New Year Resolved
A Creation Myth
I know it can be hard to see
because of the way
our solar system rotates around the sun,
the way winter follows a line
seemingly separate from human influence,
and how we can see the shape
and movement
of the Milky Way,
but if you zoom out much farther,
it becomes clear
that I am
in fact the center
of the universe.
Starting there,
when imagining the way
a mountain
can be important to millions
and wondering who what is so important to the mountain
that survival of itself,
not for itself,
seems emotionally entangled in need
with constant need of telling:
Arrival is not a place,
you have to wonder at the way
every atom in our bodies
was once something that burned
some amount of time
and some amount of space
away. Something on fire in a way
much larger than what it means to explore
the alienness of any given species
at any particular place - for are we
not all alien
and in possession of all the water
that will ever exist on this planet?
Not through ownership
but through the chemistry of a human
body in the shape
of a singular planet and the natural
worlds’ own proportions.
Then how to heal ourselves
on this rock of capital G’s
(un)wanted children
where the only universal-planetary
rule leads us to consume each other
for survival? The wapiti with a central nervous system
like ours so it must be more important
than the grass, but consumption still the law.
And if you meet a more merciless destructor
than water herself
run.
So what does it mean to live in The Shadow
the conflict of longing
heavy and foreign,
thick in my mouth and uncomfortable.
It seems cheap to long, and lazy
but best still, for centralized need.
Need: to watch
the mountains change
every single day
the Mountain watching
every single day
a life my universe can fathom but my mind cannot
speaking in glacial tongues of time,
too slow for us aliens to understand
claiming knowers
though the tree is older
and generationally more capable
of giving.
So the invitation is there.
Warm and almost entirely honest.
An asking,
To Myself:
Come live inside of me already.
For the winter at least.
