) 2004 Quietheart
Close your eyes. Feel your body in all of its exquisite detail chest heaving softly with the miracle of breathing arms and hands fingers and thumbs designed so perfectly for touching and feeling for knowing the world in a tactile sensory way
Legs created for the gift of travel made to allow you to explore the world to carry you from one breathless vista to another your feet and toes fashioned by the Universe to know the softness of autumn leaves and the roughness of windswept sandy beaches
Your consciousness a way to know not only your own life essence your own soul but a means for the long eons of life to finally express its own beauty in song and poemin dance and story in tears and joy you are all of life made conscious that it may know itself in a way never possible before.
You are no longer bound by the chains of time or space nor by the form your own body has chosen for this trip through the cycle of life Let your thoughts drift free like the breezes that kiss the breast of our Mother this cool windswept morning you are all things all places all times at once.
You are the acorn born of the passions of the spring quickened in the full long days of summer pulled from the fingertips of your mother tree by the August thunderstorm to fall softly upon a bed of blossoming asters and goldenrods. You are the fullness of tomorrow's dreams plump with the promise of new life as the leaves rain down upon you and the frost pulls a warm layer of humus over your body
You are the tentativeness of the first fragile taproot splitting the shell from the mast reaching downward searching for the ancient bonds of soil and water pushing upwards with the first tentative leaf that will someday transform the bright noon sun into shade dappled shadows. You are the very frailness of new life with all the possibilities that time and persistence may bestow.
Now transformed by time you are the subtle sapling long past the delicate seedling, full of the vigor and excitement of youth a youth that will last a hundred years, for what is time to an oak? It is the endless progression of the wheel of the year the call of spring chickadees and newborn squirrels the storm tossed winds of hot summer afternoons the rain of ripened acorns on an October day and the quiet stillness of new fallen snow.
You are the intricate roots of a century and a half of growth deeply intertwined with gravel carried south by the ice mountains ten millennia before the strong outstretched arms of branches reaching ever outward and upward for the kiss of the sun you are the touch of twig upon twig interlaced with the bodies of those who grow along side you root to root branch to brancha never ending dance of sensual belonging a thousand trees but only one grove.
You are the legacy of five centuries ancient and venerable your central bole twisted with the decades of growth your core hollow the dens of countless furred and feathered adorning your dying bodyfor even in your death you are life one part of an endless circle a line with no beginning and no end
You are the slowing rotting trunk of a once huge forest giant insect and fungus returning the centuries of sunlight and storm to rich soil so that once more the acorn may find its way downward to begin again the song that has been sung so many times in so many ways across a time that is not a time and a place that is not place.
Know as your mind and body merge in this moment, you are centeredthat you are one with all that is life and all that has ever lived.
Know now you are prepared for all that is about to happen