The Crown
I’m wearing a crown, but it’s not made of the kind of gems queens carry. It’s fallen snowflakes melted by the gentle warmth that wicks from my head to a strand of hair. Each thread holds both the weight of the ice and the water it transforms into.
For a few brief moments, the clouds have knighted me. They say here you are and deposit a sheet of droplets onto a part of me that I cannot possibly feel, but I still do. I’ve worn the earth’s creations before, whether mud from the trail or sand under my fingernails. But this is more delicate.
“It’s laughably false that I think I’m specially chosen for this honor. I suspect the earth has other plans for me. Along with everyone else who places their feet on her back.”
I wonder for the briefest of seconds if she bothers herself with the matters of the sky, or anything above the surface of the dirt. But of course she does. Because the sky has something to say about what grows beneath it. The ground has something to say about what takes root inside of it. The air has something to say about rearranging both the clouds and the sand. So.
The earth has seen this before and plenty more. It is me who has changed. It’s me who has noticed the new arrangement of natural elements near my skin. I’m the one who stood outdoors and allowed myself to be changed by the water falling from improbably gently from the sky. I am the one whose eyes grew wider when watching the blank winter canvas expanded by this this storm.
Does the earth raise her eyebrows when a hurricane forms? Perhaps giggles a bit and causes the ocean waves to grow by a few feet? The whales must wonder at the bump in the current while the upper tidepools get a refresh.
My crown means nothing to her and everything to me. Just like sometimes she means nothing to me – certainly to judge by my actions – and I mean everything to her. Certainly everything about whether her balance will be righted.
We are two oppositional forces that, when in sync, wear our crowns and exclaim at the glory of the place we exist. Here on this patch of ground, in this shaft of sunlight, on these miles of rock underfoot, on this wobbling planet, in this elliptical arrangement of objects in space.
Here we are rooted and here we are free. We are wrong and we are essential. We are not anything other than the embodiment of opposites.
Inspired by events in Mountain Green, Utah
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