It’s a funny thing, to let it all go. From the depths of my body, the immense shaking, tears flowed out of me like unstoppable wellsprings. They were the darkness, but they were also the lightening of the load. What had I been hanging on to for so long? Looking out across the forested hills, aspens and pines poking through the mist, long blankets of gray folded in among their extended green arms, I wanted to be hugged in that moment. I wanted to hide within those woodlands, muted in the details of something I wouldn’t be able to express more than through my breath. I wanted to be lost in it, the wordless place where I could be enough by just being myself. 

Instead I rushed down from the elevation, forgetting to take my time because I was too tired, moving afraid of how long it would take to hear the answers to the questions I was asking. I wanted to get back to what I knew. And now I am here, sea level, back in the routine, yet outside of the space I thought I knew. The body of my body, the expanse and the unknown, they were all available to me when I was within the mountains, dipping into cold clear lakes that held up the clouds and mirrored the bright sky. I was scared in the shortness of breath, thinking of what I was supposed to be giving back to earth through who I was. I was afraid of letting go into that discomfort because I didn’t want to lose myself in not knowing. There was nothing to catch me except for myself and I realized I had forgotten how to trust. I had forgotten how to be okay in figuring it out. Where do those answers live and if they are hermetic, can I stay within those caves while my soul travels free?

Back home, in these spaces of in-between, it would be a pity to give up on this inquiry now, just to go back to what is safe. I had spent so much time undoing what I had learned, spent enough time digging up the dirt, feeling it along my fingers, trying to get out of my head and into my hands. Unearthing what I thought I knew to find I know nothing at all, how do I give myself the space and time to relax into the discomfort? How do I give myself the chance to reconsider the parts of me I thought were foundational, while realizing how much time I spend doing something that doesn’t make me feel like I am home?

The questions are to be pondered, ones to give myself time for. What else can I do but listen more intently and slow down? There have been too many excuses for not doing what is meant to be done: the voice has been whispering, now brought out from the noise, and is echoing through the woods. It is enough to drive me wild, this wondering about how I’ve let myself be lost in the forests of someone else’s making. I’ve forgotten what’s within, leaving myself on the outskirts, tending to the forests I’ve come to see as owned by someone else. Among the trees, finding spots of sunlight through the canopy, warmed by my own breath now, what is being said by the small voice within?