Beloved,
I have been standing on you my whole life without once saying thank you.
That is the strange thing about you. You are too close to see. The floor under the kitchen table. The hill behind the school. The dirt that came home in my pockets as a child, the smell of the yard after a summer storm. I kept looking up for the sacred, and all along you were holding me up.
You were the first. Before the starry sky, before the mountains and the sea, before anyone thought to name anything. And still you feed every creature, the beetle and the heron and the person eating a peach over the sink.
I think about how the Sky pressed your children back inside you, and how you groaned under all that weight and then made a way. I have carried weights like that. Things pressed down so long I forgot they were mine. You taught me that making room is not cruelty. Sometimes it is the most motherly thing there is.
Lately I take my shoes off in the backyard. I stand on the cold grass in the morning with my coffee going lukewarm and let my weight sink into you. It feels foolish for about a minute. Then it feels like coming home. My body is made of you. My bones remember. My breath remembers.
So I am pouring a little honey on the ground by the old maple, beloved, for every day you held me before I knew to notice. I promise to keep my feet on you more often. I promise to remember who was here first.