I am here

Breathing hard, careful not to take too much in and fan the flames but hold on to the out breath. To linger in the still absence of breath.

Tread, tread, tread down the forest path.

Burning eyes sinking beneath tears not released.

Keep walking. Walk it out. Breathe it out.

Trip over a root. Heart suddenly flooded, thumping, racing  fear of all those feelings finding me now, here, while I’m walking, what if someone saw me, saw me like this, crying? Panic rising, hot, fast, about to spill over and drown me.

Breathe again. Out, out, out. I follow the breath out. Out there in front of me. Into the cold air. There's more. Squeeze it out a few more feet, until I might pass out, all the way to the trees. Out into the trees that stand around my knotted mind and flooded heart. There they are there. Growing straight up into sky and deep down into earth.

And I hear it. Like a break in a dam and the draining away of all I can’t take. I hear it in my body as if spoken in a familiar language unheard for a lifetime: “I am here”.

Trunk to bone, standing one to standing one, I am in their presence. Big enough to take me as I am, to take it all away, to clean me of all I can’t carry.

This plant presence of life without eyes reaches past my fleshy emotions and touches the bones of me, my cave walls housing the space within. Animals have eyes and a beating heart that wants, but the rocks, the vast moors, the woodlands, the vein of a leaf, a fallen chestnut shell, the sound of rain on the leafy shelter above, the headland through the mist and the mist itself is also life. Surrounding, accepting, dissipating, taking all of me. I am blissfully unimportant to it, as it washes me through, no reaction to what it is I have to give, holding me without capacity to ever drop me. I feel it, “I am here” and I can feel again, beyond my humanness, into who I am again.