Quiet Waters.  I spent the weekend at Kah Mogk on a tiny inlet of the Puget Sound watching the clouds play hide and seek with the dappled wall of snow-topped Olympic Mountains.  Eagles circle the water spying new salmon.  Sun drenches the rolling lawn with warmth.  Towering pines and huddled cedars soften the soft earth with cool shadows. 

This is my body’s home.  This is the earth, the dust, that somehow got into my mother’s womb and my father’s sperm and clustered into these arms and legs and heart and head and feet.  I walk here like it is the only path.  I sit and rock under the endless sky of tree-tops that is the view from my cradle. 

I weep and weep when it is time to say goodbye.  My tiny body being ripped from the earth, from my kin, my tribe.  I honored the home as much as I could this time.  I came to recognize that the only way I can return for good is when my body is burnt to dust again.

The love in that land gently reminded me to stand and sway.  That I breathe each moment to honor the forest I carry in my heart.