Tomorrow has arrived, and the forest I knew has begun to turn into yesterday. I can think of little else.

I want to bare witness to each fall of life, and I also want to stay tucked inside my home. This morning, as if by happenstance, I was given the grace of friendship by my side while I walked the path of memory. We heard the saws long before we saw the evidence, and while I listened to their unyielding power, I swallowed back grief and regret.

Life is a series of sacrifices. Life, by nature, cannot be possible without death, yet I struggle to make sense of loss. Especially when ceremony is replaced with a belief in ownership. This distancing of connection. A forgetting that we are of the land, intricately tied together in this beautifully complex, strong, yet fragile, web of life.

How many days, I wonder, will it take for the last of my friends, destined for death, to fall to the ground? In mere seconds, when we reached the edge of the woods, by way of the field, I watched a whole group of them fall nearly at my feet.

The only people stationed to warn were beside the paved road, as though they have already forgotten that feet pass through the forest often. That life is abundant, even with the leaves have yet to bud into bloom.  If we had not been aware, we could have fallen with them.