There are no words for

There are no words for what my heart sings to be
There is not a name for the living, striving, growing
In my chest and from my guts and rising up from the curl of my toes in the dirt
Not shaman but like it
Not priest but not unholy
Just the greens and golden sun through trees and the wild taste of springtime breezes, and the dark colors of tree bark that are neither brown nor gray exactly

There isn’t anything even left of me
Nowhere to mark me out and find me
I am only the breeze and the branches gently swaying against the sky
I am the fresh green of the grass
Where there is no center, nothing at the core to say here I am
Only a boundless freedom of living growing moving dying

No words or even hope of other
And when the longing calls out in me it is not to somewhere or something else
A rejoicing almost homesickness for right here, right now

I want to eat mushrooms again
And hear the breathing of the whole world with me
As the hillside makes me real, in its living and dying rumbling chest, a breath in, and out

Nowhere has my foot ever stepped
But only flowers parted and twigs snapped under the weight
Of calloused flesh and pressure moving
Down long dusty trails beneath improbably tall pines
All hushed in awe and then uproarious, as only lowland scrub forest can be
With sweat rolling down dirty mosquito bitten shins

And standing there vows pour forth unbidden
To be exactly all of this in service to all of this forever
Life living life, Life giving life

I knelt down once in the middle of the woods
Near a tree that had fallen and was rotting easily, without pressure of schedule or what next to do or be
And I prayed to every gentle spirit that would hear me
That I offered my heart in service to exactly this
The whole of Life
Crying out with sometimes words and sometimes stillness
Unsure if this was dedication or rite
But without gap, the whole of me, poured out
And seamless as I stood there was a moment
Where the world bent in an unexpected way
My chest broke open
My vision shifted whether in my head or from my eyes
And there was something that I do not have a name for
Something more than localizable to places real or unreal
But she, and it was she, was green and brown and sky-blue and purple and bright and dark and sunlight and deep bottomless dark water
And I said yes

 

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