This morning, as I watched the world unfold outside my window, a quiet yearning stirred within me—to be anchored, to belong to one place, to sink my roots deep into the earth. In that longing, I felt something echo from the land itself, a pulse that mirrors my own, as if nature too is calling me home, asking me to return and rest within her.

But this intimacy, raw and tender, reveals years of emotional entanglement and neglect, wielded by others, taken on as my own, shadow and projections ever dancing in a gaslit labyrinth, leaving obstacles in my path, hindering my ability to fully root myself in the permeability of belonging.

The spirits of place in their elder wisdom, rooted by magnolia, oak, and pecan, spoke to me in the language of wind and root, asking me to lay down my burdens, to release the knots that bind me. They called me to sink deeper into their living embrace, to let their ancient branches cradle my weary soul, and to remember that I too am woven into the pulse of this earth.

A lament now a liberation:

“Child of the Hollow Earth”

I am a lost child of the Earth,

fed just enough to survive,

but not enough to remember

how to belong.

My ribs ache with the hollowness,

a hunger carved deeper than hunger—

a cavern where roots should be.

I am a lost child of the Earth,

fed just enough to quiet the cry,

but never enough to grow these roots.

This hunger—

it is older than my body,

older than my name.

It hums in my marrow,

a song of the half-fed,

the half-seen,

the half-heard.

I was taught to sip from shallow streams,

to take the scraps

and call them nourishment.

But the soil beneath my feet whispers:

“This is not the feast you were promised.”

And yet, I have lingered,

hands outstretched to barren tables,

my hunger mistaken for devotion.

Neglect is a cold teacher.

It shows you how to kneel

at the altar of scraps,

how to braid longing

into silence.

It tells you to be grateful for crumbs

while your insides howl

for the wild abundance

you were born to inherit.

I stayed too long in hollow places,

hands cupped for a kindness

that never came.

But the Earth whispers a rebellion,

her roots pulling at my feet:

“Do not confuse the famine with love.

Do not linger where the soil is thin.”

I will return to the earth,

press my body to her damp belly,

let her breath teach me the shape of fullness.

I will howl at the roots

that have forgotten me,

scatter my hunger across the forest floor,

and call the wild things to gather it up.

To stay where I am starved

is a kind of dying.

To leave is a remembering.

I am a lost child of the Earth,

but she has not lost me.

She waits in the shadows of the cedars,

her hands outstretched—

not with scraps,

but with the feast of enough.

Let this hunger stretch me open,

let it teach me what it means

to fill myself with what I deserve.

SMW 11/23/24