Accomplishments and My Beginnings

This week has been a momentous week for me... I completed a program that has been 15 years in the making for me. Now in my early 30's I have seen much of adult life, but to have something come to fruition now that started as a dream in high school is a moment I will remember for a long, long time. It feels like I am reaching back through time to the person I was then and honoring her. Stroking her face and saying: "I see you, I know you. You are still inside me, perhaps changed, transformed, but still there. And look at what you've done!" 

Life has taken me on quite a journey, and I look at myself as I am now and see the pieces and parts of me that symbolize the various chapters of my life, all coming together in a mish-mash to make up the whole that I am now... 

I started my life far, far away... in India, where the breeze smelled of spice and rain and fresh earth, the bird-song filled the air. My soul learned to be quiet there, to listen. Really listen. I grew up as a watcher. Watching the people and creatures of the earth around me live their lives, learning as they lived and did what they did what it meant to be alive. From a very young age I can remember going to great lengths to get to places where the vantage point was the best to observe the world around me, and it wasn't until I was much older that I realized that I was visible too. To this day it's a lesson that I have to remind myself of, for often I people watch and forget that they can see me just as easily. I can still hear my mother's voice telling me not to stare... that it wasn't polite. I wasn't doing it to be impolite...I was just curious. I was born a watcher. It was one of the reason's that I loved trees so much - I could climb, climb, climb up to the highest branches, way above the ground and observe life and listen to the wind rustling through the leaves. And maybe find a birds nest with eggs in it that I could return to to see when they'd hatch.... Often it was sparrow's nests, or parrots. 

I had a little group of friends my age that were similar adventurers who loved to go exploring as much as I did, and we often got ourselves into sticky situations... Luckily, amazingly, we all survived childhood (something my mother seriously doubted I would ever do!) Once, while off exploring in a copse of trees that was farther away than we usually went, we discovered a nest in the top of a log which had been strangely tied up alongside the tree trunk of a live tree (to this day I still don't know why) and we were very excited to show people the beautiful baby chicks, which appeared to be green parrots with their bright green skin and big orange curved beaks- they were only a few days old at most and hadn't grown any feathers yet. My aunt was visiting from the U.S. and she loved birds and babies, and would definitely love this rare sighting. Only, when we loaded them from the nest onto my friend's flat knapsack, and went running back home the mile or so to show her, with the poor baby birds cheeping in terror and pooping all over his bag (he was very afraid of the trouble he'd be in once his mother found out) her reaction wasn't what we'd hoped for at all... In fact, upon seeing them she went pale and quite still. Apparently we hadn't found a parrots nest at all, but a vulture's. And mother vulture stood about as tall as we did at age four and would happily feed us to those very same chicks as meat for the next week if she discovered what we'd done. I remember the terrified journey back to the log, hastily replacing the babies back into their nest and attempting to tie the tree back in place without the babies spilling out, all the while hoping that the mother didn't return to exact her revenge. To this day I regret touching the baby birds with our bare hands for it probably meant that she would have rejected them due their strange, human smell. I never went back to check on them.... sad. I hope they survived. Even though they were vultures.