This short piece is the result of a thank you letter writing exercise at a writer's club meeting I so joyously facilitated this week. More to come. 

I saw you standing there again today. In the same place as all the days before since the moment of your creation. There's something comforting about your uniformity, something I can count on even when the world around us is in a constant flurry of change and evolution. Yesterday, for example, when the rain came and the sky grew dark, in the middle of the afternoon. Everything felt heavy, like the bottom of the sea or my legs trying to walk through a dreamscape. I felt a fear rising in me as though I, along with all I knew to be, might be swept away. Carried off into the cosmic abyss. But then I peeked outside through the blinds, and I saw you there, wavering something fierce, branches piercing the shadows and the swarms of earth and leaves. I felt as if your roots had reached up through the floor of my living room and wrapped themselves around my cold, bare feet. I felt my mind come back down from that place of turbulence and sense my connection to the ground, and I could breathe again. Do you remember it? Doing that for me? Or is grounding just so embedded in your essence that you had no choice? I guess it doesn't matter, really. That moment has tumbled into this one, the now in which the storm has passed. But I remember it, and I will remember it for all my time to come. So I want to thank you. I thank you for being and for showing me how to plant myself into this great, green earth.  

This body is a house of fire
Burn the walls from the inside
Flesh melt off these bones
Reduce me to the core of this land
Upon which your fingers have danced
To the song of impermanence, 
To the blazing of a sun
Never born
Nor falling from the sky
Powered by the inifinite
​Energy of life