Past and Future

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How can we ever belong to this place? Here, lands were stolen and degraded, peoples were killed and sent away. Here, the future is threatened by rising waters, beetle-withered pine forests, dry winters; by emptiness, and loss.

What’s already happened, and what is to come–they are two stone walls on either side of us. At either end there is some sort of light, but it is milky and subdued, like the sun submerged in water.

Either way you run, the walls get longer. They stretch back to the time before humans, and forward to the time when you and I will be gone.

And what if you sit, down in this crevice, and feel the cold spread over your arm-skin, the shadow of the sun, the sun that is holy and sacred but is not your god and cannot be because it was already stolen from someone else?

And the soil, here, that is bled of life, by, not you, but your ancestors? The dark, moon-like soil that was once rich with thousands of lives? That is not yours either. You are not of it. You are not of anywhere. Not time, not place. That is the dilemma. That is how we got here.