annaleeskarma

[annaleeskarma]

I have seen this land before, the same face but a different name. I have seen those eyes so many times, in lives so very far away. How funny, the illusion of time and space.

If you've ever lived somewhere your whole life, I want you to know I think you're really cool. If you can place memories on sidewalks and open roads, if I got the chance, I asked you to take me down memory lane. Because the way you see those phantoms overlap each other is one of the coolest things to me.

There's a young woman I know who can take me back to all the years she's lived. She picks me up by the senses and drops me right there in the middle of it. She's walked me through her old apartment complex and that hometown so many times those phantoms are just as real to me. And another looks out across the rolling plains of South Dakota and says, I know these lands. You see, there's a difference between remembering the way hills look and knowing the land. Knowing what has passed through here, how the seasons have shaped it, and the mutual molding that takes place between the seer and space. Because when you have lived somewhere all your life, the land is a part of your story. It's not just a backdrop. You've held it in your hands. Played with it. Shaped it. It yours. And you belong it.

I've never lived anywhere longer than four years, city or state. And before this year, it was 5 years of moving after no more than a handful of months. I do not regret the life I've lived, but there have been times when I have looked longing at the way some of you belong so clearly to the earth. When I can't help but be jealous of your attachment to it. Because I felt that sense of belonging was never a right given to me. That as a wanderer, as a roaming soul, I could never lay claim to the land. It belongs to those who have tended it through years of growth and death. Through rough seasons and easy breezes.

But there is nothing a blunt cruise, fuzzy children, and a stranger turned friend can't fix. And anyone would be startled into awakening too if they were transported into a Pacific Coast town just outside of the Redwoods when only a moment ago they were driving up to a small town on the East Side of South Dakota on a dreary winter morning.

With the snow-ridden landscape racing past us, dogs with their heads raised in the open skylight, the woman I was with told me the stories of a specific time in space for each hill and property. She told me of the generations that grew up here and her relationship with each. How in each lake she could dive down and scoop up sandy and windy memories. And I could feel it, from her, through her, what it meant to belong somewhere. What it meant to belong to the land. To be held by it. And I related how captivated I was by that experience. How much joy it brought me to know that feeling, to see it sparkling in the eyes of others. And she expressed how wonderful my own experiences were. And I agreed. I would do everything again in exactly the same way because there is no other way that I could have lived. But still, she had tasted a part of life that I had never bit into. With nothing between my teeth, that painless thrust of bone against bone has still always been a shock.

But when we drove through that transplanted Pacific Coast town, I felt the memory of that long-forgotten Arizona Tea made with real sugar - which I have never found again in any gas station. I felt the heaviness in my body from a long hiking journey years ago. I felt myself sitting beside one of the baddest women I have ever known and looked up to see a woman just the same, rolling a blunt in a similar situation that others would've found perilous. I saw the small line of women I look up to behind her eyes. I heard them in her laugh. I smelled it in the cigarettes.

A short time after, there was a stranger who entered my home. You should've seen the pride behind his eyes when he told me his last name. He was the first of his family to be in this country, and he would bring honor to his family's name. He told me of the wretched life of abuse and hard work he had lived. So young, so strong, working in such a debilitating cold. And when I looked into his face, I realized he was no stranger at all. Because I sat in an energetic space just like this in the 10th grade in a practice band room, that rock wall in 6th grade, and English class in multiple settings. I had seen him all my life, all across the country. He had different names, but I would know him from a mile away. It's you, I wanted to say. How I've missed you, is your mother okay? But I saw myself in him too. Who I used to be, what I wanted to be, only begrudgingly admitting who I am. Because I didn't feel as divine and transcendent as the Angel sitting before me. But I guess neither could he see how it was his first name that would represent all his glory. Angel. That was his name.

These experiences gifted me the sight to see that I had always belonged to the land. Because the bones and bedrock that line the foundation of our lives are all the same. And Time and space don't exist at all. We call it by different names, and she takes on many shapes, but the mother earth you know is mine too. You've seen the multiple facets of her by staying in one place, and I've seen her by overlapping phantom shapes of mountainous forests, swamps, open plains, and midwestern landscapes. One day, I'll share my stories of how the world can turn, and millions could die, but I've been right here, caught in the middle of it, the fullness of it, with the same beings I met at the beginning of Time. And if I ever learn to pick you up by the senses, I hope I place you back down in the land you belong to and show you how it's mine too, and how we both belong to it.

So if you've ever been to the Pacific coast and driven through its small towns, and you get the chance to go to the town in South Dakota from the Movie Into the Wild on a misty winter morning, could you tell me how it feels just the same. Would you meet me there, in a place beyond time and space? And if you looked into my eyes, would you see our mother's face?