Go with the Flow

We set out from Casper this morning for the return drive to New Orleans. After a three-day delay due to record-setting inclement weather that forced closures on every interstate from here to “home” we were perky and ready to go.

The day was beautiful, the scenery sublime—bright sunshine sparkling on snowdrifts, livestock grazing in scattered clearings. As we approached the CO border, majestic snow-capped mountains appeared to the west. Breathtakingly beautiful. No place else looks like Wyoming.

About 20 miles south of Cheyenne the fuel pump blew.

We had lunch in the truck while we waited for a tow—juicy oranges, ham sandwiches and chips. We were towed back to Cheyenne to the Little America repair shop (open 15 hrs a day, seven days a week). A Sinclair gas station sits a few hundred yards away and has been my waiting room for the past three hours. Repairs are underway and we hope to be back on the road in the next 30 minutes.

It’s been an easy wait. The gas station has showers and immaculate bathrooms, big screen TV, heat and decent coffee. And Internet access!! Chatting in IM with P___, we pondered the miracles of modern technology: we locate and contact rescue using a cell phone that also permitted us to take pictures and email them to CA…sitting in Cheyenne WY, I IM with a friend in FL after sending a message to a potential client in Japan. All within the span of a half hour.

The flow = Faith, grace and digital technology.

James Brown and the Wizard of Oz

I have new moccasins, first pair ever. I have an address in Gulfport. James Brown is dead.

I am in Wyoming where the wind sings and moans as it moves, rattling the bare winter branches and scattering fallen snow so the air blinks and shimmers in brilliant sunlight. James Brown departed early yesterday morning; perhaps even as spirit, he retains his singing, dancing iridescence.

When I stand on the lower back porch of this house to smoke a cigarette, in the sparkly swirling snow powder, I imagine I am a figure inside a snow-globe paperweight.





We will leave here in a few days, carrying more than when we arrived. I accepted holiday gifts from my hosts here (I didn’t bring gifts for them). For the sojourner, the number of gifts or other material goods accepted corresponds to the length of the stopover. In the spaces between stops, every Thing must be carried so gifts, however generous and pure the heart of the giver, are only accepted after due consideration of …

• Weight
• Bulk or shape
• Relative fragility/durability/travel-ability
• Functionality
• How much it feeds my soul
• Context in which the gift was made

…among other factors. Since I will stay in Gulfport MS for awhile, I won't have to carry this stuff around. I will have a place to set things. And when I leave Gulfport....

Even if ST carried a suitcase as large as my Eagle Creek convertible backpack she could not have packed more than two changes of clothing given the copious yards of material used in the dresses and skirts of the era (the mid-1800s) plus underclothing and bonnet. After the publication of the Narrative in 1850, she also carried copies of it to sell as well as the cartes de visite.

When were cardboard boxes invented?





The “luxury” of being able to carry more clothing—in addition to the ease of mobility that my wheeled luggage permits—is a noteworthy difference between our sojourns.



Last summer in CO Springs, the temperamental winds recalled a recurrent question—what is wind? Despite two previous investigations over the span of the last decade, I still didn’t really know how wind was born. I found a book about wind in a neighborhood bookstore. [look up this title] The idea of the book caught my fancy but I really bought it because of my attraction to the owner of the store.

I was halfway through the book when Katrina happened. The bookstore owner spurned my advances so, just before I left CO to volunteer in the Gulf Coast recovery effort, I returned the book to the store. (This was not a case of the “due consideration” mentioned earlier but the emergence of one of my little neuroses— purging all material evidence of “failed” relationships.) (The purchase price of the book was not refunded; even if it had been offered I would have refused to accept the tainted funds...)

My second month in New Orleans, tornado-strength wind ripped our FEMA tents from their moorings one night and left many residents of the Algiers encampment exposed to the fury and deluge of a fierce storm. My Eagle Creek luggage was zipped tight when the storm hit so I had dry clothes to change into that night. Many of my less tidy tent mates were not so lucky.





For several weeks now I’ve wanted to see The Wizard of Oz. We rented it yesterday from Blockbuster. This afternoon, while outside the wind is quieter, I’ll curl up cozy inside and watch and tremble again as Elmira Gulch blows past the bedroom window of Dorothy’s windswept house.

On the Road from New Orleans to Wyoming

Sojourner stepped into the flow --- that is, she swam and rested in the irregular current of the sojourners’ life, willingly. She was called by God to walk and talk, teaching and preaching. Being a mirror to the people and a messenger.

I too entered voluntarily. Nudged by circumstance to give up a permanent home, I did not resist. Why resist when dreams of leaving had hovered, like translucent shadow at the periphery of my consciousness, for years? I had dreamed of escape and adventure nearly every day of the preceding decade. A fear of frostbitten, friendless destitution and death had set the stage for nightmare for years. It was time to confront the fear and cancel the dreams’ deferment. It was time to escape.

I am talkative—but I have nothing to teach. If I am called, it is by nothing more or less than whatever drives, urges, or calls every living thing toward Becoming. I am a reflection of everything. Everything is a reflection of me. And within this mutual and interdependent reflection lies the Message.

I often imagine what it would be like to meet Sojourner, to talk with her, to look at her and have her look at me. I would ask her if she ever lost sight of why she had chosen to have no home. I would ask what she learned about herself and about living from the traveling and from the sojourning. I would ask her what her own Self had to do with her work—did she do it all for God, the Father Man Above, or was some part of the work done strictly to please or entertain Faithful Sojourner?

Tonight, on a straight clear road across a white, frozen landscape, I am traveling the last leg of a journey from New Orleans to Casper, WY. A magnificent panoramic sunset played out in gold-lavender-orange-mauve-blue extravagance to my left; to the right stretched winter fields sleeping at the base of craggy umbre mounds. As the light failed, I glimpsed my face, reflected in the window of the passenger side door.

I made eye contact with myself and the first thought that came was this: I love living this way.

Thirty years ago I was riding across a frozen Michigan landscape with Mary L_______. I didn’t know where we were going. I was just along for the ride and sojourn. She had friends in Ann Arbor. I’d never been to Ann Arbor. On the ride up from Bloomington, in the middle of the night, I saw a barn in the distance in flames—startling to see such bright, violent energy in the sleepy darkness. The memory of that sight is as vivid as ever. I’ve remembered it often in the intervening years. It has appeared in my dreams. And Joni Mitchell sings of a similar experience in a song on her Hejira album.

This is the memory that accompanied I love living this way. It is 30 years later and tonight I don’t have a practical explanation or rational justification for the way I live. I simply love living this way.

Gulfport Rising

"For you know I must be faithful Sojourner everywhere..." Sojourner Truth, October 1865

The end of the New Orleans sojourn approaches. The end of the first New Orleans sojourn. I will welcome the chance to return to New Orleans, to become more intimately acquainted with NOLA--she has been so very good to me. Her beauty is alluring, seductive... I say "goodbye, for now," knowing that I leave a piece of my heart here and will always carry with me a piece of this vibrant, stricken, mysterious place.

Later this week I will travel to Gulfport to make the acquaintance of the people and places and projects that will figure in the upcoming stage of my life's unfolding. I move forward, as always--knowing nothing, diffuse and concurrent strains of grief and eagerness flowing and surging through me.

Eager to see what lies ahead, grief for departure from the rhythms and scents of New Orleans that I have come to love. Eager for the possibility of learning more about the realities of the African-in-America post-Katrina, grief for inquiries I did not pursue while in NO. Eager to lend my services and skills and passion to a righteous, relevant and crucial work; grief for my unrealized artistic intentions in a city where creativity flourishes.

As always, this upcoming move presents an opportunity to "start again." To "correct" whatever "mistakes" I made in New Orleans or other places of sojourn over the past two years. But it takes only a few seconds of trying to make a list of my "mistakes" before I am cross-eyed and dizzy and exhausted--too many to count, let alone devise corrective strategies! I can only breathe deeply, still my heart and mind, give thanks for Divine guidance and intervention, ask for continued nurture and support and protection...

To remain faithful, curious, willing, awake.