The duckling of the story is symbolic of the wild nature, which, when pressed into circumstances of little nurture, instinctively strives to continue no matter what.
~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes
I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. ~ Emily Dickinson
When you are revisiting the first five years of your life, it’s less about tangible facts, and more about implicit memories. The stories you feel in your body, real and imagined (both valuable). The felt sense, folded into your little soul, which has expanded over the decades. Maybe it’s your interpretation of the stories that were told to you about that time. And they land with a resounding ‘Yes!’ in your psyche. Yes, I felt this. Yes, I experienced this. And it is still living in me today, in various forms.
Sometimes I wonder if I have always been this steadfast, this persevering, this believing (come hell or highwater, I will optimistically believe in a better outcome!) My beginnings are wild. And my spirit matched the setting into which I was born, physically and metaphorically. The answer is yes. My mother says I was firm and spirited and sure from a young age. So determined, that my father interpreted it as rebellion, within the context of a strict religious container, and punished me for it. Punished me for expressing my surety that I am meant to be and thrive in this world. This caused me to question my self. That innate, bright, inquisitive spirit inverted, went back in on itself, and went into hiding for a time, for a decade, or rather two decades. I identify with the fairy tale of the Ugly duckling. At its root it is about belonging and not belonging. I belonged to the wild, natural world that I inhabited daily. But I did not belong to the oppressive religious community I found myself in. I would need to navigate my way out of this labyrinth, over time. To go out with lanterns, looking for myself (but that is a story for another time).
I am writing my first novel! In it, there is a scene where a young woman is camped out in the backwoods. It is her first experience in the wilderness, because she comes from a big city. She is alone. And at 3 am in the morning, under a sky full of stars, a bear shuffles through her campsite. There is this delicious fear. Fear, and simultaneous aliveness, that she does not feel in every day life. The fear in the natural world is cleaner than the fear in the human-derived world (filled with real and fabricated anxieties which compound any experience exponentially). My fear (and strange delight in) bears began when I was two years old.
Little Leah sat gleefully in the dirt and new spring grass. She was gazing intently at a robin who was prancing around on the ground in front of her. Her chubby knees were muddy, her floral print dress hiked up for better mobility, because she had been down on the ground rummaging among the wildflowers, berries and mushrooms for some time now. Her favourite pastime. This is what made her soul feel most alive. Suddenly, the air shifted. She sensed a large creature, not too far away. Just out of the corner of her periphery she saw something big and black, and heard a snuffling and grunting. Mom rushed out of the latchkey door, armed with pots and pans and started banging and yelling, to scare this intruder away. That one moment, before the fear set in, was sheer joy. Then little Leah raised her voice in yelps of fear and sobbing, to join in on the cacophony, and scare the bear away. It’s quite possible that the bear wasn’t going to eat her for breakfast. Black bears are generally shy of humans. He was more interested in the garbage pile. Mom grabbed little Leah and barricaded them both in the little shack (woefully unprepared to protect humans against such a creature), and eventually the bear ambled off, back into the forest.
Mother says, watch out for the bears,
when you are playing, make sure to sing aloud your gladness,
Fabulous encounter❤️