I am creating more space for myself to just be, I shared with her when asked my intention for this moment, this season ahead.
I want to soften into more space, become space. I repeated the words on the screen in my mind as I hit send, half checking-in to ensure this was in fact something I could commit myself to, something my thoughts and actions could clang against ​like the small tweezers in the Operation game when you made a clumsy move,​ a​n inner​ tuning fork ​I could carry​ through the fall.

Space to soften​, I whisper. ​
Yes. Send.

See, I said to myself as I carried the leftover tomato cores and banana peels to the compost pile barefoot in the morning.

Space. Breath.
Soil. Self.

I laughed at the complex simplicity of it all, the remembering.
If the wound is where the light gets in, as Hafiz says, is the rest of the body fallow, awaiting the inevitable crack that will allow the warm particles to flow through, to fill the former flesh? As they accumulate through time, do we not then become light bodies, outstretched as warm descendants from the sun?

Do our beloveds’ glow as they’re activated in the tips of our fingers, the heels of our feet, the rib cage expanded as they wander over the root body that holds us?

I placed my mason jar of potato slips and squash bottoms into the wooden box that digested our food waste back into soil. The garlic leaves and pepper seeds clung to the inside.

From the center of the pile, a tender shoot sprouted, a yellowed green from the black mush beneath. Isn’t it something how easily plants take space, warming their cellulose bodies slowly into existence.

Perhaps the mud pie kitchen of my girl youth tightened the contours of my spatial awareness in ways that are so deeply ingrained I don’t even know they exist. If I were given building blocks and nerf gun target ranges, would the web of my nervous system have a greater depth perception? I dig my heels into the mossy patch next to the silver maple and breathe a deep belly breath.

Moss. Space. Self.
See?