Wangari's Wise Mama

My mother told me that leopards would lurk in vegetation, their long tails draped across a narrow path in the forest...'If you are walking on the path and you see the leopard's tail', my mother said, 'be careful not to step on it. Instead, as you keep on walking, tell the leopard, You and I are both leopards so why would we disagree?' (from Unbound, a memoir by Wangari Maathai. “Wangari” translates as the possessive form of the leopard). I would love to teach you as wisely as Wangari's mother whose daughter became a leading environmental and political activist and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her contributions to sustainable development. But no doubt my advice will not come packaged up in the slow and lovely English of anglophone Africa and extinctions are, these days (or hours : }, much more common than the likelihood of walking over a leopard's tail even in Kenya's central highlands. Last night after my after-dinner-siesta on the mahogany couch, I went upstairs to the roof. The sky was, unlike the previous night, dark and cloudy with a shifty half-moon. I searched the grey clouds for stars and found one. I kept looking because I know this little trick...if you keep looking for stars even when it looks like it might be too cloudy to see them, you will find them. I did find 3, 5, 6, 7...10 stars last night just by looking into the same sky that had at first look only hosted one. The same is true for finding other amazing things (beings) like frogs, beauty, angles from which to look at an issue, hope. If you look intentionally, you can find anything that you are truly looking for.