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)

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.