Helping Free the Caged Souls
Lifting a toast to my mother, from whom I inherited my love of animals, my fearless public-speaking skills, and my high-priestess vibes.
I have always responded with searing heartbreak, with intense soul-pain, when confronted with any individual, animal, or plant that is enslaved, caged, or in pain. I feel that pain. As a child, I remember saving the baby bunny or the baby bird. I remember moving the oak sapling that would have been mowed down and replanting it elsewhere, where it grew to over 20 feet tall. I am unable to stomach the idea of souls in chains or in cages. I seem to have inherited this from my mother. My mother was always an animal person to her core.
In 2008, I was directing and producing a documentary film called “A Permanent Mark: Agent Orange in America and Vietnam,” and I took my mother, a widow of a Vietnam Veteran who died from his exposure to Agent Orange decades in the past through his service, along with other veterans affected by Agent Orange, and my tiny film crew, to Vietnam to film scenes for the documentary.
I took the three main characters of the film – my mom, Ron Worstell, a veteran whose daughter had spina bifida as a result of his exposure, and Bob Reiter, a veteran with a grand-daughter suffering kidney disease because of this exposure, back to Vietnam to seek answers to their questions, to meet the people of Vietnam who were also suffering, and to put their issues to rest.
While on the 21-day trip, we traveled from the Mekong Delta and Ho Chi Minh City all the way across the country, the DMZ, all the way to Hanoi.
On a stop along the way, we visited a Buddhist temple. Outside the temple, a man had scores of small sparrows in two little cages. The tradition was that temple visitors would buy a bird to release as part of an offering upon their visit. My mother was so moved by the scene of all the birds crammed into the cage that she bought one whole cage, while a veteran bought the other cage. We entered the temple and sat on the floor while monks chanted and beat drums and prayed. The birds sat on the altar while this transpired.
At the end, we took the cages outside. My mother, whom I had not known to be so bold or such an impresario, gathered us all around and said a spontaneous prayer asking that the birds, about to be released, would fly free, taking all the pain in the hearts of everyone gathered around with them on their journey.
Then she opened the cage doors with help from the veterans. And the birds all swished out and away. It was breathtaking!
That was my Mummy! A mummy I had not seen before this transformative trip. And that’s when I realized just how much I had inherited from her.
When we feel a desire to see others fly free, we experience that part of ourselves that also longs to be free.