Go somewhere sacred and press your eyelids shut, and you’ll hear the silence, just beneath the familiar songs of birds that you’ve only just met, below the wind rubbing dull all the edges of the world. You’ll hear its low hum rumbling just beneath everything else— so visceral and deep that it seems its a sound your ear itself might be making, just the faint constant vibration of a living ancient Earth. I lift my hand to offer the sky my shape, to feel it slip between my fingers, to give and take its warmth and water. The bright yellow blossoms of the desert marigold dot the decomposing granite to remind us that they too are the sun. The buzzing wings of insects beat like oars on the wind. They speak of cactus flowers and fruit, of mud and mule fat— a billion years of longing, a billion years of belonging. You could pull a tick from your neck, watch the skin stretch and recoil as you rip it away, but your blood would still be its blood and its blood your own, the cells themselves ran back and forth between your two bodies. Any separation is a delusion, and nothing can be separated from everything else. A country is a pretend place, a border an imagined boundary. There is only the land. We are the land, and we belong to the land, to one another and nothing else. And every land has its own language, the land absorbed and spat back into song, and beneath the high sun of a spring day in Baja, on that land, a woman lies on a bed in the corner of her room, holding the language of the land she sprouted from, holding fast to truths meant to be violently forgotten. She holds the only words that understand this land, the only words this land understands. And her daughters offer their hands to the Earth and give the Earth the shape of their two cupped hands, for the Earth to fill with mesquite beans and pinyon pine nuts. They pick the pine needles and weave the world into patterns like seasons and songs. They give themselves to the land, and the land gives itself back in return. So let us drive south together, in love and defiance, to cross the wall and the men with their guns, the imagined line they both defend. Let us stretch between and build a bridge to ourselves. Let us follow the coastline and kit foxes. Let us eat the nopal and the spiced salt. Let us laugh together, let us hear each others stories, let us touch the plants, let us remember what it means to be life, to be connected to everything else. Let us go to the women weaving baskets, weaving themselves into the land— to the women who, like the clay pots they form, hold the ancient wisdom of this place. Let us go to them and listen, fill our ears with their truths: they show us the only way forward, and the only way back.









I read your poem again. My gosh, so very beautiful. Thanks again for sharing.
Ryan, this is effin' good. Please keep writing.