Two Months Later

I've not written a whole lot about New Orleans lately, mostly because I had so many things percolating in my mind that I needed to give the entire thing some space and time before extrapolating anything of value.

The question that has been repeated to me, by others and myself, is "What did you get out of the situation?" And, at first, the answers were fast and many, disorganized and scattered thoughts and rage about social injustice, and feelings of inspiration and hope.

Two months later, I feel I've come up with some sort of generalized, definitive answer which also addresses the question: "Why did you go in the first place?"

The past few years have been quite scattered ones for me, as evidenced by this blog, and a period of a lot of questioning and "figuring things out." Seeking to do something like volunteer for a week in New Orleans sort of didn't make sense at the time; rather it was something that called out to me during a period of time when I was seeking direction, and I jumped on the opportunity. It wasn't what I had in mind for a transformative experience, and it certainly was never something I c\would have dreamed up on my own.

I couldn't even have articulated what it was I was seeking at the time, or to what gain, only that my heart was open and inquisitive.

And what it found was this: seeing how big, complex, and unpredictable the world is showed me what things I can and cannot control in my own life. Far from feeling stultified and helpless, it led me to feel proactive. Releasing my worries about what's out of my hands and staking a claim on what I CAN manipulate and alter (primarily my attitude towards life in general) opened up a new world for me.

For the first time in my life, I realized that happiness is not something that falls out of the sky or is waiting behind the right door. It's a choice. It's an active choice, it's a constant choice, and it's mine.

For the first time, I choose happiness and while it's constantly threatened (by things like complicated job issues, money worries, and tense interpersonal relationships, to name a few), I find that consistently choosing happiness over time leads to more happiness. The choice becomes more instinctual. I choose it over defensiveness, self-centeredness, pessimism, fear, doubt, and a host of things that kept me in the dark for so long.

So many things are out of my control. But this one thing I can have power over. And it's life-changing. Cancer patients choose it and it can improve their chances of remission. Athletes choose it and performance improves. And victims of disasters, both natural and man-made, choose it and find new means of coping.

Happiness, in my mind, is synonymous with hope, with humor, and with the genuine and concrete belief that things happen for reasons, and that those reasons are ultimately good.

I don't know why this never occurred to me before. I suppose, like anything else, it was a lesson to be learned. A hard lesson, to be sure, but with sweet, sweet results.

How did this come about? Because for every story of devastation and destruction, every horrible tale of dead bodies and loss and damage, there were gleaming little stories of hope, humor, and happiness.

I see how cataclysmic events lead to life-altering things like artistic reactions, volunteers, hope, hard work, and a call for re-structure. I see the cause-and-effect of negative occurrences and how the best reaction is its opposite- positivity. Because then you can't separate the negative and positive because one couldn't have happened without the other. So, ultimately, the negative becomes in itself a positive thing. Propelling you forward. Moving on.

Please do not misunderstand and think for a moment that I am selfishly capitalizing on the suffering and misfortune of others. I cannot, for an instant, downplay or trivialize the horrible, horrible things that happen in this world. I am simply pointing out that my experiences led me to a new way of viewing the world.

Happiness is a choice. It's a lens through which you view the world. It's not a job, or a car, or a relationship, or money, or any of the trappings of our lives. It's an attitude. It's how you receive all of these things. And if you're waiting for any one of those to bring you the clarity or buoyancy you crave, you will undoubtedly be disappointed.

I'm letting all of these things marinate and watching as fantastic little moments unfold in my life. The world is such an easier place in which to live when I'm not being defensive, "Why me," or shouldering the negativity I was carrying around for so long. That's not to say I don't have bad days or misfortune like everyone else, just that I know that these things are transitory, and their long-lasting effects depend primarily on how I choose to let them effect me. I am in control here, for the first time, of what I CAN control. And the things that I can't? I let them go.

I couldn't have asked for a better life-changing experience, and my gratitude is immeasurable.

Absolute Zero

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

- Emily Dickinson

This happens all the time now.

I'm standing in a house, which I somehow recognize as my own although it looks nothing like any house I've ever lived in. I'm standing in the living room of sorts, and everything is upside down. Furniture tossed and landed sideways, broken, pieces of it everywhere.

Suddenly, the walls begin to bloom. Circles of mold, near the intersection of wall and ceiling, begin to bleed across the wall in dusty, gray-green patterns that look wet to the touch. The mold begins to overtake the house.

And then there's a creaking, moaning sound, and it happens. The water: it's coming. I can hear it, like a freight train, barrelling forth with its terrible velocity. The windows shatter, and it comes pouring in. Great brown waves, bubbling with toxic fury. The water is pouring in, and I am standing in the middle of the room, and I am alone in a house that is filling up with water.

It picks me up, and I reach for anything. My hands touch wall and go straight through, the plaster crumbling between my fingers, the mold oozing out. This house is already in a state of advanced decay. I know that I will not get out and, in my dream, it doesn't seem to matter. Everything in my life is in this house, and everything is destroyed, so what's the point?

I wake up with my hands clenched in fists held so tightly against me that they are asleep. Pins and needles in my forearms and hands and fingers. I've awoken with one of those audible gasps that you hear yourself make and have to wonder, for a moment, if you're still dreaming.

It's come to this: I'm dreaming about Hurricane Katrina.

I've always had the same recurring stress dream: tornadoes. Always the same scenario: black sky, wind whipping, giant tube of anger and electricity bearing down on me. I am always trying to get away. Sometimes I'm in a car, sometimes I'm on foot, but always, always it's going to get me and suck me up and pull the air out of my lungs and kill me. I almost always wake up just as my feet leave the ground. I've had this dream for as long as I can remember.

And now? A moldy, ruined house with water rushing in. Everything is gone. And the worst part- I don't even try to get away.

Because that's the bigger fear, isn't it? The fear of losing everything? The fear of aloneness and loss of family, friends, house, and any little tiny thread of security that binds us to this sometimes terrible and inexplicable world. And there are moments when we see how painfully thin those ties are, like spiderwebs slick with dew. We accumulate more possessions and ideas and experiences in the hope that these things will weigh us down, give us heavier footing. But there are moments when the water rushes in, and we see how dangerously close we can come to losing everything.

But everything isn't lost, it never is, there are always more webs reaching out and as our hands flail around in this world there is always something to grab onto, even just momentarily. And if we let go, just open our hands and let the water come and admit defeat, something will reach out for us. Because life isn't like nightmares. Thankfully.

I am petrified of absolute zero. Like those burn victims who live but whose faces are marred beyond recognition: how do they go on? Loss of sense of self, loss of all ego, loss of any solid footing on this earth. Or people who lose entire communities and family members to natural disasters. How would you even begin to pick through the mourning process? Losing a house, and all that is contained within. The grief would be overwhelming.

Even more than all that, I am afraid of losing the core essence of myself. Mental illness, some neurological misfire...sometimes the damage is invisible; there is no flood, no fire, but everything is gone just the same. A wind snuffing out a candle, poof, nothing but a thread of smoke remains.

But it's like that moment in Mean Girls (Whatever, totally one of my favorite movies.) when Lindsay Lohan's character, Cady, is participating in the Mathletes contest and suddenly gets it. The line is approaching zero, it's getting closer and closer, but "The limit does not exist! The limit does not exist!"

The limit does not exist. If you do not allow it to.

There will always be something. Some thread. Some lifeline, some gossamer strand of hope. Because we're humans, and we look for meaning in fricking everything. You can lose everything, you can scrape your feet on rock bottom and feel the horrible weight of failure and loss bearing down on you like 80 metric tons of debris-infected water, but you will still hope.

"Hope is the thing with feathers," Emily Dickinson wrote. Perched on the soul, singing it's little heart out even if no one is listening.

I'm thinking maybe it's time to take a little break from reading 1 Dead in Attic and working on this presentation that has me reviewing slide after slide of water, mold, and ruin. I have the luxury of taking a step back and disengaging and, if this is working it's way into my dreams and waking me up again and again through the night, then I'm thinking I need a bit of a break.

If I'm lucky, maybe I'll go back to nightmaring about tornadoes. Or the naked dream. That's another classic.

Rebuilding Hope: A Mission Trip

Yet New Orleans didn't die, proof, perhaps, that cities are more than functional conveniences. They inspire affection, emotional ties and loyalty. It is now the fastest growing city in the United States, at 7-8% per year, even if, at about 340,000, it is still below pre-Katrina levels. If people persist in living in earthquake-prone Los Angeles and San Francisco, why would they not return to New Orleans? This renewal is despite, more than thanks to, the efforts of the city's government. New Orleans has suffered from what the New York Times called the "dysfunctional stalemate that has bogged down the city's recovery". The dysfunction is both between black and white populations and between city and federal government, and the consequence is that swathes of the place are still visibly ruined, and homeless rates remain high.

[in] the nearly five years since the storm, a "recovery plan" was drawn up, often reviewed, and barely implemented. The city, according to one involved in reconstruction, "has hundreds of millions of dollars committed but not spent". The recovery plan was created "without a drop of sense as to what was implementable".

Into the vacuum of action created by government, individuals and independent agencies have piled in. Self-organised groups that have grown up since 2005 have become significant forces of renewal.

Habitat for Humanity, an international charity, has built more than 1,300 "simple, decent, affordable homes" in the four states effected by Hurricane Katrina and her nasty little sister Rita, which followed shortly after.
The Observer
Sunday March 14, 2010

these days that you were waiting for
will come and go
like any day
just another day

there's never gonna be a moment of truth for you
while the world is watching
all you need is the thing you forgotten
and that's to learn to live with what you are

sometimes
everything you've ever wanted
floats above
sticking out his tongue and laughing
while everything
anyone can ever need
is down below
waiting for you
to know this

Learn to Live With What You Are
Ben Folds


I'm doing loads of laundry and only-slightly-ok-mostly-sort-of-absolutely freaking out about leaving tomorrow to spend a week in New Orleans helping to build houses with RHINO (Rebuilding Hope In New Orleans) and Habitat for Humanity.

I'm freaking out because I'm afraid I'll forget something vital, like protective eye wear or my journal, and I'm freaking out because I haven't done anything this before. In the ultimate paradigm shift, I am abandoning a lifestyle to which I've grown accustomed and complacent in the hopes of shifting my perspective enough to find some new stability in life. Which is really just a high-falutin' way of saying: "I decided to stop feeling sorry for myself and devote a week of my life to helping others." The fact that I get to travel, and the fact that I get to travel to a kick-ass city, is sheer luck.

Mochi once told me her theory about listening to music, and how instead of separating you from reality it makes you hyper-aware. As though you're in a movie. The music creates a temporal space that forces you to focus on minute details. The wash of sun on your face, the stitching on the handbag of the woman standing next to you, the smell of a street vendor's fare. Your mind creates a cinematic landscape, flush with flashbacks and day dreams, and the music guides this little moment in time.

The same can be said for travel. A change of scenery, biologically, creates in us a hyper-aware sense. Constant vigilance is required, because there's no telling what might be a threat or potential food item. Evolution has done nothing to tamper with our natural instincts, despite our best efforts to numb them on a day to day basis.

I find myself dampening these instincts, tuning out, turning off, and focusing instead on the rhythms of everyday. Get up, go about the day, eat at prescribed times, and follow a routine and pattern so exacting that it's stultifying to suddenly realize how much time has gone by. I decided at the beginning of November to enact a radical life change for myself and set about trying to find what, exactly, that change might be. A new job, a new city, a new religion, a new career?

And then, suddenly, I fell back into the routine. Like a mechanical ticking, my days trickled through my hands, the hours gone and wasted. And it's March. And nearly five months has gone by since my "wake-up call."

What I did do, smartly, was to sign on for this trip in the height of that flurry of decision-making. Whatever it was I was planning to find for myself and do for myself, I committed to this trip and decided it would be the anchor. If everything else fell through, I would still have this thing that I had agreed to, worked for, and am now finally embarking upon.

A week in a different city with people I barely know, focusing on a cause that has always plucked at my heart strings and doing brute manual labor is certainly a cause for hyper-awareness. An appreciation for different sounds, smells, flavors.

One of the things I was always so amazed about when I moved to Florida was the change in light. A monstrous, flat sky with intense light that cut through everything for twelve hours a day. Nothing like the thin, milky light that comes and goes with the seasons in the north east. Florida is nothing but light and air and water, and for three years I never got used to the intensity of it.

This is what I mean by hyper-awareness. Who thinks about light, unless it's Daylight Savings time, or a shift in the seasons? You travel, you think about light. Your perception is skewed and acute.

I've never traveled without some evolution or revolution. I'm a thinker, and airports and buses and independence and time alone and away breeds new visions and hopes and choices. This is such a ripe moment of my life, with everything marinating and culminating and the past few years slowly beginning to slide away leaving only the meaningful and taking with it the petty, but insurmountably heavy, baggage and heart break and doubts and failures.

And so I take up my proverbial hammer, and I head to NOLA with hopes of transformation, transition, and making some small dent of a difference in the overwhelming mountain of need. I'm searching for some moment of truth, I know, but attempting to keep everything in perspective and let things happen organically.

Mostly, I'm there to rebuild. Houses, of course, but myself too. However selfish that sounds.

Stay the course with me, and we'll see what comes out of all this.

Arrivederci.