The landscape of my body holds stories that will never be told, perhaps even words that I have never known– ancient dictionaries hidden in the stars of my genes, shaping, deleting, evolving as I move through this life.
My heart hold the raucous crashes of Indian rickshaws, and the first caw caw caw of birds calling at five am, the smells of fresh garlands and tea amongst the goats and cows roaming the dusty streets.
This belly holds my grandmother’s recipes, fresh ginger and garlic and golden turmeric full of love and family and lingering over empty plates, while elders wash their gnarled hands with water poured from silver cups.
This mind carries the wisdom of medicine, the blood of doctoring, the thirst to serve beyond myself and the reach of my two hands. While these feet run miles around the world like the feet of my father, blistered, thickened, yet happy and well worn and used up.
These cells are the DNA of generations of ancestors, reaching beyond space and time to where I cannot see, and yet. Also there lies the seeds of my children, their souls and spirits, somehow contained in the architecture of my blood and bones.
The body knows so much more than this brain could ever hope to understand. Within lies dust and Earth and broken roads that somehow led to me, and onward to the future, wherever the journey may take me, through all the hours and days I have been granted.
And so I try, I try to release the quest for a superficial beauty, the desires to exist in a different sort of vessel, a disrespect for what only this singular body can hold and live.
My surface terrain of wrinkles and creases and scars are the marks of all that is deep, rising to the surface, showing that I was once here.