Rounding the May Pole

Up in Hattiesburg, just a couple hours away, Marsha receives her doctorate this afternoon and I am having an interesting reaction to that fact. A surprising reaction, as it was completely unexpected.

I find myself lonely and a little bit lost, as if this conclusion to part of her journey marks yet another ending of our journey. The endings keep coming over and over again… as if there's no way to be done, or to move on, or to go somewhere else. Like the labyrinth, just as it seems that I am moving closer in (or further out), the whole thing spins around and I am facing back where I started. I'm in a different place, but it's not really a different place at all.

Same as it ever was…

This time… right now… at least for the moment… it feels like a strange, and difficult, place. I feel simultaneously freed and bereft. It doesn't help that work in New Orleans is drying up far faster than the streets after rain. Getting people to move on ANYTHING in New Orleans right now makes the idea of blood from a stone seem easy as pie, and even projects that have been finished for months are stalled on the doorstep of completion as if those with the authority to finalize the project are frozen in fear, or confusion, or simply inertia. Consequently my available finances have shrunk and new business prospects that were really pretty good back in the early days of rebuilding after Katrina are looking like they're going to be stalled until sometime after hurricane season.

Momentum has slowed to a crawl… getting things moving again feels like a job of Sisyphean proportion, and I'm not enjoying the idea of getting flattened by the stone.

What to do in the midst of all this is about as confusing as it's ever been in my life, and that's saying A LOT!