One With Nature

Guest Post from Kyleen Salais, junior at Franklin High School

It is imperative to stay connected to our natural roots.

The way nature works around adapting, we work around the clock to get things done. But as we wake up late to a meeting and run with toast on our mouth and coffee spilling

everywhere on our hands, we take a look at the sky and breathe it in deeply.

How the sun might be feeling today, how the clouds felt grief, then solemn, now drifting melancholy that transposes every soul to touch our lips, sealed, and kissed of rain. How in all of that, that's how we start our life.

And just as the lonesome mountain that moves ever slowly, our aging roots may start to become apparent. When I gaze down this mountain, and the breeze kisses my body like a blanket of cooling comfort, I release everything to this monster that absorbs all my roots every time I give it the will.

We're natural as the lifting wind hitting the barks of trees that paints its soil into a massacre across our portraits.

The configuration that daunts the plain void of white, now furiously embarks influence painting vicariously. Strokes of choices and freedom fix in clumsy lines to make branches, values, and beliefs are swift and golden-kissed leaves. Fate prances softly present to make heartwood.

Who made you respond to everyone else's burdens? Who made you become the microphone that pitches and echoes every time a dirty, smacking mouth comes close. Who made you so tame? What stopped you from frolicking down the long concrete tar road or the abandoned forest?

When did I become a flimsy string intertwined between the world and myself?

When did I start telling myself they were apart?

I realized that I was letting time get ahead of itself and not wait for me.

I realized that just as the wind stopped and listened to my mumbles, they moved on. I realized just as the water seeps through the soil- it will quickly thank for what has come and left the remaining water that it didn't need.

I realize all the answers are inside of me.