Poetry, Nature, Questioning Existence

The Vanishing

Lost in the engulfing creep of wildness

It changes you, somehow, the taste of the wild, the touch of the raw wet air against your skin, the scent of moss and decaying things, the instinctive tinge of fear in your belly, the loss of oneself into something bigger, the vanishing.

And you don’t know what scares you more — being engulfed by the dreams of trees or in the silver slip of moon song lilting on the breeze, or in wrinkled valleys disappearing into granite peaks, or the spill of water trailing in braids across the cheek of the delta, or the cry of the hawk searching for its mate, or the spate of sudden rain pebbling your skin when that storm blew in across the mountain and you tasted the frisson of lighting upon your tongue, or the time when you fell into stardust landing upon the sea, or when you felt the glacier breathing and you knew that same breath had been breathed by whales slipping up through the sheath of arctic waters into the frigidity of a solstice summer day and also by some long-gone creature skittering through a heathered heath, and you knew that, someday, you, too, would simply slip into obscurity, lost within the wildness, or maybe, somehow, freed.

The vanishing, it terrifies me. But then, I remember the mycelium pulsing beneath my feet, synaptic fingers of fungal energy connecting roots and singing about a scale of time of which I cannot even begin to conceive.

And I have to believe that the engulfing creep of wildness and the seeping need of my soul for immersion into the beat of a hummingbird’s wings or the heady perfume of lupine, thick where once the snow lay deep in the crease of the earth, or the delirious warmth of sun now soaking into my skin, is to remind us of the thin boundary between fear and the whisper-thick truth of who we really are and of what is left behind in the shivering silence dying behind the screech of the great-horned owl who has seen you in the darkness.

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

Thank you to Thomas Gaudex for creating Scribe and for giving our tribe of poets a place to spread their songs of passions and tears.

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Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.