In the high hush of Scottish hills I hang my hammock between two patient pines. My angel, My dog, soft as a question, ears tipped to the wind, curls up at my side, her warmth comforting, together breathing the same slow language as peat and stone. Night folds like a familiar map stars stitch cold silver into the black. Haunting faces ghost of the past swirl endlessly in the blackness, within me.
I find stillness here, a reconstruction of ribs and roots, the earth re-teaches my soul how to remember weight, the universe trades its distant thunder for a single continuous pulse beneath my ribs, deep in my chest, deep in the wells of my  heart. Breath becomes an ancestor’s drum, old rhythms that steady the tremor of modern days, of times old long forgotten, so that what was broken takes shape again, softened by moss, re-knitted by wind.
Emotions settle into peat-dark wells and rise, clear, as gratitude. Memory drifts through the trees, ghosts of past selves, wounded places, footsteps that were once hurried, voices that hurried me on. The forest keeps them kindly, neither condemning nor clinging, allowing me to lay each down like a cloak, a lifting of a vail. In that unclasping is transcendence, becoming, not a leaving so much as a returning, an unwinding back into the patient logic of leaf and stone.
I whisper to the night, to the stars above, the small, necessary things, apologies, thanks, forgiveness for the nameless faces of those who taught me how to be, bound by pain & sorrow, the hills answer in a slow echo that is not mine but becomes mine to hold, a gift. The dog lifts her head, catches the scent of something older than us, older than time, together we listen, to the rustle that might be wind, might be our ancestors might be the earth itself remembering us, welcoming us home. Reborn, tender, and soft heart open wide, a fresh, a new no longer a haunted space, only a beating heart beneath my ribs.