A SHRINE TO THE SPIRITS OF THE LAND
Oh Land, oh sweet soiled Dirt, oh Gods-Who-Live-Below. Beneath the grasses, the roots of trees, the road pavement and paint, the brush and the bush and the wilderness, You lie, sleeping, waiting, breathing, shifting: slow-moving, like the tectonic plates that carve and shape the continental earth, but ever aware, alive, persisting through drought and ice, flood and fire. Enduring, long-lived, far-seeing Land, whose domain is as wide as the mountains whose arching bony structures shape the ribcage of the fine earth.
I am dying, like corpses in ash and dirt, and it makes me strong. I bare my teeth and feel the storm in my fingers. They tell me that being in other worlds is supposed to feel detached, unreal. To the contrary: everything in the Dirt is visceral. It’s shaken me to my core.