Theme
12:17am August 24, 2014

➸ Unfolding

okideas:

youneedacat:

Sometimes I want to unfold
The beauty of the world
As if it was the most intricate
Origami flower
That had ever seen the light of day

Then I want to wait
And wait
Until the flower blooms for real
Until its velvet black blossoms
Tinged with purple edges
Grow fuzz that you can run your hand over

…

Thank you. I read this as an expression of faith, which makes faith a more believable position.

Thank you.  Faith for me is different than faith in organized religion, that’s certainly for sure.  Faith for me is faith that the redwood sorrel knows how to make it out of the ground, every time it needs to.  That the mushrooms know where to put their fruiting bodies.  That trees can grow out of nurse logs.  That the entire cycle of death and rebirth exists in the soil of a redwood forest.  That the redwoods themselves have such a fire for life that they will grow new trees off of their own branches, some of them creating an entire forest in the sky.  That there are lichens and salamanders that only live in the sky their whole lives, never seeing ground, because of the nature of old-growth redwood forests.  That even in second-growth forests there are single older trees here and there, like the Mother Tree, that hold up the entire ecosystem that would’ve been lost if all the older trees had been cut down.

That’s my faith in a nutshell.  That nature, as expressed in the place I was born into, knows how to take care of itself.  That it is as beautiful as it is demanding and as demanding and harsh as it is beautiful.  That I am under its protection down to my bones, because I was born there and it marked me as its own.  That I am a creature of the woods no different from another other woodland creature, no less for being human when I was born into this place.  No less nor better than the slugs and the salamanders and the mycelia.

That’s my faith, that’s my religion or spirituality, if I have one at all.  And, yes, this poem is another expression of faith, although I would never have thought to put it that way.  I would have said it was an expression of love.