Enough

A few weeks ago I found myself holding a wing feather from a hawk marveling at how lucky this piece of keratin was, of all the things in the universe it could be, to end up as a feather for a hawk. What sights and astonishing heights it must have experienced. Did it bathe in a mountain lake? Skim the tops of hay fields as it came down for a catch? How wonderful to have had a short existence as a part of something as heavenly as that, when it could have been anything at all in this big world.

Days later the popular commercial, featuring teens and older being told to do something "like a girl" versus how a young girl did something "like a girl" went around and we all were reminded that women are powerful.

It'll be short lived though. The wow factor will fade out of our day to day routines and women everywhere will again be forcing on themselves the fact that they feel often as if they are not enough, and only worth what they can give out to make the people around them better.

I know this is true because I hear my friends. I see the blog posts that are quickly reposted that speak over and over again about how overwhelmed we are and how lacking we feel alone with ourselves at the end of every day.

What if someone looked at you at the end of your days, the way I thought about that feather, and considered how lucky your body was to be a part of who you were in this life. Not the minutes that make the hours that seem to ever more quickly spend the days. But the moments of things you used it for.

My hands have written the letters that put my father's name forever on the wall in Washington DC. They have wiped the tears of people I love, petted tigers, made handprints in concrete of the house I grew up in, fed baby kinkajous, and bled under the stress of work.

My hair has blown back in the wind from long gallops in the open and I've seen the mountains of Wyoming from the back of a horse. I swam with dolphins, wrote a eulogy, and thanked God for the beauty of a star filled night as equally as I have the sunrise.

I've created some things and destroyed others. I've been wind burned from the breezes off the ocean at the top of a lighthouse and cat-fished by a lakeside when it was too dark to see where the ground left the water. My name is carved into a tree.

I know the way music sounds when it's played live on a summer night, how to make my babies laugh, and how to give someone else love even when I have run out of it for myself. I breathed in again after my mother's last.

Fear has knocked me on my ass and my heart fought back.

I've ridden motorcycles on the dirt tracks, hung out backstage with the lead singer, and made meals that created joy and fed tiny growing bodies. I saw the twin towers from an airplane, wrecked a car, and ice skated with the boy I had a crush on. I've broken bones, needed stitches, and went back to work. I made a snow leopard enclosure shoulder to shoulder with a famed biologist who taught me everything.

My dog and I ran in the dirt of 7 states, a racehorse licked my face, and I've saved approximately fifty turtles from highway death. Once I taught a bird how to call the family dog to it's cage, stroked a deer, surprised a moose, and worked with snakes. Even though I never went to college, I ended up spending two years teaching at one.

I can autoclave surgical packs, tell when a dog is mentally incompetent, read bedtime stories with funny voices, and teach a green thoroughbred how to jump.

I know Shel Silverstein poems by heart and fart jokes that send ten year old boys into fits of laughter.

To offense of the ears in the vicinity I've played piano pieces to an audience and sang karaoke. My mother used to delight that I could call the seagulls from anywhere and butterflies would land on me. I've caught the wedding bouquet, danced until the DJ closed down as well as in the rain, and eaten scallops and shrimp I just pulled from the water.

I know how to make snow cream, where the fairies like to hide, and what salt tastes like on your lips on an ocean pier at 2 am. I can french braid little girls and ponies.

I'll lead you to a dozen mountain waterfalls, show you how to shoot an arrow true, and make you some fried cornbread. I know the patience of a mother who has had no sleep, gently trying to soothe a colicky baby, and the fragile state that comes from a broken heart.

I've buried friends, given birth, and cried when a song came on. I've been arrested (nothing major, settle down) and blessed by a priest. I have tattoos I've never regretted and of all the thousands of things I can see both sides to, I firmly believe there is more good than bad.

Never could I tie a good knot, walk away from a justified fight, drive a manual, or climb a tall ladder. I've also been fairly poor at controlling having my thoughts immediately spew out in the form of words.

Many times I've said no when I wanted to say yes and yes at times I wanted to say no.

I've wanted and lost and loved and had the wind knocked out of me. I've seen sunlight hit a baby's hair in such a way that God himself could not have looked more undeniably beautiful. Only twice have I had shooting stars go across the sky I watched and only once have I thought the world would be better off if I was no longer a part of it.

I've tried for things so fiercely I was in danger of full destruction if they did not work out and loved people so much that I tried to rein in my emotions until giving into it just being my way, embraced as a gift instead of seen as a fault.

All of this. All of these moments and things I have tried to recall to remind myself of that thing that so many of us find time to pick a fight with daily, I am enough. I am enough. I am enough.

I hope when the day comes that I am done, my body will be like that hawk feather, blessed to be a part of who I was.