misplaced mama

Photo by the beautiful Jeanette

I have been asked so many times: “why Sula?” This is a good question. I like to answer it. I like it much better then having to respond to this: “Zoola? Zoola? Where did you get that name from?”

Sula is a word for Peace in an untraceable North African dialect. In Iceland, it is the word for The Sun. Supposedly, though I can’t find proof anywhere, in an old Germanic tongue, Sula means, little bear by water. Sula is a novel by the inimitable goddess of bound words, Toni Morrison. Sula is also the name of a lioness at the African Wildlife Park somewhere outside the city of Phoenix. A man named Astarius told me that particular fact at an Anthony B show my husband and I recently went to. It was the first time I had ever left Sula at night and for more than 2 hours. Astarius, dressed in layers of African garb and wearing 20 pounds of wire-wrapped amethyst came up to me and I think started to sort of hit on me. I can not say for sure though. I have a hard time picking up those kinds of vibes these days— my man radar is down, plus I usually I have a couple kids in tow and my social life is the grocery store and library, places filled with other mamas. I usually smell like breast-milk poo and BO so most men stay far, far away. Astarius starts throwing me some astrological type lines and I cut to the chase with him: I have 2 kids and I am hear to do the winey-winey dance with my husband. I do tell him about little Sula and how I left her with my brother and his wife andthat I was really nervous to be away from her. He asks me to come into a quiet corner with him. Because Bill was 10 feet away listening and by the smile on his face, obviously amused by our interaction, I followed Astarius. In our little quiet corner he cuped his large dark hands and puts them over both of mine. Then he told me to visual Sula’s heart in the middle of our hands. And to send her heart love. Then he started making the most amazing sounds with his throat.nose.mouth area. It was basically the exact sound of a Didgeredoo. Vibrating. Electrifying. Elevating. Tingly. I imagined Sula being snuggled and loved in the long arms her unncle or being rocked and sung to by her aunt. I imagined her taking the bottle of pumped breast milk and being comforted by the sound of her big sister playing near-by. He finished his sounding (what he called Reiki-Om) and I felt better. I knew Sula was just fine and in good hands.

She isn’t named Sula because it means peace, or the sun or a bear. Or after a lioness at a wildlife park. Although those things are all pretty nice.

We picked the name Sula out for our unborn daughter back in 2000 when I wasn’t even close to being pregnant. We visited Missoula, Montana a bunch of times that year—Bill had been booked for a handful of shows. Missoula is a hippy-hip little university city in the middle of breathtaking Montana, the place where Purple Mountain Majesty is sung about. Good music would pass through Missoula and anytime a mash-up-the-dance-reggae dj was needed, promoters invited Bill up for some playtime. Bill and I would hop in the pick-up and treck up to Missoula from Sun Valley, ID, the place were we took a year long sabbatical from L.A. (aka, Sanity Leave). Some very generous Trustafarians (this is what we called jobless white kids with very long dread-locks and what seemed like an unlimited supply of cash) booked us in cheap yet cozy hotels, made sure we had food and fine quality herb and in return Bill spun music with some pretty fantastic musicians. It was, to say the least, a very fun time in our lives. We loved playing reggae in the mountains of the old west. We loved Missoula.

We loved it so much that one particularly late evening when the chalice had been passed around quite a few times we decided that if we had a girl we would call her Soula, short for Missoula.

Fast-forward 2 years. Bill begins a serious Aikido practice. In Aikido cosmology SU is a seed syllable. At the heart of a mandala that Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikido, often used to explain what Aikido was, is a circle, and in its center a dot superimposed by the symbol SU, the seed-sound of the universe. SU is the kototama of creation– the pure vibration out of which all things emanate. From this incomprehensibly dense point or sound, steam, smoke, and mist pour forth in a nebulous sphere , giving birth to our phenomenal world. SU is the original sound, the beginning, the word. Just like the Aum (om) in Sanskrit. Bill was now sure he would have a daughter named Sula (changed from the original Soula version. Though I kind of liked the added o…a little soul in the su).

Fast-forward another year. When a small pink girl who resembled a 5-petaled rose came out from me in our apartment in L.A. she was most definitely not a Sula. She was a Mia. Mia Rose.

When I got pregnant again we were thinking she was actually a he and therefore he would be a Sebastian.

But Sula came down and out and then up, up out of the water and into our arms. She was a Sula. She was utterly and unmistakably a Sula Pearl.

And when times get tough, like crying fits late at night, or unexplainably in the late afternoons screams, we often sing the sound of SU SU SU to her and she very quickly stops the tears, get still and looks at us as if she remembers that this is exactly how it is all suppose to be.