Stone-Map
{a borderland dream, a liturgy of the wild}
It was cold, due to the wind howling across the desolate landscape, in gusts that pushed and dried the body. Perhaps due to hunger or thirst, she insisted on sinking her hands into the still-warm ashes that covered the ground. With a dry mouth and scratchy throat, she breathed dust. But beneath the ashes and debris, something continued to sing. In the midst of the darkness, something sparkled stubbornly, almost inaudible whispers in forgotten languages.
On her knees, her hands dig and scrape, with scraps and shards that scratch and dry plastic under her nails. She searches. Her hands ask, grope, rummage, deeper and deeper. Her hands find and are found in return, embraced by the deep, damp ground.
I unearth a small oak box. Heavy and dense. Ancient. Locked with four locks. I listen to the box, smell it. I caress its old wood and shudder. My body trembles, and now it is not from the cold. It burns. It pulses. There is a memory, a reorientation, in an old and new form that moves between my hands, the box, and the ground. It passes through me gently, whispering through the wind and the ancestors, echoing in moss-covered rocks and misty sleep.
I notice that my hands are wounded, I feel the deep marks, and the scars hurt. I sit with the pain and the box on my lap. Shrouded in dust and ash, it continues to sing softly. I sing with it, in murmurs that recognize each other. Thus, without knowing how, the earth, the fungi, the wind, and the stars unlock the four rusty keyholes. Keys made of soil, mycelium, breeze, and the glow from the depths of the cosmos. The key to the root soil, the sustenance network, creation-inspiration, and the constellation-origin. The box creaks and opens, exuding an ancient smell, a fleeting memory that quickly dissipates. Inside, a stone with three dimples marked on it. It fits in my hand, but I feel it is giant and ancient. I feel the pulse of the ages. It breathes softly in my hand, but perhaps it is a map—an old teacher.
We breathe deeply together. We return and remember. The warm ashes, the now open box, the stone, the earth, the fungi, the wind, and the stars. But also the tired body, the chapped lips, and the wounded hands. We rest here for a while. We unearth memories, dreams, and testimonies; we unlock relationships, gently and without haste. Songs that arise and soon evaporate, like freshly turned earth, like raindrops.
The stone reminds me of something older than resistance, even older than pain, a wild loyalty to the Earth, which does not presume to save, possess, or amend. Being with, remembering through presence, witnessing as a gesture of care. Holding the stone, not as passive observation, but in a pact to remain with the becoming of the world, even when it burns, bleeds, and dissolves. To witness the Earth is to entwine ourselves through interbeing.
The Stone Map had been waiting for me for a long time inside the buried oak box. It opened with keys made of soil, mycelium, breeze, and constellation. The Stone whispers that it is a roadmap of dreams and invites me to witness it, asking me to find the three seeds. To call them in borderland prayers, to open myself to the ecology of dreams. Not to study them, but to metabolize the listening of dying rivers and contaminated soil. These are the dreams that speak before the voices. These are the protocols of becoming together, of the liturgy of the wild. I run my thin-skinned fingers over the three dimples of the Stone-Map, and I hear them say my name. The Stone allows itself to be read as an archive of sensitive memory, as a record and realignment. Its weight is that of ancestral responsibility. It invites me to sow testimony, to write silence and mourning together in an unshakeable presence alongside a convulsing Earth. The ashes also begin to sing.
I learn to listen again, perhaps even to let the earth bear witness to me in return. The seeds will sprout in their own time....
I let this dream run through my bones. I whisper back to the Stones. I sing to the wind. Maybe the seeds are also seeking me.
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