Context: Sometime in the autumn season. It is a sunny weekend afternoon, cold but pleasant. Ru and I are out for a walk. We are just wandering around. I ask him to notice the colours of the fallen leaves and the last few flowers of the season. A few people pass by walking their dogs.
We stop at a bench for a break. I park his stroller and both of us are sitting on the bench watching the world around us. I point out a pigeon pecking at the ground.

Me: Ru, look who is here.
Ru: (grinning) Kabutar! Kabutar! (Hindi word for “pigeon”)
Me: (teasing him, of course, my favourite thing to do!) Ru, tell me, who are you? Are you a kabutar who flies?
Ru: No mumma!
Me: Then you must be an animal like that dog (pointing to a dog passing by)?
Ru: (looks at me curiously almost figuring it out where this conversation is headed!) No mumma
Me: (enjoying this conversation!) Then tell me, are you a tree?
Ru: (grinning) No!
Me: What about that? (pointing at a small dahlia flower nestled in the grass), are you a flower?
Ru: (perhaps fed up with this game but showing excitement!) Yes flower! (repeats with excitement as if he has figured it out!) flower mumma flower!
Me: (laughing) O really, and what flower are you?
Ru: (without any pause, laughingly) Mumma’s flower!
Me: (utterly amazed and cuddling him up!) Ru, I know what you are, you are a charmer!
Both of us continue laughing!

What seems to be a simple, almost foundational question of your identity— who are you?— reaches far beyond names and groups of different life forms, and the roles we play with and within these forms.
It touches on what your roots are, what you imagine yourself to be, how you grow through experience, and who you keep becoming through your actions, aspirations and desires. Ru’s desire to be called mumma’s flower reflects and embodies a fundamental truth for most living beings on this planet— the need to belong, to discover your roots and branch out, to bloom, while somehow sustaining the changing seasons and embracing the fact that someday you will wither and fade…perhaps to bloom again, somehow.
And as we traverse through the changing seasons, the act of discovering and becoming who you are feels much like a tiny flower in the vast green field—branching upward and outward, trying to catch the light, yet rooted, still somewhat tucked into the familiar comfort of the soil.
Who are you? Isn’t it after all a delicate act of balancing? …the yearning to bloom, to make yourself seen, while keeping a piece of you rooted, protected, nestled, concealed or often, even masked…