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Running alongside mini floating ice glaciers and a partially frozen river, while white grey

clouds flowed through the sky and earthen winter hibernation spread low around thawing grass and glimpses of brown wet earth.

Long parched tree roots like finger bones burrowing into sleeping ground, reaching down into the quiet river bank’s tundra.

The stems of dried flowers at the river’s edge standing thin, like the leafless branches that rested quietly overhead as I leaned against the steadfast grey tree whose trunk has supported my West for so many different seasons.

Flocks of birds flew, dark V’s in upward flight, wings supporting small delicate bodies. I paused, looking up, thanking the Sky for the way Sundays have re-learned how to feel sacred. For both what we now know and what we didn’t know then. For the way nostalgia dances with longing.  For how far we have already traveled.

And as I stood later with pink cheeks and bare feet next to white porcelain, drying off skin that had found the warmth of water again, my eyes caught sight of themselves in the mirror, caught sight of my own steady limbs, and held the soft question that maybe even in our fumbling, we are human, and we are beautiful.

~{LAO}

You do not have to be good, you only have to let the soft animal of your body love

what it loves. ~Mary Oliver

{humanly ambitions}