Find Yourself on Mardi Gras Day

At this point I don’t know what I love more, experiencing Mardi Gras or reflecting on it after, in part because I don’t even know what the spirit of Mardi Gras is telling me until all the piece are laid bare and Ash Wednesday is here and the costumes are packed away for next year. You can set your intentions but the spirits have their own and sometimes its a matter of deciphering them rather then guiding them. I have little choice in the endless day-dream of colors and sounds of Carnival, and I have little choice in the endless stream of insights and wisdom, before, during and after. I am here as a student to surrender to the reality of life turning upside-down. Mardi Gras is magical, maddening, muse-ful, and masterful in her ability to contort, reshape, deny, delight, and repurpose my life for anywhere between 2 and 3 months, depending on Lent. 

To the rest of the world (the rest of the world that does not celebrate Mardi Gras, that is), it must seem like a perpetually silly and redundant thing to do. Maybe it even seems frivolous, flamboyant and a far-reach from anything "productive" or important. Or maybe y’all are just jealous, I don’t know. And to be fair, every year I enter this experience questioning its value and worth myself. But I think the questioning is really important because the answer will never be the same, and party will always looks different. Quit trying to chase the good time from last year and find what is before you.

This year the party-ritual took on an air of protest. That felt new for me to discover: that even despite the capitalistic frenzy of costuming supplies, even despite the parade of glue sticks, even despite the tossing of trash from float after float, I recognized an element of collective protest in the way we move together as a single organism, breaking with the tradition of a typical work week, breaking from isolation, breaking from routine. The organized chaos is a reconciliation of pain and joy and wind. 

And boy, did we need recognition of all those things this year. New Orleans started this 2025 year literally with a bang, then snow, then a Super Bowl which promised riches and did not deliver, and then finally into the thick of Carnival season to help wash (or blow) the bad taste all away (those arguable not for everyone). The very elements this year brought this promise of renewal: a wind so fierce you couldn’t help let go of all your sins, or maybe of some of your inhibitions. Or maybe it was the ghosts, riding in on the wind, asking us to remember. Or maybe I should speak for myself. 

For me, shame was the theme this year. Perhaps a strange word to hold on to and a strange word to set free in this time but it came on naturally and remained an intertwined member of my rotating friend cast this Carnival year. Shame, as in, why has this been controlling your life for so long?? Shame, as in, you can choose a different cognitive path. Shame, as in, you are not wrong for sucking sometimes and making mistakes and just being alive. It was so strangely liberating to be with shame this year because it was invisible in my psyche for so long yet has played such a huge role in my ability to cope and experience life. Goodness, good riddance. 

Also shame is interesting to observe because what is normally “shameful” in society gets a front row seat during Mardi Gras. It’s somehow shameful to be ourselves, to “do what ya wanna,” to eat too much (King) cake, to pee between parked cars. It’s “normally” shameful to take off Thursday-Tuesday and party in the streets, or forget to pay your rent on time, or stay up late too many nights in a row, smoke pot when your normally don’t. During Carnival, however, it is not only not shameful, it is expected, celebrated and encouraged. Switch it up, put life on it's head. It's like a pressure release valve on expectations, obligations and norms. Without this valve, well, I can’t image at this point how I’d cope with the devastation of politics or inflation or heating oceans. Mardi Gras is like a city-wide vice that collectively helps us deal with the rest of our lives. 

It is also a coming together. This city bonds through collective joy because come hurricane season we are bonding through collective fear, heat, and low-income. There is something endlessly special about everyone being out on the streets together, celebrating and playing. I mean everyone. It’s something New Orleans does best, in my opinion. Even on a random night in November you can go to Saturn Bar to see Cumbia and the crowd is more diverse then just about anywhere you’ve ever been: you’ve got the shaved-headed punks and the dancing mom and dads, you got the old folks, the barely legals, the basics, the queers, the blacks, the whites, the latinx, the freaking everyones. No one bats an eye. Mardi Gras is the same times a thousand. How powerful that is! How special it is to erase pre-tense and posturing. Not that is doesn’t exist—I admit I still cringe at the old white men trying to be funny with their self-deprecating antics, but I try to contain my judgement and laugh when necessary. 

What is really happening is that we are seeing the inside of everyone when they put on masks. What is normally contained has exploded into glitter and creativity and costuming. Our creative selves are our true selves, our true expressions of the divine. It is like God playing with themself (pun intended). We get to see our spirits playing in the streets. This year I got to see how much I love mine. Can you image that! My former self is crying with the joy of making it through all those formidable moments in life. Phew. 

Speakings of moments, that was a huge take away this year, as well. Moments. I used to think the point of life was to make things permanent, and I still do want that, in some ways. I want it to be endlessly summer, joyful and secure. I still want the promise of no pain, all the stability, and a future on lockdown. But I’m just out of luck if I try to live that way. Life is however, an endless stream of moments strung together and so much of it is actually quite invisible. We laugh and tell jokes, make faces, gestures, talk and stare. Even as we wear costumes and change the scenery so much of life is how we interpret it and the connections underneath it. It’s all just moments. Like that time my friend and I watched this nudibranch-eyeball thing take off their costume to pee and then spent 5 minutes wiggled back into this strange contraption as we died of laughter 30 feet away. That moment no longer exists save our memory and the retelling of a story.

Or that time I ran into my friend made of trash. Or that time a clown was posted up on the side of the road in the thick of Mardi Gras checking their, I dunno, facebook or something. Or that time the Black cowboys marched. Or that time the bands paraded. Or that time we shared a shrimp po-boy and ended up with mushroom that were entirely too strong for the quantity taken. Or that time the wind blew Mississippi water in my eye, proceed by the wind blowing whisky in it, followed by someone’s dearly beloved.. Or the time I found a lighter, a dollar bill and a wallet in the same spot at a bar, one right after the other. Or the time I rode on some double-decker bike situation being pulled by many kind humans. Or the time me and another cried as we thought of the LA fires, right there in the middle of Carnival, all clad in yellow costume wear. Or that time I told someone they belonged there. Or the time I watched two lettuce-puppets converse. Or the time we helped pull someone out of the river. Or the time I danced to brass at the end of the night under the black sky with a friend-acquaintance painted in silver and rhinestones and it felt like we were creating light. 

All just invisible moments in time, alive only in my memory and the words I chose to honor them with. 

Somehow the contraction of Mardi Gras came many days late this year (you know, the contraction that follows expansion in life). As it gently sets upon me I ponder the futility of doing anything at all. A little dark, I know, but the contraction is existential in nature, nearly always. But I also ponder the futility of not doing anything. As in, how can we not sing and dance and create? The spirits were clear this year: step up your game, grrrl. In the strange invisibility of life sits the invisibility of the things we think, believe and honor. Revel in those things. Bow to those things. Give thanks for those things and don’t stop orienting your life to the sacred invisible because it is the invisible that gives meaning and purpose and courage to life. It is the fleeting laughter, the revolutionary ideas, it is the bond of community and connection of friends, it is the surrender to divinity and the flowers we offer them. Life is just the opposite of what we were commercially destine to believe in. Life happens between the cracks of convention and materialism. 

Right in the mix of the invisible is you. Find yourself but don’t try too hard because actually there is nothing really to search for. Quit seeking and just be. Seeking implies you are trying to get somewhere you are not but it’s like gold at the feet of a rainbow: always running and never receiving. Stop searching and you are found. You are found when you are here right now, observing your choices and reactions. You are found in the ways you care for yourself, and the ways you don't. You are found when you see the reflections of the world you create before you and around you. You are found when you pray then listen for a quiet answer. You are found when you allow invention to rule the day, rather then letting rules rule your play. Each moment is an opportunity to find yourself, be with yourself, know yourself. Each moment is an opportunity to wake up and know life and yourself on a more intimate level. Each moment is precious and rare and unique, but I do admit, for some odd reason, Mardi Gras does makes the opportunities to find yourself so much more fun..

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If you liked this writing and need more reflections on Mardi Gras, you can read mine from 2023 and 2024.