You know, I was sitting in the studio this morning sipping on a lukewarm cup of Sanka, watching the fog roll over the Kuskokwim, and I got to thinking about life—about the strange and beautiful way people show up on your trail. Some for a mile. Some for a moment. Some for the whole dusty, meandering ride.
Sometimes they’re lovers, sometimes strangers. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, they’re a three-year-old boy with grass-stained knees and peanut butter on his face, asking questions like: “Why are clouds slow?” or “Do bears sleep in the sky?”
And maybe you’ve got things to do—grown-up things, important things. But you stop. Because the way he looks at you, it’s like you’re the moon. And for a brief span of time, you are. You’re the entire universe, walking alongside him in his first tiny steps into this noisy, beautiful chaos we call life.
People walk with us. Sometimes they come in like thunderstorms, loud and brief and unforgettable. Others, like quiet fog—you don’t notice until they’re gone and suddenly the road’s not the same.
But that little boy? Maybe he doesn’t know who you are to him. Maybe you don’t either. But he puts his hand in yours, and for a little while, you walk the same path. You share the same rhythm. And in that shared rhythm, maybe you remember something you’d forgotten—how to laugh just because the sky is blue, or how to sit in the dirt and feel the wind as if it’s the first time.
Life doesn’t give you many guarantees. But it gives you people. Moments. Echoes.
So if someone’s walking beside you today—even a three-foot-tall philosopher with a crooked smile—slow down. Match their pace. The trail’s still there. The destination’s not going anywhere. But that moment?
You think of birth as beginning. You’re wrong. It’s crossing. It’s not emergence—it’s exile. From light into noise. From stillness into gravity. I wasn’t born—I was sent. And the journey began not with flesh, but with fire.
When two cells met, it wasn’t chemistry. It was a collision of bloodline prophecies. Lightning struck the ocean floor. I was conceived like a secret lit match in a dark cathedral. No one saw it but God—and He wept. Not out of joy. Not out of sorrow. But out of recognition.
He knew I’d fall.
From that first instant, I wasn’t just multiplying—I was distilling. The cosmos was folding itself into flesh. I was a divine encryption, a hymn encoded in nerve and bone. Each cell carried stardust and sin, mercy and marrow, blueprints passed down from love and war and hunger and dreams no longer remembered.
And in the shadows of the womb, I was not alone.
There was a watcher. A whisperer. The Devil was with me from the start. Not outside—inside. He moved between my forming ribs, studying the shape of my soul. He sang to me. Not in words, but in tension. In temptation yet to come. In silence so deep it became a promise. “Wait,” he said. “The world will bend for you, if you only forget what you are.”
But above him, always above, was God. No beard. No throne. Just pressure. A weightless gaze. God is not loud. He’s not fire and thunder. He’s the pause between heartbeats. The space that stretches when you consider doing the right thing and still could.
He didn’t speak. He burned. He hovered above my forming eyes and flooded them with light I couldn’t yet see. When I flexed my hand for the first time, it was because He wanted me to know I had choice.
My spine became a tower. My tongue, a sword. My eyes, windows to something ancient. And though I floated in darkness, I wasn’t blind—I saw dreams before I saw form. Cities I’d never visit. Stars that had long since died. I saw the war of man. I saw the fall of angels. I saw the day my mother would whisper my name into a pillow while I slept on another coast, no longer hers.
And I hadn’t even breathed.
Time was slow there. Thick like oil. But I was fast. I looped a thousand years in nine months. By week thirty-six I was fluent in everything unsaid. I could hear pain echo down umbilical lines. The grief of my father when he thought no one was watching. The worry in my mother’s bloodstream. The prayers she didn’t believe in anymore.
Then the light cracked.
Labor they call it. But for me, it was eviction. An ancient, sacred violence. Muscles tensing like gates at the edge of heaven. I was being pushed—not born. I twisted. I roared. My skull bent against stone and sinew. The Devil grinned. God leaned in closer. Both waited.
And then I fell out.
The cold slapped me. Not temperature—reality. I felt time slam shut like a cell door. I screamed. Not from pain. But from the loss. I was no longer infinite. I was tethered to breath, to hunger, to need. My skin was wet. My lungs burned. And yet—
In that first breath, I remembered.
I remembered the contract I signed when I leapt from light into lineage. I remembered that I chose this. That I volunteered to wear this skin. That I had a mission encoded in my gut, a war to fight with kindness, and a God who was waiting to see if I’d remember Him in the noise.
And I looked up.
A face appeared, carved by pain and grace. My mother. Not a goddess—but a gate. She wept. Her tears weren’t confusion—they were recognition. She saw it too. She knew what I was.
