To Reclaim What I Buried

I wake with the taste of knowing on my tongue. It’s a distinct flavor; one that I have recognized as a blend of pomegranates and honey.

I dreamt of the goddess again.

In my dream, I’m walking the edges of a forest. I am walking with purpose. I have been somewhere, have seen something, and am now returning with answers. There is a staff in my hand and feathers in my hair.

I hear her, rather than see her.

You are an hedge walker, she tells me.

I feel these words settle in my chest and immediately expand, taking root and spreading outward. My hamr ripples around me. The word healer flies around, brushing up against the edges of my psyche.

You are here but not here, she says. You are there but not there.

I open my eyes and watch the blades of the fan swirl above me. I run my tongue across my teeth, savoring the brush with something other. It’s been a while since I’ve been here, but I know this land. This past week has carried an exhaustion that only comes when my dreams are not dreams but messengers, sometimes only felt rather than remembered. But today I remembered.

I let out a breath. I empty myself. And at the bottom, in that rocky ravine of my soul, I close my eyes and expand.

//

Every year, I choose a word. It guides me through the landscape of the coming months in a way far more useful to me than resolutions. Last year my word was reclamation. At the beginning of 2025, I envisioned golden threads belonging to me returning. Standing at the Cliff of the Fool, I waited for these missing pieces to return. Some did. Some found me as soon as I put out the call.

I didn’t realize the other pieces were waiting to be excavated.
I didn’t know so much of what was missing had been buried.

Only when I allowed myself to stand at the cliff’s edge, my hair blowing in the wind, was I able to see the monuments I erected so I wouldn’t forget.

//

When I was younger, I spent my summers in the mountains of Idaho. My great grandfather was a cowboy—a living legend in the Sawtooths where he was rumored to have branded a grizzly bear. I grew up with the smell of hay and sage; knew the ways in which horses seemed to read your mind and energy. Some days I can still feel the freedom of that particular expanse. I can still feel the way my body turned electric when I smelled the leather of a saddle or felt the untethered joy of a gallop.

My mother would pull us out of the one room cabin where we slept at cow camp and line us up for a hike.

“You need sun.” She would say.

But then we’d start to walk, the sun burning our skin, and she would inevitably stop and close her eyes before whispering “shhh. Do you hear it? What are the trees saying to you?”

I never knew how to answer her in those days. I rolled my eyes a lot, confused by this version of her.

I buried this moment in those mountains. Only recently have I returned to reclaim it.

My mother would never admit it, but her question has ancestral roots. Roots that speak to the lore of trees and the rustling of leaves and how they speak to us in their own language. Roots that spread far beyond the current Christo-Fascist landscape. Her asking us was her tapping into that ancestral vein, and without even realizing it, she created a map line for me to return and remember.

//

In Beasts of the Southern Wild, Hushpuppy finds herself on a mythic quest to help her father. During this quest, she meets a man who offers her a chicken biscuit. He then tells her that he’s saved every wrapper from every chicken biscuit he’s eaten, because they remind him of who he was when he ate that particular biscuit.

“It makes me feel cohesive.” He says.

Hushpuppy looks at him. Blinks. Then whispers, “I wanna be cohesive.”

I saw this movie in theaters when it came out, and I was the only one there. In the middle of the theater, with the music swelling around me, I sobbed my way through this scene (and the entire movie, honestly) because of the resonance.

I, too wanted to be cohesive.

I, too wanted to feel aligned and gathered and whole.

I, too wanted to know why I felt so split and separated.

I, too knew what it was like to have the ability to “count all the times I’ve been lifted. [To] count all the times I’ve been lifted with two fingers.”

Toward the end of the movie, she says “when it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces. I see that I'm a little piece of a big, big universe.”

She found what she’d been looking for, had made peace with her monsters, even calling them friends.

//

My word for this year is resonance. I am integrating—reaching toward coherence. And I am realizing that reclamation is not over. Coherence—the pulling in and integration of all of your disparate parts—this is perhaps the most important step of reclaiming the buried parts of self.

It’s remembering that my 21st birthday was spent forgotten, but it’s also remembering that for my 16th birthday a dear friend managed to convince the entire line of people waiting for the Rattler at Fiesta Texas to sing to me.
It’s remembering the thread of wild that appeared to me while standing up in my best friend’s car in high school, my entire body from the waist up exposed through her sunroof, laughing and singing as we sped down 410.
It’s the heartbreak I endured from the linebacker, but also the click into place I felt when my husband and I started to date.
It’s being told I’ve always had a rebellious spirit.
It’s never fitting in, never finding a place, feeling both here and there.
It’s finally understanding that as a gift.

But more than all of this, or perhaps because of all of this, I see there are a number of monuments I have yet to uncover. The reclamation an ongoing endeavor—the coherence a byproduct. You cannot have one without the other. The parts of my soul do not live outside of each other; in fact, they live in tandem. The Heartwood brushing up against the river of my voice. The river flowing directly into the sacral sea. All of it belongs.

All of me belongs.

And on the edge, just beyond the line of sight, stands a row of aspens. I can see them here, from where I stand on this cliff. The sunlight hits the leaves in a way that make the tree line look as if its engulfed in flames; and perhaps that flame is more cunning than metaphorical. There is sight within the shadows there; a different kind of knowing than the monuments erected in this Heartwood. I gather the pieces I’ve excavated—the messy and broken and the ones that shine—I’ll need them all for this journey. I look toward the trees again, the sun just beneath their branches now, glittering against the worn path.

I know it’s time for me to leap. The way before me is unclear, but I know my way around liminal spaces. For this is what I am reclaiming, what I am gathering close to my bones as a song sings them to life: I am an hedge walker. I am an hedge rider. And these disparate pieces I am calling back to me wrap around my staff for safe keeping.

I am returning, but also, I am leaving.
My path the spiral, ever expanding, guided by the voices who whispered to my mother the secrets of trees.