The Art of OrigaME

I laid the blanket on the hard earth and put my hood up.  It was summer, and foreign to my flesh was feeling a frost creep within my system after a sweat drenched day of hiking, but a heated season is no match for the mountain chill, dead set on proving her force no matter what God or entity stands up to her.  She had won the unforeseen war waged against my tolerance for the cold.  My back flat to the pebbled ground, I looked to the deep set black sky, rich in texture and exploding with millions of stars and the meteor shower that stole each one of my breaths.  I had never allowed myself the opportunity to dream I’d be able to know the sky on such an intimate level; my arms stretched out, my fingers became tools for designing patterns to frame my vision, my hands stacked like telescope, one single fingertip tracing constellations to memory.  I swear the stars were prismatic in shifting colors, winking secrets at me, and flirting at the idea of knowing mine.  So I unleashed soul thought to soul heights.  I felt so small and insignificant in that beauty, and I acknowledged how something so vast could easily steal and swallow me, and I felt a twinge of fear that vulnerable me, with no armor but my hoodie, could fall victim to gravitational pull, the entire Universe falling upon me, crushing me into dust that would settle in the dirt and that which became airborne, captured within the ascension of sky back upon her pedestal.  I confessed to that Mother Sky that I hated the shield I wore as often as I could, and how I wanted to know freedom as wide as she.  Her silence was security, so shed the shield I did, and as it fell to the ground and my flesh felt cactus sting of cold, I lit my words and sang them to her in the language of shapes, formed in my body’s dance.  I was liberated and would come down from that mountain an enLIGHTened being.  I felt like the unseen hands of night had unfolded me and reshaped me numerous times in mere hours….the art of origaME. 

E.A. O'Connell