The Pack that Held My Life

“At the edge of the known, I found the bridge between worlds: the road taught my body how to listen, and that listening opened the door to Ophia.”

Edge of the Known is a companion series to my poetic/visual/soundscape videos. It follows eight months of sojourns through deserts, swamps, and ridgelines—and the moment those miles opened a seam into Ophia. These essays are the bridge between worlds: how the body learned to listen, and how that listening became story.

Departure

I checked a bag that wasn’t a bag. It was room, pantry, and hope-chest: tent, headlamp, filter, along with the kind of courage you don’t feel until the plane door opens and there’s no turning back. I didn’t leave to reinvent myself. I left because the self I kept dragging through the nights alone and the days on fire needed open skies in which to breathe.

A Sensual Spirituality

The body as the gate through which the spirit returns

There was a season of my life when I thought spirituality meant leaving the world: light without weight, devotion without skin. It seemed noble at the time: transcend the messy soup of life, rise above the endless ache, polish the soul like an heirloom. But such quests for “perfection” filter out the very currents that make a life feel lived: sun on the cheeks; Earth on the tongue; the quiet joy of a steaming cup at dawn.

Spring returned after a long winter. Color seeped in so slowly I didn’t recognize it at first. I walked the same street I’d walked for years, and one morning it wasn’t “curb, road, bank, hill”—it was one living gesture, a single breath composed of many parts. Nothing had changed. Everything had changed. Reality had become more sensual, not less, and I felt a kind of reverence bloom in my chest that didn’t require a sermon to sustain. I understood, in my body, that spirit and ground were never adversaries. They formed a loving union I’d been too numb and/or distracted to bless…

Colleen’s Invocation

Some nights, she speaks to her sister as if distance were a dream.
As if the veil between worlds were paper-thin.

“If my life has a purpose,” she writes,
“it’s to remember what we promised the stars.”

Outside—
the city forgets its own divinity.

Inside—
a single spark rekindles.

(There are moments when time no longer moves forward,
when the ticking of the world falters
and something vaster begins to listen.

Colleen finds herself in that hush —
where memory, dream, and the fragile clockwork of the heart
all begin to echo one another.

✴ In stillness, the world remembers its own breath.

When time itself pauses, even silence begins to speak.]

When the World Falls Silent

Sometimes it happens at dusk—when the air goes still.
The furnace hums fade.
Even the sparrows hold their breath.

And in that stillness,
I can almost hear… the world self-communing.
Like it’s remembering something forbidden.

Lately, the hospital clocks skip a second here, a second there.
Lost in hesitation.
Like they’re unsure which time-stream to belong to.

I told the doctor about it.
He said maybe it’s stress,
while thinking, “delusion—and overactive imagination.”

But when the silence comes,
it feels… alive.
Like someone listens through its doorway.

And sometimes—I swear—
I hear wings.