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Hi ,
The story came up for me as I was trying to find my bearings after getting Covid last week. Although we recovered from the symptoms within a day or two, the fatigue that followed took some more time to bring us back to normality. Since I am in my last month of pregnancy, I lost two kilos, so this story brought a fresh perspective on life. I always find solace in nature to replenish my energies.
Once upon a time, there was a small boy called Malidoma Somé, who lived in a village in West Africa. When he was 5, Malidoma was taken away from his village by a priest and brought to a boarding school more than a hundred miles away.
He remained there for fifteen years of education, and he escaped at the age of nineteen and managed to find his way back to his village, where he was a stranger to his own people — unable to speak the language, uneducated in the ways of his tribe, and people stayed away from him because of his education and ability to read and write.
In a final attempt to reintroduce him to village life, the elders of the village sent him on a month-long retreat with a group of other village boys, most of them much younger than he.
Malidoma was asked to sit and watch a tree. He was wondering what the purpose was of such an activity. He thought to himself, there had to be more to it than staring at a tree, right? Then he became angry and felt like he was being humiliated, as he sat in the centre of the village.
But after some time, Malidoma began to speak to the tree. He poured his feelings of frustration out and apologized to the tree. He hugged the tree and felt like he was at home, in the arms of his mother. This experience started his respect for trees and nature, the first of a series of magical journeys.
Somé states that each person is born with a destiny, and he or she is given a name that reflects that destiny. Somé says his name, Malidoma, means "friend of the enemy/stranger." He believes it was his destiny to come to Western audiences and promote an understanding between Western and African cultures.
This is a true story of reconnecting with our roots, of connecting with a world not visible to the naked eye, and when we do connect we realise our true identity, so-called labels are simply a figment of our imagination - we are just a tiny speck of dust in space.
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