Today I had the opportunity to describe on of my very first "I-swear-to-god-I-did-not-make-this-up" moments, and realized it was the perfect kind of story/morality lesson to go into this kind of thing.
This is one of my crazy stories that I don't actually get to talk about much, because it isn't the kind of thing that comes up naturally often, and it is also one of the most unbelievable, in my opinion, experiences I have EVER had.
So, for the back story:
When I was a small child I was SUPER into conservationism and was honestly probably headed down the road to becoming one of those super-douche vegans that chews out new assholes for people who eat too much meat. I mean, I had moved from Boulder, CO, to the conservative deep south before starting elementary school. I have no question as to where I got that neo-hyppie BS I was spouting. But damn, I was annoying about it, I am sure. Thinking back, I'm amazed I wasn't backhanded for being such a twat waffle about it at the time to my poor Southern teachers who just wanted to be left to their conservative ideologies without some prattling 9 year old explaining to them repetitively about how horrible they were for not being vehemently against the logging industry. On top of that, I was always that ringleader child instigating shit, but never really getting into trouble for it, and I'm not really sure how. I only remember two major instances now, but I know there were more I was directly responsible for.
For the first one I had to be in like 2rd grade or so, and it was PE day. That school was heavily influenced by the military, like all but a handful of my schools were, and so we always had to run a mile before we could do whatever we wanted, be it during PE or recess. I had already ran my mile, and so had my friends, and somehow, some way only ethereal deities know how, I managed to convince like 5 other girls to grab hula hoops with me and stomp around in a circle waving the damn things around our heads or like old school drum majors with giant batons while chanting "WE ARE MOTHER NATURE'S DAUGHTERS" at the top of our fucking lungs. After 15-20 minutes of this, the poor PE teacher, who I remember as an apple shaped, fairly butch woman with a bowl haircut (almost your stereotypical Hollywood PE teacher) called me--just me--over to her. She wasn't stupid. She knew it was all me that started that mess. All she did was curtly tell me to stop because I had given her a headache.
Then in 4th grade, right after my school got uniforms, I started exploring the edge of our schools campus. It was heavily bushed, all brambly and dense and I loved it. I also had a fucking psychotic obsession with tree sap...if I remember correctly I was legitimately convinced I could somehow turn it into amber. I guess I thought I could do it with my mind if I thought hard enough or something, basic geology be damned. So I would go into the wooded area and collect sap, by myself at first, because that isn't weird at all, no. I would fill up my pockets with it, and take it home to my sap collection. At home I made a snake with some of it. And some other random weirdly molded pieces of "art" I was convinced would turn into cool amber sculptures somehow. I remember one time I forgot to take the sap out of my pocket and my mother washed my wool, school-uniform-approved sweater and was so livid that I wrecked my only sweater that I could wear to school. The sap sealed the pocket shut and I was so pissed that I couldn't keep collecting sap with it. But anyway, after a couple weeks of just me oddly wandering off into the pine trees, I somehow managed to convince one other kid it was cool to come check out the pines and collect their sap. Then another. Then like three more. And we would play in the paths in the bramble. Eventually I had this entire fucking posse of like 15 other children of various grades that followed me around like some sort of woodland messiah. I remember talking to all of them, my weird little disciples, while standing up in this almost room-sized space in the bramble that we always met at. I was standing and talking some nature-y shit and they were all sitting around me receiving my conservationist teachings.
I got into a piss-load of trouble for that one. But not as much as I probably should have. It was very carefully explained to me why it was fucking moronic for me to lead essentially a classroom's worth of students off into the bramble in the shitty neighborhood we lived in. Whoopsie....My B. I think why I didn't get into more, and more real, trouble was because I was the star pupil of the school. The school administration probably realized that while I was fucking stellar in all that academic crap, my common sense side was in need of a helmet.
But anyway, clearly, on a scale of one to crazy hyppie, I was a solid Luna Lovegood. So this is why I think it is so crazy that I did not become a rabid vegan, running away from meat and attacking anyone that does eat it.
Instead, around the end of forth grade, beginning of fifth grade, I had what is arguably the absolute most fucking unbelievable moment of my entire life.
I was taking out the trash as one of my after-school chores. The trash bin was on the left side of our house, and on that side of the house the property line was lined with holly bushes. I had just put the bag in the bin and was walking back inside and heard this crazy commotion from behind me. I turned around to see this bright red cardinal flying as fast as it could away from some kind of medium sized hawk. The cardinal dove into the holly bushes, trying to throw the hawk off of it, but that plan backfired. The holly actually slowed the cardinal down more than the hawk, and as they both emerged from the holly bushes, about 2-3 feet in front of me, the hawk caught the cardinal in its talons. The hawk essentially used the cardinal like a skateboard to land: one claw wrapped around the cardinal's chest, and one around its neck. As it landed on the ground, the poor cardinal started just screaming these awful death and terror filled shrieks. But I was captivated by the hawk. It looked me dead in the eye as it choked out the cardinal, rocking back and forth on the cardinal's body, while not giving a single fuck that I was standing there.
It was the most zen moment of my life. I don't remember actively thinking anything. I actually remember almost hearing a disembodied voice be like "This is the circle of life. Deal with it" as the hawk stared into my soul. Seriously, I have never had that kind of eye contact with another living being since then. That event made me come to the conclusion that it was okay to eat meat. I had actually been contemplating vegetarianism at the time even.
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