We just kept tending; a raw reckoning in a turbulent time

I wonder if a bird can tell
when the air between us is shared.
I wonder what it has seen.
If your wings could speak,
would they tell me about the sky?

I don’t need an answer.
I just stay.
Co-breathing, co-witnessing.
The moment exhales.
And so do I.

We are in remnant time;
where grief moves like weather.
Where hope doesn’t announce itself,
but returns slowly,
like a bird who remembers
the shape of your hand.

Tending rather than fixing.
Lingering rather than to escape.
I stay beyond what’s necessary,
and with intention for presence itself is a form of care.

Not everything needs to be resolved.
Some things are only meant to be felt.
Like presence.
Like grief.
Not the sharp kind, but a low ache;
a grief braided with the Earth’s own exhaustion,
even for the grief of lost kinship,
of futures dissipating like breath in wind.

But I do not want to numb it.
I want to open to it.
To linger in it;
not out of despair,
but because presence itself is an offering.
This is how I remember.

Living inside a polycrisis,
I want to live into a kind of care
full of raw, sacred remembering.
That we belong to one another.
That we belong to this Earth.
That we carry something tender and necessary.

Why does anything remain
when so much is unraveling?
What anchors us
when the ground keeps shifting?

Reverence is a practice;
 to tend to one another,
 to honor the gifts that come to us,
 is to participate in an ancient, ongoing ceremony of reciprocity. The gifts we carry. We each have our own.
They are entrusted to us to share.
Not to give what we’ve been given
is a betrayal of the sacred responsibility we hold.

So this is the gift I carry.
And I offer it now:
not for praise,
but to enliven the life around us.

Because to live with a deep sense of purpose
is to live spiritually awake.
To keep tending,
even when hope edges into exhaustion.

To trace memory through the residue of presence.
To honor the subjective, the intuitive,
the flux that never ends.

What remains stable in a world in motion?
Perhaps only the steady rhythm of tending.

A slow reckoning,
where hope meets its edge,
and chooses to stay.

We just kept tending.
And somehow,
that was enough.