Tyanne Sometimes

I am

I am the Sun

I can be harnessed

for your own 

but you can never 

keep me 

from radiating

I am the workhorse

I will sweat and writhe

do your bidding if you are worthy

and if you aren’t 

I will buck you

right off

I am the phoenix

I will rise 

from the ashes of my own creation

when I’ve burned 

everything

down I am the canary

I will show you the fumes 

of your own destruction

before you burn

everything

down I am the mermaid

I will twist from the grasp

you held too tight

I will vanish in the waves

gone before 

stunned eyes

Western red cedar boils on the stove, releasing her healing magic into the air.  It has been too dry here and a hacking cough has started.  Your throat is raw just from the act of breathing in and out again and again. Raw from the feelings you haven’t let yourself feel through to completion.  Raw from the words you haven’t said.

Rain begins to drip down slowly then comes in waves, pounding wildly on the roof. Splashing on the windows lulls you into a different space.  Cedar and rain are washing insides out.  They drain the resistance from you and leave you bare, vulnerable, open.

when shattered pieces

keep you 

from flying again 

into the calm of wild seas

they shimmer there 

languishing exposed

in each harsh sunray

when eyes can do nothing now

but watch clouds pass

from rock bottom of that well

black into azure and startling white

they blink back tears

burning with the memories

of wide open fields

 when heart suddenly dwells

on the outside 

beyond bone walls

where no harness exists

it flickers there

stuttering in exposed panic

with shallow breath

when each cell turns

twisted insides out

contents spilling

flooding swiftly away

they writhe in fearful question

quivering into the void

of empty spaces

before

flesh knits together anew

or eye sees the truth of that sky

before

heart thrums with birth-right abandon

or cells fill in with light of that love

within each breath

and into 

every 

single molecule

you must

whisper 

yes

The catalyst caught me by surprise, as catalysts are often wont to do.  He looked one way but felt another completely and the chain reaction ignited with the first touch.  My breath caught and his eyes widened as he sensed me feeling him on the most intimate of levels.  Our connection was one of those that shakes you to your core.  The way déjà vu feels when it catches your body, twisting you around yourself, catapulting you through time. Future and past colliding right here in the present.  

The message swept across my cells and I grasped the potential our souls could reach if we were both in our bravest states.  But he wasn’t, and I was alone again on that journey.  At least that was the first story I told myself – that I’m abandoned again.  All that burgeoning potential receded back into the place of waiting and wanting.  

Losing myself in the forest was the only way I could escape the sadness and disappointment. There in the shadows, the trees whispered that this was the way.  My hands stretched out, reached for them and I was suddenly attuned to their voices.  They have always been talking but I was never on their frequency, their wisdom lost amidst the chaos of my thoughts.  Finally, the hypothetical transformed into knowing.

The forests speak quietly at first, so low that you can’t even sense the vibrations.  As you return again and again, your committed presence is recognized and they begin to gift you more.   They know to ease you in, the way the sun eases you slowly into the day.  The sun recognizes its own potential for damage if it shone down suddenly. If it never gave warning, its daggers would explode into your optic nerve, making you retreat back down toward the darkness. So the sun knows to send beacons of light past the horizon giving gentle alerts that it will be soon rising in all its devastating heat and brilliance.  Not all the elements know to go this slow.  

Without warning, his fire burned me inside out. No one else had shone that whitehot or been able to send light rays straight through me.  Maybe he couldn’t help it, couldn’t control it.  Or maybe I could simply see right into him and there was no way to look away from that flame.

Tiny, trapped seeds of the magnificent Ponderosa must meet flame in order to explode open to the elements.  They can lay there in waiting for decades, needing one simple thing.  When finally exposed to light, the wind and rain, those vulnerable seeds can’t help but to reach out and grow into everything they are meant to be. Dormant, waiting for so long, maybe I needed his fire to release me and leave me exposed.  

Among the trees I finally knew intimately this most natural of processes- that the forest relies on flames to clear and to release. To make way for what is next.  And I suddenly understood something else as well. Fire must move on or it dies. It has to go or it will run out of fuel and flicker into nothingness.