about time

I have stayed for over a month in a small cabin below a mesa. One edge of the mesa is becoming a butte. The butte is pinkish-red standstone. Hawks fly above it. There is a meadow in front with sunflowers. 

My first week, I was on the porch and a coyote came sauntering across the meadow. He stopped and just looked at me and I looked at him. Then he loped, as coyotes do, through the meadow and into the trees. I stayed where I was, bemused. Then I went in and called my friend, S_ in Gallup.

I asked her, what does it mean, the coyote staring like that? She laughed. She said, He’s saying, 'About time you’re back.'

…a long time ago, I lived here…

disembodied

...is how the past few months have felt like. Fitting, then, to be interviewed on a podcast of that name by e.v. escher. We talk about being in time and out of it, the meaning of it all and recurring images of a girl walking away from the ashes of a great grandmother tree.

I’m going into myth more and more these days. Or is it memory?

at dawn

I don’t have any wisdom for what is happening in the world.

I watch grama grass tipped with long seed stems. I watch sunflowers sway. At dawn, tiny brown birds make small disruptive sounds. A lone mullein holds her ground. Her leaves unfurl around a spike of flowers pointing to sky. 

I don’t have any wisdom for what is happening in the world.

Let the sky fall, I wrote one day. Let the rain come.

Let the love of wildness grow in secret spaces.

Go out on the land. Let your feet guide you. Dance with ravens. Sing with sky. The dancing will make an animal of you and the singing will make a raven of you.

Shebana Coelho info@shebanacoelho.com