All Will Be Revealed in Time...

Dedicated to my father...Dad, I'm tuning in

For many years I didn’t know how to interpret the experiences I was having communicating with a beyond-human world. As a child, I would dance in the sunroom of our house and have long conversations with my grandfather who, as a spirit, looked like a giant floating head. As an adult, however, my active imagination felt like a radio I couldn’t turn off. Sometimes it was as if gods were demanding my attention by capturing my being in a trance. 

Wanting to find a container for translation, I learned to read the ancient form of tarot, numbers, and images that hold primordial truths and transcend linear time. 

***

The night before my Dad died I met him in the street, walking across St. Nicholas Ave with my mother alongside, pushing his bundled grandson in a stroller. It was a brisk and sunny afternoon in March. We greeted each other on the sidewalk, the stressors of the week falling away, welcoming in Shabbat. I thought my Dad was the funniest person in the world. He could make me laugh even if the room was dark and all he did was wiggle his pinky toe. 

My Dad thought I was an idealist. When I was twenty-five I decided to move across the country after a daydream about designing a network of compost hubs. Five years later, I felt called to leave my steady job at the composting non-proft I had built, to return to the country where I was raised. 

My Dad and I both grew up at 5 Kirkwood Road. I grew up in Harare, Zimbabwe, a country at the cusp of transformation, with aspirations towards a future grown from liberation. Thirty years prior, my dad had grown up in Salisbury, Rhodesia, in the same house, on the same land, under colonial rule. While I experienced a utopic childhood with memories of smelling the earth beneath my bare feet, my father’s adult perspective of Zimbabwe saw a less hopeful reality of the country’s unfolding. 

I worked nights and weekends for seven months to save up for the trip and fundraised from friends and family to support the training of local herders in holistic cattle grazing, a way to restore soil organic matter to mitigate floods and drought. I spent the first two months of 2020 at a conservancy along the Dimbangombe River, an hour from the town of Victoria Falls, reflecting on the formative years of my childhood life.

As kids, we would run on the pathway along the Falls and get soaked by the spray. When I finally returned as an adult I paid the foreigner’s rate to enter. As I walked through the gates I could hear thunderous drumming of water pounding against the rocks. I walked deeper into the lush canopy and tears began to fall from my face, an entry fee for the sacred domain. 

My tarot cards had fallen out of their box and the single card I drew from the pile was the King of Cups. I laughed in amazement. What a joy to experience nature’s wonder. 

***

Cups represent emotions and the realm of consciousness. The king protects and provides for these domains.

***

The night before my dad died we got into a horrible argument. I couldn’t even tell you what it was about. I don’t remember. I was angry and had been for a long time, about the conditions of the world. Throughout my life, and especially in the year before he passed, my dad had listened to my frustrations and tolerated my outburst storming out of rooms and yelling until the lump in my throat had purged from me. Even as a child, I would run away, but I never went very far. I would sit at the bottom of our driveway in a patch of the garden underneath the trees listening to the crows and playing with mud between my fingers, calming my nervous system and bringing me back from whatever I was upset about.

When I returned to visit our childhood home, the one my Dad and I shared, the pool was drained, the grass dried out, and the two tall trees that stood at the foot of the driveway where the crows used to gossip, were cut down. 

I hadn’t been following the surmounting news about the pandemic, so when I checked in at the airport and wasn’t allowed to board my flight to the next destination, I was confused. The man holding my passport said, “You must go back to your country of origin.” I sat in a room with a hot water dispenser and an assortment of teas and secured a one-way flight that emptied my bank account. I boarded the last flight out of the country before lockdown. I squeezed into a middle seat wondering if the hype of this virus would be short-lived. Fourteen hours later I arrived at JFK. My face was red from spending the day before walking with cattle in the bush. I rolled my suitcase towards the parking lot and there was my Dad, standing by the car, waiting to give me a hug. 

***

The Tower, in tarot, is the card we brace ourselves for. It symbolizes the dismantling of the things we as humans construct - egos, cities, beliefs, and the beautiful worlds we create. It can mean chaos, upheaval, or revelation.

***

During the early months of the pandemic, I stayed on a pullout couch in the spare room of my parent’s apartment. There were mornings when the view of the river was hidden under a veil of mist. My nephew was born, and my Granny passed. I kept walking around repeating aloud “The ancestors are shuffling around.” 

***

My father had a strong sense of equanimity and demonstrated acts of service. One year for his birthday I was excited to give him a litter-picker-upper for his walks along the river. When he opened the gift he said “Oh good, another one.”

There is a home video from when I was a kid of my dad recording elephants around a watering hole, his voice quiet so as to not disturb the wildlife. In the background, I ask “Dad, can I film?” But he continues reciting the scene, ignoring the question that I repeat over and over again. At one point I step right in front of the camera, my face bursting, and with the sternest voice my child self can muster I repeat, “Dad, Can I Film?” He casually denies my request and continues on. We watched that video together when I was an adult and he shook his head contemplatively and said, “Why didn’t I let you film?”

After nine months of living with my parents, I had saved enough to rent a temporary sublet and begin my next transition. My dad drove me and my suitcases to a sixth-floor walk-up on Avenue D. When we arrived I saw that there was no bedding in the apartment. My dad drove home and back again just so that I would have a pillow to sleep on that night. 

The next morning I sat on the wooden floors and from the tarot deck pulled the Tower card. 

***

As a highly sensitive person, I notice and feel unspoken and suppressed dynamics that yearn for attention. Things my father’s stoicism could miss. The night before he died he sat in a chair across from me and told us that he had accidentally mixed up the dates of a doctor's appointment, it was scheduled for the following month. I sensed an unease in him as he shook his head, but he raised his bushy eyebrows and shifted the conversation to another topic. 

My frustrations had been simmering. I desperately wanted my dad to understand the dissonance between the world I imagine and the realities experienced. Yes, I am idealistic and see the world for what it could be, with healthy soils and unpolluted waters, and self-expression as wild and diverse as nature herself.

My frustrations began to boil. I had read half a dozen reports on climate collapse and listened to stories of land stewards who are pleading for us to notice the interconnectivity of all beings. I was infuriated seeing that complacency in one direction causes degradation in another.

Fuming, I yelled at my family about all of this. My dad, unsure of how to respond to my yearnings for this world to be more justly sane looked at me with compassion and said, “You’re Right.” 

But I stormed out. 

***

The next morning I called my mom to apologize and she said to me “Your dad just wants us all to have a lighter heart.”

With those words held close, I wrapped myself in a blanket and sat to meditate as the daytime light grew stronger. In a guided meditation I imagined myself standing on a long familiar road, the one that travels toward Victoria Falls, Mosi-oa-Tunya, towards The Smoke that Thunders. 

On this road, the past was behind me, and my future ahead. A long way forward stood a tree with a thick trunk and deep roots. My inner child appeared next to me, wearing colorful socks, a polka dot tutu, and stars on her shirt. With wide and curious eyes, she smiled up at me and took my hand. I felt assured, she had become a trusted companion. To my left, another guide appeared. She was someone I did not recognize, yet. She stood with her spine elongated, her head slightly bowed, and her feet firmly rooted to the ground. She stood tethered to source as if a medium between worlds, and her embodied equanimity intimidated me. 

With these two guides, I began to walk along the timeline of my life. The cavity of my chest widened, and my heart sank as if held in the hands of a beloved. Suddenly I was bathed with a blinding light that grew in intensity until it pounded over me as if I was standing under the weight of a waterfall. It was as if consciousness itself was pouring down curtains of luminous code. Tears gushed down my face. Sensory information was being received so fast that I had to say aloud “Please slow down” to which the message came, “All will be revealed in time.” 

When the space around me became clear again I wiped my eyes. I felt the stillness that comes after a breakthrough therapy session or psychedelic trip. It was the first warm day after a long winter, and I put on a jacket and walked into the sunshine to meet my family. 

Then I got the call. My brother-in-law called me and said that my father had a heart attack. At first, I didn't know how to process the words. I began to count my breaths out loud - one…two…three…four. I began preparing myself to see my dad looking weak in a hospital bed. I reminded myself to be strong by his side. I didn’t know he was already gone. 

I ran through the streets to meet my sister on the corner in front of the bodega on Henry and Pineapple. The world around me was a blur. I turned a corner but was stopped in my tracks by the sun as it absorbed my line of sight. Consecutive orbs of sun rays trailed in the sky like a staircase and I knew, in that moment, that my father was no longer alive.

***

The tower is the sixteenth card in the major arcana; it comes before The Star, a card of renewal. 

***

The funeral happened on a chilly day. The woman who had stood beside me on that road now held me up as I looked at the faces of shocked friends and family. My mother bargained with the gods, we listened to her song of grief through wails. When it came to covering his grave I dropped to my knees and shoveled dirt in with my hands. The earth was rocky and cold. Three birds passed over us. Together, in that moment, my mother, my sister, and I looked at each other and knew his body was at rest. 

In the year to follow my world collapsed. I had been a princess in the kingdom that he built, and now I was abandoned to a wilderness. I was led on a path under the ocean by a serpent who swallowed me whole. In the darkness of her belly, she lulled me to sleep. She drew from me poison and toxins. She taught me how to shed layers of skin until I dissolved. No space above or below, just what is and what unfolds. I heard her song of rage, protecting that which is sacred, and she satiated me in her elixir of joy. 

On the first night, when I stepped onto the balcony of my mother’s apartment, my Dad was the river. The vibrations of his humor were the hue of the water. The clouds were made of his wisdom, the steel of the train tracks his dependability. He had become everything. 

The first year Yahrzeit happened on my cousin’s wedding and I danced all night in my liminal form. When I went to sleep my father’s spirit came to me in my dream. He reminded me of the feeling of being loved unconditionally. 

He used to say us humans are like radios - we just need to tune into the right frequency. 

Thank you for reading.

This story was seeded in Parables of Change. It will be watered and nurtured until it grows into a book, with roots and branches exploring themes of mysticism, grief, decolonization, and more. You can follow and support by subscribing!

If you’re curious about the guided medication in the story, you can listen to Timeline here.