The day I met little Goodall and the Aleutian…

I thought I knew about land. It was the scenery where once I carried out biological studies and more recently, the environment that I described through my writing. But it was until that day when I heard, “the sound of a chimpanzee’s greeting epitomizes my child dream to go to Africa”, that a flashback was inevitable. Why did I decide to engage with land as a job? Precisely, because since I was a little girl I always wanted to know about it, the ants that crawled through and the plants that would beautiful grow from it. So armed with my unprofessional microscope and a digging stick, I collected grasshoppers, rocks, leaves, flowers and everything that would fit in my tiny lens just to be amazed by the structures that were not evident for the normal eye. Somehow the years took charge to dilute this vision, until that African dream statement. To be able to remember the land, the cloud forest and the near dormant volcano that inspired me to choose biology conservation as a career and later on environmental communication, was just overwhelming. Land taught me about curiosity and now about connection. “The mind can lie, but the heart never lies”, once I heard from an Aleutian. Now land is my inner child, the voice and wisdom of my ancestors, my hope for human kind, my consciousness. By the way, if you are wondering who little Goodall and the Aleutian are, well, I´m referring to Jane Goodall and Illion Marculieff.