Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Another last-minute flight home tomorrow, because this is life now.
They don’t tell you, when you decide to uproot yourself from the place that you are from, that there will always be reasons to need to go back and that these will be distinct from the reasons you want to go back. That there will be never-ending guilt about all the times you don’t or can’t or didn’t know in time. That there will never be enough time.
In truth this has been life for a long, long time now.
You will remember (be haunted by) all the calls. What country you were in, what you were doing just before. You will have no recollection of the in-between, the time until you either made it or you didn’t. There will have been packing and airports and planes and trying to figure out where people are gathering and when, and all those edges will be blurry but you’ve gotten so good at leaving places that perhaps there’s just nothing worth remembering, in between.
Autopilot as defense mechanism.
You learn, over time, that the hurt is a consequence of ongoing connection, evidence of ties that remain.
They didn’t tell you, when you first decided that you had to leave, that you will have to leave parts of yourself behind.
They did tell you that you can’t run away from yourself.
Attribution
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
— from Remember by Joy Harjo