I waited through a thousand lifetimes,
for Mother Gaia to turn her face toward me—
not in haste,
but in the slow, wise silence
of roots learning the shape of stone.
I waited as empires powdered into dust,
as rivers rewrote their names,
as the moon kept its patient vigil
and the stars, old as prayer,
lit my long return.
I waited with my hands open,
empty as winter fields,
yet sure that beneath the frost
something green was remembering me.
And then—
I felt like I was reborn by loving her-
I felt her everywhere:
in the pulse of loam,
in the breath of cedar,
in the dark gold hush of rain
touching the earth like mercy.
Mother Gaia did not arrive
as a thunderclap or a crown.
She came as a turning leaf,
as the first warm wind through my ribs,
as the tender ache of becoming
what I had waited to be.
So I stood there with my head hanging, in the grace of the Lord
a soul with a thousand winters in it,
and at last I understood:
waiting was not emptiness.
It was the altar.
It was the seed.
It was the long, luminous path
by which I learned
she belong to
the earth
before the earth said my name.