The Wheel is Turning…

In the newest twist to our story, we have decided to stay in New Orleans. Pretty soon after our abrupt transition, I could tell Asa was not ready to say goodbye to his house. He will tell you differently and that he was ready to let it all go, but every day when he talked about it, I could sense a sadness. One realtor did some research on the house, and we got to see blueprints from the late 1800s, draft cards of former residents, and funerals that were held here. As a side note, newspapers from a long time ago were like Facebook gossip pages, letting everyone know things like who fell on Bourbon Street, who hit their head, and who walked them home… We even unleashed a witch after unearthing a shoe under a window in the bathroom, which we haven’t replaced yet and need to since we still find presence of her from time to time. Not only does this house hold so much history, but it seemed like Asa had some unfinished business with her. I didn’t want him to rush into something he may later regret, and as we learned more about the strange things happening in the real estate market with corporations buying up single family homes so people would not be able to buy a home again, we made the decision to keep the house and work toward fulfilling the dreams Asa still had for her. While I’m excited to help bring these dreams to life, this has been a very hard transition for me, and I still feel displaced and long for my desert home, which contains almost all of my belongings since we were only going to be here for a month…

But here we are, and I am trying to find a way to feel like this could be home, although I feel like I am in denial that I am not just going back to Moab. I told Asa the other day I do not ever see myself transitioning everything over to Louisiana. Just the thought of claiming Louisiana as home feels painful. I so desperately miss mountains, canyons, cracks, towers, raging rivers, monsoon waterfalls, playing desert detective, feeling the presence of ancients, and just intimately connecting and communicating with the land. I recently joined some social media groups to try and fulfill my outdoor adventure needs, hoping I had just missed something, and everyone responded how sorry they were and that I would just need to go back west to get my fill. I cried as I read each comment, and as much as I want to take trips back to Moab (and have had plans to do so for months), there is something about doing it that feels so overwhelming that I haven’t done it yet. Life still feels so in flux, and I haven’t been able to find my footing. There have been moments in New Orleans where I can feel a toe trying to ground, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to not just keep afloat here.

Right after crying through writing all of that, I went on a run. While this is the least active I’ve been since I had my accident in years, the most consistent (even though it is faaar from consistent) activity I get is a run through the neighborhood. I start at the house and run a loop through the french quarter. Today’s run reminded me what a joy it can be in a very different way. As I run, I see neighbors, tourists, crust punks, residents of a nursing home out for a morning sit, city workers sweeping the streets in the quarter (sometimes more often than I see our trash collectors), and the other week I saw a real life pirate. There is a bar I run past that is always open, and it is fun to see what action is happening at 9am, which sometimes is a lot. I think many of us have forgotten about community outside of our family and friends. I know I did. We go to work and after work activities and then come home and close the door to the rest of our community. In New Orleans, almost every house has a front porch or stoop, and everyone sits outside. You actually get to be face to face with your neighbors all the time and remember that community is larger than your little bubble. The aftermath of Hurricane Ida showed me one of the most powerful displays of community I’ve ever experienced. While the government and large organizations were putting up red tape, people were out in the streets taking care of each other with whatever limited resources they had. It was the exact opposite of what we are told happens in crisis situations. People were not hoarding but were sharing. I now firmly believe the only way we are going to get through whatever is to come in this wild world we are living in is with this larger sense of community. And despite my longing for my desert home, what a gift New Orleans is teaching me.

Living here, I am around some of the most resourceful, creative, talented people I’ve ever known, and while this is helping me learn more about myself and connecting to things larger than me, in a lot of ways it is also more challenging than when I was drowning in corporate America. In this process of disconnecting from societal expectations and living in a place where so many people live outside the “norm,” I’ve realized how I used high achieving school and work performance to detach from what was really going on in and around me, and now that I do not have that to grasp onto and hide behind, it is sometimes a pretty terrifying free fall into the abyss. I know everything happens for a reason, and maybe a reason I need to be here now is because of the way the community in New Orleans walks through this darkness together while at the same time learning how to not get too far gone, which is a delicate balance in navigating these swampy waters.

No one has been walking through this with me more than Asa. While the news of us staying in New Orleans has been very different for both of us, he is helping me find my way to home. On the night of my birthday, after he spent days organizing 24 hours of birthday magic, we were talking with someone about the decision to stay. While I talked about my perception of Asa’s sadness around selling the house, for the first time he talked about how he was thinking about me in the decision and how he wanted to make sure I felt a sense of security and not just impulsively jumping off into the unknown, again. We’ve jumped without looking for most of the decisions we’ve made in this relationship, and while those impulses got us to this place of love, they also got us into a lot of explosive, dark, seemingly impossible to navigate places. We are both so strong willed and are used to plowing forward independently. And even though we “knew” each other on a deeper cosmic sense, we didn’t really know each other in our current forms. At one point, Asa said he’s sure we probably obliterated each other in another life, maybe when we were dragons. But we have worked really hard, especially since coming to New Orleans, to know and respect each other so that we could be on the same team and not obliterate each other again. I think we both realized on some level if we jumped into the land in New Mexico from the place we were at we probably would have eaten each other. Now we have the gift of a pause and a space to continue to work toward this partnership.

In the process of working on this partnership, we also get to work on this fortress and try out ideas for the roadside attraction we have been talking about since a few weeks after meeting. If you know me, you know how much I love a roadside attraction and the world’s largest anything. One birthday a few years ago spiraled out around a pilgrimage to the world’s largest pistachio, and another time, a friend and I called hours ahead to make sure we got baked potatoes at the potato museum that houses the world’s largest potato chip, which if you’ve seen it you know it could be much bigger, and despite the instructions to call ahead for a potato, we were informed you do not actually need to call that far in advance. I know when Asa and I get the house to her peak it will be wonderfully magical. There are so many things I am looking forward to bringing the community with Asa through the house, and I know this period of painful transition will bring so much growth. It seems like a lot of people are in some form of painful crunch right now. Things in our world continue to get wilder, and despite having difficulty seeing past some of the challenges of right now, I feel a bit more secure knowing there are so many of us out there trying to find a better way together. So thank you.

If you’re in New Orleans, watch for updates from us. We’re hoping to have a soft opening of the house around jazz fest. We had some set backs due to Ida, including $20,000 worth of damage Asa is still fighting insurance and FEMA to even make a dent in covering it, but once the holiday rush is done, we are throwing ourselves into it! Since Asa also thought we were only going to be here for a month, he left some of his things, including the original tarot drawings, in my storage unit in Moab. We are going to hopefully drive out there to get them in January, so they will have their permanent exhibit in the space room, which is getting a new coat of constellations, mythical creatures, and spells. The day room is also getting a fresh coat of clouds and will be an ongoing gallery space for all of your art! We’ll let you know when we’re starting to curate it. We’re also re-doing bathrooms, fences, murals, etc, and I am going to dive into creating a garden space in the back with raised food beds, interactive art, sculptures, fountains, maybe an outdoor oven, hot tub, fun house…we’ll see how much we can do on our little art money and with the space we have. Thank you to everyone who has supported us on this path, and we’re looking forward to hosting so many magical events in the future! Let us know if you want to help!

And if anyone ever wants to go find the one rapid in Louisiana or take a sabbatical to go sleep under the stars in some red dirt canyon, you can find me outside the mystical red fortress building a bed in my car for those times I need to balance out this new city life.

The Times They Are A Changin’

Heartwork Arts