Tangled with the Land

I walk back onto this land, and it carries its scars like old stories.

The stones feel hollow, the soil tired, yet still it opens its arms to me.a returning son.

Its welcome is loud and deep,

like the breath of a morning that has seen everything. Like a grandmother singing the harvest song. My first conversation is with the old olive tree.I lean against its strong roots, as though touching the horizon through its veins.

I ask it, as I hide my anxious breath:

How does one carry a homeland in the heart? The olive tree answers softly: "Between a heartbeat and a heartbeat."

The land greets me with the smell of wild sage and sumac. I sit under the olive’s branches, its roots clinging to the soil, like a summer storm grips the open sky. It's branches, know me before I was became a "refugee".

The tree and I bound like the tall wheat shafts, reaching together toward the light. The land whispers of my childhood, a childhood still waiting to be gathered.

I close my eyes and drift, and I hear my grandmother’s voice: “The welcome we say to those who come onto our land must deepen each time we see them, so that your world and theirs may be woven into one.”

When I open my eyes, the sun strokes my hair, and my soul turns into wild thyme clinging to the mountainside. From the distance, I smell sage tea brewing over a fire.

A neighbor calls out: “Come, have tea with me.” As I breathe with the sage, tangle my soul with the air, and let the language of the soil entwine me, I collect my scattered self.

This is not only my return. It is the land’s return to me.

Come, have tea with me on my land.

@sadaa.echoes