She, the Tree, stands high
and beckons for us to land
Sacred grounds
Connecting us deep in the soil
Opening the sky for our wings
Where a feather’s tickle tells all
Upon a breeze where whistling
Comes from the beak of babes
Some of us are closer to transformation
To transition
To escaping our own egg
But we are all on our way
Migrating home again
Some to hang below the flags
With sacrifice and pain
Some to perch safely
Some to preach insanely
But we all find our way back
To sit on her maternal branches
Life is a corridor of thresholds. Each breath unlatches a door. Each step crosses an unseen seam in the fabric. Conversations molt, relationships shed skins, grief carves new riverbeds through the chest. When we watch only the flicker of change, it can feel like weather without pattern, a storm with no season. Yet every transition leans against something older and more patient than the moment itself.
Beneath the quicksilver of events stands a great, breathing architecture. Imagine a vast tree whose roots drink from ancestral dark, whose branches cradle our days like small nests of becoming. Imagine a web strung between stars and stones, trembling when one strand is touched. Imagine soil deep and loamy, remembering every fallen leaf and every buried bone. Our changes do not occur in isolation. They are gestures within this larger body, tides pulled by a moon we do not always see.
When we fixate on the surface, on the snapping twig rather than the forest, the why of our transitions vanishes into noise. But when we turn inward and downward, we find a hearth that does not flicker with circumstance. An inner sanctuary waits there, not as escape, but as axis. It is the quiet root system of the soul, the spiritual home that steadies the canopy when winds arrive.
To honor this ground is to move with change instead of bracing against it. The joyful and the tragic, the ordinary and the astonishing, all become teachers carried on the same current. Anchored to what is enduring, we can step through each threshold with a kind of reverence. The river still moves, but we remember we are also the riverbed.
This is my journey,
— Nate Long “Owl”