Photo credits-Sleepy owl films

We woke on the moon

Crawling from burrows while our minds ache for a world that’s been gone 

Bodies gasping, exhaling sustenance for one another. 

Inhale, exhale.  back and forth. Growth and decay

Iridescent dirt under our nails as we grow food and hunt, reaching and holding one another as we become this new world. From deep In our dreams we hear echoes of a time that came before, many worlds ago-when the world had such structure, such order. 

The people before found their world harsh, large, and dangerous. By speaking their fear they took its power as their own, creating systems, sequences, patterns. By knowing what would come, they knew where to go. 

Time expanded around them and their universe bloomed in fractal explosions-as new limbs grew, the people would grasp, label, and control-and so their domination of the universe came to completion. Without realizing, they stopped living in the world, and instead merely spoke of the world-why move mountains if merely saying you did has the same effect?

But no matter how little they moved with eyes open, when they closed them they still dreamed. Dreamed of chaos, of growth, of movement-crying for them to drop their tools and hold one another instead, but when they woke their hands were already frozen in time-fixed in a clutched fist around the crystalline world they had built. 

The earth roared, unwilling to be held captive in such a way. It spun faster, wanting to fling these pests that will not budge to the dark corners of the universe for what they had done. How dare they try to stop growth, chaos, entropy itself? But they would not go. They dug their grasping hands deep, clawing down into the flesh of the earth, anchoring down. Eventually the world grew over them, burying them as they froze-unable to remember how to grow or to let go-so instead they slept, and dreamed. 

And then one day, we woke on the moon. 

I have been searching for the places where we all used to belong, before we learned how to be alone so well.

This life was never meant to be a lonely pilgrimage. we were born to orbit one another, to form constellations, to be bound in shared meaning.

There was a time when we lived like roots entwined in the same soil, when no one had to earn the right to be held.

Togetherness was a birthright, like breath, like laughter.

Now we grow and grow apart, shrouded in skin and solitude, passing one another silently, ghosts in a frosted glass world.

We practice shrinking behind locked doors, glowing screens, never sharing the same soft firelight.

We sit across from one another, heads down, the weight of things unsaid thick in the air.

Please see me, the oldest prayer, hangs forever unspoken.

I miss the village we never had. I grieve the tribe we were born too late for.

What we lost isn’t just the unbroken unity of the circle, hands linked, voices raised in unison.

It’s the absence of walls, the way joy once belonged to everyone, and so did grief.

I want to believe we can still gather beneath something bigger: a sky, a tree, a silence. something big enough to hold all our small and splintered selves.

Maybe there, we could remember how to make our world whole once more, from the pieces of one another.

Maybe there, we could finally say:
I know you don’t know me, my brother, my sister, but I remember you all.