2015: The Pleasures of the Flesh

i woke up this morning and, since it's the first cold sharp day of the new year, i made my bed, crisp and clean, and washed all the dishes and hung up my clothes from the night before.

as i stood in front of the white porcelain sink, my feet chilled by the wood floor, i was struck by the pleasure of the warm water on my hands and the steady balance of my legs. i picked up each tea cup one at a time and looked at how beautiful it was. it made me so happy that i stopped and took a deep breath and felt how easily and simply my lungs expanded.

all of sudden, i was filled with such overwhelming gratitude that my eyes filled with tears. not just for my body doing easily what i needed it to do, but for clean running water, for warm water, for the heat and light and space in my home, even for the softness and reliability of my ratty sweatshirt.

i felt so happy i could burst.

at our post-yoga dinner (yes! i did bikram yoga for new year's eve and it was my best new year's eve in years), i was talking with friends about the things i did to survive cancer. my friend susan avery reminded me how we met at a funeral of a friend. she had been going through her cancer at the same time that i was. at the funeral, i said to susan, "that could have been me."

i don't remember because when we think about our pasts, how we see them keeps changing depending on the present.

but this is not a post about being sick.

this morning, struck breathless and almost weeping with gratitude, i changed the water in the flowers on my dining table and i remembered one thing that saved me, that still saves me - impulse and hedonism - or the pleasures of the flesh.

one of the hardest things about a life-threatening illness is when you are in the hospital and your friends leave. because they get to walk out. they get to walk out and take a big breath of fresh air and feel the sun on the tops of their heads and go back to their everyday lives.

http://tomnewyears.tumblr.com/

in the hospital system, you're increasingly cut off from any sensual pleasure. my senses registered pain and nausea from the needles, the drugs and the smells of rubbing alcohol and cleaning fluids. my tastebuds were numbed. my hearing was jumbled and incoherent. my memory was shot. my brain craved sedation.

i couldn't take another minute of it. i felt like i'd rather die than spend one more second looking through the window at life rather than living. (i am a dervish, so i am not scared of death. in my experience, death is liberating and bright.)

if i was going to be alive, i wanted to be immersed in every second of the material world.

so i walked out.

natural medicine gave me a chance to taste, to breathe, exercise, to feel - not that my way is the only way. just that that worked for me.

like most people whose lives are compromised, i learned to be immensely grateful for every pleasure my body and mind offered me.

all those things we do without thinking - letting your tongue roll over something complex and delicious, inhaling the fragile scent of flowers, reading and comprehending rich, intoxicating prose, listening to a song that makes you float, drinking, swimming, bathing, stretching, kissing.

all those things we have but we don't appreciate - clean water, quiet nights, heat, food in the refrigerator, shoes, clothes that protect our skin and keep us warm. a place to keep the objects and, even more importantly, the people we love safe and secure. the ability to pay our bills and keep our electricity and internet and cell phones running.

so for the beginning of 2015,  if you are reading this, i wish you so much love it feels your heart might burst. i wish your eyes, lips, tongue, skin, muscles, tissues, nerves to give you pleasure. i wish you prosperity and safety and security. i wish you a year of days so crystalline and pure in their beauty that you can barely let them end.

i wish you clean air and water and food and week after week where you don't have to worry about your health, your finances, your loved ones. i wish you clean sheets and a bed. i wish you the freedom of forgiving people who have hurt you and i apologize for any way i might have hurt you or made you feel less. i wish i could erase any pain you still carry.

i wish you gratitude and awe and wonder and serenity that life will unfold in a way that supports you and embraces you. i wish you to feel powerful and graceful.

YOU ARE AMAZING.

i love you. i kiss you. i am so grateful for you.

http://tomnewyears.tumblr.com/

please click on the link and keep it open in another window. the music makes all the difference...

guns and roses

one of the singing amazons is looking at colleges. (phew! that went fast!)

why is it when the kids are little, time seems to move so slowly? with newborns, time feels frozen almost. you are keeping track of days and then weeks of life. and then they are toddlers and you count time in months. "she's 16 months' old," you say, because you're keeping track of developmental milestones and nervously awaiting the terrible twos.

and then all of sudden, they are rambunctious kids and you're organizing playdates and lessons and figuring out schools and how to entertain them while you're making dinner. (i used to feed rara and then put her in the stroller and make sasha and zarina push her up and down the hallway while i was cooking). or you're trying to figure out whether your neighbor can watch one who needs to come home while you're stuck at work (and working on remembering to pick up the supplies for a school diorama project). you count the minutes before bedtime, the hours you can sleep before you get up and start the whole delicious and exhausting and messy process all over again.

but when they hit 11 or 12, everything starts moving faster and faster. only a year til middle school, and then tutors and SATs and performances and school dances and teams and heartbreak and the next thing you know they are halfway through high school and you haven't unpacked the summer clothes from two years' ago. next, you blink, and the college applications are all in and you're in limbo, waiting to see what happens next.

amongst her choices is USC which is a good school for acting and performance. so i was talking to a fellow mum about it and she said, "it's a great school and, even though it's in a terrible neighborhood, the crime rate is going down. there were only four shootings on campus last year - but no one was killed."

i said, "FOUR shootings?! (let me add that teachers (and others) are now allowed to carry concealed weapons at schools and churches in north dakota.) who is giving students guns?"

the mum, who happened to be british and danish, shook her head.

school children and college students and movie goers and shopping mall shoppers are getting shot in peacetime u.s.

calls for gun control and new gun policies are all over twitter and facebook and whitehouse.gov but no one seems to have a clear plan or any idea what the 2nd amendment really meant.

a friend of mine, pia sen, a brilliant professor in birmingham, alabama, who raises the most beautiful flowers, is trying to fund a crucial study on gun violence, access to guns and gun policy. we have less than a month to help her. (click here to read about it).

click here to donate funds

but please do it soon. blink again, and your kids will be adults. we hope and pray.

2 amazons @ 9 North Moore St.

the amazons have started a rock band.

it was really a matter of time. when my third daughter was born, my friend hilton als gave a me a card that said, "congratulations, you have a girl group."

zarina started singing before she could really speak. i remember her, at a year-and-a-quarter, shaking her head back and forth on the changing table and making noises.

i said, "zarina, what's that?"

she looked at me and said, as most toddlers do, something unintelligible. i asked her a few more times before i understood what she was trying to say: "elmo song!"

rara started playing music on a box with rubber bands on it, we had to record a whole series of her songs. from there, she graduated to a ukelele and eventually, a guitar. despite being forced to take piano lessons in between, she returned to the guitar.

here they are - zarina and rara on vocals, rara on guitar.

the rest is, as they say, history...

note to zach vella and foundations group, real people live here.