silence

"In our Aboriginal way, we learn to listen from our earliest days. We learnt by watching and listening, waiting and then acting....There is no need to reflect too much and to do a lot of thinking. It is just being aware."

- Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann, an elder from the Nauiyu community in Australia, talking about dadirri, which in the Ngangikurungkurr language translates to 'inner, deep listening and quiet, still awareness'

- from Chapter 4 of Phosphorescence by Julia Baird

Today is my last day of this 8.5 year training path!! We made it!!!

What a crazy insane wild wild ride

I would totally reflect, and wax poetic about how monumental this moment is for me

But in truth I'm just thankful for 6 months of waking up after the sun has risen

And I'm excited for wherever this next chapter will start 

But beyond everything, I'm in genuine awe and insanely grateful 

My high school doesn't even exist anymore. People smoked weed in the bathrooms and two of my friends were sexually assaulted, we had three teenage pregnancies the year I graduated. Multiple lockdowns because of people bringing guns to school or sightings of people holding guns and walking around our school 

I hung out at my best friend Anna's house almost every day after school. Her apartment smelled like cigarette smoke and I barely ever saw her mom; her dad lived in a different state. It was just Anna and me and her cat and the music videos we tried to copy, the notebook we shared to document cute boys and what they said to us, her tall lanky brother popped his head in occasionally to tell us to shut up 

It was still better than some of my afternoons in my house, when my mom didn't talk to me and I felt like the only child on the planet 

No one would have ever thought that a kid from my school would be here

But here I am

And no one can take this from me