a gathering of threads

The sky is pomegranate red at sunset.

A wayward cloud shaped like an arrow pierces the fruit and the juice drips secrets down into vessels, into valleys, into all the fields and oceans.

Clouds gather. Tides roll in. I watch from the shore, shifting with the sand, asking for my place in all of this.

The roots of trees respond to me:

Be honored. You are witness. You are watered by the storms you’ve weathered. You are lifted by the winds and you dance. You sing. You journey and return. You are pulsing, a complex system intertwining, yet a still and simple thing of nature. You are many things and many ways at many times and many places, and always through it all you are witness. There is nothing more precious you can be than that which you are.

I listen to the rustle of the wild blooms that sprout from my limbs and face and heart and everywhere, and I know that the roots speak true.

Not too much, for those wings you have are much too wide and eager to fly — but just enough to come home to.

holding your hand, small child still needing shelter from the sinking doubt

of later years and yet, memory fails me when i try

to recall what protection felt like; maybe i was never sheltered, not

in the way that feels safe — though certainly in the way that

feels smothering and hot, suffocating in a space too small, too filled

with useless material weight to encourage little wings to spread as wide

as the sky the eyes of the heart have always so loved

i don’t remember much that sends any warmth traveling through the core

just blankness, silent knowing that once i was a child and once

i had a childhood but that suddenly, time flew away and my

little wings could not keep up without room for them to unfold

and i do not know the self that i woke up missing

she swings inside a small house of time we found this evening

the clouds leak out the window; i am called to simplicity’s side

to live here, within this moment’s short shelter for a bit, appreciating

a space where everything takes care of itself for a change, and

The heart is a labyrinth, a tempest, a secret, a grove.

Small shoots greeting cool air for the first time, sharing space

with towering trees who don’t think twice about which way to turn

next. They are already home, right where they were born.

Oh, to possess that courage: to find freedom in staying, to grow

straight up to the heavens, to sprout defiantly, to claim however small

a space as your own, to live right in the middle of

listen: the moth and the moon both speak. they speak of flame and fluidity, of short lives lived long and curiously.

All of this charred woodland emptiness. Soon they will be clearings, a different sort of empty. The sort that is a promise.

Sprouting small wild things that will rise in days to come and invite creatures to claim sanctuary where before there was none.

And when the sun sets and beams fading light through the trees in slanted lines the empty spaces will look just like magic, a garden, a dream —

Sometimes I imagine that in the end, at the peak of the mountain, I shall enjoy only my own company,

quiet serenity. Gentle breeze stirring draping fabrics. A sunlit morning. Grecian blues and ivories. Shimmering azure valley down below.

Such quiescence that has swallowed me whole and taught me intimacy. Such grandiose melancholy that has also lent me my astonishing capacity for bliss —

Sometimes I imagine this is how I should like to end my story. Heartful and anticipatory, alone with my desires, in the most magnificent way. Dancing with the wind that skirts the clifftop until scattering into it, becoming