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.