Wafting scents of wild creeping oregano, slightly crushed by the light, small feet of the young girl as she walked on that narrow packed-dirt trail, gently spotted in dew, in the early hours.

School-bound but free—in nature—of the emotional constraints of her home, the girl dreams and dances. Shoes in her hands, stepping lightly towards the two-room school she attends for her second-grade year, she smiles at all that the world she sees offers.

Freedom is a treasure.

Her few years have been dominated by boundaries—the transparent plastic sheath that provided her oxygen, salvation, life itself. The irrational expectations she experienced at home, expectations that a little one could not grasp nor achieve. They were high above the reach of her young, short arm and well above the comprehension of her innocent love.

In the hospital, she had learned, and knew well, how to quietly follow the instructions, how to offer her young arm, or feet, to those that had knowledge of the secrets that kept her alive. Through the needles, the dripping crackling bags of fluid, the bitter taste on her tongue and the calming song-swish of pure air. Following the directives was life giving. She knew these allowed her to go home, sometimes.

Home, a place of fewer constraints, but more uncertainty, more loneliness, but no physical pain.

From her earliest days, she had observed closely all she could see and hear. Be it human or winged or four legged, through observation she was entertained, and found joy. At a young age, she learned to read without instruction, a gift that transferred her to the places and peaceful lands she couldn’t presently be at. It set her on paths that offered her calm.

So many days had been spent alone, inside the tent, isolated.

Her mom was at home caring for the family’s three younger children. Her father had to take the family’s single car to work long hours setting up radio station antennas, building transmission lines, and keeping the family financially afloat—medical bills and all.

Their occasional visits to the hospital brought smiles but not warmth. The time was spent in conversations with other adults—doctors, nurses, caregivers—gathering information about their daughter.

The hugs and kisses, the focused time that she yearned for, were all unavailable to the young soul that had not learned to voice her needs.

Years passed. She turned seven. A job transfer brought the growing family to the mountains of this beautiful island. The mountains brought a change of pace and more stable emotions at home. Cleaner air gave her reprieve from the tightening of lungs and the fight to breathe.

She spent a delicious year spent roaming the woods, following the small trails left behind by animals or perhaps other people. It could be hard to tell. Oh, the giddy laughter at chicken eggs found under logs, the delight at fruit trees to climb, the privilege of plucking their sweet offerings to be enjoyed right there in the heights of the tree.

She savored the freedom to discover a little girl’s world, to actually live the dreams conjured through her many books, to follow the fancies of her constant internal conversations. It was all her active imagination could have hoped for.

Two of her siblings always followed, one fearful, one a comrade. One growing with her, sinking deep roots into rich soil—roots that still live in treasured friendship.

This year she gloried in barefoot walks and runs, crushing aromatic wild herbs with each step, feeling cool dew drops on toes that relished the wet soil. She experienced freedom from constraints, from masks and tents, from needles and stagnating on a bed. Freedom from emergency rooms, ambulances, sirens, gurneys speeding down hallways. Freedom from warm washcloth baths given by strangers, exposing all that one needs to protect.

This year anchored her in a love for the outdoors, for nature, for unconstrained laughter, for freedom of spirit and soul.

It allowed her to develop a lifelong relationship with a trusting and trusted brother, a gift she still treasures; it taught that she, also, could find a sense of belonging with those she loved most.

Her reading had finally burst into her reality. What bliss she lived during that time!

This year in the mountains brought enchanted days to a lonely girl, a child who discovered nature and outdoors, scents and feels, skies and birds.

These gifts she treasured in her heart; there she stored these immeasurable riches. Her heart, a vault to be opened later, as needed, in the years to come.

She would often ponder early dew-dazzled mornings, walking that narrow, worn down path, crushing the tiny white flowers of the wild oregano. In these musings, she found freedom, security, and a joy that allowed her to trust the narrative of her life, to draw deeply from its untainted peace repeatedly throughout the many years to come. 

The year on the mountains of this beautiful island was just that, a year. Soon another job transfer, a move to the inner city, confined her among people living so close to each other that eyes could be felt on her with every step she dared to take outside.

She lived within cement block walls that started to feel as constraining as the oxygen tents of her younger years. She spent much time indoors, her first chance to fully live with others, and experienced the realization that she was still alone—separated from and misunderstood by those she still yearned to be held by.

The girl endured overcrowded classrooms led by stress-driven adults, that freely–and publicly–voiced displeasure at her lack of social skills, at her dress and presentation, at her silence. Rigid rules enforced at home required her and her siblings to dress in full coverage with donated elderly women’s clothes. What was beautiful in their innocent eyes rapidly became the laughingstock of so many. She didn’t understand; she didn’t know better.

She mentally retreated into the familiar safety of a plastic tent, where pure oxygen let her breathe calmly, and from there withdrew farther to the dewy paths, the wild oregano, the welcoming fruit trees.

These years in the inner city of a big metropolis brought many more hospital stays, nights in emergency rooms, long ambulance rides to places were a bed could be found. The tents were gone, no longer used. What would she give to be in one again. The cannula that now pinched her nostrils, the oxygen mask, allowed for less freedom than her former and familiar tents.

Emotions and fears unknown to her crept in as her age moved rapidly into double digits. She began to experience those dreaded body changes, was subjected to learning the nuances of self-protection.

She created invisible walls around her. Walls that stabilized her and gave her life. Walls sheltering her heart and soul from feeling pain, allowing her to once again walk the soft, dewy earth filled with fresh scents, to recreate the pleasure of finding nature’s gifts, to experience joy, calm and peace even within the confines of a stressful situation, unavailable adults, and their unreachable expectations and demands.

Her weeks at home, amidst the many more in the hospitals, had her reading more, locking herself away from requirements she could never meet.

Yet pleasant weather found her hesitantly stepping into her home’s small back yard. She did appropriate a square foot of it and planted herbs—oregano and mint—life-long friends to be her companions while she talked and dreamt. Ah, so many hours spent in their company. There were a place of rest, girding her unstable ground, freeing her from tiptoeing on eggshells within the confines of her home.

She did grow up, as we all do. Outwardly overcoming, she was ever finding ways to stay connected to the freedom and peace that the year of nature gave to her.

Slowly she learned acceptable ways to dress and speak and present herself that would not attract verbal attacks, non-verbal reactions. As one who had been shaped through staying quiet and observing others, she saw and understood raised eyebrows, pointed silence, and rolled eyes; she recognized them as a few of the many ways others can display disapproval, invalidation, dismissal. 

Instead of freely walking barefoot, breathing pleasing herbs, she learned to tread carefully in those oxygen-sapping environments she found herself in—environments in which quietly submitting as she used to do by offering her arm or foot for the needle to find a vein was again the way to survive. But there was always that path within her heart, that place of calm that soothed her soul.

She has always desired to live in a way that imparts to others the joy and peace and freedom given to her that year. She longs to share the security of a cool ground overgrown in beauty, of strong trees able to hold her weight and the weight of those she intensely loves, the sweetness of many fruits.

Were her children able to see and taste these through her? Or did they only feel the walls? Were there openings large enough for them to touch each other’s lives?

Her success at this has been minimal, she believes, as she can see the remnants of that oxygen tent when she carefully looks around her, still protecting her in alienating ways, silently.  She painfully regrets having those threads of the isolation tent circling her life to this day.

Ah, in this quarantine time the world finds itself in, she has been given time, and space, so much space, for pulling and tossing those threads with her scarred arms—mending, creating apertures, paths of joy, peace to freely walk towards the dew where her heart’s treasures are. To bridge both lives into one beautiful land.

She desires that what others remember about her is the joy-filled little girl’s heart that skipped through the life-giving dewy woods, full of dreams and laughter, rather than remembering her as one securing the walls she was forced to create in the ordained narrative of her life. 

All people encounter tripping rocks, hurtful words, the insecurity of no protection, and the minimizing of a soul’s beauty.

So her wish for her own soul, for her children, for her friends all around her, is that they treasure a desire to seek and find the path of rest. She longs for them to learn the plethora of ways, simple and intricate, to keep on it, securely at peace.

A heart, freely at peace, smiling, unencumbered, brimming with purity is a gift everyone searches for and, I hope, finds.

May our feet follow the dewy, herb-scented paths to a place of laughter and rest, pure air and clean hearts.