Allons Mardi Gras!
If we return to places we have visited previously, we cannot return to the emotions, the musings, or the exact moments of experience past and gone. And so it is, I return to Lafayette for Mardi Gras anew and the life that continues to happen here. The people. The music and dance. The memories. Some dance friends are here from afar. and some are local, but they not as much present in the community as before. Some I don’t get to see much at all. I want the return to other times, to touch the memories I hold dear. But this is not how life works. I touch what I can, and allow myself to settle in to what just is for now.
One friend, suffering from a handful of years of disease, enters hospice care in his apartment next to the Blue Moon Saloon, where he worked as sound manager for many years before moving over to do sound at Rock'n' Bowl. I rub the back of his hand, and he rallies to open his eyes for a brief moment. I am forever his Vermont hippie-chick friend. He passes within days during my stay.
Fitting in a way—to leave the culture two days before Fat Tuesday. I feel grief. I feel the community of all who have stopped by with final goodbyes.
I want to believe in the bigger picture of what we are doing here on the planet. I want to believe there is a reason, even if it is to experience all that this lush and sensual environment offers to us.
One friend, suffering from a handful of years of disease, enters hospice care in his apartment next to the Blue Moon Saloon, where he worked as sound manager for many years before moving over to do sound at Rock'n' Bowl. I rub the back of his hand, and he rallies to open his eyes for a brief moment. I am forever his Vermont hippie-chick friend. He passes within days during my stay.
Fitting in a way—to leave the culture two days before Fat Tuesday. I feel grief. I feel the community of all who have stopped by with final goodbyes.
I want to believe in the bigger picture of what we are doing here on the planet. I want to believe there is a reason, even if it is to experience all that this lush and sensual environment offers to us.
As Mardi Gras parades happen around Lafayette and the smaller outlying towns, beaded necklaces appear everywhere. Around people’s necks. In trees. Broken on streets. Hanging from fences and railings. Unless we go back in time to understand the traditions, we forget. Or we don’t care. But there is symbolism in these beads: green for faith, purple for justice, and gold for power. It goes way to the 1800’s. Now, people gather at the barricade fencing to beg for plastic trinkets and strings of beads, maybe understanding the relevance, maybe not. There are krewes (organizations that organize parades during Carnival season) trying to bring awareness to what these trinket parades have become, like Lafayette's Krewe de Canailles walking parade. Plastic is forbidden, nothing is "thrown". Parade walkers meet and greet the parade watchers, gently offering store coupons, packets of wildflower seeds, handmade crafts, food.
The bulk of parades, however, continue on with what is now current tradition:
I wonder about the symbolism and how it affects me this time in Lafayette. I think about my friend passing away within days of entering hospice care, his family holding vigil on the front porch, the same front porch where we all sit and talk and watch the passers by. I want to believe in the color green, having faith that my friend leaves this dimension for another adventure.
But there is more than that. What about the purple and and the justice—what is fair, moral, praiseworthy? What is deserved by our actions in this world and in our lives? Maybe I sub-consciously hang gold, purple, and green beads from my truck’s rear view mirror to remind myself to walk with integrity and fairness along my life journey. I want the constant reminder.
But there is more than that. What about the purple and and the justice—what is fair, moral, praiseworthy? What is deserved by our actions in this world and in our lives? Maybe I sub-consciously hang gold, purple, and green beads from my truck’s rear view mirror to remind myself to walk with integrity and fairness along my life journey. I want the constant reminder.
The gold holds me to the fire of action…the power to claim the best part of myself in this world. Faith is not enough. It is the actions that matter to me. Justice holds the balance for those actions. This is what I look for now in community, and in individual people: the four pillars of justice— fair actions, transparency, truth in voice, and impartiality. I hold life within the color purple, seek it out.
This time, this year, I hold my people close. We are not here forever. My new love joins me for part of the spectacle, his first time to this culture. We dance, we take in parades. He meets those who have become important to me here in Lafayette.
Celebration of life comes in all forms-- the dancing, parades, marching bands, floats with trinkets and beads flying into the crowds...
...as we all continue our search for... faith, power, justice.