KEEP WALKING, VISIBLE ONE

We say that the purpose of going out is to come back. We cross the threshold and go on the sacred mountain or desert, not to escape, but to claim who we really are, to embody our wholeness, and to bring back the medicine that the world needs.
————————————————————
Walk Away, Invisible One,
take your place upon the land

Let your heart swell
as big and wide as the sky

Let the mystery of your soul
dance with the mystery of the desert

When you are ready,
pick up a prayer

What does a prayer look like?

It may look like a naked dance
courting the soul of the world

collecting bones to sing over
blowing embers in the palm of your hands
as gifts to a wounded world

stewarding the storm within
towards the blossoming of a desert lotus
at moonrise

It might sound like
a conversation with rocks and lizards
and other citizens of the desert

It may sound like a song of gratitude,
rising unexpectedly from your belly
reclaiming joy

or the beat of a drum
forgetting who is drumming whom

or, it may sound like Silence
heard only by the Heart-Ear
of Deep Listening

It may look like abandoning the old temples
to build the new ones

shedding skin and tears
that no longer serve
giving it back to the land as offerings

It may look like a question mark
in the form of a juniper tree, asking:
Are your ready to commit?

Maybe you become a mouse
getting into the smallest spaces
to gnaw through bonds
that would have you bound

Or a funeral conductor, burying old stories

Or a warrior taking a stand
with blood pulsing,
announcing to the mountains:
I’m here!

When the prayer has fully prayed you,
Walk in, Visible One.

Take your place in the Circle—
it is time to be seen.

It is sometimes hard
to come down the mountain

But do not linger in the threshold.

We need your story.

Walk In, Visible One,
take your place in the World,
because the purpose of going out
is to come back.

Keep walking,
Keep making the beauty
giving it away as medicine

the beauty that is uniquely you
crafted in love like the smallest bead
that people may not even notice

but that the earth & the people
so desperately need.

Keep walking, Initiated One,
Keep walking

(From No Lies On the Mountain, a Wild Nature Heart poetry collection out later this year)