And then one day we just couldn't anymore.

Couldn't keep up the maintenance on our shouldn'ts and shoulds.

Couldn't pay the contractors to keep building our skyscrapers of spin.

Could no longer hold up the weight of a world made of lies

and so we let it splatter on the floor

and sprout night orchids.

And that was when the Forgotten Ones rushed in.

No longer staved off by propaganda and pain,

no longer contained by our cages made of mind,

they set to work with sharp claws and great mandibles of ivory

slicing away the steel bands wrapped around our soft hearts

and cutting the bolts on the door of the old grandmother magic.

And they taught us— no!

They reminded us

how to walk on this earth as they walk.

How to step with a pregnant tenderness

in communion with the planet.

How to grow our hair long so it makes love with the wind

and listens for the whispers that are too quiet for our ears.

How to work with the land not in dominion but in friendship

and to extract the thorns of dogma and punditry from our flesh

and to vomit up the madness of millennia of civilization.

And we forgot our old stories of separateness and shame,

our minds now too life-sized and world-shaped for falsehood.

And we strode in companionship with the Forgotten Ones back to Eden,

untamed beings in an untamed world.

Untamed beings in an untamed world.

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Reading by Tim Foley.