As they struck me, I entered the forest to stay alive.
Each bullet through my heel taught my body another way to rise, another way to breathe.
When the world reached to make me resemble itself, I stepped beyond its measure.
The trees received me until I was no longer human, but a grove.
They would have carved me into their own likeness, a slow deformation.
They left me clothed in the grime of civilization, stripped of wilderness.
Instead, I entered the rivers, and the current restored what had long awaited resurrection.
Before names, I washed myself into a sweet formlessness.
My ivory tower is not an escape.
It is a renaissance.
My awakening is not gentle peace.
It is endurance.
I go to the forest because life still breathes there,
and every breath returns something
the world keeps trying to erase.
I bury my hand in the earth,
and with every handful of soil
I kiss the Ancient Mother
without needing a prayer.
The trees speak in the language of leaves,
a tongue older than memory.
The wind greets me by wrapping itself around my body,
as though it had known my name before my parents did.
The mountains stand before me,
not as obstacles, but as a welcome.
Their presence is enough to seize the whole atmosphere.
Here, in this hidden paradise,
at the edge of the unknowable,
I enter a communion no currency can purchase.
I worship a divinity no religion can define.
Only the living world remains here, shining endlessly.
Beyond the web of artifice, here is only authenticity.
How beautiful it is to behold my Creator in such purity.
How peaceful it is to behold myself in quiet eternity.
― Atrona Grizel