Our human heartbeat begins within a bundle of pacemaker cells before the heart is formed. Once matured our heart synchronizes with our mother’s in a rhythmic pulse of our two human hearts beating in tandem not only in matter but more directly in spirit ties us all directly to the divine source within each of us. This frequency isn’t attainable through religion alone nor is it earmarked for a sole religious practice. There’s no spiritual country club to join, no dues to pay. Just a deep, peaceful calm that washed over me every time I found myself safely back in the womb never knowing fear or concern for my own protection from every enemy.
Anyone, and more to the point anything, dark angel, devil or demon, is kept at bay as I grew within my mother’s blessed belly’s protection. God sang me lullabies while my mother slept. A dozen years passed by in a flash, now a distant flicker. I calmly wait and count twelve feet below the surface of my reverberating safety zone in the neighborhood pool. Rhythmic, deep bass notes lulling me to a near daydream sleep forgetting to breathe near the end of my three minute exercise. Wait! Not yet! I swam frantically wiggling my body as a racing sailfish toward the surface of the pool. What a rush on the cusp of life and death. Whoosh!
Just milliseconds from blacking out and dying again I suddenly woke up halfway through falling to the floor in my teenage bedroom. Slam! To the floor I went. While rubbing the side of my head checking for blood I felt a warmth within my skull. Something was sizzling in my weary yet ironically fully awakened mind. I quickly did the math before I forgot a thought that stemmed from the very knife’s edge of my dream state. Cacophonous sounds had startled me awake. This time a knocks rapping at the door layered with deep native drums pounding in my skull. Last time it arrived as the ringing of bells, chimes no one else could hear. Silence to them.
Focused now, my intuition set my memory ablaze. Another superpower unearthed, thawed out that’s been lying dormant for fifty-three years in the arctic wastelands within my mind. It’s been strutting around the square unbeknownst to me as I searched other lands for more insights, more knowledge as to my true nature. Now I know another hidden truth about my DNA’s divinity. A year ago a dear soul read my mind revealing my cosmic number was three, just as her’s was also. Three, as it comes to this, is alive and well again. This time written directly into my Zodiac makeup. If we follow the dates it’s all crystal clear. Nothing hidden.
I was born a rare, Zodiac triad. My assigned appointment at birth signaled something else much deeper that I’d take half a century to realize besides the surface level definition on display to everyone else. I arrived four weeks early, to the exact day, on January 19, 1972. My projected date was February 19, but God had plans for me that couldn’t wait. My father’s birthday was exactly three months prior on October 19, 1940. Yes, another reference to three. Lest not forget mu lucky number is also three to the third power, 27. Driven, fighting to win at all costs I blazed a trail of bridges built and burnt to a crisp. Never rebuilt.
I gained a bit of wisdom each time I singed my current employment ending it at just the right moment. I was never meant to work for others like so many do for the rest of my life. These intentional self deprivations taught me resilience. Once I’d had enough of their hypocrisy and thirst for power over me it was time once again to say adieu. Every time I was thrown back to the beasts of this earth, put down in a painful mockery, I grew stronger, bolder. Even when disability assistance was fully denied after waiting two years, I did what no one else imagined. I kept my sights on what is unseen, not what is seen by all. As I unravel, I reveal.
While everyone around me felt they knew how to fix my situation, I asked them to take a few steps back. Give me some room to breathe. Let me decide what comes next. Stop giving advice to someone you don’t even understand. I am not someone that can be easily forced into anyone else’s vision for my life. I appreciate the sentiment, but I have plans of my own. They started being put on the back burner, then in my back pocket for easy retrieval. I already had the answer without even asking myself any more questions. I invested in myself. I never gave in to systems attempting to persuade me to fall inline like so many others did.
Each toxic attack brought me another layer of steel forged by forces long ago. My inner Capricorn never caved even as God gently knocked me down. As I gained my feet each time I focused deeply on my center of gravity. I’m not spinning in circles, but I am peeling away layers in a circular pattern. Each unraveling layer glides, circling outwards around me as I feel a gentle breeze stirring up, forming a funnel rustling the autumn leaves at my feet along the trail. Each spiral generating an invisible miniature twister lapping the leaves upward, outward and then gliding back and kissing the ground leaving a spiral as seen from above.
With each twirl this circular layer of leaves expands just as my inner knowing and sensitivities grow. All my life I was scolded for being too sensitive. I was raised to win, not to write poetry, paint watercolors, or draw hundreds of caricatures. I did do these things, but my father was always concerned I was taking a path that may prove difficult in order to sustain a financially independent life. A safe life. I think this stemmed from not only his own obsession with success, but even more so from the events surrounding my birth and the first three years of my life. I was small and born with an innate reality distortion that I was insignificant.
My struggle with inadequacy began during my own exodus from my mother just eight months into her pregnancy. I was a preemie, an underdog. Born weak and damaged with an emergency doctor’s order for a complete blood transfusion that was cancelled abruptly at the last minute. My body, still fully intact, never given a circumcision just as da Vinci portrayed his Vitruvian Man some believe is his self portrait. This desperate longing for attention followed me all the way through high school. When dad got home from work he walked right past me dozens of times. I guess I wasn’t stoic enough and far too sensitive, right? I was.
My birthday, actual and projected, spans Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces. I didn’t realize this until recently at 53. It’s been staring me down for half a century, but I’ve been busy manipulating my reality. I built so many masks for survival I even lost sight of my own reflection. Now inner knowing leads to understanding that my core traits were always so closely aligned with Pisces, I cannot unsee what is now is plain sight. This understanding is so well aligned, I’m nearly speechless. Well, speechless for me is still running my mouth more than most. Now it’s also clear why I was so drawn to the ocean at such a young age.
I spent summers riding the waves at Edisto Beach and Isle of Palms. Time well spent on Sullivan’s island where my birthday twin, Edgar, Allan Poe, used to inhabit. My profoundly empathic, artistic, romantic, and heightened sensitivities of Pisces have rung true for so long, but as a half century narcissist I saw these traits as weaknesses. Now I fully embrace this water sign’s waves of consciousness as my true north. Well, south really if we’re talking about my imagination. I was never really a Capricorn. I was a water sign disguised as an earth sign. I enjoyed finger painting in nursery school dipping my fingers in muddy water.
During the hot, dry summers that resembled barren, cracked desert the cracks kept widening resembling tiny earthquakes as they spidered out in all directions. The ground uneven, uneasy shaking between breaths. These little earthquakes that Tori Amos sung about eventually lead us into a state where nothing feels grounded anymore. Every moment is spent trying to gain balance in a world that worships paint and suffering never truly offering relief, just selling another unneeded product so another fat cat board member’s stock rises one more tick. Their slight of hand, now obvious to us all is played out.
They also remind me of lightning right in that single millisecond moment spreading out forking across the skies. While looking in the mirror now I also see them as veins scattered all over my eyes. Some days more bloodshot than the next depending on the amount of sleep I survived the night before. Born with a wandering eye requiring surgery at age one, my eyes still played tricks on me. Somehow no one ever noticed that my permanent scowl wasn’t solely due to always feeling like a social outcast, I was also nearsighted. Just as my need for glasses since birth wasn’t corrected until I reached 19.
Every year during roll call my homeroom teacher always accidentally embarrassed me when they’d ask if Carol Vinson was present. I was, but they thought I was a girl. I was even scolded for intentionally horsing around pretending to be the Carol in question. 1991 became the same year mine and Dad’s first names were adjusted from feminine, Carol, to masculine, Carroll. This plagued me every year beginning in nursery school following me all the way through high school. Junior year was I free from the bullies, but still not the teachers. Do yourself a favor and don’t name your kids with androgynous names.
Masculine versus feminine spellings confuse the simplest of minds. As fate would have it, my birth name and birthday both held connections to two of the most enigmatic geniuses in the histories of art and prose. I share my birthday with Edgar Allan Poe and Leonardo da Vinci’s name is hidden within my own. Edgar’s detective genre prose filled with mystery and mayhem and da Vinci’s thoughts on our interconnectedness with everything around us also pulse through my veins. Once awakened there’s no turning back. There’s no magic blue pill to re-enter the matrix. Even if I could go back I would choose to continue moving forward.
Pisces, the most awakened of the Zodiac, interprets the rhythms, patterns, and musical dialects of reality, hidden and implied, with such rich intention it’s become it’s own living, breathing entity. Pisces represents the highest elevation wielding psychic forces greater than any others of the dozen or baker’s dozen if you know Ophiuchus, the serpent-bearer. Once I reached my half-centennial my mind shifted, adjusted, and woke up enlightened with what I’ve coined as an activated intuition. My mind was awake again as it was the first time I drew breath. Finally everything was clear. The why of it all shimmering like diamonds.
Every mental block, creative or otherwise, vanished within 36 hours of my psychiatrist removing lithium’s toxicity from my bodily temple. Swimming with the fishes always felt natural, primal. Although the lure of Capricorn’s success at all costs mindset kept me under its spell for fifty years once I came up for air I knew I was finally home. No longer taking dips in the deep end of the pool, sitting at the bottom drawn to the echoing reverberations and pressure giving me immediate relief from the earthly attacks and taunts. Twelve feet down felt safe, familiar as if I was still floating in my mother’s womb.
The American Dream that I now call the Grand Illusion brought up ad absurdum more times than I could ever count. I ran out of fingers and toes to tie it to since I was three years old. Chasing and realizing a dream planted into our subconscious passed down from one generation to the next in the form of capitalistic materialism. I now live peacefully, purposefully, and prayerfully more in line with a monk than a successful American businessman. I dodged those bullets like Neo. Rather than chase an unattainable dream maleficent and mirky, I chose to address my own independence. There’s no admission of tithings or guilt. Calm.
No secret society writ the lines of absolute plagiarism plaguing our world’s societies. We’ve traded our humanity for the seduction of technology. Our critical thinking skills are melting en masse. It’s time to wake up folks. You’re just falling for another golden calf sold by a snake oil salesman who recently announced he would soon “treat adults like adults.” Feel free to search that one. It’s utterly disgusting. Those of us who chose not to join the zombie horde’s goblin ranks have work to do. We’re spreading old-fashioned truth bombs for those who choose to not only see the truth, but continue spreading disguised lies like wildfires.
