Dear friends,
You may have missed this, but one of my sons and his wife just adopted four siblings into their already-three-sibling family. No pictures or names yet, as they are required to foster first. And yet, we are all calling each other “forever family” already. They call me “Kiki” and have been learning a little of our family history, including about the man (ahem, legend) we call “Chief.”
Last weekend, the youngest—who is a delightful, spunky three-year-old, sat on my lap and said out of the blue, “Kiki, I want to be a…. bird.”
Me too, sweet girl, me too.
My version of birding, a pastime that has inexplicably become cool, is to put out a few seeds and dried mealworms in my backyard and just watch. I don’t want to know much; but I do want to experience the birds. And, like my newest, youngest grandchild, I kind of want to be one.
Now, this anthropomorphic wish to escape human life could be—is, in some way—a luxury not everyone can afford. If privilege is “the ability to walk away,” it can also be the ability to look away, to pretend that what hurts others but leaves me unscathed doesn’t exist. A kind of complicit naivete or ignorance. I get that. I really do.
But I also believe privilege means we “sit in the shade of trees we did not plant,” and therefore we can and should leverage our privilege by sharing the shade. Or, to use my original metaphor:
Everyone needs a moment to be a bird.
What if we figured out a way to impart those moments to others? Yes, human life is heavy and full of grief, especially if we take it all in unflinchingly and even more especially if we were the ones born in places of war and violence and profound unwelcome.
I’m not advocating for escaping any of the truth of the human condition or the worst of human suffering. All I’m saying is that if you know how to take momentary escapes (I think we call that self-care these days), why not share that with those for whom self-survival precludes self-care?
I write this just an hour before I’ll leave my house for our quarterly Coffee Summit, a night normally devoted to training with our entire staff and trainees at Refuge, a night that this time will be instead devoted to dinner and bowling!!
For a few hours, we will become playful kids who will, I hope, forget the life that often leaves us stressed, traumatized, hurt, and anxious. The heavy, earthbound life. For just a while, we’ll be birds.
Taking flight,
Kitti
P.S. – I have friends who paint! See Bluebird by Lynel and Mourning Doves by Liz below.
