One morning I saw the most beautiful rainbow I had ever seen and that day became even more unusual when I was visited by a colourful and charming little bird. I had climbed the backyard wall in the terraced street of houses where we then lived. It was raining but despite that I wanted a better view of the rainbow whose vibrant colours lit up the sky and filled me with such joy that I hoped it would stay there forever. I was eight years old. My mother came out into the yard and called for me to come down before I caught cold. Just then, seemingly out of nowhere, a blue tit, a bird which I had only seen on a chart in school, landed on my sleeve and stayed there. For a long moment we looked at each other, this tiny, exquisitely coloured bird and I, and then, to my disappointment, it flew away. It had been only a few passing seconds but somehow it seemed that the bird and the rainbow were related in their significance. It was as if they had appeared for me alone on what was an otherwise gloomy, rain-filled day. I kept the memory of those moments alive in my mind.
That night, whilst I lay sleepless in bed, the images of the rainbow and the bird came back and they now assumed the aura of messengers. It would take me a long time to unravel the message they had been sent to give me but, in the darkness of my bedroom that night, I already felt that those images held an exciting promise, a tale of contact with natural-born creatures which would become part of my destiny. I knew that the only thing that I could do was to follow that blue tit, the harbinger of the way to follow, through the woods to where wildlife flourished, where I would learn from the birds and other wild creatures who dwelled free within the bounties that nature provided. It was as if the core of me was waking up: I knew I would have to strive hard to nurture this part of me that hadn’t yet matured, but it would lead me to the place I really belonged, possibly somewhere beautiful. But for now it was all simply the hint of a dream as yet undefined. I guessed that the bird was not likely to frequent our backyard ever again, and I never did see another brilliant rainbow over the wall. But nature had already delivered its message, which would lead me, over many years of questing, finally to Owl Cottage.