Older Than Fear -

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Before light, darkness.
Not the darkness that follows loss,
but darkness before beginning.
The deep without edge.
Mother and child in unformed breath
Name waiting, Earth opening.
A seed not yet dreaming of green.
Silence,
before silence could be broken.
A small beating heart,
finding a rhythm, recognising a shape
without a world to answer it.
Cold,
Comfort and kindness await in the dark clay
The hand of comfort that never came
Kindness has not yet been imagined.
Creatures of many legs move through
the dark body of the earth,
writing their unnoticed paths.
Twigs.
Stone.
Root.
Green shoots -
the first scripture,
written before words,
before mouths,
and before prayer.
Nothing here asks who deserves the rain.
and who belongs.
The earth does not know these questions.
Stone.
Root.
Insect.
Seed -
one body, becoming.
before the world learns to divide.

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Living beneath weather that no one else can see.
Fear is not a storm that comes and goes;
it is the climate of my body.
Beneath my skin, hundreds of small wounds,
opening where love cannot reach.
A hollow place waits to be filled.
Without food or warmth.
Warmth is too close.
So, I eat my clothes - the softness of wool between my teeth,
- a small animal of comfort I can swallow without asking.
My body folding towards the earth,
a young tree bent by wind.
My spine becomes a question mark.
My shoulders shelter around the small bright animal of my heart.
I learn to become smaller than the ground,
and walk the earth lightly.
Outside the circle before words arrive.
Only an ancient law, written before language:
my voice inside, my breath on hold,
and I dissolve into the corner.
Sitting at the edge of the fire,
watching others belong,
wondering
if I am human,
wondering
if this borrowed breath
is really mine.

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Before I knew language, I knew weather.
The pressure in a room,
the storm behind a face,
the silence carrying the cold.
I learned to breathe in gasps,
to listen through walls,
and become so small
that danger might pass over me
like the wind flattening the grass.
Carefully, I was taught without words
by a hand that could not soothe the wound,
and love carrying its own terrible gloom,
waiting for that door to open,
wondering what weather would enter.
So, I became the explanation.
Creating a map to survive.
Better that I am wrong, better that I am broken,
I believed I caused the winter.
If I caused it, surely one day I could bring back the spring.
So, I carried these sentences like stones stitched into my pockets,
calling them truth, while others called them personality.
They were the frightened wisdom of a child who still believed
that danger was alive.
Until
I walked into the wilds.
And placed my hand against the warmth of a horse.
A dog lay beside me, quiet and still.
Blackbirds lifted all together into an open sky.
The trees offered their shade, and the river offered its water,
fox accepted me without question, and the earth held my weight without condition.
Now, I stand where that child once stood.
These old sentences still live somewhere
in the basement of forgotten sorrow.
Sometimes when I am still,
I hear another voice older than fear,
It says:
You were never asking if you deserve.
You were asking if you were allowed to exist.
And the earth has been answering
since the day you were born,
without argument, shame, and theology
simply by holding you.

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I arrived wearing a cloak embroidered with a message - I do not belong.
Fear was the colour of its language that I did not speak. Yet even then, there were pauses, small enough to be overlooked, and large enough to keep another story alive.
A woman smiles without wanting anything in return. A teacher noticed something no one else has seen, and a stranger spoke gently - for a moment, my body remembers it can soften.
Gathering these moments, like a bird carrying tiny strands to a nest it has not yet built. The trees receive my silence as though it were a simple prayer. The wind touches my face with the tenderness I had not yet learned to give myself.
I lay the cloak down as I begin to recognise that there are places where nothing is demanded of me. Places where I am not measured and where I am not wrong.
I kneel in the chapel of the convent, amidst flawed stones, human sisters, and broken prayers.
Yet something shines through the cracks.
A Presence I cannot name.
I do not call it God, nor yet call it grace.
I only know there is somewhere I breathe more easily.
Something in me has become quiet; sometimes, in this stillness, I feel less of a stranger and follow these small lights. A kind face, a faithful friend, a book that seems to know me. A therapist who does not turn away. The smell of rain. Old trees. Birdsong waking in the morning.
Somewhere beyond then and now, life itself is looking back at me with kindness.
I follow as travellers once followed stars. Not because they remove the darkness, but because they tell me which way to walk.
Looking back, I see that while fear was trying to persuade me that I did not deserve to exist, something else was always searching for me.
Without thunder or revelation.
Patiently.
As though Love itself knew where I was hiding.
I thought I was searching for God. Perhaps all along God was searching for me.
Leaving small mercies scattered like white stones along the woodland path.
Never enough to blind my suffering. But always enough to keep the path from disappearing.
Now I understand that these moments were never accidents. They became the quiet rooms inside where I can rest when the old voices return, gentle hands that held me long before I knew how to hold myself.  They became my faith.
A quiet knowing that, beneath all the frightened stories I carried, another story had always been unfolding.
A story older than fear, written in roots and rain, in friendship and forgiveness, in the silence of prayer.
And then, very quietly, I understood: I had not been walking towards Love. I had been walking within Love.