the root of it all

my dear one,

It’s funny how you knew so much better what was important in life than I did for so many of the intervening years. While I was chasing money, love, and validation, you were digging in the dirt for worms and begging your mom to let you go to the barn more often. You knew from such a young age the preciousness of time spent alone with your imagination, letting your creativity run wild and free. That days were best spent running and rollerblading and riding horses until your muscles ached so badly you could barely stand up - building forts in the woods and coming home with legs scratched up and dirt-blackened finger nails, completely exhilarated from the smallest accomplishments. Doing none of these things to look the best or be the best or “for your health”, but for no other reason than that it made your soul sing. Failing and failing and failing again but not even realizing that that is what you were doing, because the life was in the doing itself and not in the so-called successes. That the people you love are for loving and not for grasping onto, and the best friends you will make are the ones you meet doing the things that you love. The ones you laugh with so hard that it makes your stomach seize up and tears pour down your face.

There is much I have learned, while I was forgetting all of the things you knew. That some of the very best things in life come out of the worst moments. How true it is that there can be no thorough appreciation of the light without a heaping dose of darkness. That crying isn’t such a bad thing, really. Mostly I’ve learned to put words and logic to so many of the things you knew just from being born a human, a tiny piece of a big whole, vastly significant and entirely insignificant at the same time. Things I must ‘practice’ now because they were unlearned somewhere along the twisting path of ‘growing up’.

I have been coming back to it slowly, slowly and then so quickly in recent years. I think you would be proud of me/you now. We are finally beginning to get to the root of it all. All of the things you always knew you wanted, but couldn’t figure out how to prioritize as a young adult, so new to what you thought was freedom at the time. More greenness, more animals, more bread and butter. In touch with the earth as much as a busy life allows. Digging in the dirt all day and coming in scratched up from head to toe with beetles in my hair. Much is different, but it is much the same.

For the longest time I thought you lived only in the past. I know now you have never been past, you have always been present; shoved down deep inside a vortex of anxiety and metaphorical bandaids, but always there, shouting so loudly that I could often hear you without recognizing the sound.

I am here now.

I am present.

You are present.

I can hold you now like a child of my own.