By Nicholas Triolo

I worry about the future, about my knees, my job, my family, my mother, my father, my niece, my heart.  

One step. One breath.

I worry about our species and all those we’ve extinguished, about this administration, these oil fields, those polar bears, these wolves, those frogs. We’re eating our home alive and pang yet with more hunger.

One step. One breath.

Hell, I drive. I drink coffee shipped from 7,000 miles away. I check my iPhone and tweet and blog and care about Likes piping through my feed. I feed that. I am one of them, monsters of the incessant chow-chow, that all-you-can-eat buffet, chain-smoking Camel Reds in the back of the casino at three in the morning, cold fish sandwich half-eaten and waiting for a winning ticket. I am the smoke, the shadow, the blackened lung. I am adjoined to this curious hominid form of outgrown egos conforming to modern ways to be visible, to be somebody, somewhere, anywhere, anyhow.

One step. One breath.

I’m masculine. I’m feminine. I’m human, animal, bird, reptile, stone, moss, that fungal, ever-connecting, ever-metabolizing growth. I’m wild and domesticated, of this place and in this place and also not at all native to this place. I’m both tempest and its calm eye, larkspur meadow and a fistful of cactus. I’m mountain and prairie, swamps not to be drained or caverns to be drilled. I’m we, all, whole, and also me, one, singular, brown eyes and Sicilian nose, settler skin I did not request, colonial hues I wish often to peel away, that Lewis and Clark inheritance pointing to anywhere else but here, always pointing to new frontiers and wealth acquisitions, distant gods and distant planets, hungry for salvation elsewhere but never here—this dirt, this water, this trauma, this opportunity.

One step. One breath.

I didn’t ask for human form but I’ve received it, a bundle of bone and tissue, and for that I’m grateful. Such gratitude extends to other species, then, those who had no say in their emergence but are here now to live into themselves as best they can. I didn’t ask for this skin, this gender, but have likened to it. So for all other genders and persuasions, I honor them, call them kin. And this place, a nation of patriarchal take and deny, I never pledged allegiance to forgetting how our stars and stripes were first acquired, amnesia as prerequisite for Inquisition. But I’m here now, in this epoch, of this country, and for that I pledge allegiance to such an invitation: that now is in fact perfect, that living in a time of broken democracy in a mass extinction event is precisely the moment I was made for. I emerge and run toward such fractured times.

One step. One breath.

I breathe life into my skin, animating it from the inside out like a balloon, praying with each foot strike for more restraint, more honesty, more humility. With each step I carry our stories, our idealism, our hypocrisies and unanswerable questions. We, you, I carry this with every step and breath and we run towards home, towards a place familiar, safe and rich in clarity and belonging. A place to belong.

One step. One breath.

How to do more with less? I ask through unbrushed teeth. How to love more with less, run more with less, be more with less, give more with less? The tweets, the hate, the tired binary rituals of conquest and Otherness. Such noise makes me dry-mouthed. So I step into the forest each day to reset, to heave my luggage around. And sometimes, if I’m lucky, a semblance of prayer arrives underfoot and I become free for a moment: free to belong, free to accept my contradictions and those of others, free to accept our moment as it is, because we’ve all just emerged and are tacking through great windstorms of belonging, and this is all we seek: to belong, to laugh, to dance, as one.

One step. One breath.

 

Nicholas Triolo is a writer, filmmaker, novice baker, and runner currently living in Northern New Mexico. He is Blog Editor for Orion Magazine, Territory Run Co. Runner of the Wild, Senior Mountain Guide for Aspire Adventure Running, and his stories have been featured in Orion, Trail Runner, Terrain.org, The Dirtbag Diaries, and others. Nicholas is working on his first book, The Way Around, about pilgrimage, ecology, and revolution. Read more at nicholastriolo.net or find him on Facebook (facebook.com/nick.triolo), Instagram (@nicholas.triolo), and Twitter (@nicktriolo)