Pacha Mama

These mountains created

walls around me

& I keep thinking of them, the

mountains, the room of the

valley, the feeling of not being stuck but

being contained, held in energy, and earth

and the bowl of a sky

The bowl of the sky? I'd heard that phrase before it's

not mine but it never landed until

the sky was a bounded enclosure not

endless expanse

I've been in mountains of various

shades, ranging heights, and the scents of

cardamom or juniper or pine or the smell of fog

and snow. Sun. Fragrant sun.

These mountains helped me understand

words. Bowls of sky and the absorption of

Self into earth. “You approach the mountain until

you no longer see it. You are within it.” How are

you within a mountain? When it builds its walls around

you and when you begin to note it's exposed veins (drilling) and

they feel like your wound and you

feel the heat of water knowing

the warmth is coursing from the lava still

flowing within

I didn't know what Pacha Mama meant, who she

referred to-- I heard her sung I saw her written I

heard her name. I heard her name and wondered who

Maybe she calls you in. Maybe it's a siren's call

to be enveloped by her walls, sheltered

within the green, to be under the

bowl of sky

held

Pacha Mama, Mama Andes, these mountains that

are a spine, that hold the earth upright that keep me

upright my calves sore from climbing up and up

and still the bowl of the sky is far away I am

never absorbed into the sky just

these walls of earth of rock

I wanted to write words as soon as I

entered her

as soon as I found myself in the valley

within her walls within

her mountains within

her

I had words. I didn't know what, why, but there

were stories in me, in her

as I was in her I had a song to sing, I knew her

name