It is January first. We should all be up in arms about it. And… even more so because it is the last year of existence of life as we know it. (that was me being facetious by the way)
The world is going to crumble this year, or perhaps the dawn of the awaking of bliss in the universe, or maybe Jesus is going to come back and tell all of his followers the truth about themselves, perhaps all of the injustices since the dawn of creation will finally be healed, or rectified. Perhaps all of the last thousands of years of hanging on the cross actually will wash away our sins. Maybe Buddha will come back as Mary Magdalene, and Jesus will come back and take her in a glorious Yabyum knot of juiciness, and then there will be balance on the planet. Maybe the whole thing will blow up! Or maybe it will be just like any other year. So many possibilities!

The stirring of the 2012 pot has been so rapid that even the children are trying to convince themselves that they believe it is going to be a positive change. But you can see it in their eyes. There is worry. They are worried because, like the animals, they know more than the average adult knows about how the universe works, and they don’t even know they know what they know. When people collectively focus on some outcome, it is almost inevitable that all of that attention is going to manifest into something. It happens every day. People create all kinds of things for themselves, and that makes easy sense, but when we all focus on some doom, or the fending off of doom, it is even easier to expect. Those who expect the doom, will find it, and those who are trying to counteract the doom will probably be nursing those who called it to themselves in the first place. I keep aspiring to keep my focus on expansion and love peppered with creativity. But it’s not so easy all the time.

I want to believe that the 2012 disaster theories are out to lunch. But the more I hear it roll off the tongues of the masses, the more padding in my helmet I need. This is going to be a crazy year. And yes… Like every day before this one, I will set intentions for a happy day and prepare for an even better tomorrow.

Last night, I tucked the kids in with the visiting puppy, climbed in with my beloved and set some intention for the year to come. What else would I feel good doing when the clock strikes midnight but loving my honey and listening to my son laugh in the distance? If I were to take an assessment of the last year, I too would say that it was rather like being raked over some really hot coals. But now… This morning, the only coals being raked are the ones in that ridiculously airtight wood stove that our dear friend gave to us.

The year 2012 might just be the best year any of us have seen. It could be awful. No one really knows- but if I base the possibilities for the year to come, on the feeling I had when the clock struck midnight, I would have to say I am feeling pretty optimistic. The chariot is still in tact, my king is beside me, the prince wears a smile, and the cat is basking in the sun in the window seat.

Losar (Tibetan New Year) is drawing near… It is (for me) far more redeeming celebration of a new beginning. The emphasis on leaving the old year behind, and greeting the new year with some Puja. Days of visits with friends and family, and tons of appreciation. More of that every day please!!!

It has been a very difficult year as years go, but as it comes to a close, I have so much to appreciate in my life, most of all that things feel really good in this moment. If how I feel right now is indicative of how the next year is going to play out, it looks like it is going to be a far better one than last year.

On the way into 2011, I had a twelve year old- but he swiftly became a thirteen year old before my eyes. Looking me in the eye without strain to his neck, and we seem to be seeing each other better than we were half a year ago. He raked me over some seriously hot coals, flipping me on all sides to be sure the embers made contact with every surface. I lived my own pain as a tween, my now pain as a mom of a tween, and I lived his pain. It was brutal. Somehow… By the grace of what magic we seem to invite, we have come out the other side of a long hot tempered summer. We are growing and moving toward a whole new chapter of coming adulthood. Of course I have to look at it that way. If I dive into the truth of what is to come in the teenage years… If I don’t convince myself that everything in the mind of my child will one day (SOON) make sense, I am going to put a backpack on, grab my honey and run to south east Asia never to be seen again.

I can get through the next five years… I CAN! Beside the most amazing man that ever set eyes on me and saw who I was… Still sees who I am and still stands beside me. I cannot give thanks enough for such a blessing. Words cannot express my appreciation for him.

My friends are surrounding me to glue back together a beautiful chosen family that had once scattered to far ends of the planet, making the dissolution of my “real” family less painful.

My creativity is flowing and I have begun a new book… I am about to launch the campaign to self publish the Haiku deck
that has been waiting so patiently in the wings for me to set it free…

I have been writing for the local paper, and though it is “only the local paper” it is the first time anyone has stepped up and said, Rachel, Yes.. I want to give your untrained, grammerless mind an outlet. I want to pay you to write. And it feels incredible. Two articles out, more to come.

Our home is toasty, our hearts are full. Life is beautiful.

Happy New Year!

Jon, my friend and guide, thought it smart to avoid the bus station and instead, get off on the edge of town, not far from the bridge. His plan was to walk down through the less populated area to the hotel he was accustomed to staying in. It was deep in the old part of the city. Jon led me, his friend John, his girlfriend Erika, and their mutual friend Charlie to our destination with confidence, and he had not told us that the walk would be two miles long.

Banares (the Hindi/Urdu name for the city) is one of the oldest cities in the world, and certainly in India. From the well traveled streets I landed on, you would have no idea how old the city really is.

The street, closest to where we were let out, ran parallel to the river’s edge. And we walked on it for a couple of miles. Not quite dirt road, not quite bustling city street, it felt strangely like an old western film. I still can’t put a finger on it twenty years later but it felt abandoned though people stood in the doorways of their shops and the occasional patron stopped to discuss the wares. I suppose it felt that way because it was clearly once an inhabited area, or at least built to be so. Just beyond the doorways of restaurants were padded walls upholstered in red velvet, with lots of gold and gilt chandeliers. Mirrors on every wall. in it’s heyday, this was a swingin’ part of town. It felt oddly familiar. Like a boulevard in Hollywood might have looked in 1936.

I had been on a train for most of the day, and it is pretty much impossible to pee on an Indian train. Sure I had done it, but I held out for the last hour of the ride in an effort to avoid the sloshing hole in the floor experience. Now I was even more strapped for a place to pee, and I was finally going to join the ranks of some of the locals and take a pee in the street. It was rare but more common than seen on NYC streets. Normally public elimination was spotted behind (or not) three and a half to four foot walls considered public toilets.

Or the more common convenience station; what we called “shit fields. In the mornings locals were seen heading out to the field with their pot of water for morning constitution the same way you might see dad heading off to the bathroom with the sports section.

It wasn’t the first time I cursed the stupid decision to buy that army duffel bag, nor a new experience to wish I hadn’t shoved so much stuff into it- but it was the first time I was going to pull my pants down in the middle of the streets and take a pee.

Thank god for the suggestion and desire to blend in. I loved my Salwar Kameez and wore it proudly with my fake chinese Chuck Taylors with the tire re-purposed rubber souls that I bought on Pahar Ganj, heavy suckers. The dress that is worn over the pants covers one’s butt cheeks well when squatting between two stoops in the streets of this beautiful and infamous town where people come to die. Maybe it was the relief that marked those two stoops so clear in my memory but it was liberating, and not just the pee. You have to let go of an ingrained inhibition about bodily fluids and privacy that would otherwise not be an issue. “Otherwise” as in if you weren’t raised in the western world. Call it barbaric (I don’t) but babies are potty trained days after they are born. They don’t wear diapers, they just pee on their mama’s back, when the trickle happens, Mama’s response is to make a little ssssssssssss sound. And soon the babies make the ssss sound and mom holds them over the ditch like everyone else.

I felt free peeing in the street while my pals waited for my release.

When we left the safe-haven of Mcleod Ganj the Tibetan settled hill station,

Jon told me stories of Banaras. It was the New York City of India, music everywhere and universities rich with opportunity to study with masters of instrument and voice, poetry, artists, thinkers… It was the city not far from Deer Park, where the Buddha gave his first teaching. It was the holiest city in the world for Hindus. The Ganges River which runs past its banks is the same river that flows from the head of Shiva, the creator and destroyer of all things.

Hindus come from all over the world to bathe in the river Ganga before they die. It is like going to Mecca for the Islamic people. Because of this… many people, walk, crawl, or are carried to the edge of the water for one last dip before death, and for most Hindus it is their first as well. Many just don’t make it til the very end. To bathe in the Ganges is to cleanse the toxins of sin (if you want to use that word).

Death is a sort of theme in Banaras. The bus stations and train yards are littered with stretchers and elders hunched over from the weight of hard Indian lifetimes. It seemed like, from every train car- a family was carrying their sixty pound mother to the landing. On the waters edge, the same, lowering her for one last dip beside Shivite aesthetics.

I was pretty excited to be heading into the old city. After the last saloon on my imaginary wild-west-Indian-ghost-town street fantasy starring me as an Indian Mae West, we were suddenly deeper in India than I had been yet.

The street narrowed, and the brightly lit wide boulevard turned into a dark and ancient alleyway which wound right and then left, and eventually became more of a walkway. I have to use words like walkway and alley, so as not to give someone who had never been there the impression that the streets were wide enough for a car. These were narrow passageways with little light coming through the ceiling of the space between buildings. I had a difficult time believing that he knew where Jon was going and the three others in our group were following him as though they didn’t care if he actually was lost. He was walking with a confidence that we couldn’t muster if we had been given special gumption juice for breakfast.  The feeling was that these ancient passages we were walking on were alive like no other buildings I have ever experienced.

When I was a child I moved onto the property of a woman who had bought it to love it up and bring life back into it. It had been worn down and mistreated, and she touched every square inch of surface in that house. Loving every caress, hammering and demolition. As I grew up, year after year from fifth grade to graduation she spent every summer and fall and spring and even winter working to bring healing to the walls, windows, doors and hearths in that house, and it came to life beautifully. I know the corners in that house so well, I can recall the smell in the front room or hear the sound of the aluminum  screen door off the kitchen as it closed behind you. In the summer it slammed, and in the winter it sort of parachuted closed with a little bounce because of the plastic over the screen that acted like a storm window. I love that house so much that ten years after it sold I still drive by hoping for signs of life. All of the loving work, time and effort that Eve put into that house, has left it since being sold. It’s settled into another weekend home on the block with the character power sprayed on by a corporate painting company, the current owner having no idea how many hours Eve stood on a ladder painting each pane on every window every couple of years having taken them off to re-glaze them all first. Each year, switching out the heavy storm windows for screens and back to storms for the winter. The house still lives it’s just calling for love as the foundation settles and cracks some more, giving marbles a new direction to roll when they drop.

These streets, these structures had a life that was nothing like that. They had held together through flood and famine to be standing, some thousands of years old. Every ten or fifteen feet in some spots were statues built into the walls that had been rubbed and rained on so many times you can hardly tell which deity is in what shrine. Ganesh’s trunk only merely detectable. Orange paint regularly applied in attempts to preserve the relics. I think the city is held together on prayer. Periodically as we wound our way through the hallways they would open up to a small park that felt like a courtyard where more light was able to make it through. An ancient tree, possibly some benches, beside a shrine. Most of the parks I had seen were actually shrines and not “parks” as we have come to know parks in American cities. I loved running into the occasional cow and his herder and that being a normal sight.

Amazed at how fast we had gone from the wild west to medieval in a matter of a second and curious as to whether John really did know where he was taking us, I asked as we arrived at the Shanti Guest House- if we were ever going to arrive at the Shanti Guest House.

Once inside the office, John was greeted by a jovial Hotel Owner who was perfectly happy to give us one double room for three people. This was almost unheard of in Indian Hotels, where you pretty much have to wear fake wedding rings when you are traveling with a person of the opposite sex. Indian’s are sticklers for the bureaucratic process, so it was a pleasure to check in at the Shanti Guest house. Even with the proprietor being so nice, we accepted the lock he gave us for the room. No need to the comfortable exchange by telling him we had our own combination Master Lock to secure our door with rather than the “very secure” one he had provided. Inside the hotel opened up into a courtyard. From the outside of the building, you had no idea how much light was shining just beyond the walls. I like the courtyard theme in Indian Architecture. In the center of the courtyard a man was working on his motorcycle. He had been traveling overland from Europe. Every piece of the engine was  laid out on a piece of Canvas beside him while he gently directed a young Indian boy on how to assist him.

After a sponge bath in a shared bathroom with a hot bucket of joy, we were off to explore. I was ready to be taken to Manikarnika Ghat. Otherwise known as the “Burning Ghat.” This was where, if you are a man, and you have enough money, your body can be burned on a private tended pyre. There is said to be a single sacred fire that has been burning for centuries. The caste responsible for tending  this fire and all of those cremated at Manikarnika Ghat is one that I admire, the Domes. I often still think about the idea of a fate such as to be born into a caste who spends their life wafting in the scent of burning flesh, keeping the bodies on the fire as they burn. If to be burned at this sacred Ghat means the assurance of transition into Nirvana, and an end to the suffering of Samsara- The cyclic journey from life to sickness to aging and death and back again through the realms that you may have brought yourself to via particular conduct or way of life/behavior of thought- then these men who tend that sacred fire are attainers of vast merit if not their own free pass to Nirvana.

A we got closer to Manikarnika, a strange and eerie song rang through the corridors of streets.

“It takes a total of three hours for a body to burn from start to finish.” Said the man beside me in his thick Hindi accent. “A whole lifetime only to burn in three hours.”

I can continue to tell you about my experience, but I found this blog entry while looking for a photo. It is an INCREDIBLE entry.

I highly suggest you continue by clicking here…

Or follow this link:

http://www.petermalakoff.com/ManikarnikaGhat/latest.htm

Because our day of time, of hours~ and the clock-hand turns,
closes the circle upon us; and black timeless night
sucks us in like quicksand, receives us totally~
Without a raincheck or parachute, a key to heaven or the last long look

I need love more than ever now… I need your love,
I need love more than hope or money, wisdom or a drink

Because slow negative death withers the world and only yes
can turn the tide.

Because love has your face and body… and your hands are tender
and your mouth is sweet! and god made no other eyes like yours.

~Walter Benton

This morning, while looking for something beautiful, I found a web page dedicated to my favorite poet.

Whenever I read his work, I am reminded that I have been greatly influenced by his writing.

I had one book, “This Is My Beloved,”  as a teenager, and I read it often. When I lost the book in a move, his writing became but a fleeting memory. Hail to the interwebs! Because I found it on Amazon, and received a copy from my dear friend a few Christmases ago.

I love to share his work with you, because some of you who have hung on the words of my poetry (back when I was writing a lot) will see what a style thief I became. My only grace being that I didn’t know I was doing it until years after I had written a great lot of my prose.

It does sometimes feel like hanging off the side of a cliff, doesn’t it?

I wonder when that last pebble is going to give way to an avalanche of tears and stifled emotion. This planet is so so sad these days.

How to stay bright, shiny and happy in the midst of the sadness?

Not sure, but I am open for suggestions.

I was excited because my three year old was excited too. “He loves the big family vibe,” I kept saying.

It brought me back to my own thanksgiving at three, there was a table full of chosen family, the food was delicious. The mashed potatoes were so perfect that I can remember the peaks; a sort of surreal white bowl of bliss, the kind that I viscerally remember even more than  the back of my hair going up in flames as I reached for them. I fell asleep, in the bathroom sitting on the toilet, sometime after dessert.  A long day I suppose. I remember my mom coming in and walking me to my bed, tucking me in and giving me a kiss on the forehead. She used to sing, “You are my sunshine…” when tucking me in.

Anyway, back to me, the mom… we were having this beautiful thanksgiving feast, and Chogyi was the first on line when the food was ready.

He stood there scanning the goods, his wide eyes just barely clearing the table top. After about thirty seconds, his excited expression turned to that of utter dismay and he burst into tears which, when they dropped off his cheeks, could have filled a shot glass pretty fast.

And then he cried out in utter exasperated disappointment…

“Where’s the popcorntoastandjellyBEANS!??!?!?!?”

It hadn’t occurred to me that his interpretation of Thanksgiving was solely based on the Peanut’s Thanksgiving special. The poor kid had been hyped up all day for the popcorn toast and jellybeans!

Not the big family vibe, not the stuffing, mashed potatoes, not the pumpkin pie.

Luckily I had some kick ass health food store jelly beans left over from Easter, and they were still good (as if Jelly beans have a shelf life, event he health food store kind)! Toast was easy, and I popped some corn.

This year, ten years later I am going to surprise him with Hors D ‘oeuvres of popcorn, toast & jellybeans.

Remember when you had to wait until the monday before any holiday for the Charlie Brown’s …(insert holiday here) special?

Now you can just go to youtube!

And I would like to point out that this Sandusky/Penn State horror is EXACTLY what I speak of when I say that Homophobia is at the root of everything that is wrong in our society.

It is at the root of EVERYTHING wrong within our global society and particularly in this one.

We raise our sons to fear tears, to fear eachother, to distrespect women. to go to War with eachother, their neighbors and the whole fucking planet. We do this by giving them role models like that asshole. Removing them from their hearts and telling them to punch a guy rather than love him.

The Jerry Sandusky’s of the world have made my job as a mother ten times harder. How am I supposed to raise my son to be a protector whan I have the entire planet against me.

How am I supposed to let my son play sports? How am I supposed to let my son go to church?

How the fuck am I supposed to raise an aware conscious loving man in this fucking society.

“WORK HARDER!!!”

“HIT THAT BALL!!!”

“RUN KID RUN… FASTER HARDER FASTER HARDER!!!”

“BE A MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!”
Oh, and since your parents trust me, and since your society tells you that I am the role model you should follow, I think I will fuck your little brother in the ass while I shower him down after a hard workout.

Good shit people.

Good shit.

Fuck you.

How about we teach or young boys to love? Not to shut their hearts down and then abuse eachother and everyone else around them.

I have decided to write a 175 page novel in thirty days along with thousands of other people who are also taking the challenge. The prize? Having taken the challenge. If I actually accomplish it… YAY! If it is worth a read… YAY! If it is badass… YAYYYYYY!

If not. COol.

I will accept support and love while I am trudging away.

And today, since it starts at midnight… I am going to take ideas all day. I have no idea what I am going to write about. The only thing I do know is that I am going to write a young adult novel since that is about the number of pages of a completed young adult novel.

I invite you to comment here and give me ideas… What do you think I should write about?

I begin tonite at midnight and I go until three minutes to midnight on the 31st of November.

Yep. Rebecca thought… THIS REALLY IS  the pits.

Welcome to the Jungle? What the hell were they doing in this god awful situation, forced” to handle such sophomoric grapple for attention? Could they actually claim that they had been forced to do any of this? To get out of it meant simply quitting their $6 per hour jobs, buying $20 bus tickets to warm homes not three hours away. But nope. They were sitting on a fucking couch in the village, “Living the dream!!” And it sucked. Everyone in the room knew how much it sucked.

When they took the apartment from Susan, they were so excited. They were finally graduating from camping out on Bobby and Max’s couches. Or getting on the bus hoping to stay with Bobby or Max, only to find out that they “just weren’t feeling it” that night. There were too many nights that the three of them stood on the sidewalk outside Bobby’s house wondering where they were going to sleep. The result would often be some conjured story about being locked out of the house they were care-taking, or missing the bus home.

Shayna wondered if Darren’s stepfather had suspected anything the time the they called him from downstairs at  midnight with a story about having been supposed to pick up the keys to a friend’s apartment and missing the girl at the store they had been left in. Steve had been so kind to make them comfy beds on the huge sofa in his giant upper west side living room.

New York is a jungle. Rebecca thought. All the “trees” were cold hard buildings built by Native Americans with the balls to scale scaffolding hundreds of feet off the ground. The “bushes” and undergrowth bust stops and subway landings. The wildlife… A motley array of rats, pigeons, squirrels and fucking homeless people just waiting to be exterminated by it all. She suddenly became horrified by the choices she had made in the recent years. In that moment of realization, nothing about her “adult” life made any sense, and clearly she was not an adult if she was willing to put up with this shit for any length of time. Why did living in NYC have any relevance in her life? What the fuck was she doing? What was the alternative? To admit failure and go crawling back to her mothers couch? To admit failure and go back to Shayna and Charlee’s mother’s house and bounce back and forth between their rooms so as not to overstay her welcome.

As difficult as it was to admit, Rebecca had to; this torture they were experiencing was nobody’s fault but their own. It was self inflicted torture, and someone would have to call the hand soon, because it was getting bad.

“Finally! Jesus!” Appetite for Destruction was finally over. Now they could scurry to their room in the other apartment and get some sleep. Rebecca was not lookoing forward to the next day, work at nine am, and then another evening with Mutt and Jeff, since the other two girls were actually working until one in the morning.

Nope.

At the mere flinch of Rebecca’s foot, Jason moved toward them and with one swift motion, swept the guitar across the three of them not an inch from their faces.

“Sit.” He said. And fired up the next song.

To be continued…….

Once the girls were seated there was a flurry of cassettes and the  dimming of the one red light, Jason and Miles tripping over each other were ready to please. If that’s what you call it. There was a numbing malaise setting in on the girls, each with their own way of blocking out the awful reality before them.

It really was a nasty apartment. Charlee worked at convincing herself. The place stunk, and every time, with the bums in the hallways. The last time Koch cleared the park, seven turds were deposited one flight up on the landing.

As Charlee’s eyes glazed over, and Jason “plugged in” his guitar with no strings, her mind drifted to the night the boiler broke. Shayna had just gotten out of the shower, she was naked, and it didn’t really matter, it was 98 degrees in there. Rebecca opened the window to grab the ginger ale she had left out on the fire escape. The fridge was never cold enough.

“Oooh, leave that open…” Shayna said, “that shower was hot, but when I turned the water off, I could hardly tell. It’s hot in here!”

They had left the window open for about five minutes when the clank clank clank of the boiler blowing, five flights down, went un-noticed. An hour later, they were fully clothed, coats, hats, gloves, long johns, every blanket covering them while they laid together beneath the extra futon.

It was Shayna’s turn to be in the middle. No one was sleeping, everyone was shivering, and somehow, they all rolled over and Charlee moved from the middle to the left, Rebecca got out, Shayna rolled over and Rebecca got back in. This went on about every hour until the sun rose, giving each one of them a turn in the middle for warmth. There was really no hell worse than the boiler breaking on the coldest night of the winter.

Oh wait…

Maybe there was.

As Charlee regained focus, she could hear the awful sound of the guitar lead in to Welcome to the Jungle. How could she miss it? Shayna had fallen in love with Axel Rose a few years back, and she would play that goddamned album twenty times a day. It was a good album the first five times. After that it was enough to make her want to jump out a window and just run.

Shayna looked at Rebecca who cringed as she heard the same notes, bringing her back to the worst band she had ever been tortured with in High school. Shayna had killed Guns & Roses for them all. But this was beating a dead horse to death with a guitar and toy microphone.

“Really?” Charlee couldn’t contain herself. She just couldn’t believe she was about to be forced to watch two spoiled rich idiots lip sync Welcome To The Jungle. And they were fucking serious!

Yep. Rebecca thought… THIS REALLY IS  the pits.