Aging Party Girl can learn better

Rayelan, also known as Aging Party Girl, is annoying because the accent she touts, the product of attempts on the part of her family to relieve her of her speech disability, still deceives people into believing there is something behind the face besides the culture into which she was born.

Other children can be cruel, we all know this.

Did she once tell me that her classmates referred to her as 'ChickenCoopGirl,” because her family lived in a chicken coop for a time when she was small?

And certainly she has many unique memories of your young girlhood. For instance, living with her grandparents and at age four being sent out to make sure the cows were able to break through the water in the trough and drink. Little hands can get cold and shivery. But families expect their children to work. Mine expected that. And my father was carrying camera equipment up the back of Half Dome for his father when he was eight. That is quite a climb for even a healthy adult, but Father thought nothing of it.

Grandfather in 1926 with his microscopic motion picture camera

When he first spent the summer in Yosemite, that would be 1913, he was afraid of heights. But his father taught him something magical which had sustained him at the dizzy height of 10,000 feet when his aerial balloon broke loose at the end of a day of filming the rebuilding of San Francisco on October 31, 1909. You can read the stories here.

As Grandfather looked down, shivering with fear and cold, he later told Father he felt all of his dread drain out of him as he heard the silence behind the wind. It filled him, calmed him, brought him to see himself differently and it was then he felt in himself the desire to take the new technology of photography and ensure it was, for all time, securely in the hands of the people as a tool for truth and understanding of the world around us. Take a look at the film, Extending Human Vision and learn more about Arthur C. Pillsbury, someone I honor and love.

What we are left by those who come before is different for each of us. But this story was one Father shared with me when I was very young and it has sustained me over and over again throughout my life.

I was blessed with parents who taught through their own choices and values. I believe this is the greatest legacy any of us can have.

Rayelan's legacy from her parents is clearly different. She was a child living in a culture which shaped her but for which she was not responsible. But she was blessed with a mother who was filled with love for her children, even if her father left much to be desired.

If she decided to live in her own truth there is much there to teach her and bring fulfillment. Let's hope she does that. 

Steps on the path to a destination we cannot see but which draws us on to a better world.