Finding Your Way Home, Through a Summer Forest Floor

You decide to sit atop this summer forest floor—
Packs of green ramming through wreckage of Autumn colors.
You think your way Home can start here.

Multiple tiny lives brew and teem
On this mix of Death and Life.
But no account to you—you’re intent on a plan:

“This place should calm me.
I’ll count my breaths,”
You’ve been taught: this is your way Home.

But before you can count
Oh, those Summer Greens—shimmering, wilding … wilding,
Whispering, “come unto me, all ye that travail.”

Your ears now perked, you realize you can only hear
A single cricket — chirp-ing … chirp-ing:
Your heart’s ba-boom, ba-boom, in syncopation.

Wait! You hear more music snaking about:
Saplings singing songs of summer’s urgings;
Blue bonnets bobbing to the beat of breezes.

Act III. Go Deeper … Into Sensing

A single ant crawls on your ankle,
Shocking you into a surge of sensing,
Dropping your soul through the forest floor:

Smell the hair of bear galumphing back to its den;
Feel the warmth of the sun’s glitter crackling open
Treasure chests in tiny seeds, root sap, bulbs.

Ride this network of roots — follow the ancient Songlines
Across the span of water- and worm-holes, across Indra’s Net, bejeweled:
Where Home is latticeworked through Everywhere.

… Where Home is latticeworked through Everywhere.

Thank you for the poem. I like the part in Act I where it says this is the way you’ve been taught to return home, by counting the breath.

Counting the breath is supposed to take me home in yoga, but I find it does so in playing trombone more than in yoga.

I feel home when I’m playing  my trombone because it takes me back to high school when I took lessons from DSO players to follow my passion.

 Also, I’ve learned to answer “the breath” whenever I am asked “but who are you really?” It’s also the answer in every trombone master class when they say “what’s the most important element of playing?”