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Selected Excerpts from A Cosmology of Self

EMERGENCE

Today,
I will feel sun on my face
the way a child greets the morning,
as if it were a first meeting.

Today,
I will walk
as if I have just found
my legs—
not hurried,
but as if to say:
these are miracles.

Each of us is surviving,
coming up out of the ground in our own way—
as if from the deep earth of some older story.

WOUNDING

Some wounds come
with a history attached,
a lineage of old fire
passed hand to hand
without anyone meaning to.

I felt the rupture—
yes—
but I also felt the echo behind it

I saw you after you died.
I am so far down in the dark
I could reach your coffin
and knock.

RISING

I walk into the meadow at dawn.
The sun rises over the Three Sisters,
huge gemstones in the distance—
alive and watchful and powerful.
They are almost silent,
but they whisper:

“New dawn.
Renewal is grace.
Renewal is standing where you are,
welcoming the world again”

I am moving within myself,
and that is all that matters.

A pen is caught beneath
the fall-board of my piano.
It is my job
to pull it out today.

I reach in,
find the pen,
and take it out.

REVELATION

How do you know
you are not alone?
You know
because when you look left
and see an owl
flying beside your family truck—

you turn your head right
and a boy is standing there,
a boy with a loincloth,
a boy with an owl feather in his hair,
a boy you know without knowing how.

“Stand where you are,”
Ezekiel said at last.

“You are enough stillness
to survive any storm.”

The words settled into me
like a compass
quietly turning north.

RETURN

You have held your life,
gathered it,
held it with two hands.

“And for that,” he says,
“we see you.”

“And this remembering—
careful, gentle, alive—
is a treasure.”

I am home—
not anywhere outside me,
but here,
in breath,
in the weight of my body
returning to itself.