Before the first breath, there was belonging.
Note:
Alms: Something (such as money or food) given freely to relieve the poor.
Cumulus: A dense puffy cloud form having a flat base and rounded outlines often piled up like a mountain.
The body does not know how to be everywhere at once. It keeps its place, breath by breath, upon a single patch of earth. It learns that place slowly—through the soles of the feet, through the rhythm of the lungs, through the quiet affinity between gravity and bone. The world does not arrive all at once; it gathers itself in small offerings.
Beneath the body, the earth is patient. It does not rush its gifts. It grows soft grass in careful increments, blade by blade, until there is something tender enough to receive weight without protest. The ground remembers each footfall just long enough to soften the next. When the sun climbs too high and burns with a steady, merciless gaze, the earth shelters—trees lifting their arms into canopies, leaves stitching together patches of shade that flicker and shift. Under this green hush, the body cools. Sometimes survival is nothing more than finding where the light has broken.
Beyond the stillness of land, the sea refuses to be held in one place, yet it keeps its own language with the wind. The surface trembles, then gathers itself into long, breathing swells, as if the ocean were a chest inhaling sky. The wind presses. The water answers. Neither remembers the shape the other leaves behind. They meet, part, and meet again, shaping each other in passing, drawing a horizon so clean it feels less like an edge than a breath held between them.
Above it all, the sky is a playground for what cannot be still. The cumulus drift in constant motion–a moving ornament against emptiness. Water rises quietly from the earth, escaping in invisible threads for a brief joyride in the sky. It gathers into clouds and lingers there, until its own weight becomes too heavy to remain suspended. Then rain—like an alms—falls, touching leaf, soil, and skin with equal care, restoring what heat and time have taken.
The body trusts a world it never consciously chose to. The season arrives wearing the wrong face—clouds without rain, wind without relief. The unspoken kinship frays. The body lingers, not knowing where belonging has gone.