Only This

A Poem About the Way We Remember Our Becoming

Light Through Bay Tree, San Geronimo, CA

No edge. No wound. No need to begin.
Only this weightless belonging, vast without question.
Unfolding, breathing into being, like light drawn gently
through the leaves at dawn.
Everything is here, uncounted, unmeasured.
Everywhere is only this. Everywhen, stillness.
There is no absence to define. No reaching. No naming. No... other.
Dark and light hold each other — two hands that never learned to let go.
Still, something stirs beneath the stillness —
not desire, not decision, but the curve of movement itself,
pulling toward something never forgotten, but never quite remembered.

Eyes open to the world. 
The wind touches skin and begins to notice its end.
Sound hums in the hollow of ribs.
Color pours into this body, not as sight, but as warmth.
Held by everything, before learning to ask.
Breath comes. Breath leaves. 
No questions. No resistance.
Only the wonder of this without explanation.
Gazing at the light, unknowing its name is the moon —
it glows, and somehow, it glows within... me?
Pain flares, sudden and clean — no story, just presence.
Joy comes after, uninvited, as if the world forgives
before sorrow has learned to form.

Time begins to shape the corners of the day.
Sleep arrives with rules and regulations.
The sky still sings, but only when no one else is speaking.
The moments of joy are scheduled in hours.
Wonder is allowed, but not always welcomed.
There are clocks in every room.
I watch grown hands busy in a dizzying rhythm,
while the sun cries out behind the shadows.
I ask why. I ask again. Eventually, I stop asking.
A quiet part of me begins forgetting
what my bones once carried like song.

Good and bad take root in the soft space behind my eyes.
I learn to flinch before pain arrives, to smile before I’m ready.
Each praise, a tether. Each punishment, a narrowing shape.
Desire begins to speak with a forked tongue.
I chase the warmth of approval and lose my way in the doing.
The world hands me blueprints, and I build a house with no windows.
The house is too small, and I forget how to leave.
Every reaching plants a seed.
Every seed grows toward the thing it was reaching for.

I build. I perform. I accumulate.
I am seen, but not touched.
I am heard, but not listened to.
I keep a thing called a calendar.
It is not a vessel, and yet it finds a way to fill itself.
And the more it fills, the less I seem to be.
I measure my worth in tasks completed, and call it progress.
I forget the sound of my own breath.
I forget what stillness used to offer.
The forest fades into backdrop. 
The sky dims into screen.
The face in the mirror
becomes someone
I must learn again
how to love.

Things break. People leave.
The map folds in on itself.
But the ache that arrives
does not ask to be solved.
It only asks to be seen.
A breeze moves the curtain and I stop —
not by choice, but by necessity.
The tea cools beside me. I forget to drink it.
And in that forgetting, something opens.
Something long abandoned begins its way back home.

The threads begin to appear, not clearly — but enough.
A gesture returns, not in memory, but in shape.
Every closing becomes an echo.
Every thought carves its signature in silence.
There is no blame here, only the recognition
that the world responds in the exact language I’ve whispered to it.
Not punishment, but mirror.
Not judgment, but reflection.
And so I listen —
to what was once too soft to hear.

A breath. Unhurried.
Not as remedy, but as arrival.
The tree outside shifts in the light —
or is it that I shift around the tree?
Who is this "me"? This "I" that has somehow become?
The ache of longing is still here, but it no longer pulls.
It leans beside — a silent, unhurried companion to whatever this is.
The light through the window leans in, gentle and sure,
as if it too had once forgotten this body was part of the earth.
Remember.
Remember.
But not in thought —
only in the way a hand knows the shape of its own palm.

The air feels different now.
Not brighter, but more willing.
The silence isn’t empty.
It’s full of things once rushed past.
A rhythm long beneath the stride that rises slowly into the spine.
Something settles — like soil after long rain.
There is no answer. No ground. Nothing.
And yet — it is everything.

The earth is soft again.
Fingers press into soil.
They do what they’ve always known to do.
Nothing blooms here... yet.
But already, something leans toward light,
as if remembering the shape of its becoming.
The soil does not promise — it listens.
And once shape begins to form, it will not surprise.
Only remind — 
of the seed 
that waited 
without name.

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Background music in audio by Mettaverse