Beyond the trails we know
That which is divine.
I asked the trees for ease and they granted it. Barefoot, feet firmly rooted in the soil, I followed the trails winding down shrouded paths of soft earth beneath me. By the end of the walk, I counted more than 10 different species of butterflies—fluttering, weaving across the skies. Green. Blue. Yellow. White. Brown. Orange. I stopped to watch their twirling as they rested my gaze upon the lianas graciously draped upon the trees. Sunlight struck the trees revealing shades of green I had not noticed before. A monkey crouched on a branch, eating with so much attention, lost in sensational chewing - the sweetness of leaves.
At a turn I had never taken before, I let curiosity guide my legs, skipping and balancing between rocks playfully and I wound up finding peaceful trails. They sunk into the valley then rose into a quiet clearing - and then, a bench, waiting as is for my arrival. And I answered this call, settling into its wooden form. It was without a doubt, a sanctuary. A place so untouched, yet so alive, now left to the home dwellers of this forest. I let the soil carry me forward into places that begged for my return.
Hudungwi? One asked as I passed, staring at my feet.
No, I replied. Not at all, and I smiled, as though my feet themselves had responded, knowing they had received that which they had been yearning for.
I thought of a particular scene I had recently read in Toni Morrison’s Sula.
Sula and Nel as children digging their hands into the earth, burying whatever they could find, then piling mounds of soil into the hole. They moved in silence, each knowing what to do with no words exchanged. I thought of their presence to each other; their deep listening to one another. Their keenness to all the aliveness that surrounded them at that moment. Even despite what had preceded that moment and what was to come, it was something quite divine.
Divine, not bound by walls of towering structures or ideologies etched into the mind, but vast, unrestricted—like the forest's towering canopies enveloping me, or the ground I stood upon, holding my bare soles. Divine, not as something out of reach but present. Here. In that moment, I was not just in the forest: I was part of it.
I wondered: Isn't that the divine—to simply be as one is, in the place one is?
Like seeing the soft orange twilight light landing upon the building with a soft, caressing touch? To witness. This gift of sight - what divinity!
Isn’t that the divine?
To hear the children’s laughter; their exclamations of awe at a grasshopper hopping through grass.
Isn’t that the divine?
To hear the screeching and loud call of the hadada ibis but instead be drawn in wonder to the synchronicity of the tunes?
Isn’t that the divine?
To crouch to this earth and watch the bee sink into the tiny flowers marveling at how something so small could make something so sweet.
Isn’t that the divine?
To look up to the trees, asking for so little, only to be offered with so much abundance?
How much more of the divine surrounds us, awaiting our gaze?