CROOKED TRAIL

Ever get the feeling every moment was a whisper coaxing you forward? A wink from the unflinching eye of God expressed in a tree knot writhing with bees. Honey in my veins (and yours?) And the whites of so many sclera gazing blind on the inside. 

How do we see, then? When the headlights dazzle, when our vision blurs? What are we reaching toward?

This is how time is constructed in memory: fragments like jewels spun on spiderweb, precious as water on scorched earth. I reach but my hands don’t know the shape of it. Constantly fumbling to build something others will understand. 

The landscape knows and reflects. No filter, just divine expression—how the light hits the rock & carves faces from shadow. Pareidolia or prayer. We consecrate ikons, statues, to possess, but in the thick of the trail the saints & spirits breathe with their own red lungs. Fire & flood, beckoning with the Word. Birdsong or cicadas, the way we hear the falls before we come upon them. 

But we do crest the hill. Every time. Even as our bodies ache to give up. 

Over that lip the story unfolds, just for a moment in perfect language. 

We see ourselves there, captured in the mouth of it, all that water rushing to belong to a greater current. The joy of movement, creek to stream to turbulent cascade. 

And the fall, inevitably, baptizing the stones.