Romulus: The Old Man in the Sea

My name is Romulus and I'm an Asiatic Veiltail Carp or goldfish. I am 13 years old! I could live to be 25!

I am over a foot long now! Most people do not realize how long goldfish can live if they let us.

My human rescued me from a tank full of goldfish meant to be turtle food or food for bigger fishes. She brought me home and added me to her 10 gallon fishtank which was on top of her piano.

Well, I disappointed her bitterly when I killed all of the Angelfish and Swordfish in the tank with me. She wasn't that knowledgeable about fish, otherwise she would have known that I would do this--plus there was just enough room for me in that tank!

However, she admired my strength and beauty and took very good care of me. Each night, she would practice the piano--remember my tank was on top of it--and I would critique her playing. When she would make a mistake, I would thrash angrily and stare viciously at her. So she would try very earnestly to play beautifully. I especially loved Chopin for his flowing notes to which I would stretch my fins and yawn quite widely! I do NOT like Bach though because his music is so choppy, that is more for humans than fish!

Making Waves to Music

At the end of each practice session (some of them lasted eight hours or more), my human would play my own special song she always played just for me. I knew then that she was finished practicing and would wag my tail. Yes! I do! That song was Mozart's "Ah Tutti Contenti," from The Marriage of Figaro.

After five years of being in that tank, I had grown to be nearly six inches long and my human decided to get me a bigger tank. I moved into a 29 gallon tank with large blue gravel which I enjoyed piling into mountains and rearranging every week. My human was now becoming much smarter about fish care--measuring the pH in my tank and adding only distilled water during water changes, which she'd do every month.

Someone to Call My Own

But I was becoming lonely. My human now had two parrots to whom she was paying more attention. She didn't come over as often and pet me (yes, she'd put her hand in the tank and I would swim under her hand for a pet). So she decided to get me a mate. That brought Rhiannon, the egg-shaped goldfish, into my lonely life. Rhiannon grew very quickly and soon was the size of a honeydew melon! We became very chummy but needed more room so we moved again--this time into a 55 gallon tank! Now I'm over a foot long!

I still listen to my human practice the piano when she has time. We have known each other 13 years now and that is a long time for a fish and a human. I know her parrots pretty well too. They like to look at me in the tank and I like to look at them. I'll swim over to near where they're sitting and weÕll stare at each other communicating and exchanging ideas. It's fun!

Taking care of me is a LOT of work and is also expensive. My human has to spend nearly a whole day a month cleaning my tank and measuring ammonia and nitrite levels in my water. She is careful not to use tap water in my tank, which can contain residual chemicals from winter runoff (do you humans really drink that stuff?) which can kill me rather quickly. Actually, once I got tuberculosis from this and my human nursed me through it. Not many fish survive that! She was vigilant though and I made it!

pictured above: Romulus, the goldfish, lived to be 13 years old!

Communicating With Fish

Animals have been trying to communicate to me all my life as they try to do with most people, we just don't get it. I guess one of the first times they really got through was when I developed a relationship with my goldfish, Romulus. Yes, it was rather a shock to get communication from a fish, that was the last place I expected it to come from. But it made sense, really because these fish were kept as pets for centuries by the Chinese and I was just discovering why.

The first thing I noticed about Romulus after he had grown rather large were his soulful eyes. Then I would notice his reactions to the music I played on my piano. He showed a distinct preference for some types of music which when played he would stretch his fins out and 'yawn' as fish do when they are supremely content.

Romulus dances to the sounds of Chopin He seemed angry, too, when I would make a mistake or play a type of music that did not have a flowing quality to it, like Bach. Sometimes, if the mistake was particularly displeasing or the music very choppy, he would slap his tail on the water's surface and splash me! It is hard to deny that interspecies communication is going on here!

Romulus became ill one year with tuberculosis and required lots of medication and careful water changes. He survived but spent much of the time hunched in a corner. I would sit by this corner and put my face up to the glass and wave a finger at him. He would wave a fin back at me.

There was now no question in my mind that we were 'talking' to each other. But I had no idea what we were saying. I just knew he could see me and recognize me and would wave to me. I also became fond of petting him. Yes I would put my hand down into the tank and as he swam by, I would gently touch his scales. He didn't really react to this, he didn't try to avoid the contact though. His scales felt slimy of course but also smooth as silk and this fascinated me.

I became very attached to this fish and his mate, Rhiannon, and my memories of them will be ones I always treasure. Romulus lived 13 long years and before he died, he went back to his corner until the end. After he was gone, Rhiannon spent a lot of time in that corner too, grieving for her companion, a fish.

We Are All Elephants or The History of Love

I have always been someone who puts Love on a very high pedestal. You could kind of say I’m a love snob. Not like some critics who may draw distinctions between sentimental love and true, core love. They draw the line between silly love songs and great ballads. Supposedly, the human concept of love was invented in the dark ages when courtly love became all the rage literally as knights rushed to their deaths with great zeal as long as it was condoned by the love of a great lady. But preceding this ‘revolution’ by great spans of times were the Sanskrit definitions of love. Sanskrit is the language of ancient India and considered the most complex language and alphabet ever used. There are eighty words in Sanskrit for love. There’s love of a sunset, love for your mother, love for your daugher, love for your home, love for eighty different things.

That sounds very advanced doesn’t it? Eighty words for love. Can you name at least eighty things you love uniquely? I could never name all the things I love nor could I come close to properly describing each of them. I suppose even Sanskrit is still just a language trying to tie up love into a neat, tidy bundle. But it can’t really be done. And yet, there is one love that is transcendent and unreachable for each of us. The love of self. How much time do we spend contemplating self-love? People talk about self-loathing and how that’s so bad. After all self-loathing is imposed upon us by the harsh, unfeeling judgements of others. Gosh what does it mean to love yourself? Sounds kind of weird. But no it’s not, it just means that you love being who you are and who you could become. It means you love being alive. But do you? Is life all that great? Not a lot of the time. What makes it great are those special ones we let into our sphere of love. What makes it bad is when that sphere is empty.

Chopin was a wild caught Moluccan cockatoo who taught me a lot about this. It wasn’t long after he came to live with us, in his 22nd year, that he realized he was loved just for who he was, a crazy, feather plucked, nosy, destructive, foul-mouthed cockatoo. For the first few weeks, he would squawk back and forth to my amazons who lived in another room. My amazon, Pumpkinhead G. Parrot, had been working for a number of years on his parrot version of the ‘Gettysburg address’ (oddly we live not far from Gettysburg). One evening Pumpkinhead had the opportunity to watch a re-enactment of the Gettysburg address on television by an actor. He was quite impressed that humans could use so many words so concisely and so pregnant with meaning. He got the gist of the address perfectly and immediatley took upon the task of writing his own Gettysburg address. He already had the first line down, “birds are so good/so bad.” And on this day that he saw “Lincoln” on the television, he added a second line, “Birds should fly.” It sounds simple and self-explanatory enough doesn’t it? Birds should fly, but Pumpkinhead hasn’t been able to fly in nearly 15 years. So it means a lot to him.

Pumpkinhead added a third line right away. “Birds should fly up somewhere.” He knew that birds should fly up in the sky and not be in people’s houses. His wild caught mate Guff probably told him about her brief life in the rainforest and perhaps a glimpse or two she might have caught of her parents flying into the nest cavity with some squiggily worms. He knew this was how it was supposed to be from the feared “black birds,” as he called them, outside who seemed to come and go as they pleased. So his parroty version of the Gettysburg address had grown into a paragraph. “Birds are so good/so bad. Birds should fly. Birds should fly up somewhere.” It was finished. That was really all that needed to be said. Birds make great editors.

So when Chopin cried to Pumpkinhead, Pumpkinhead announced back to him, “Birds should fly.” Chopin replied, “I hope I go away soon.” The desperately unhappy Chopin would repeat this daily for some weeks to come and then he would add to it, “I hope I go away soon. I hope I die.”

I found this very troubling and explained to him that I believe if he did die, he would simply be reborn as my experiences have taught me. So he modified his credo, “I hope I go away soon. I hope I die. Forever.” I did my best to try and convince Chopin he was wanted here and that we loved him. He wasn’t disposable to us like he was to his previous owner, he was a grain of sand on the beach which we were attempting to save from the imminent high tide by carrying to what we hoped was higher, dryer ground. He was that world in a grain of sand that Blake talked about and we wanted to admire him. One Friday evening, my husband and Chopin and I were lounging in the sunroom enjoying pizza and old Motown songs. Christian and I sang along with the radio, “you get the best of my love!” and at the end of that line Chopin chimed in happily, “for your WHOLE life!” He was finally happy.

He knew that he had been named after a great composer. Probably because, his predecessor, Mozart was always hovering over my shoulder in Spirit and telling him what to do and how to act. Chopin would talk to the air above my left shoulder in a quiet voice, and I would hear one half of a spectral conversation. Chopin would shake his head, “No I can’t. I can’t help it. Now go away!” Soon Chopin would become very jealous of the spirit of the recently departed Mozart and Chris and I wouldn’t be allowed to mention Mozart’s name or even play any of the human Mozart’s music without loud squawks of protest from the proud Chopin. Chopin came to call me “honeybunny” in efforts to win my great love for Mozart for himself. Eventually he realized that there was no contest, my love was not finite. There was plenty for both Mozart and Chopin and every single creature in our lives. His jealousy relaxed a bit and we just tried to enjoy eachother’s company.

He and Horatio, the dwarf rabbit, lived in the living room with me and I would often read on the couch all day as I tried to keep Chopin from making noise which would awake my husband who worked the graveyard shift and was trying to sleep in a nearby room. It became apparent to me very quickly that Horatio and Chopin could hear every word I read in my head. One particular afternoon I was reading a book about the Buddha and read a passage which explained that the word buddha means ‘the awakened one.’ I looked up at Chopin after reading this passage and he looked astonished and perplexed at the same time. In his parroty voice he croaked as he glanced at his little friend Horatio and his feline friend Cleo, “We are all awake!” What was the big deal? Indeed!

He became proud of the fact that he too was named after a great composer and also of the fact that most humans, in my opinion (which he valued), couldn’t pronounce it with the proper panache. Being a parrot who had to work somewhat to clearly mimic our vocal language without the benefit of vocal chords, it gave him a kick to hear humans mispronounce HIS name. And so I became aware that he wanted to learn more about this “Chopin” person. I told him about the great Polish composer, that he was a revolutionary and not just a musical revolutionary but a political revolutionary fighting for freedom against the aristocracy. I explained how people ruled each other. And then I played him some music of Frederic Chopin.

As we leaned over the CD player, our heads together and listening in reverent silence to each single, furiously played note, he heard the wondrous complexity of emotions being expressed through wordless sounds yet with great eloquence. He was awestruck. After the composition was finished, he whispered to me, “I don’t want to go.” He didn’t want to go away soon, he didn’t want to die, forever. He wanted to stay, he didn’t want to go.

But in an odd twist of irony, Chopin would indeed go and very soon. As he turned 23 it became apparent he was very ill and like his human counterpart, veterinarians would surmise, he also succumbed to tuberculosis from which he had suffered for decades. After his death from a pathological break of the leg, due to lack of bone density, I gathered up his toys and other effects and put them in the roaring fire I had started inside our wood stove in the living room. This was a sanitary and final way of elminating any trace of disease from the environment though I needn’t have worried because he hadn’t been ‘shedding’ it for decades.

Then as I stared into the fire, I was struck with a vision of immense power and magnitude. A herd of fear-crazed elephants stampeded out of the wood stove and through the air and right through me! With my jaw dropping on the floor I sat there and soaked up the angst and terror these animals felt as they fled. What did this mean? I was so dumbstruck that it took me weeks, months and even years before I could really face what their message was, one that they shared with Chopin whose existence was stampeding right out of our galaxy with them.

Immediately however I knew the correlation between the elephants and Chopin was the relationship between pianos and elephants. In olden days, key tops were made from ivory brutally ‘harvested’ from wild elephants. Mankind’s greatest artform and ultimate expression of civilization cost a dear price for a noble race, the elephants, unlucky purveyors of snow white keycaps. What greater disparity could there be than this? A noble race of giants who mourn the bones of their dead and yet inspire us in many ways with their rich emotional lives being driven to the edge of extinction so we can tickle the ivories and make beautiful music? What balance of nature is that? None, it could be the greatest imbalance of nature.

That night I heard Chopin’s croaky voice in my head chanting “We are all elephants, we are all elephants, we are all elephants.” And I knew that this was a message of such great import that I must put it somewhere for safekeeping for a long, long time and nurture it and protect it until I felt I was ready to release it into the world. That time has come.

We are all elephants. We are all awake. Every single living thing is awake and loving it and any lesser expression of love is a denigration, a daydream or a nightmare that keeps us from experiencing our wakefulness fully. Stand up for the integrity of love. It is not meant to be splintered into myriad definitions, it is meant to be one burst of love for life and so don’t fool yourself into thinking there is any justification for taking a life to express it.

The Water Of Life

Chopin was a 22 year old, self-mutilating, feather shredding, purportedly insane wild-caught Moluccan cockatoo I had just rescued. He did indeed seem crazy, yelling, "I hope I go away soon! I hope I die!" I explained to him, "Chopin if you die, you will only be reborn again." So, he revised his rant, "I hope I die forever!"

He needed attention and mental stimulation. And a shower! In the bathtub, I sprayed him with the hand-held shower head while he exclaimed, "Water! Water! How does it work?" Haltingly, I replied, "Um...I don't really know." In an outside cage I soaked him with the hose and let him dry in the hot sun. While happily preening himself, he proclaimed earnestly, "I like water!"

Together, we listened to classical music, and once afterwards Chopin whispered, "I don't want to go." But he still chewed on his chest so I called Tera for help.

Tuning in to him Tera said, "He says sometimes he feels crazy." Then she took a few moments to send him some Reiki. I watched him atop his cage as he looked up at the ceiling, turning his head this way and that.

Softly Chopin asked, "Where are you?" Then ruffling up his feathers and shaking himself like he'd just been caught in a rainfall, he said in wonderment, "Water! Water!"

When I heard Tera's voice on the line again I told her, "He said 'where are you?' and then 'water, water.' What did you tell him?"

She explained, "I sent him the energy and told him he could receive it over the next 24 hours and control it like a faucet turning on more or turning it off."

I smiled, "Tera, you told him it was like a faucet?"

She replied, "Yes and -- oh my! That's why he said 'water'!"

What stronger affirmation than that could one possibly ask for?

Later that summer so many years ago now, I came home from Tera's Level II Animal Communication workshop bursting with enthusiasm and asked Chopin "How would you like it if I hosted an animal communication workshop and have lots of people right here in this room with us practicing animal communication?"

He leaned way out over the edge of his cage, his head reaching forward as far as he could and with solemn reverence said, "Water!"