Earth Bearer

The mind can’t remember without the body. When I’d walk into a room and forget what I came for, I'd have to retrace my steps.

There are no rooms anymore. Only paths.

I’m not too far gone from the path if my body remembers why I left it—and how to find my way back. If it weren’t for where I’ve chosen to be, I wouldn’t be able to collect memories like acorn tops or mulberries. Being lost no longer feels the same.

The desire path I’ve made, from my moss-cushion bed to my bathing pool, branches off like the trees around me. My body learns its shape each time I walk upon it. Sometimes the trees stand where I expect to step next, stubborn and stoic, but I’ve learned that going around builds an understanding between us. A respect. In that small negotiation, my shoulders loosen. My breath becomes something more entwined with the air. They act as a guide and a place to rest.

One of the paths leads towards an open field. It fades from chartreuse in the sunniest opening to emerald where the trees close in around it. In the distance, above the trees, I can see the tips of snowy mountaintops. I found this place nine sunsets ago—fourteen sunsets since my lilypad birth in the bathing pool. Without clocks, my body keeps time, through the sun’s movement, my hunger cues, and when my cycle begins and ends, like a quiet tide returning.

But what matters most about this field is not when the sun sees it, but when no one does.

When the moon rises, the field shifts. The greens deepen into a midnight lagoon, and everything slows down.

The world stops asking anything of me. Safety is here–in the absence of demand. In the way my body no longer feels the weight of being perceived. I sit on a stone and lift my feet out of the tickle of the grass, and I feel myself return to something I recognize.

Before I found this place, I would perch on a low-hanging branch above my bed and listen to the wildlife stir, deep within the brush, feeling protected by enclosure. I’d befriend a beetle, or draw flora into the dirt below me, building rituals so my body would not forget how to belong somewhere.

I used to think I would be consumed by darkness. Back then I wrote about it from a bedroom with a real mattress and a television glowing in the corner. I thought I would become a writer of beginnings and endings. But I’ve realized that version of me was trying to find comfort in loneliness, trying to name it before she became it.

Now I know belonging is not something that lives in my mind. It lives lower. In the weight of my arms when they finally stop tensing as I carry heavy wood. In the curve of my hips as they keep me afloat. In the padding of my feet adapting to sharp rubble and soft mud. It’s the slow agreement between body and ground.

This life has offered me a different form of scripture. It lets me write with my feet and tell stories with my eyes. If someone were to find this place after I am gone, they might read it in the shape of the path, in the bend of grass, in the places I chose to linger. Not as words, but as a body learning where it could finally stop flinching.

And as I sit on the stone in the open field, I grow drowsy. How strange, to feel so safe that sleep arrives uninvited. The silence hums like a lullaby my mother would sing to me. A fawn might step out from the trees and press its sandy nose to my shoulder, or a wolf might howl from somewhere I have not walked yet. I might respond, not as something separate from them, but as something briefly unguarded.

I used to imagine myself as a princess, an actor in a play—a songbird. I’d spin about the house, in the basement, the backyard, the balcony. My muscles knew no constraint as my arms spread out into wings and I took up space.

I didn’t know what would come next, and how it would change things—I didn’t care to. And now, when no one is watching, I understand something simpler. All I have ever wanted is a body that does not have to defend itself against being alive.

I found a place to call home—and it feels right.