Tectonic

 

There is a fault line in my earth.

A fault line that formed as I was emerging from the earth. The earth cracked and shifted as I crawled out of the ground. The water seeped into my groundwater and broke the innermost core of me. And plants grew in there. They used the water and they made me with the air and fire above. And I grew from there.

The fault line lay open for years. Unmoved. The whole of me grew above.

Then, the me above started to get heavier and heavier. And the ground was not strong enough to hold me. The fault line started shifting.

I became unbalanced. I noticed rumbling and quiet stirrings that moved me slightly. And before I knew it, an earthquake started and my whole foundation crumbled to the ground.

I fell onto the earth and I lay helpless.

Then the fault line continued to move, and shift, and bend, and fold, and ripples of mud and hay and fire and air and vegetation mixed together and enveloped me and held me and reassured me. And I took it, and had to stare at it in the face. I looked at it.

It was an ugly, deep, dark hole. A huge scar in the earth cleaving me in half. And I took it and I told it I didn’t want it any more.

I acknowledge you, chasm. But I don’t need you and I don’t want you to rule my foundation any more.

I took it and I gently turned it into malleable sand that seeped through the cracks and allowed water to enter and roots to start to enter the earth, and take new hold. New footholds and spikes in my new foundation. And this took a long time. This took years of slow growth. A millimetre at a time. And then I’d get it wrong, and I’d have to go back in and clip some of the shoots off and start again.

And only recently I have actually seen something stirring above ground. For so long I have tended the roots and nothing showed for it.

Then not long ago, a small shoot emerged. I looked at it and it was beautiful. It was me. I re-entered the earth and emerged unchanged, bur forever altered. For I am grounded back to my earth and my water, and I am the fire and the air and the excrement that formed me. For they are all beautiful molecules that make up what I am.

I am matter. I matter.

I can now focus on growing these shoots and I know now where the roots all are, so if I need to trim one of them, I can go back into the earth, dig a little and find the one I need to trim. Delicately and lovingly, for I know the fault line lies dormant, as it has settled back into the ground, and the more I trim and the more I do in there, the more it settles, a day at a time. It still quietly rumbles, and the small cracks that are still in there slowly fill with sand. And this will be forever. For the fault line is in me. But it is not me. It is my foundation  and my roots. I cannot deny it,  but I am settling it. I am filling it and quietening the earth that I came from.

My ground. Mine. My roots. My being. Me. I can see me.