Me, Jaimie Lynn and Aviva pose with hoops before Eris
Mardi Gras in New Orleans was a strange and wonderful time. Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday, but the celebrations leading up to the actual day last for about two weeks. Besides the celebrations around the Super Bowl, the peak of Mardi Gras for me was marching in the Krewe d’Eris Parade on Sunday the 14th of February.
Eris is an unauthorized parade, as described on NOLA.com
“As Sunday night slithered out and Lundi Gras scuttled in, The Vieux Carre was swarmed by the filthy vermin of the Krewe of Eris, a wild and phantasmagoric walking (and bicycling and wheelchairing and shopping-carting) krewe dedicated not to misrule but to no rule at all. Unorganized, unauthorized, un-permitted, and unconcerned, the Krewe of Eris is an open-membership tribe honoring Eris, the goddess of discord and strife. In the mythology of the Greeks it was Eris who threw the golden apple that sparked a feud between vain deities, revealing the pettiness and weaknesses of the powerful, and thus the Krewe of Eris gives the lie to the grandiose and flashy motorized superkrewes, mostly by being much, much more fun.”
I was part of the Hula Hooping corps, coordinating with our friends in the flag corps. We marched at the front of the parade along with a luminous dragon and a marching band. The theme of the parade was “light and pleasure” and along that vein my friend Aviva and I both got LED hula hoops, and our third hooper Jamie Lynn marched between us to catch some of our light. We all decided to dress in costumes of white and gold. I had a fun marching band hat with gold horns made by a talented woman named Jade. The rest of my costume I got from second hand shops.
Marching for about three hours with a hula hoop was both exhilarating and tiring. I had so much fun tossing it as high as I could and catching it, watching the swirls of light making pretty patterns in the sky. The crowd loved us, and was us. People seemed to wander in and out of the parade, adding to the chaos and beauty of it. We had rehearsed a routine but found it impossible to carry out. It was all just fun and celebration.
Since I was hooping I could not photograph the parade itself but I found some cool photos online on the Wandering Dreamers blog and also on l*ght//motion’s flickr page. The slideshow below is of the photos I took before the parade…
On Tuesday I biked out to the famous Louisiana Superdome to watch the New Orleans Saints Parade take off. I propped my bike up against a palm tree and stood on the seat to get myself above the crowd to take these shots. I started daydreaming about building a bike with a photo stand or maybe just a really tall tricycle. But for me it always comes back to stilts. Gotta get me some.
I have been here about a month and have enjoyed watching the Saints mania build to a ever pitch, explode during their Super Bowl victory, and leave us with an electricity in the atmosphere around New Orleans that is palpable. I am normally not one to wax poetic about sporting events but this team has brought hope and renewal to this city in a way I couldn’t understand had I been living anywhere else during this time. I am grateful to the universe for arranging my visit.
Double Dutching in Jackson Square before the Super Bowl
In looking back upon my life, I have noticed a strange pattern. I have lived in the geographical fan base of successful football franchises much of my adult life. The first time it happened was kind of heartbreaking, living in Syracuse and Rochester (NY) while the Buffalo Bills played in and lost 4 consecutive Super Bowls in the early nineties. At the turn of the century I moved to New England in time to witness the Patriots go to 3 Super Bowls, winning two of them. Now here I am – a new decade, a New Orleans, and at the epicenter of the wildest football scene in the history of the universe. And yes, the Saints victory over the Colts in Super Bowl XLIV has beaten the shit out of every other football experience I have ever had. WHO DAT!!
Aviva hooping it up!
It is really funny because I am not a football fan, per se. I have watched a handful of Super Bowls and playoff games over the years, but here in the Big Easy there is no way to avoid the Saints mania. This is a city only five years out from being nearly destroyed by Katrina and the Saints seem to represent something beyond sports. They are the Phoenix rising up from the flames, with all the aura and legend of that mythical creature. Even my yoga teacher waxes poetic during class, prophesizing that the Saints’ victory is going to end the Hindu Kali Yuga and usher in the Dvapara Yuga. She tells us that we are all about to become beings made of light, and if my quantum calculations are correct she just might be right.
I spent the day out with my new friends who love to Double Dutch and hula hoop. We rode our bikes through traffic jams and dog parades (Barkus) to get to Jackson Square in the early afternoon, where we set up shop and drew a huge crowd around us. The Saints fans (aka all of New Orleans) were all out in their black and gold, some wearing more elaborate costumes. The sun was shining and our little boom box was playing upbeat music and it was all pretty picture perfect, as my perfectly pretty pictures hopefully convey.
For the game I went to a party, with the usual anarchists and artists you find at random parties around New Orleans when you are a freak like me. I sat inside an old warehouse building of some sort on a dingy car seat watching the game projected on a giant bed sheet. The setup would occasionally lose reception and about half way through someone put Saints Radio on instead of the CBS audio, making the famous Super Bowl commercials seem even more surreal. There was no heat and so I went out at half time to warm up by the fire while The Who played and we all secretly wondered if they regretted the lyrics in “My Generation“.
The second half of the game was epic, up to the point in the 4th quarter when the Saints made the game’s only interception and ran 70 yards to victory, and into history. After all the hugs and victory cries and high fives our posse once again rode out towards the French Quarter, busting out the jump ropes and hula hoops on the corners of Frenchmen and Royal. Once again a jubilant crowd gathered around us, while cars drove by honking and the whole city took to the streets in celebration. Everyone yelling “Who Dat!!” over and over again. All people united by one event, a celebration well deserved by this amazing city. I am blessed to be here, and to be a part of it all.
I have been here in New Orleans just over three weeks and have landed my first job, as the New Orleans Vegan Examiner! The Examiner is an online news and blogging site that deems itself “the insider source for everything local“. They have hubs in most of the major US cities and recruit people like me who have a passion for writing about interesting topics to do columns. The pay is based on the popularity of the column and any advertising we can help them secure.
While I do not expect to become rich talking about veganism in New Orleans, I think that it will provide some other nice benefits. I am hoping that I will be able to use the column to encourage restaurant owners and chefs to try vegan options and add them to their menus. I hope it will bring more people to the vegan events being held here in New Orleans. I am also aware that Examiner articles get high Google rankings, so I think that it will bring more publicity to my other vegan projects and perhaps even my personal website. Beyond all that it will help me to hone my writing skills so that I can someday write that New York Times bestselling book I have in me somewhere…
If you would like to help out, please subscribe to my column, post comments on my articles, and keep coming here to check out this blog. You will get so much good karma you won’t know what to do with it all, and you will have to pass it on to others.
photo i took on my iphone through a gallery window in the French Quarter
In my last post I spoke of giving selflessly and building community as paths that can lead us out of our own drama and suffering and into a better future. After writing it I felt an awkwardness, wondering if my thoughts and actions really measured up to the things I had written. It is great to be able to write and perhaps inspire people with words, but it is in the realm of action where we are truly tested. I heard a small voice in my head telling me that perhaps I was promoting ideals that I wasn’t quite living up to.
I have been in New Orleans less than two weeks and I am sure nobody expects me to be a community leader or the patron saint of reaching out to neighbors at this point. However for the first time in about 15 years I am a minority in my neighborhood, a pale white face in a sea of darker skinned people. Coming from a far less diverse community in Northampton, MA I find myself plagued with white guilt. Our culture is the operating system that runs in our minds, and even after years of disk maintenance, software upgrades and attempts to understand the problems that cause racial divide it is difficult to transcend it. I feel a bit unsettled when I walk out my door, as if my neighbors all distrust me and perhaps I should distrust them. It is a fear I knew I would have when I moved here and one I wanted to confront in my life so that I can evolve my being.
David Hammond with his snowballs in NYC
There is an artist named David Hammond who I learned about while studying Fine Art Photography at RIT back in the mid nineties and the lesson of his performance piece has stuck with me since then. In the middle of winter in New York City with snow on the ground free for the taking, he set up a spot on the sidewalk and began selling snowballs. In googling the work now I find that the concept behind his piece was to mock the commodification of the art world. But what I remember is a deeper lesson. In selling snowballs Hammond was able to connect with people that would normally walk by him with eyes averted, who now were curious and ready to strike up a conversation. He said something like “two strangers are naturally going to be uncomfortable around each other, but given a common object they can make a connection”. I wish I could find his actual quote about that now, because I am sure he said it more eloquently than that.
At any rate, yesterday proved to be a turning point in my evolvement. I brought a small toy guitar here with me because I wanted to reignite my passion for playing but could not fit a full sized guitar in my luggage. I am typically quite shy about playing publicly, but yesterday I wanted to play and it was too stuffy in my apartment. I somehow overcame my fear of being the cracker playing folk songs in the hood and went out onto my front steps to play. Within a couple of minutes the kids across the street took notice and came closer to watch me. I had assumed that street musicians were so prevalent here that no one would care much, but something magical happened for me. People were noticing. An old black woman came over and stood next to me with her eyes closed and her heart totally open to my music. The kids across the street were now dancing and a few more people had come out. I realized then that this talent was one of my gifts, something that can make people happy. I realized that all the street musicians are down in the French Quarter trying to get money in their hats, but there is no money in my neighborhood, so this was more unique. The shared experience of the music turned me from stranger into a new member of our community.
Later that night I went out to the Hukah Club with my landlord and his partner. It was Hip Hop night and once again I found myself a grain of salt in a pepper shaker. Perhaps because of my earlier experience I did not feel the usual discomfort. The music was like a steam engine propelling my bootie barge into motion. My inhibitions dropped once again and I lost myself into dancing. I hopped around and shook my hips and all the while looking people in the eyes and smiling. I think that it moved people to see this white boy unafraid even though I don’t have the requisite moves usually performed in the hip hop genre. The men started giving me various secret handshakes and teaching me little shoulder pops and hip thrusts. People were smiling with me.
I ended up at the edge of the dance floor near a raised platform where some women were sitting and dancing. They started taking pictures of me and then dancing with me, posing with me, laughing and letting loose. They even started doing that grind thing where they would bend over and put their fine booties into my groin area and move it them all around. Jump up jump up and jump down. So I started doing it too. All the yoga I have been doing has gotten my quite limber and flexible, and these girls loved dancing with me. I was dancing with the guys around me too. It was some of the most fun I have had in a long time. I was aware of the difference in our skin tones, but the dancing and celebrating transcended the cultural baggage in my mind and set me free. We are all one people after all, with many variations and flavors.
I feel like time is speeding up for me, like there is some great force propelling me onward. There is no more profound spiritual fulfillment than to be finding ones purpose in this life. I am so grateful to have these epiphanies coming more and more frequently, like I have opened up some channel for the universe and it is starting to flow more easily through me. I keep getting this deeper and deeper sense that we are all on the cusp of some great change. I also have a sense that I am meant to play some small roll in bringing it about. I believe we all are, if we can open up and let it in. At night I walk through this beautiful city and I can feel the trees speaking to me, I can hear the voice of the Earth, feel her warm breath in the air. She is my lover and my friend, who sustains me as I go. I make my promises to her, that whatever it is and whenever that time comes I will be ready. She in turn brings to me the experiences I need in order to grow. All the while she cultivates this love in my heart, shimmering and effervescent, that flows out from me to all sentient beings
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At the end of the night I came home and recorded The House of The Rising Sun on my guitar with my new Samson USB mic, it is one of my favorite songs about New Orleans and I would love to share it with you:
Dukkha – “the Buddhist concept of suffering, a Pali term roughly corresponding to a number of terms in English including suffering, pain, unsatisfactoriness, sorrow, affliction, anxiety, dissatisfaction, discomfort, anguish, stress, misery, and frustration.” ~Wikipedia
I got on a train to come to New Orleans on that same day that Haiti was devastated by a terrible earthquake. The news came to me in broken bits as I traveled, passing through the landscapes of small American towns, sleeping and awake, checking the Internet on my iPhone in those places where I could get reception. World events seem surreal while moving through time like this, ungrounded and alone. Still the death toll seemed unimaginable, and reminded me of the destruction that nature had inflicted on New Orleans five years ago.
My journey to this strange city I now inhabit was brought on by a personal disaster, one that rocked my inner world and has caused me to feel the deaths of many of my hopes and dreams. I had spent the previous nine months or so of my life in a state of bliss, in love with a woman who I thought I would grow much older with, who embodied so much of what I had been seeking in a relationship. Then one morning I woke up and she had torn herself from my life, for reasons that did not make sense to me. I pleaded and begged her to change her mind but she would not even respond to me at all, leaving my heart devastated and all the plans I had made of moving to New Orleans to be with her in ruins. In the absence of her ability to communicate with me I decided to come here anyway, because I felt the city calling, because I needed an adventure, because I had some small hope she would change her mind.
Swan River Yoga on Chartres St
Upon arriving here I bought an unlimited month of yoga at the Swan River Yoga Studio in order to keep my practice going and to ground myself. New Orleans is where she lives and where we spent some of the best moments of our relationship, so I knew that I would have memories haunting me that I would have to deal with. I knew the yoga would help. In the first class I attended the teacher began by speaking of Haiti, and how disasters of such magnitude are humbling to us. How they make our own troubles seem smaller, and how they give us pause to be thankful for what we have. I had thought of this myself of course, but the mind is so adept at keeping our own drama in the forefront and the greater dramas at bay that it was good to be reminded by someone else.
It is difficult to internalize the suffering of people in other countries who we have little physical connection to. The news is constantly full of stories of death and tragedy, and we necessarily numb ourselves to them in order to be present in our own lives. Yet in our own suffering we can understand the suffering of others. If I did not feel the loss of this relationship so poignantly it would be harder for me to imagine any loss.
One of the reasons I decided to come to New Orleans was because of the loss suffered here. I knew there were many people still recovering from Katrina, and that there was lots of volunteer work to be done still. I had a realization that by helping with this rebuilding I could also help rebuild my own heart. We are all connected in this way, through our ability to hurt so deeply and to long for transcendence.
As I planned my move I connected with Burners Without Borders, an organization related to the Burning Man festival and its concept of a gift economy. At Burning Man there is no exchange of money, people survive in the harsh desert climate by giving and sharing. This opens people’s hearts and builds community. In the aftermath of Katrina the Burners Without Borders formed to help out along the Gulf Coast, applying lessons learned at the festival to devastated communities in need. Since then the organization has spread throughout the world and is involved in many projects. There is still one woman here, an amazing soul named Summer, who is organizing volunteers to help in the Lower Ninth Ward. She is working with a community organization called Lower Ninth Ward Village. I have connected with them and will be volunteering as much as I can while I am here. While I have barely begun, I already feel a sense of being part of something larger than myself. I can already see that this will help to heal me.
We all wish to stem the flow of suffering in our own lives. Some of us deal with it by trying to shut the world out with anger, drugs, television, or feigned indifference. Some turn to organized religion, hoping that there is an afterlife reward for humbling oneself to the proper deity. I believe the true spiritual path calls us to be present in this moment, to experience the sadness of life and to transform it into action. Human civilization’s greatest flaw is our hoarding tendency, our inability to share resources and compassion. We walk around daily looking for compliments or understanding from others, yet are reluctant to give it. We need to overcome our fears of others and the cultural baggage that gives us excuses to turn away from those in need, in order to make ourselves whole and fully human.
If our greatest flaw is greed, then our greatest evolvement is compassion. With the tragedies in Haiti still being revealed, there are fund raising efforts going on everywhere. It is helpful to give money, it makes us feel good about ourselves. Money is very impersonal though, it builds no connection between the giver and receiver. It is easily redirected into the pockets of the greedy. Since most of us can not go to Haiti to volunteer it is still better than doing nothing. If you want to donate I would recommend researching the organizations you are giving to, and trying to ensure your money goes to an honorable organization. Two that I recommend are Food For Life Global (A vegetarian/vegan food relief program) and Doctors Without Borders.
Beyond that I encourage you to help Haiti from within your own community. The beauty of practicing compassion is that it is a renewable energy source. Helping others plants seeds of gratitude that grow compassion in the hearts we have helped. You can start by reaching out to your friends and neighbors, and once you have the strength of community you can organize people into action. Collect clothing or other goods to send to Haiti instead of money. Use your creative energy to imagine ways to help that middlemen will not be able to diminish. Or join with others who have already begun.
We need to move away from the crumbling paradigm of governments and corporations and towards reliance on the people around us. It all starts with each of us, learning to be giving. All the accumulation of material goods and wealth is just building walls around us. It is freeing to take all the things you don’t use and give them away. To give whenever you can, as much as you can. Wether it be time or service, art or love, food or hugs. Build your community, support your neighbors. When the empires fall we will need our communities in order to survive.
The next time you step in dukkha, realize that it is the same dukkha we are all stepping in. Honor your heart and spend a moment with your own sadness. Then breathe in the air that we all share, the air that has been cycled through the lungs of all of the animals and the plants and the oceans. Take a vow to find a way to make the world a better place, to reduce the suffering around you. You are a stone cast into the pond of being, and your actions will ripple out into the world around you. As we build empathy and compassion our own sorrows will diminish, because our lives will serve a greater purpose. It is the true path to liberation.
Derek Goodwin is a vegan photographer who splits his time between Northampton, MA and New Orleans, LA. Derek specializes in documentary style photography, weddings, portraits, animals, events and music. He is well known for his photographs of rescued farm animals living in sanctuaries. He also creates visionary fine art photographs of night time cityscapes and fire dancers.
