Spring Pep Talk

A message from heart to mind

The heart said, 
darling,
 worry is a bad use of your imagination.

Live, as if you don’t know anything but curiosity. 
Following butterflies down trails creates a path, 
where there was once only unruly overgrowth. 
Do not tame the wild, tend the wild- 
listen to its every call 
and refuse to be limited by the minds
of those who live in the confines of man.
Instead, keep only the company-
 of nature’s wild children. 
Let the roots of trees reach up into your heels 
until they take the form of the capillaries in your lungs. 
Embrace the cycles that live inside of you. 
Drink every season from the chalice of life. 
In seasons of death, 
dig your own grave and treat it like a flower bed.
Lay your shadow to rest, 
as hands tread soil and dirt begins to 
collect under your fingernails. 
Look up 
and watch dark brown earth envelope you 
and call you home. 
Admire the quiet song of earthworms 
digging holes into the most tender of your feelings. 
Watch, as the world you once knew disappears into darkness. 
One day, a small sprout begins to move in the direction of light,
sending roots into the soft, vulnerable places
that heartache used to take up. 
The sprout sits there,
 just underneath the surface,
unable to recall the word for rain. 
As water nourishes its cellular membranes,
the memory of the dance of drops falling 
and creating ripples on the bodies of puddles
conjures the word for 
whole, instead. 

For a moment, 
the fear of the unknown is overcome 
by the desire for breakthrough.
The sprout promises the earthworms to move only in the direction
of possibility and cracks through the dirt,
into the world of green, 
watching as feet skip past, 
in a rush to somewhere important, 
missing the tenderness of the moment 
beneath them.