Happy Earthday. I changed my profile picture to the tiger to celebrate and honor this magnificent endangered creature. When I selected the photo, I was transported back to my small child self sitting under a bed-sheet tent held up by a desk chair on a Sunday morning. I was singing softly to myself and lying in the sweet privacy of my white tent space having a conversation with my favorite animal...my stuffed tiger.
It has been a very busy two weeks...visiting my sister and her kids in Norton, picking up my Mom and bringing her up for a visit here in Maine and then taking her home again to attend a musical tribute with Stephen for a friend that recently passed away. The week came to a crescendo with the musical tribute because it was a reunion of souls, some of whom haven't been seen since 1970 or so. To describe the week as intense is an understatement. By the time we got home after taking Mom to a birthday party for her friend, and cleaned up after a very carsick Sadie Hopkins...I felt like I had been shaken to my core. We have a quiet life these days. Music is acoustic and more in the background than it was in the days when I was angry and blasting my songs at top volume from the car radio. We live in a place of deep quiet and bright stars; long, cold winters and space between neighbors. Our lifestyle is home centered and only gets wild with people when the boys come home with their friends.
Today...Good Friday, I feel the cross of my past with my present. Maybe I'm flooded with images of my child self because of spending such uninterrupted time with my mother. Or maybe the revisiting of so many forgotten friends from so many years ago stimulated the tsunami of memories. Whatever the reason, the effect is such that my usual state of consciousness feels shattered and my energy is depleted. Who was I then and who am I now and how has it all happened that I am here now?
I imagine my child-self talking to my precious tiger under my tent. Growing up in a family of 5 girls forced me to seek solitude in Sunday forts or at the tops of trees. I have always been a child of the Earth, a nature lover and grasshopper feeder...a self appointed protector of toads and turtles...a singer of songs from the treetops. I remember the velvet feel of my toy tiger and stroking it to soothe myself. Sometimes it actually seemed alive and it looked back at me challenging me to grow my fierceness and protect my boundaries. I have always struggled with finding the right balance between territory defense and an open door policy that translates at times into doormat. Quite frankly, I still do. Now the tiger is endangered. When I was that child the Eagle was endangered; a victim of DDT and the early warning signs of American agricultural mono-cropping. As a grown woman, the Eagle is part of my daily life...wild and free and cruising the Androscoggin River with regularity. Now the tiger struggles to survive the pollution and poachers and I struggle to listen to it's quiet communication.
The great cat lies poised but relaxed with dark eyes riveted to my every move. It's whiskers twitch as it sniffs the air determining my scent and whether or not I can be trusted. As I gaze into it's eyes I see the fierce wild edge that develops on the skin of a survivor. I see the quiet yielding to the dictates of nature...the weather, water and wilderness. Health is about working together with the greater patterns of our mother Earth. How can I do that if I am surrounded by too many humans? Many humans means lots of dynamics, vibes, busyness, traffic, noise and pollution. How can I live with too many too close? I need space to run and allow the Earth to strengthen my thigh muscles...power and speed for the hunt...speed and power for survival.
Relaxed and confident. Wild and free. Please let me be a human that allows for diversity of species and can celebrate differences. Let me be a human who can trust the laws of wild mother nature and can thereby be an inhabitant of a peaceable kingdom...let me be a human who values the myriad forms of life and who, when the time comes, can accept death. Yes I am a child of the Universe...no less than the stars and yet no greater than the animals and plants that sustain me.
Please guide me in living a balanced and sustainable life that is gentle on the Earth so that she can be gentle on me. This whole write feels like its turning into a prayer...a Sunday morning under the tent prayer...because I'm waking up.
I'm waking up in a nearly 60 year old body looking out through eyes of a child who has and always had, the wisdom to seek the wild places where she can be one of many species and not just another one of many in a multitude of one species. When I am exhausted by urban rush and vibrating with the buzz of human beings, take me back to nature...back to the woods where I can visualize myself as a being embedded in the nature of our planet Earth, grounded in my dreams and a part of the solution to the problems created by my species. It is not a weakness to be sensitive to the brass and metal of my kind. It is a kindness to restore balance. I am the hippy that has aged and gazed into the mirror of the past, but in this present life, I am the aged human looking out of child eyes and finding a friend in the endangered wild...there is a mirror in the eye of the tiger.
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