faces of those drowning and the faces of those looting were largely black faces, race came into the picture.





What kind of people are these, the people of New Orleans, who stay in a city about to be flooded, and then turn on one another? Well, here's an answer. Thousands didn't leave New Orleans because they couldn't leave. They didn't have the money. They didn't have the vehicles. They didn't have any place to go. They are the poor, black and white, who dwell in any city in great numbers; and they did what they felt they could do - they huddled together in the strongest houses they could find. There was no way to up and leave and check into the nearest Ramada Inn. What's more, thousands more who could have left stayed behind to help others. They went out in the helicopters and pulled the survivors off rooftops; they went through the flooded streets in their boats trying to gather those they could find. Meanwhile, city officials tried desperately to alleviate the worsening conditions in the Superdome, while makeshift shelters and hotels and hospitals struggled.



And where was everyone else during all this? Oh, help is coming, New Orleans was told. We are a rich country. Congress is acting. Someone will come to stop the looting and care for the refugees. And it's true: eventually, help did come. But how many times did Gov. Kathleen Blanco have to say that the situation was desperate? How many times did Mayor Ray Nagin have to call for aid? Why did America ask a city cherished by millions and excoriated by some, but ignored by no one, to fight for its own life for so long?




That's my question. I know that New Orleans will win its fight in the end. I was born in the city and lived there for many years. It shaped who and what I am. Never have I experienced a place where people knew more about love, about family, about loyalty and about getting along than the people of New Orleans. It is perhaps their very gentleness that gives them their endurance. They will rebuild as they have after storms of the past; and they will stay in New Orleans because it is where they have always lived, where their mothers and their fathers lived, where their churches were built by their ancestors, where their family graves carry names that go back 200 years. They will stay in New Orleans where they can enjoy a sweetness of family life that other communities lost long ago.



But to my country I want to say this:



During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us "Sin City," and turned your backs. Well, we are a lot more than all that. And though we may seem the most exotic, the most atmospheric and, at times, the most downtrodden part of this land, we are still part of it. We are Americans. We are you.




Anne Rice is the author of the forthcoming novel Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt

Monday: Confusion and Upsets

I went to add your daily horoscopes to my blog today and audio blogger was not working. Was I mad, well quite frankly yes. I wrote an email to find out what is happening but since man takes a holiday today while women continue to work, don't know when I will hear back. So here it is in good old fashioned text.


Mercury has entered Virgo. It is a time of doing the detail working and watching critically all that is going on in your world. Criticism can sting so we must watch our words as well as our thoughts. Be ready to defend your position but try to do it with kindness.


Until tomorrow... Keep looking up.

Sunday: A wonderful New Beginning

I am so excited. I started a new project today in honor of the new moon. You can now hear your daily horoscope from me, Myriam, at http://myriamsmuse.blogspot.com Please leave a comment to let me know that you are listening.

Love
Myriam

Friday: Be gentle with you cause you are the only you you got.

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

George Bernard Shaw

During these times of change and sadness, it is very easy to go back and look at life and say: I should have done this or that differently. Like we can change the past? How foolish is that? I love my life mistakes, flaws and all. I could have spent my life doing nothing and where would I be. A brain filled with no memories and a heart dead to the zest and chaos of life.

As I get caught in my reverie, I realize there are no truer words than those spoken by my sister Glenna: We are all doing the best that we can. Sometimes in times of trouble and heartache, we punish ourselves more by saying I should do this or that and then we compound it when the times have changed and are more stable by continuing the litany I should have done this or that. Truth is we didn’t do this or that, we just did what we did and we moved on.

Today, embrace your errors, your flaws, your mistakes and bless your honorable efforts to embrace life with passion and intensity that makes being human a little more special.

Be gentle with you cause you are the only you you got.

Thursday: A post from my morning prompt

Scents of Yesterday



Riding down I 90, the full moon lit the highway with a brilliance I had seldom seen. It was as if my journey was being watched by the Goddess. I could feel the culmination of many years of hoping and praying coming into existence.



Jimmy met me at the bus station and he had Melody with him. Turned out they had been hand fasted jus a week ago on Halloween and they were a site to see. Melody was definitely a character to behold. She had jet black hair with a bleached white pouf in the front. She wore all black and these high healed black leather boots. She looked like a caricature of Morticia Adams. I had to admit Jimmy had met his match. We drove to the apartment and we walked to the open market in the French Quarter. Even in New Orleans they stood out as unique. After lunch a tourist asked if she could take their picture as we walked out of the restaurant.



Jimmy had been lonely after his break up with the crack whore, so I prayed that he would find someone with whom he could relate. I chuckled to myself as I recalled how my mother would always say: Be careful what you pray for, you are going to get it.



My journey to epiphany had begun.



It was not but a few weeks before Mel revealed that she was pregnant. I felt some concern but also felt that a baby would help Jimmy find roots and perhaps settle down. I was supportive of her and so was our dear friend, Rita a dancer on Bourbon Street, and Mel finally decided to keep the baby.



The next 8 months were spent getting to know the person behind the mask of artist and creative and wild child that was my daughter-in-law. In the mornings Melody and I would often walk to the Café Dumond for coffee and begnets. The scent of the rich dark brew was stimulating and calming at the same time. As we sat by the lazy Mississippi we would listen to the sounds of jazz wafting on the air as street performers entertained the tourists for tips.



I made a new friend called Trip. Trip was a trust fund baby. His wild ways had driven his family to distraction so he was packed off to the French Quarter with a monthly allowance to indulge his chosen life style. I don’t know how he managed to run out of money toward to the end of the month with a ten thousand dollar stipend until I started to spend more time with him. Trip was representative of a long heritage in the French Quarter where wealthy families would ship the errant sons to the southern port of decadence in order to save family reputations. This practice had been going on for centuries and Trip was a pure example of a life of indulgence into the realm of the senses.



If not anything, Trip was generous because he liked company and was truly a lonely and lost child of the quarter even though he was approaching his mid-thirties. We would go to the bars and restaurants of the Quarter and I was able to experience some of the most delicious foods and wines that culinary genius could prepare. We would go to the bars on Bourbon Street where dancers would dance dollars and drinks.



The dancers were usually young girls who had run away from abusive homes. Many had children and had to support their babies by dancing to a dream with brass poles on small stages lined with mirrors. As I got to know the girls and heard their stories my heart would often break. Painted faced children using sex to support their lives of misery most only able to do their jobs by taking a bump of cocaine or smoking a rock of crack. Many a lap dance paid for a hit of crystal meth.



I remember one time at a strip bar, I asked Trip for a dollar. He thought I was going to tip a dancer. Instead I rolled up the dollar and lit it. I slowly waved the smoldering bill under my nose. A man who had been enchanted by the virginal vixen spinning dreams with a brass pole all of a sudden began to watch me. The chair he was sitting on was leather and comfortable and was on rollers. He watched intently as I took in the scent of the burning dollar and his chair rolled toward me. As he came close enough to hear me I leaned over and said to him in my best southern sultry voice – don’t you just love the smell of money?



The irony left me laughing again as I would often do during my times in the crescent city.



Coffee, begnets, sweating bodies, garbage pick ups in the summer, and burning money just a few scents of yesterday that come to me as I watch my family and friends trying to survive in a cesspool of what once was a land of dreams for many a lost soul. I remember saying to my son’s grandmother, I wish Jimmy would leave New Orleans and she wisely replied: Where could he go where he would fit in? That question is even more poignant after Katrina has destroyed the homes, the dreams, and the little hopes those who found safety in the arms of La Femme NOLA.



After thoughts: It was another full moon – in fact an eclipse at 5 degrees of Leo/Aquarius when I finally met my epiphany. My granddaughter Joliet Epiphany Morel May was born. When Katrina struck a dagger through my heart Saturn was conjunct the degrees of Joliet’s birth sun/moon. Saturn represents problems, loss, and in the extreme death. The sun represents the father and the moon represents the mother. I hope it is just difficulties and not death that this dear child has to observe and recover from like the many children that I see on the news.