I have been spending time in the garden. The smell of wet pollen set against the arid Chinook breeze blowing in from the ocean.  Whispers of connection strained through the milky brown soil, sometimes I swear I feel my grandmothers hands reaching for mine. A message in dirt, and dreams the petals carry through time. There is a calm in the act of growing. A reach toward the sun runs through all living things. A mirror of blood draped in ancestral knowledge. I forgot how to fish in the new hunter/ gather paradigm, and in the quiet, a paradox is born.  I would like to think that the birds remember my name, eating the seeds freshly planted with a smirk across their grace.

My grandmother would tell stories of hunting mushrooms in forests draped in misty moss. The smell of autumnal decay squished between her words, making my hair stand on end like porcupine. You could hear twigs snap in her silent pauses, where her eyes would look up to the sky, and then slip back into tales. Tales of tall creatures made from old stories, who still roam and haunt the landscape. Tales of  little people who lived on rims of volcanoes, and haunted lakes. Ties to an old way of being intwined in the cycles of Earth. It felt safe. It felt familiar.

Right now, the world around us burns in torrent flame and indifference, and I long for the soothing caress of Grandmothers tales, but her words are now wrapped in the winds. I will sit in the garden and feel those words wrap around my worried heart, and find peace to breath long enough to remember. Yet, I tell my tales in the confines of a mechanical life, wrapped in binary sinew, my drums occupy the servers of modern living. I hate to admit that I am bitter at where time has placed me.. bitter that I have to wade through the muck of others greed and desire for destruction. But, there is no time for bitter abandonment, for the harvest is yet to be reaped.