When the land calls,
it may start as a faint whisper on the wind
or a rumbling in your ancestral bones
arousing a memory of our collective past
as earth-based people who have always known
ourselves through place.
If unanswered, the call may pick up.
A grating throb in your chest;
an unplaceable grief for something lost;
an unspeakable yearning for something else;
an unshakeable commitment to something more.
The discrepancy between
what is and what can be
is truly maddening:
the claustrophobia of staying
too long in an outgrown skin;
the sorrow of silencing oneself
when life is meant to be sung;
the strain of believing
love must be earned
when it infuses everything.
Yet it is precisely this gap
between what is and what can be
that emboldens us to cross the sacred threshold:
to walk into the wilderness alone,
to make our amends,
to return to the soil,
to utter our truest vows,
to pray for vision.
Remember this:
Even on the longest night
alone on the mountain,
you are never alone.
For the earth welcomes you
as a child of creation
returning home.
And through the sincerity of your longing,
the chasm of uncertainty you straddle
forms you into a stepping stone
between a people lost and a pathway found.