Ground

Ground  Does it bother you, the grinding? Teeth marks left on bones. The tideline’s broken shells. The ground, subducting. We could call it entropy, a shame, a disaster.We could focus on fault lines and fear — there’s plenty to go around. But what if, instead of choosing these fragile, hesitant masks, we see that we are born of bedrock and tide pools, shaped by lichen and riverstone, we are actually the quaking Earth, itself — what if then we never fully surfaced to think of fault lines and Richter scales, but became a flow, diving down, breaking free, emerging at the rift, renewed, never really shaken to pieces, ever, but always just one spinning, concentric, whole. What if instead of the broken and imperfect shells, or even the pulsing, charging sea, we are the play of minerals between the tides — the dance of elements, joining and rejoining, never separate, never nothing, never something for long. What if instead of the graceful curve of caribou antler, it’s gleaming lines marred by toothmarks, we aren’t the rodent’s body, craving calcium, but its hunger — a pure desire which, perfectly met, draws you forward, always seeking, finding, always moving within the security of now. What if you believed we are all of these and more, even none of these — and that was finally enough. It is time to play. Now you see the pieces are always here. Reassemble. Take this mask of subduction, and release the sublime. In this moment, always — in the shattering, the rebuilding, and the longing — we are the grinders and the grinding and the ground.