perhaps what we need more than anything, is just to know, just to be reminded, that we are mist on the water, a short breath, because we forget the oldest stories, the ones that used to live in the mouths of our oldest grandmothers, the ones made of rock and bone and moss and stone, stories that sit around the fire, singing of things that are older than we know, older than memory, almost as old as God, from before we first thought of our own cleverness, how the earth was a rich Mother, wearing lichen on her eyelids, how she used the red of Larch on her lips, how she is a home to small, breathing things, how she used to live in peace—before, and still—she calls to us, woos us with microscopic worlds living on old stone walls, and thriving in the cleft of rocks, and isn’t this what happens when we ask to see the face of the One who holds us, how we are hidden for a moment in the cleft of the rock, kept safe and warm, and how we fight this, how we shape a ‘no’ with our mouths, instead of melting into the love, how this is the hand of grace and forgiveness, and God always there with small stories of redemption, for every soft body, for every soft body, for every soft body, and then it was done, and everywhere, in every moment, if we cared to look, if we cared to listen with our bodies, if we chose to listen to the story that lies deep within our oldest memories, from long before we arrived with our own cleverness, from long before we were ever told that we didn’t belong, how love is the antidote, how love leaves her signature all around us, pay attention, listen, already we walk in the sacred realms, already we are not alone, already there is God sitting under the Larch tree, looking at the waters, patting the ground next to his feet, waiting for us to sit down, share a flask of tea, as we talk of this and that, laughing about all the things that used to frighten us, all the chains that we walked away from.

© Liezel Graham 2023