Ancestral Futures of Re-Membrance
They’re the face in the trees lifted from the soil where their feet once tread, their bodies once laid, their tears once fell, their smiles once warmed by the glow of the dawn, their words of anger once cast like a fishing net over rowdy waves.
They’re pressed into the matrix of a leaf, springing from the bellies of pregnant dear, living inside the pupils of Bear as she wanders the woods looking for the berries that carry their laughter, and the acorns that harbor their pain.
They’re Wandering the corridors of your finger prints. Nesting in the folds of your vulva. Chirping in the creases of your smile. Massaging the drums of your ears with their midnight whispers. Kissing the wet rock after a fresh rain through the souls of your feet. Lapping at the colors of the valley through the light-fluxing dance of your eyes.
Their bones are rattling root systems underfoot, and their breath is quaking leaves overhead. Their percussioning presence is invoking tremors whose long arms reach out from colliding plates.
They’re dancing in the space between your thoughts, and stretching out their yawning hearts along the terrascapes of your dreams.
Their songs can be heard in the spaces where rivers rub against land, where flowers coat bees in gold, where fruit seeds pass through the guts of foxes enraptured by the distance those lithe and cunning pawed people take them, where the guttural spells of raven ripple the air, where sand exfoliates the watery winding bellies of serpents.
They’re giggling in the crackle of static belting from your radio. In fact, they are the static. They’re grieving between the chapters of books that ensnare your imagination. In fact, the pages are made of them. They’re haunting the windowsills from within the wood that frames them. In fact, they ARE the wood that frames them. They’re burrowing through the concrete that muffles the slow press of earthworm. In fact, they ARE the concrete that muffles the people of humus.
They live in our raucous joy, our rebellious sorrow, our raging wonder, our whispered awe, our murderous appetites, our hateful speech.
You cannot take a step in one direction or the other without them within you and all around you. Your very life is the murmuration of all their entangled, inseparable lives moving across undulating webbings of time.
We lived in their every action, present even in our own absence, as possibilities emerging through the mattering confluence where life extends into death, and death extends into life.