When I was six years old, my mom signed me up for a ballet class.  I don’t think it was my first foray into ballet.  I think another girl I knew had joined so I decided I wanted to go too.  I remember being filled with trepidation and excitement.  I had donned my pink leotard and placed each bobby pin just so.  I was a very meticulous child.  I learned to dress myself before I could walk and I French braided my own hair in primary school.  I think I learned things quickly so I felt like I could control them; as long as I knew the rules, life was safe and predictable.  Or so I thought.  The first day of dance class brought with it one of life’s hard lessons, one I’ll never forget.  Apparently my attention to detail was nothing more than a misguided attempt at fitting in, so you can imagine my dismay when I showed up to a class full of Chinese girls in blue leotards.  They were tall, lean and graceful; I was short, pink and far too focused on what I looked like to pay any attention to what I was supposed to be doing.  You see, the lesson I learned was not that one must phone ahead to get the dress code (though it might be recommended), it’s that fitting in is an effect of showing up, not the other way around.  Often we’re so scared of not fitting in, that we avoid or even stay away from situations we’d really like to be.  Unfortunately, had I known ahead of time that I was going to be the pink flamingo flailing around in a sea of swans, I probably wouldn’t have shown up at all.  Sometimes it’s better not to do too much research.  You run the risk of scaring yourself out of doing it altogether or building enough intellectual knowledge that you tell yourself you don’t need the actual experience because you already know it.

i also made sure my brother was always in style

Despite how traumatized I was showing up to a ballet class in pink, and despite developing an oversensitivity to wearing the right outfit, I’m happy I can look back on those experiences and see how much I’ve grown.  How could I have known better?  How can we ever truly know?  It’s what makes life interesting and exciting; it’s what allows us to see ourselves – who we are and who we are not.  When I was little, I didn’t know I was separate from my pink tutu, that I wasn’t defined by my pink tutu, that it wasn’t my identity.  Now I can see very clearly, it was just a pink tutu, and I feel compassion for those moments of distress.  It’s funny actually, I also remember making paper mache pigs in first grade.  We covered balloons in newspaper and glue, used egg cartons for ears and pipe cleaner for a tail.  I remember taking great pains to evenly paint a thick pink coat, to get the ears perfectly glued, and his eyes looking in the right direction.  At one point during this process, I looked over, probably remembering I hadn’t recently absorbed oxygen, and saw that one of my classmates had painted her pig blue.  BLUE!  I experienced the same shock and horror as I did that first day of ballet, only this day it was projectively through my friend.  Didn’t she know pigs were supposed to be pink?  I hadn’t even considered venturing beyond my experience of what I knew to be true.  I had been afraid of what might happen if I didn’t color inside the lines, it was unknown territory, but after looking at her bright blue creation, I was envious.  I, too, would like to have painted a pig blue.  Probably that particular friend would have shown up to ballet in her underwear and been fine with it, that was just how she was.  Being older now, I have different rules and hopefully have grown out of the most limiting of perceptual boundaries.  But the reality is, I wouldn’t know.  I still color in the lines as I perceive them and anything outside is slightly dim in comparison, yet to be illuminated.  In many ways, that’s how I see the world.  Like a coloring book where I create the lines and I fill in the colors – using as many or as few as I want, as vibrant or as dull.  I can either remain inside, or I can step over the line to see what’s on the other side.  Perhaps in doing so, I will see there is a bigger picture to be filled.

Growing up, my mom, my brother and I took many a road trip to visit family in the mystical mountains of British Columbia.  My mom was raised in a tiny, Bavarian-themed ski town about ten or eleven hours east of Vancouver, and it served as our holiday destination during nearly every school break.  It’s where I first learned to snowboard, first learned how to play drinking games at the local pub, and where I watched my cousins be born, become kids, and grow into little adults.  It’s a special place for me, with special people, but just as the destination holds a treasured place in my heart, so does the journey.  I still relish in the memories I created on those drives, stopping at fresh fruit stands, playing word games, trying to memorize the towns along the way, and even sometimes stopping half way to stay in a humid hotel room with a rattling air conditioner.  There was rarely a trip when we didn’t spot a soaring bald eagle overheard, or a regal hawk watching over us.  We saw deer and other wildlife as well, but the birds were especially precious to me.

Somewhere in her life, my mom developed a special appreciation and affection for Native American culture; in Canada, the First Nations.  I’m not sure exactly why, perhaps it was the time she spent teaching school children on a Native Reserve, maybe some past life connection, or simply her love of humanity and nature that brought her close to their ancient spiritual beliefs.  Regardless, it was a reverence she instilled in us, and an experience of awe we share.  By the time I was born, my mother’s brother and father had both passed away, my only relationship with them consisting of familiar stories and photographs.  But whenever we saw an eagle soaring proudly over our puttering sedan, my mom would sigh, teary eyed.  She would share her thoughts through an emotional smile, “There’s my dad, looking after us.”  I believed her every time.  To this day, I think of her every time I see an eagle, and I feel safe, connected.  I think of her long lost relatives watching over me, protecting me.  When I was seven, my grandmother passed away.  Since then, every hawk I see evokes the same feeling of interconnectedness.  I don’t know why my mom shared this with us; if she hoped to inspire awe or simply share her own experience.  I don’t even know if it comes from any Native tradition.  But after all these years, it is a gift for which I am eternally grateful.  It’s a reminder that we’re connected to everything, that freedom lives within us, as does the history of every being that came before.  Life is full of these experiences, if we choose to see them.  Sometimes it just helps to have a little reminder.  Thanks mom.