Dear Friends,
Happy Father’s Day to all my wonderful father friends everywhere! This is an auspicious weekend—we are now officially into the summer season, and past the second of three eclipses in the current cycle. We also just began a new moon cycle, a time of new beginnings.
I’m personally in a healing phase, with a week to go in the “take it easy” period after receiving treatment for my knee injury. The knee is healing, and I am so looking forward to being able to move around normally. I suspect it is still going to be some time before I can sit cross-legged, or take a long hike, but I’m optimistic that both of those things will eventually be possible again. I’m grateful to everyone who has contacted me with healing wishes.
I woke up this morning thinking about my own father. Curiously, I didn’t realize at that point that today was Father’s Day. I didn’t have much of a relationship with him while he was alive, which is sad. But several memories arose as I was waking up. One was from the days when I lived and worked at the Hanuman Tape Library. I was in my 20s and had recently moved to Santa Cruz from Taos, and I was talking to my father on the phone. He asked me, “So what’s next?” I said maybe I would try to go to India. Then he absolutely blew my mind by saying, “I used to live in India.”
WHAT??!! My mind raced frantically through all the files in my memory banks to find any basis at all for this statement. But of course there was nothing. My father had been too young to be in World War II, and had never been out of the U.S. There was pretty much zero chance he had lived in India in this lifetime. So…I questioned him cautiously. He replied that he didn’t know how or when, but he knew for certain he had lived in India! I hung up the phone dumbfounded by the revelation he had made, and elated at the opening I now felt was possible between us.
He was unfortunately narrow-minded and quite bigoted—two reasons why we didn’t have much of a relationship. I knew better than to push him for more details at the time, because it was clearly uncomfortable territory for him. He had made a giant leap in trusting me with this very sensitive disclosure, and I am 99.99% sure he never shared it with anyone else. But it gave me hope for a way to connect with my father, and I looked forward to my next visit with him.
It was not meant to be. When I found a moment alone with my father during our next visit, I guardedly brought up our phone conversation and asked him to tell me more. He became agitated and swept the whole subject aside. It was never mentioned again. And the deeper connection I had hoped for never happened, either.
And yet in a way, in that one moment, it did. He gave me a glimpse into the inner sanctum of a very secret part of his psyche, one that contained this prickly subconscious memory that I imagine was very disconcerting to him. I’m sure it was painful for him to admit, even to himself. So, among the many memories I have of my father that emphasize the lack of connection between us, there is this one precious gem that he inadvertently gave me. That was the realization I had upon waking this morning. And it’s Father’s Day. I feel very connected to him!