Oh Alaska!

Oh, Alaska, I found You.

Oh Alaska. I found you.
You were too big to fit in my eyes and too silent to fit in my heart.
This morning, I forgave someone and my vision and spirit opened a bit wider, wide enough to get a glimpse of you.

I stood on a mountaintop and saw the Big One shimmering
between the green horizon and the dark rain bank.
Where other pilgrims below me were taking photos and chattering like birds
In the presence of an old lady tossing seeds on the street,
I was gifted with silence, vastness, so alone and present, that I felt
Why the trees had been so quiet, the clover so wee voiced, and
Wind so still.
A small pine whispered the secret, “We wait for the snow, the Goddess of
The North, and have no aspirations of our own here. We serve her and are in silent prayer waiting her arrival.”
I sang to her soon-to-be coming and the wind winked at me in passing like an usher going through the choir with a collection bowl.

Forgive the broken when their raw edges nudge your own open wounds and scars. Take as example the small twig I found as a teacher, perfect, with one tiny cracked limb. It wasn’t a martyr. I held it in my hand and it moved gently in the breeze with the same rhythm as the ocean.

It now resides on my altar.
As do you.

vali hawkins mitchell 9/5/11