I am sitting outside.
That sentence still carries a kind of miracle in it, even now. Even after these few years of learning it back — the outside, the open, the willingness to simply be under the sky without walls between me and whatever the sky is saying.
The earth is cool beneath my bare feet. I press them down deliberately, the way you press a hand to something real when you need to remember what real feels like. Grounding, they call it, and the word is exactly right. I am being grounded. The earth is doing it, quietly and without ceremony, the way it does everything.
There is sun on my face. Wind moving through my hair like something that loves me without needing anything in return. I had forgotten that wind could feel like that. I had forgotten a great many things.
Trauma is a house you stop noticing you're trapped in. The walls become ordinary. The locked door becomes just a door. You learn to call it home and mean it, because it has been so long since you knew what else home could be — what it felt like to stand in a yard in bare feet, to let the grass speak its green language up through the soles of your feet, to lift your face and receive the sun like the uncomplicated gift it is.
I lost years to those walls. I won't number them here. They know what they were.
But the earth waited. That is what I keep returning to, sitting here in the last of the afternoon light with my journal open on my knee and my feet pressed into the ground like a signature, like a promise. The earth simply waited. It did not ask where I had been or why I stayed away so long. It just received me, the way it receives everything — the rain, the fallen leaf, the bare foot of a woman finding her way back to herself one slow season at a time.
I am still learning to stay out here. To resist the pull of the walls, the screen, the ceiling. Some evenings it is easy and some evenings I have to choose it, have to carry myself outside like something fragile and set myself down in the grass and wait for the remembering to come.
Tonight it came quickly. The first touch of bare earth and something in me exhaled that had been holding since morning.
The tending of living things tends something in return. My practice is simpler than a garden — just feet, just grass, just sky, just the willingness to be here in the body, in the evening, in the life that waited patiently behind all those locked years for me to come back to it.
I am back. I am learning, still, what that means.
The wind moves through my hair again. I let it.