For weeks I had known I needed to go.
Not why, exactly. Just the pull of something unresolved — a conversation I needed to have with someone who could no longer answer back.
I drove out, found the groundskeeper, found the headstone. Stood there in the quiet.
And realized — only then — that it was Father’s Day.
My pregnant wife hadn’t understood why I needed to go out alone that morning. I didn’t have the words to explain it to her. Only the bone-deep knowing that if I didn’t say the things I had been carrying, something would pass forward that I refused to pass forward.
Deep down I knew: if I did not write that letter, I would not break the ancestral wound. And I would pass it to my kids.
So I wrote it.
Everything I have built since — every circle, every session, every piece of work offered in service of healing — has roots in that afternoon.
June is the month of the Father. And this week’s piece opens the month with the teaching that everything else builds on: the Moon in Vedic astrology, the Fourth House, and what it actually means to become a different kind of father than the one you had.
The full letter — the one I wrote at that grave — is linked in the piece. It is not an easy read. It changed my life to write it.
And there is a current chapter to this story that I haven’t told you yet. One that is still being written. That part comes later this month — for those who go deeper.
With love for every father trying to do it differently,
Shiva J