Tag Archives: wilderness myth

Beyond the Firelight ©️

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The night had dropped hard, black and clean, and the wind off the ridgeline carried a rawness that tasted like iron. I was alone in the timberline, no fire, no trail behind me worth following. The pines stood like silent witnesses, their shadows folding into the snowpack, their limbs heavy with silence. Every sound that came—the crack of ice shifting on the creek, the low moan of wind funneling through the rocks—was mine alone to bear.

I’d pushed this far without meaning to, or maybe it was always meant: step after step away from the pack, until the pack was only a memory. My body ached, but in the ache there was a kind of purity, the sense that I had shed every layer of comfort and expectation until only sinew and will remained. Out here, stripped bare against the wild, I could feel the terrible perfection of it.

And yet, the fear came in waves. When the wolves lifted their voices from the valley floor, it wasn’t the threat of teeth that unsettled me, but the reminder that they had one another, a chorus to call back and forth. My own cry would fall mute, swallowed by snow and sky. The alienness of my path lay not in danger but in the distance—the certainty that I had become something apart, an animal untethered, unrecognized by its own kind.

Still, there was beauty in it. The stars were sharp as flint above me, a million cold witnesses, and in their light I felt myself both infinitesimal and immense. Perfect in the sense of being whole, terrifying in the sense of knowing there was no road back. The wilderness had answered my evolution with silence, and I accepted it, stepping deeper into the dark as though the dark were my inheritance.

The Field Between Them ©️

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Two trees grew in a field where no man prayed, Split by a stone that the thunder obeyed. One sang of heaven in bark and bloom, The other drank deeply from winter’s tomb. Both bent to wind like prophets in sleep, Their roots clasped secrets the river would keep.

O mountain mother, hush not thy voice—For wolves still yawn and the elk rejoice. The stars hang drunken on fir-lit pines. Where the dead breathe fog in the faulted lines. And under their branches, frost-wrought and bare, Lie hoofprints nailed like hymns to prayer.

One tree leaned westward, one toward the sun, Their shadows braided when day was done. No saw, no axe, no farmer’s grief, Could split the vow in bark and leaf. They grew not tall for man’s delight, But to whisper to moose in the lantern night.

Beneath them lay the bones of snow, Where blood once melted, then ceased to flow. Not war, but silence had torn the skin—Of a land where breath is held within. And the trees stood still as if they’d known That God rides bareback through pine alone.

So rage, green giants, and swing your boughs—The storm is just the world’s old vows. Though cabins rot and ranches fall, Still you stand, and still you call. And when my time comes, make me this: A voice in wind between roots and abyss.

Two trees grew in a field where I lay down, One bore a crown, the other a frown. Yet both were true, and both were wild, And both remembered me—as child.