This winter the road is washed out by a waterfall.
The two children prance ahead,
Their laughter reaching the stairs
That lead to trail’s end.

I assume (of course) that there’s a cliff where the water torrents down.
The wet ground feels good against my bare feet,
And my sister, rushing river below,
Roars her rapture up at me.

Following my guide dog I wonder at walking.
Each step taken, is a falling
And catching of myself again and again,

Knowing nothing of what’s ahead, and moving forward anyway,
Expecting I will land upright, but when I stumble
I forget to trust my own sense of balance,
All the while baffled by my fear of letting go.

I watch the impact I have on the earth.
What a strange way to journey through the day:
My body made of earth and water passing recognition over
Earth and water, before my time to pass over.

Like so many thousand drops of water, I am spilling over
Making way, dancing across boundaries between worlds,
Shimmering along edges of my clay self,
The path I am tracing, a carving through centuries and stone.

And then amidst the music that surrounds me,
Gathered in, held quietly, I am stilled,
As if I too could dissolve into the halcyon pool below.

Toward the dense, deep smell of grey
Looking up at the leafy tree branches above,
“Who are you kidding?” I ask.
Slipping beneath sound into its silences, I answer and listen to the one who speaks:wordlessly.

“We say, in a fight, you cannot win,
You can only defeat;
And out on the rock– my brother—we
Locked horns and the blasted words deafened our ears.”

“I remember being ashamed, lying sheet-wrapped and silent,
And more than the running into wall after wall,
It hurts to know that once we threw rocks,
And for a while afterward, we did not speak to each other.”

“Words are like oceans. They are beautiful and offer freedom,
But once you are there with them, never turn your back.
Perhaps I am who I was before.”

“And if I am, somehow, in some mysterious way,
Then a child was born who happened to have an I
Who I could hear and think and feel and share.”

“Coming home, we stamp off our shoes and put all our baggage away.
I look out under the stars and watch the world dreaming,
The rest was long and good to wait for.”

Now I stand next to the two children,
With no memory of how I got myself here.
Beyond the railing, I can trace the shapes
The river makes as it moves.

The wind is making a play thing out of my hair.
I wonder whose story I am telling,
And if I’ll ever know who called to me,
From somewhere beyond the stream of time.

And for a moment, the song of myself that lives in me
Sings of the wind of changes, and the land,
Cradling the river in it’s arms.

I brush away the lingering mist,
Spray splashing on my face.
But there is more to be said, and though I do not understand,
This time when I answer, I speak from more than I am now.

“Sometimes, we trip on the roots and sometimes we step over them,
And when we’re walking, sometimes the routes get too long
And we get lost retracing them, tracking where the footsteps fell,
And it’s the wandering lost that has often frightened me.”

Tell the I who sought after freedom, who long ago
Misplaced the map written in the language of belonging,
Tell my feet that crossed and recrossed the road
Full of its endless spiraled turning,

Tell the I who faced sun and rain to hold my own,
I am reunited with my own, I have come full circle.
Tell my hands that constructed and reconstructed the shelters,
I am home.