16/02/2026
She was not broken—
only wintered.
Deep beneath the frost-line of her ribs,
where forgotten rivers hummed in stone,
the Inner Woman slept
like a seed waiting for permission
to rise.
The forest knew her name
before she remembered it.
It whispered through pine-needle breath
and the soft green language of moss.
“Come back,” said the wind,
combing her tangled thoughts
with invisible fingers.
Once, she had been river—
wide-hipped, laughing over smooth rock,
carving canyons with patient devotion.
But drought had found her.
Voices like locusts
had stripped her banks bare.
She mistook survival
for silence.
So she became earth—
hard-packed, unyielding,
cracked in careful patterns
no one thought to read
as scripture.
Yet even desert remembers rain.
One dawn, a single drop—
not loud, not dramatic—
fell through the dust of her doubt.
It was kindness.
Or grief allowed to soften.
Or truth spoken without armor.
Whatever its name,
it entered her.
The soil trembled.
Roots long coiled in self-protection
loosened.
They stretched like waking limbs
toward a deeper aquifer—
toward the dark, sweet water
she had hidden from herself.
Spring does not argue with winter.
It simply arrives.
Sap climbed her spine.
Green insistence threaded her veins.
Where she once braced against the storm,
she now leaned—
trusting the rhythm of sway.
Petal by petal,
she opened.
Not the fragile bloom
that wilts beneath a careless gaze—
but the wildflower
that splits rock to be born.
Mountains bowed in quiet recognition.
The moon stitched silver courage
into her tides.
Even the old scars,
those fault lines of remembered thunder,
filled with gold—
like rivers of light
finding their way home.
She did not return
to who she had been.
She became forest after fire—
richer in soil,
braver in root,
singing with a thousand small lives
that only flame could free.
And when the wind asked her name again,
she answered without trembling:
“I am the thaw.
I am the rising tide.
I am earth remembering itself.”
And somewhere beneath her steady feet,
the seed that once slept
smiled in the dark—
no longer waiting.
~Unknown
Welcome the inner deep healing 🌲
Wilderness Pursuits
