by Stacy Bustamante
I once walked for an entire day. I stopped on occasion to relieve myself, or to tie a shoe, but aside from those brief and momentary reprieves, I kept the pace of my beating heart. I liked the feeling of the tall grasses as their yellow furred points passed across the palm of my hand. I would sweep my arms back and forth as I paced the fallow ground below. The yellow drifted off and cornered the sky. I liked how the heavens and the earth, as if yielding one to the other, hemmed me in. In the vast openness, the sound of my soles scraping across the dirt was a ministry to the dark, dry earth within my bones, speaking, “The ground is good. The rain will come.� I stopped to pick up a smoothed stone that had made me stumble. I rubbed its warm skin across my cheek. I turned and tossed it out of the way. And then, I continued on.
Stacy Bustamante is a stay at home mother of three who lives in Northern Colorado. She spends her personal time dedicated to refining her craft of writing. She loves the earth and the spiritual aspect of life, and these elements of existence are the foundations of her writing. Accompanying photo by Leonora Enking