With bold feathers on my head I reach for the sky, all height and sight, and I am suddenly flamboyance with waves and synapse. A tail grows long and does its own searching from a place where I could not otherwise see. It slings itself back and forth patiently while my feet, like giant panda paws, pick up vibrations from sounds left a million eons ago.

To learn to be that primal, all red and pink, lace and glitter, all ripe belly and open heart, is to mingle with the breeze of bees. It's to feel my way back into self where cell and membrane meet.

To learn to be an animal is to enter a cave on hands and knees with faith in eyes and ears, breath and curiosity. In the darkness a tiger appears in watery hues, half wild, half domestic, but vivid as a bowl of oranges on a summer windowsill. He gives me no false promises, only the feel of his thick thighs, the rhythm of his pace, his tight naked muscles.

It could be a savage moment, or you could say this is an errand of madness. But those commanding thighs, too alive to argue, assure me that I have a taste for the journey. If I tell you I can become that tiger, can actually feel the measure of his ways, will you re-imagine our lives? We are in great need of getting away from the familiar.

Once there was a beginning.

Then there was an end.

Without the drama of the Bible, some things remain the same: shared ribs, children, sacrifice, good and evil.

We beget the next generation with our sons, and maybe they will create the next. Or maybe not. If not, it will have been a good ride, as James Taylor sings. A lovely ride. I could spontaneously make a list for you. But for now, living gets me up each morning to teach and write, tucks away the past into quilts, avoids floods and interprets dreams. Now I fold these up at night, he there and me here, our bodies in separate chapters.

Sometimes I place memory into drawers of forgetting. Sometimes I trade something old for something new. Sometimes bird feathers count for nothing, or maybe you could say this is all we ever really had.

We had these moments, remembered or not. There was a beginning.

Then there was an end.

Leave if you must, but don't say, please don't say I didn't work enough. You in graduate school and me as new teacher standing on the concrete of a cold basement entertaining five-year-olds with memorized songs. Cleaning up after that little guy who failed to get to the bathroom on time. Don't tell me. I stacked books at night and filed receipts while you studied. Let's not forget the weight of grocery bags or laundry bags or diaper bags. Hot meals. The secretarial pool on the eighth floor of Blue Cross. An ill-equipped classroom in a Jewish Day School. A biology teacher for bilingual students. A screaming toddler being carried from surgery to car, mother and child alone in a snowy parking lot. Presents wrapped for family birthdays you were allowed to forget.

Don't say I didn't document our growing family with photographs carefully placed in albums. A kitten. A puppy. Goldfish. Mario the hamster. Pots of soup. Nursery school. Soccer practice. New glasses. New sneakers. Wrestling shoes. A book written in between dryer cycles—a paragraph here and then there. Passover Seders. Don't forget the shank bone and the oven that must not leave a trace of last year's crumbs. The recipe for Aunt Edith's matza apple tart, margarine instead of butter so the meat won't mix with milk. Mail sorted—yours, mine and ours.

What to throw out? What to keep? Boxes packed and unpacked. Passport forms. Toys to entertain while traveling. A proofreader in an advertising firm here. A public relations department there. Temperatures taken at midnight. Dancing a cranky infant in the dark. Get rid of this job. Take on that one. Live here. Live there. Sweep the porch. Walk the dog. Take him to the vet. Clean up as one century turns to the next. This country. That one. This need.

Don't.