[I wrote this creative essay several years ago during my MFA program years. I thought it would be a fun way to welcome the autumn equinox. Happy fall!]
Most likely, I remember the photo incorrectly. I haven’t seen it in years, though it must still be in one of my mother’s many photo albums. A picture of three little girls – my sister Teresa, another girl whose name I cannot remember, and me. We wear matching white shirts with small red hearts sprinkled all over.
Teresa’s brown hair is smoothed back into a braid. The girl in the middle matches her neatness. Mom braided my hair as well, but wisps of blonde hair, loose and unkempt, cover half my face. Mane-like.
I was four years old, the youngest of the three. The matching outfits served as our singing costumes. I don’t remember the singing. It must have been for a school. It might have been Christmastime. It would have been in India, the place of my earliest memories.
The girl whose name I cannot remember told me why my hair was messy like a mane. “It’s because you’re a lion.”
“I’m not a lion.” I bristled at her comment, yet was also intrigued.
“Yes, you are. Your birthday is August, so you’re a Leo. And I’m a scorpion.” She tried to pinch me with her fingers. I skirted her grasp, smoothing back my hair, but it fell into my face again.
***
Linda Goodman can be largely credited for popularizing astrology in the western hemisphere. Her books on the 12 signs of the zodiac, especially Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs, found a welcoming audience in the late 1960s.
According to the basic idea of sun signs, the movement of celestial bodies affects the movement of bodies and events on earth … as above, so below. The form of astrology most frequently practiced in the United States bears the stamp “contemporary western” astrology because it focuses primarily on the sun sign – which zodiac sign the sun rests in at the time of a person’s birth.
A complex understanding of astrology involves far more than the sun sign or a daily horoscope (generally reduced to a paragraph-length forecast of love, loss, or wealth). In America today, we are proficient in fixating on a single aspect of some fad, on a certain lens of some knowledge, and assuming that is all there is to know.
***
I grew up knowing myself as a Leo. A lazy lion, a proud lion, sometimes a bouncy lion when my childish energy irritated my four older siblings. “Leos are proud,” they would tell me, “like lions.” As six children of missionaries, we had been taught pride was the cardinal sin. That pride had brought about Satan’s downfall from angel of light to chief of all demons. One of my siblings hinted that, if Satan had a sun sign, he would have been a Leo – because of his pride.
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