Horoscope

Capybara

       My son once told me that capybara, the world’s largest rodent, eat circles in the grass during the full moon. He told me this unequivocally, his eyes shining, his smile radiant, inflated with the confidence only a 10-year-old can have. And I believed him with the innocence of an Amish child watching bears arabesque at the circus.

        With all our technology, I contacted a capybara expert that very day. The scientist swiftly responded and said that, though this South American animal has other remarkable abilities, including sleeping underwater, they were not believed to eat circles in the grass during a full moon.
       I was disappointed. I think the animal biologist was, too. But sometimes you have to lie to evoke deep beauty. Who doesn’t ache to discover worlds, brimming with animals that create art by eating reflections of the moon in the grass?
       You do, Taurus. And this is your year, baby.
       You writhe toward the call of creative freedom. But something is in your way. You have been burning to lighten your load, longing to donate your stuff that has seemed so vital. Yet, you’ve learned lately that this meaning it is only slightly so.
       Let’s not mince words: It is time to leave your home, so bloated with memories it is empty of the here and now. Even the lies of the past that once so aggravated you have been enshrined in sentimentalism. You’ve been held captive by the hollow hope that the past will somehow appear differently, that your adorable young children will come back to you, miraculously unscratched. But once you walk, you never crawl again. That is the law of nature. For them, and for you.
       Don’t let the snow and the shovels fool you. It has been a long, dark winter. But there is a purpose: to dream of a deep blue daisy or a capybara eating circles to reflect the full moon; to remember how soul food tasted in another life. As you’ve hunkered down, stuck in the past, almost accidentally you’ve been mining your imagination. You have sometimes stealthily, sometimes dramatically, moved mountains already. You are done digging out.
       Hear the cock crow! Yank the zipper down! The flowers are reaching for the sun, generously turning their heads toward that lustrous light of spring. So drink your kombucha from a Styrofoam cup. You are smartly on the move.
       What matters most is who you are: inimitably you. Your sense of home is beneath your skin. The Samarai Mizuta Masahide wrote in the 1600s: “Since my house burned down, I now own a better view of the rising moon.”
       Let the magic begin. Dance circles beneath the full moon, languidly or spastically. With pencil in hand and bells on your feet, you can go anywhere. Go gregariously, but lightly, too. Keep your eyes wide open like an Amish child at the circus. And don’t be afraid to lie. Tell beautiful lies. 

(This is the result of a writing exercise offered up in a writing salon. The words in bold were all the words we had to include, based on a list we compiled as a group: http://elephantrockretreats.com)

As My Father Lay Dying

Before my father died August 13th, 2012, my biggest fear was that I would not be there to say good-bye. This fear was not realized, but it turns out that saying good-bye is not at all what I thought it would be. It is not a single act, but an approximation, an approach that I will probably continue making until the day that I die.

My father lay in the shape of a crescent, his skeleton distinct, at once ancient and fetal. We were never a touchy family, but as he lay there, that's all I could do: touch him. I smoothed his forehead with my palm, my hands found the knots in the back of his shoulders and he moaned with pleasure while I rubbed the tight muscles. A few days before he died, his eyes flew open when I came in the room. He smiled with one side of his face. He was lucid and clearly happy to see me one last time.

"Hi, Dad," I said. I didn't know what else to say.

"Hello, daughter," he said, which drew tears to my eyes so fast I had to turn and rub them away. To be called "daughter" under such circumstances is an honor, indeed. His only. Forever I will be that: his daughter. 

I'd gone to California with a clear purpose: to help ease his way into death and to support my mother. I had no preparation for this, except being human. I'd never been to a funeral. I'd never been at the bedside of a dying person. And this was my dad. But God was there, too, as I believe he always is when we're being most human, most present.

This is what death does: reduces us to our essences.

Most of the time, my father made no sense as he lay in rigid postures that would have been agonizing to a healthy person. When he tried to speak, his words were jumbled. Mostly he lay breathing heavily, staring at us. My mother chatted to him about her day and awkwardly tried to rub him, too. But as the time grew nearer to death, she let the small talk drop and told him how much she loved him. He struggled to sit up and his eyes grew wide one last time. He emphatically mouthed something incomprehensible.

"What?" my mother said. "I can't understand you."
He tried again. She looked at me.
"Listen with your heart, mom," I said. "He's saying he loves you. He loves you."

My mother nodded. Tears hung at the edges of her eyes and my father relaxed back down into the bed. As my father wasted down to his primal essence, my mother's artifice fell away, too. She stopped trying to be strong. She let herself be led. She was fully in the room as I have not seen her since I was 10 years old.

Then, before I became a teenager, my mother loved me without threat. We'd sit with our legs bent across the floor heater in our Berkeley, Calif. house, our t-shirts billowing with heat as we held them open over the grill, trying not to burn the backsides of our knees. Little did I know that as I said good bye to my dad -- the man who set the highest standard for what men should be -- I would also say hello to my mother, genuine and loving as I only vaguely remembered her being before I became a teenager.

This is why we're here: to help each other die and in that I learned to love my mother, unconditionally and to understand more deeply what it means to live. My mother used to embarrass me, which now makes me ashamed to admit. How childhood does cling. But here we were, all of us reduced by grief. And my mother is no longer a source of shame, but of compassion and even admiration. Her smile looks different; bigger, revealing her big teeth, which I never noticed until now. All the artifice fell away. And it has stayed away.

As we said good-bye to my father, there was a new connection between the rest of us -- my brother too.

My mother comes to visit for the holidays. She sits and reads by the fire. She is content, happy to be in our presence. She says things to me that I have not heard since I was 10.

"It's been such a nice visit," she says.
"It has," I say. "And I haven't been a bitch." I laugh at this, but it's true. I have been and now I am not.
"No," she says. "You are sweet."
To become sweet. This is my journey now. 

From Seeds to Forest

In January, 2012, I embarked on the re-dreaming of a novel I started almost 12 years ago. With the guidance of a writing coach, Rosanne Bane, and the Robert Olen Butler's book, From Where You Dream, I began to envision my book using colored index cards, each one with a sensory description of a scene. After several weeks, the stack grew to 120 or so. Like a magnificent bud, it became an invitation to go further. 

My office was once my daughter's nursery. This is the room where small creatures became full-sized humans with lives of their own; a room for babies and dreams that grow up. I cleared off the desk where her little bed once was and spent several more weeks arranging the cards in the order they would appear in the novel.

I had avoided this little room for the past few years, stepping into it only to bring something that I need to file. I had all but abandoned my novel here. It sat in filing boxes and stacks, collecting dust. It would haunt me, sitting there in a box in the corner of my office. I became adept at ignoring its little persistent sounds. I tried to drown out its call with my excuse.

But its cry of abandonment soon reached me in other parts of the house, in other moments of my day, when I was teaching or reading. My avoidance of writing fiction began to appear in the form of jealousy and irritability. Restlessness took hold of me. Even with a full life, I found myself wondering what was missing and misplacing that at times on my marriage, or focused on how Metro magazine had dropped my popular Personal Gaines column. I secretly hoped that by just sitting there, someone would discover me. I would silently disparage other writers who’d apparently been doing the work and had a product to show for it.

But this January, the year I turned 50, a louder, deeper voice emerged: I am not done with that book. My life won’t be complete if I abandon it now. But how? I no longer knew what I had in that box. I read it and was pleased to find that some of it was good. But I had no idea really how to reenter the world of my novel. When Rosanne told me I could do it with a commitment of 15 minutes a day, my thoughts ran like this: “I can do that!” Then, “No way can I actually write a novel that way.” She assured me I could and I would.

I implemented Butler's idea of ‘dream storming’ on index cards, letting my mind fly from one character to the next, from one place to another, feeling, hearing, seeing through each character, paying no mind to chronology or even logic. Then I did it. I wasn’t always sure, but this was new territory.

Since I’d been working on this book in some form for many years, some of my scenes were already well imagined, deeply grooved in my mind. I put those on the cards, too, trying to give equal weight to well-travelled places and new ones that came up in my dreamstorming. I resisted the urge to place them in order. I simply wrote six to eight words on a card, put it under the deck and went to the next one. I stayed high above the details, swooping down for a quick, sensual peek, then back up to survey the lay of my novel land. It was pure freedom to fly anywhere I wanted, visiting this character, then that one. I stayed sometimes for a cup of tea with one, just long enough to see how the air felt in that hospital room or abandoned church or cool adobe hut.

When it came time to imagine one of the most difficult scenes – the protagonist hits a dog with his mistress’s car, then shoots it to relieve the animal’s suffering – I did not have to stay too long. I swooped down to the side of the road, then back up to fly. This was the scene that had always ended my writing sprees. But in this process of index cards, I was able to envision the next scene and the next. I was able to feel the character’s healing and relief as he buried the dog with the help of man just returning to his reservation.

I dreamed scenes until I thought there were no more. Then I began the process of laying them out in order – not necessarily chronologically, but with some emotional logic. I placed a few down then gathered them up. I added, subtracted, changed the order. I learned that structure is fluid, just like life. New scenes have appeared. Others have died. It is a living thing, this book.

 After several days, cards covered my table that stood exactly as my daughter’s little bed once had. There in that bed, she once told me that the sky people took her away at night. “But they always put me back,” she said when she saw my worried face. My daughter is grown now, living in Chicago. Here I am in her little dreaming room, a little afraid that I will fly away into my book and not return. But each time I do, more grounded than before, knowing that my book is taking real shape, something to hold and one day to open. For the first time since beginning my book so long ago, I am able to see the end of my book. Soon the soil will be ready. Each card will blossom into its own bloom to make a garden. 

I am now about half-way through my deck, more than 50,000 words have become a forest and I am the explorer. Each day, I drop down into the territory of my novel, following this character, then that one. There is no turning back.

Closet Cleaning

Every few weeks, my closet blows up. The many pairs of folded yoga pants spill out of their baskets, onto the floor around my dresser, crucial layers get buried and I begin to dig frantically for the outfit I thought of in the shower. I finally sit down, refold and launder the chaos only to begin again. The hanging clothes remain mostly untouched. I finger them listlessly from time to time, when I'm meeting a friend for wine and sigh that I have nothing to wear.

I had been vaguely aware that I need to address my closet, face what I have, get rid of what I no longer need and fill in the gaps of what is missing. In short, I needed to take inventory, but the project kept getting pushed to the bottom of my to-do list.

One afternoon, I was admiring my girlfriend's easy, unique sense of style. As I asked where each item was from, she answered with Target or Old Navy. But her gorgeous understated boots and Italian leather bag were from Grethen House. She believes in investing in shoes, bags and the one-of-a-kind pieces you just can't get at Target, so she saves and waits for sales.

"It would be so great if you could look in my closet and help me figure out what I have," I said, half to myself. "I don't really know what I have anymore." The words were barely out of my mouth when her face lit up.

"I'd love to to do that," she exclaimed. "I can come over and we can look at what you have." It sounded so simple -- even fun -- and before I knew what I'd gotten myself into, we set a date for wine and closet cleaning.

I was touched. This is what girlfriends in sitcoms do for each other. Then I was scared.

Closets are private -- both figuratively and literally. They are for skeletons, for coming out of or staying in. They are for hiding. They are dark. There might be monsters. But mostly in my case, they are for forgetting, accumulating periods of my life that subtly weigh me down as they remain unexamined. My past hangs on hangers, obscure designer jackets and dresses (also from Grethen House) that I bought toward the end of my first marriage when I was fiercely lonely, anxious and comparatively rich. I never seemed to have enough, always needed one more piece to make it complete. My current life resides in baskets on the closet floor in the form of yoga pants, funky skirts and tops -- the clothing for teaching Gyrotonic and my everyday life of movement.

I gave my friend numerous chances to bow out, but she expressed unwavering enthusiasm to help me with my closet. The appointed Friday night arrived. She showed up exactly on time wearing a cute hat over her short bright blonde hair. We ate pasta and drank a glass of wine, until it was time to climb the stairs to my bedroom. She sat in a comfy chair that faces my dark closet. I opened the doors. Now she'd see my dumb choices, my bouts of ugly style and utter waste.

But that's not what happened. Piece by piece, she oohed and ahhed. Sometimes she tilted her head and said, "You could wear a simple white tank with that from Target." Or, "That would be great with a little black turtleneck." Occasionally, she said, "hmmm...No." But it was never as painful as I'd imagined. I almost always agreed that the piece didn't work on me or I just simply would never wear it again.

Most of the pieces I had bought from Grethen House were still amazing. My friend helped me remember that I can wear them every day. I don't have to wait for a special occasion. She reminded me how to dress things down, make them easy, make them me. Rather than feeling wasteful or embarrassed to see the money I once had, I was grateful that I was once able to do that. Even in my loneliness and compulsive buying phase, I still had a good eye.

We made a pile for consignment, a pile to give away. I tried things on, a little self conscious. But she said things like, "Oh my God, Susan, you have such an eye for detail. I'm going to have to borrow some of this some time!" She later referred to me as her "little fashionista."

At the end of the night, my floor was covered in things I'd be getting rid of. What remained had more space around it, enabling me to see my wardrobe in a whole new light. I had opened up my closet and instead of feeling judged, I felt absolutely loved. Friendship had taken on a whole new level. Now, I only need a white tank and a black turtleneck to make everything work.

Creative Recovery In Progress

I am taking a creative recovery retreat. Or, more accurately, I am retreating into the creative. I'm not going out of town or cancelling my clients. I am simply and radically making space every day to finish my novel. Or start it. Again. I am committing to show up at the door of what Butler calls my dream space. I figure if I keep coming to the door and knocking on it, it will open again. There may be a special knock, but I haven't found that yet. I'm just going to the secret cave entrance every day, because you can never get inside if you aren't even at the right door.

For me the creative is one and the same as the spiritual. It is not born of logic and rational thinking. I will not get far thinking of fame and fortune, or even of writing a good book. I am recommitting to the process of creating a work of fiction. This commitment is much like one to mediation and prayer; it is the act, the process, the certain alignment of my heart to the universe that makes the commitment not only worthwhile, but essential.

I am taking things apart to create something new. I am taking apart my assumptions about what makes me a writer (an audience), so I can rediscover the reason I loved writing when I was in third grade: to tell stories, to make some order of sensual and emotional chaos; because I believe our lives have a shape and purpose in the smallest, daily ways; because I love being alive and I have always been compelled to capture the myriad reasons for that love.

This is something that takes courage, commitment and faith. Each day, as I show up to the page, I am increasingly convinced that this process is essential to becoming my best self. The struggle to write fiction brings me face to face with deepest enemies (self doubt, laziness, fear, distractions) and helps me not only face them but come to love them, too. Because without these saboteurs I would not know how important faith is. The alternative is not acceptable: saying, 'I once wanted to write a book' or 'Maybe I could have written a book' is to not have lived life to its fullest. The only failure would be not to try. So let it begin. Let it continue.

If you don't see me here, it's because I've gained admittance to the most important, mysterious place I know: my own imagination. Wish me luck.

Unexpected Gifts

Sometimes it takes an act of aggression to discover random kindness.

Happy holidays! After circling around a couple of times in a small lot, I waited as someone got in her car and prepared to back out. The woman in the car behind me began honking her horn and wildly gesticulating from behind her steering wheel. I took some deep breaths, but the honking continued. Maybe she didn't understand that we were in a parking lot and I was waiting for someone to pull out. I got out of my car and as I approached hers, she swung her door open, screaming, "Move your car!"

"I am waiting for this parking place," I said. I got back in my car and pulled into the spot that had indeed opened up. She whipped her car around to the other side, got out and continued yelling: "You just couldn't walk five feet!" I explained again that there was no other spot at that moment. She continued yelling, her blue eyes blazing.

"Wow," I said. "Happy holidays." Okay, I was slightly sarcastic at his point, but still not yelling. "Let's calm down." My heart was pounding fast and hard.

"Oh, calm down, calm down!" She shrieked, mimicking my gesture of surrender. "You know you approached my car, I can report you for assault." I smiled -- actually, I might have laughed -- and I walked away into the coffee shop. As I tried to calm my flailing heart, a young man stood next to me and spoke. He had the nicest face I've seen in a long time.

"Wow," he said, "that was crazy. It was so obvious you were waiting for a place."

As I told him that she said she was going to call the police to press charges for assault, she walked into the coffee shop and continued her rant.

"I have your license plate number, I can report you for assault."

"No," my new friend said. "That was not assault. I was a witness."

I thanked him, bought him his coffee and got his information, just in case I did need a witness. As he wrote his name and number, I told him that a few years ago, I could have been that woman and how grateful I was that I was no longer allowed stress to destroy me. He nodded and handed me his information.

"Thanks, Alex," I said. Then I registered the last name. "Wait," I said, "you know my son!" I told him his name. "I'm his mom."

"Oh my god," he said, "I've heard so much about you! I've heard he's doing great."

"He is," I said, "he is."

We kept shaking hands and grinning, as though we'd each found our long-lost friend.

"Gimme a hug," Alex said.

There we stood, embracing in Starbucks. My heart calmed. Unbridled aggression and a hug, both with strangers, in the span of five minutes. There he was, a witness in more ways than one. In few words, we acknowledged the healing in my son, too.

Thank you stressed out woman, two weeks before Christmas, for reminding me what really matters: There is real random kindness in the world, healing is a force more powerful than sickness. Whatever  whatever my worries as I face a lean bank account on the edge of the holidays, they are nothing compared to my depth of gratitude for the goodness that is afoot.

Fast of Words

I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
--Henry David Thoreau

In my family, I am the talker, the storyteller. I have always been compelled to entertain with my gift of gab. With my mobile face and energetic gestures, I can be a one-woman show. It gets downright exhausting sometimes. So on a recent spiritual retreat, I felt an instant sense of relief when the leader announced that we would be in silence.

Silence, for me has often been something inflicted, a punishment or banishment, a withdrawal of emotional warmth: "the silent treatment." But this was not a punishment. Instead, it would be 'fasting from words,' a phrase coined by Henri Nouwen in The Way of the Heart, something cleansing, purifying. Much to my surprise, I welcomed silence like water on a desert hike. When I told my husband about my joy meeting silence, he was also surprised. A quiet man in the best of mood, he is in a constant fast from words, except in the morning, when I do not want to talk. And sometimes I suffer in his silence, misreading it as a withdrawal of love, as I did when my mother sent me to room to think about what I'd done wrong.

I grew up in a mostly quiet house. The brown shag carpet, earth-toned upholstery and abstract paintings cast a cool shadow over everything as my mother wrestled with her private demons, sometimes talking to herself aloud in the shower or in her bedroom. Sometimes my parents listened to music, but it was sad music to my young ears, like Joan Baez, singing about the war in Vietnam. Anti-war politics was the soundtrack in our house. Our dinner conversations usually began with my father ranting about Berkeley-in-the-60s politics, as he fielded urgent phone calls about who needed bailing out of jail for refusing to be drafted, who had gone underground, who the FBI was watching, that suspicious van on our street that neighbors suspected was full of wire tapping equipment, or when the Black Panthers would be coming to our house to hold a meeting. These were not times to protect children from potentially scary stories. We were treated as little adults.

Then silence would descend over the table. That's when I would grow animated. Talking was a way of bridging our private loneliness, sometimes frantically trying to lift the energy gathered around our egg-shaped white laminate table. When I wasn't talking, I was writing. I spent much time filling journals, mostly trying to figure out what made my mother tick, what ailed her and how I might fill the hole of her own deficient childhood.

I loved to talk. I knew how to make my father laugh, or even cry. One time, after my first child was born, I told my father a story that made him faint. It was right after my son was born and the delivery was dramatic, complete with an emergency c-section and general anesthetic. It wasn't a bloody story, but apparently I conveyed all the loss of control and fear that experienced. With my little 10-day-old baby asleep at my side, my parents listened intently. My father grew annoyed, said he felt sick, told me to stop. I did. We stood to leave and he fell over like a tree onto the floor. Now that's a powerful story, he later told me.

While my chattiness has always been a stand against silence, a incessant attempt to heal the darkness that threatened to envelop my home, here in the woods, in the cozy lodge, silence was a gift, not a punishment. We ate in silence and far from awkward, it was musical; the clink of the silverware on the plates, the whisper of chairs sliding out as we served ourselves more food. My mouth was full of taste and scent. In the woods, during meditative walks, golden light fell through the trees and sound emanated from everything. Even light has a sound. I could hear the glimmering of the spiderwebs in the sunlight. I joke with my kids that I can hear so much better when I put my glasses on, but here in silence, it was true: Silence reveals.

Silence is space. The first time I experienced this space, I was in high school -- arguably the most chatty time in life -- on a 24-day survival course in the Sierra Nevada wilderness. We hiked over 200 miles, carrying heavy packs, twice for 24 hours straight, rock climbed and struggled to cooperate with people, some of whom we never liked in school and even less out there in the wilderness. In the middle of all that was solo. It was meant to be a vision quest, which I was cynical about for years until I realized solo was the most life-changing three days of my young life. During this fast from words, human contact and food, I saw no one and heard no human voice -- not even my own until the second day.

I had sworn I would not speak aloud as that would surely mean I'd lost my mind. But when I found myself anxious that it might rain and my mind raced ahead to hypothermia, I made up a little Winnie-the-Pooh-like poem: It's nice to know that if it rains, I'll be okay. I repeated this, while I rocked back and forth on a granite slab that overlooked a deep ravine. There above the tree line, I could hear the wind rushing through the trees below. As my voice calmed me, three deer ascended high plateau. They stood there, not 30 feet from me, a buck, a doe and a fawn. I froze. They froze. But I soon realized that they had come when I was rocking and speaking, as though I'd called them. I resumed my rocking and quietly mouthed my simple poem. They began grazing around me. Every few minutes, the doe and I locked eyes.

This story floated back to me during my silent retreat, reminding me as the deer once did that I am never alone, no matter how solitary. Though I will always be a social being, thriving on stories and the company of others, I know that there is nothing more restorative than silence. It is only in silence that we can really hear, see and feel -- which is perhaps also the reason we avoid it. You never know what will come up. But I fear it less and crave it more. After all, something wild, something magical might come up.

At the end of my weekend retreat, I returned home, excited to tell my husband all my discoveries about silence. I even find a way to turn silence into a story. But something else happened, too. At least in the immediate afterglow of my silent retreat, I did not feel so much pressure to speak. I became a better listener. I was able to hear those I love and in doing that, see them as they are. Not as I want them to be or remember them being, but as they are right now. That is the first act of love.