“I want to remain so
rooted to the ground
these tears
these hands
these feet
sink in.”
-Rupi Kaur
I want to remain rooted. I want to feel the dirt between my toes and the wet green grass after it rains while it seeps into my skin. I want to stand in the middle of a forest, while I hear the songs of birds calling to each other with their own notes of bliss. I want to be so embedded that a day does not go by that I don’t remind myself there is something more.
There’s always a time during the evening when the sun just begins to set and the yellow beams start to dance through the pines of the trees. That’s my favorite time of day, when I can drive in my silver sport with the windows down, feeling the reflection of heat hitting my pale face. That’s when I know there’s something more.
Petrichor: the smell of rain and its earthy fragrance after a summer downpour. Petra, meaning stone, refers to the fluid that flows like blood in the veins of the gods. Petricor, the smell that causes me to tip toe barefoot onto the pavement in the middle of a rain storm reminding me there’s something more.
One of my favorite memories in the rain was right before school started this August. My best friend had just returned to campus and she came over to my house. We drank green apple vodka as a last hurrah of Summer. I don’t remember how we got outside, but it was a downpour. The downpour where the word Petrichor came from; where that smell remains in your nostrils as the drops of rain pour onto your skin. We danced in the middle of my neighborhood road for hours as the rain continued to fall. I can still smell it on the clothes I was wearing to this day.
Chrysalism: the tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm, listening to pellets of rain dance on your roof, whose soft words are incomprehensible but whose cracking release of built up tension you understand more than anything.
Rain let’s the build up of tension I’ve kept hidden deeply in my chest release with tears of my own while I walk to my car. It hides my secrets from others, because no one has to know. It washes my face with the dirt of the past, letting it go.
Just the other night it began to thunder storm and I got into my bathtub. I remember slowly taking my head under the water as the pellets of rain on my roof and thunder against the walls began to slowly decrease. But I could still hear it.
Ambedo: a trance in which you become completely enthralled in vivid details, raindrops racing down a window, trees leaning back and forth in the wind. You are so completely enthralled in the experience of being alive; reminding yourself there’s something more.
In September, my friends and I took a spontaneous trip down to Cummins Falls. We had never gone before, and we wanted to be outside during a beautiful weekend. It took us an hour to get down to the waterfall through big hills, woods and rivers. I can still hear my friends’ laughs as I told them it was going to suck climbing back up. When we reached the falls, the air inside me pushed out in a huff of satisfaction. It was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen. How the earth made this picturesque waterfall. It astounded me. I remember being in the water, floating as I spread my fingertips across the top of it. As I looked around me, no worry was in my head, no bad thought or fear and I thought to myself that this is how we are supposed to live; rooted, grounded, alive and in awe of the earth around us.
Like when you see the trees in your front yard gently start to rebirth their leaves after a long winter. When in Autumn, you saw that same tree with vivid reds and oranges so bright that you wish you could be that tree; able to decay part of itself just to be reborn again.
When you see the snowflakes gracefully reach land, each one so different so pure. It’s like nothing could break them. They sway like a piece of paper in the wind, until it drops onto your warm jacket, and you’re able to see the design this earth created just for that one speck of frozen rain.
When I was a child, I used to think I was so odd, looking at nature through those blue eyes of mine in such a different way. I still do, paying too much attention to the world around me in the grainiest detail. I catch myself staring out the window needing to see the sun over that field of tall wheat grass filled with light browns for acres. Suddenly, my body is standing amongst that same field and I can feel the musk of wheat grass and corn between my finger tips, the rustling swinging of them all for miles whispering to me, the sensation of pure warmth and heat on my chest from the suns rays. Reminding me, there is something more.
Somehow this world was ripened, flourished and born with just dirt as it’s surface. Somehow, our world was created with the utmost beauty and magnificence. The streams in the middle of forests trickle down mountains. The oceans tide continues to pull in and out, repeating this synchronization with the moon, never ending. The trees, some so old they’ve been flourishing for hundreds of years; they’ve seen wars and disastrous storms but strive and grow with their scars on their bodies reminding us to keep going. The season; changing from month to month with no control and yet here we are.
Some of us remain rooted like those trees, and others are stomping through the grounds of the world with no precaution of what they are destroying.
