I find myself drawn back to the red earth. The red earth, red with iron, red like blood; my blood red with iron.  Perhaps just earth in general or perhaps I'm just homesick.  I never thought I would call it home.  

...

Earth in hand. Water on earth, and slowly, very slowly, through earth.  A caress turned frenzy when looked at from this point in time.  Behold the wreckage, the damage, the decay of time, of earth, of land, the wash away...

Reveal the veins of the earth.  Cut with a knife, deep, where you think they are until you still can’t find them; because you never learned anatomy, because human dissection is forbidden, because you have little idea of what’s inside. 

No one dreams of an autopsy.

Red earth washes off hands looking like blood.  How can you tell me it isn’t, inside and out of me.  How can you tell me I'm not the same?

I lived my whole life there, and hated every minute, but never got acquainted...the sun was always too bright (and me, no little more than bone, didn’t like the bleaching).  Now I miss the heat so much I stand in front of the open oven, keeping myself from crawling inside.  Me, the witch, don’t need any prompting from little children, don’t need any prompting to burn myself alive...or bury.

I miss the red earths.  The smell of dust and fresh cool night makes me panic, hyperventilate, I want it all in me again.  A door glued closed at the creese.  

I cracked the red monoliths and it looked like home.  Tiny red mountains, piercing, under foot 

...

The Grand canyon, so grand it stands as the identity of a state some call home, spanning 227 miles long, 118 miles wide and more than a mile deep, stands as proof of the earth's vein systems.  Revealed through the patience of water wearing down stubborn earth with ceaseless caresses we see layers of skin, we see rawness and vulnerability, we see natural scars, we see shades of earth so much like our own.  Ancient oceans left you behind, you call to it, mourning sweet memories of its pressence every time the rain falls.  Formed 5 to 6 million years ago the displaced natives called you “mountain lying down”.  It’s amazes, how unknowingly and accidentally, perhaps instinctually, we sometimes get it right.  Cracked earth so closely resembling my cracked and dry skin as I take it in my hands and push it.  

Stubborn earth.  Unmovable one may say, but oh, how they would be wrong.  You move, you travel, you get carried away by wind and weather.  You nomad, you travel yourself the same as the rest of us.  You sift, you silt, you swiftly swivel and sweep, you form.  You are taken up by a hand that forms you.  You enter human hand, presumptuously all knowing, and you shiver, you shift in hand.  And we shiver, oh hand, to know you as we do ourselves.  From a bit after the beginning of time humans took up earth to make.  To make religion, and utilitarian object; to make carriers of many things.  

In China they perfected the use of earth dubbed the most pure, white, and designated it prefered for heavenly ceremonies.  Europe became so jealous they ground their bones to make this, to mix in and imitate this earth so pure.  Carbon and Carbon, iron and blood.  In japan a broken bowl still held as much potential as broken earth and they repaired it with gold.  Heaven and earth made one.  

At my home some earth is so fine it leaps up to meet the air.  The dust in the atmosphere here, a science teacher told me, is why our sunsets are so vivid and wild.  Every night the sky like fire, a funerary pyre, the trailing skirts of the setting sun.  Ultimately, the more I learn about science, or the world, the less anything seems different to me; the less anything seems different from me.  

Nothing is as it seems.  The earth is neither still nor stagnant.  The earth is in me as surely as I am on it, we share blood, we are made of the same stuff.  Like the clouds, things may shift in form but maintain their identity.  Oh little human, as you pick at your flesh, see “...the great loneliness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it.” (Theodore Roosevelt)

I find myself drawn back to the red earth.