Grounded Noé Piña

My vision blurs again as I crawl, because it has been so long since I marvelled at nature. It has been so long since I gave thanks. So long since I felt I could.

The earth bears the marks of human damage. An old campfire. Brush worn away by the tramp of feet. A piece of tinfoil, and a plastic bag caught on a bush. For a moment, I wonder if someone is here, and if they will see me, a middle-aged person crawling on my knees. I imagine them laughing at me, and me paddling away in hopeless shame. But I pause, take a breath, listen to the wind through the trees above me like the echoes of my people’s voices, and I keep going, not knowing if this is bravery or madness, but knowing that it feels like truth.

I reach the centre, where the talisman once stood. It was like a shrine made of sticks and woven circles. It helped to centre the forces of the world on this spot, so that you could centre yourself too.

It is not there anymore.

I crawl to that spot, dappled in afternoon sunlight reaching through the canopy. The wind blows gently, tenderly, as I put my head to the ground.

Forgive me,I think, though I can’t say what for. For not being enough, maybe. For not believing enough, too.

Help me,I wish, needing something, anything, from my world, my people, so long gone. I wish to wear my clothing and speak my language and practice my faith in peace, in a world where no one will laugh at me. In a world where I don’t need to worry anymore. In a world where I could turn fifty and be proud and full of love and pass on my teachings to the young.

I straighten back up to sitting. Give me hope, I mouth silently, turning my tearstreaked face up toward the sky. A loon calls in the distance, and a crow looks down on me from the trees. I am not alone, I remember. I close my eyes, and feel the softness of the earth below me, brush my calloused fingers over the fragile moss I kneel on, feel the life in the rocks and the air and the trees above.

I don’t know how long I sit there, listening to the sounds of the world I once knew, of a world that is different, and behind financial barriers still, but not gone. For a moment, I push aside my poverty, my disability, the life I never wanted, and I simply feel.

When I begin to crawl back to my canoe, I don’t have answers, exactly, but I feel like answers aren’t as necessary as I thought, and somehow that is a comfort.

When I am almost back, my knees protesting as I crawl across a patch of bare bedrock, I stop, and blink, and stare, thinking, for a moment, that this is an apparition from my memories.

I crawl a couple meters over to it, reach out with broken hands to touch the soft purple petals.

One flower, still here. One flower, like me, in a world that doesn’t remember when things were different. In a world that doesn’t remember when this island was covered in them, and when my people danced and sang freely, and held it as the most sacred of spaces.

And as I look at that one flower, I am filled with love and wonder and I smile, truly and deeply, even as I drop my head into my hands and cry, for a broken heart in a broken world.