(An Aboriginal concept. For Indigenous people, the past is understood to be part of a cyclical and circular order known as the “everywhen”; conceptions of deep histories & deep time rely on active encounters with both the ancestral and natural worlds.)

I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
-'Sleeping in the Forest' by Mary Oliver