The curve of your own smile. Sometimes you touch your fingers to the corners of your mouth just to feel the way they turn up when the sun kisses your lips. You don't always believe that your body remembers how to express joy.
Then there's the bliss--more a memory now--of abandoning yourself to the woods. The city, a thing forgotten like an unremarkable story or adequate meal. Where is that spontaneous wildling unafraid to go deeper? The forest (be it in a book, heart, or landscape) is made up only of trees and dreams and roots and shadows, after all. And they all want you there, going so far as to lay down a bed of fallen leaves to pad your steps and covering their rocks with moss so that you may rest your head in comfort. It has been so long since you listened to their secrets. So long since you told them yours.
And how did that game go, where you picked your way across the stream, searching for the next foothold on rocks smoothed over by the water's caress? You weren't always thinking of snakes and eels hiding under them. You weren't always worried about slipping. There was only the cool, clean feel of the water lapping at your feet and rushing between your toes. Feel it now and let the wet ripples carry away your worries.
And you can't forget your hair, nor the times you wore it loose and wild (though some would call it a thorny thicket or a nest of copper wires--but those are voices best forgotten as you relish the way your curly auburn locks cascade down your naked back and fall around your open shoulders). You must remember how to weave flowers into your long tresses and let the only chains you wear be made of daisies.
Next, find those delicious beats that pull you toward the dance floor. Court your inner hedonist and let her play and laugh and move her body in the way that it was meant to be moved: in time to the heady heartbeat of congas and claves and vocal chords wrapped tight around a melody. This is you remembering that your natural state is joy--and that there's nothing wrong in sinking into a song's lusty embrace.
Perhaps by reclaiming these pieces of yourself--like stray strands of string and dandelion heads--you can begin to weave a new story unfettered by the dead-end plots that made you forget yourself in the first place. You never belonged at the bottom of a well or stuck under the heel of another's boot.
Weave together more forgotten things into this wild tapestry: scraps of bright ribbon and grapevines, bits of memory and the feathered corners of well-loved books. Stitch it all together with those small pops of energy that tell you everything you need to know before logic tries to smother the sparks. Then, when you have incorporated your last fingernail and sage leaf, finish it off with the whispers of the universe--here in a dream, there in the roadrunner crossing your path--that ask you to remember, relearn, truly understand that you are a daughter of the moon.
That your life is in long fingers curling around tree bark, feet resting on fat branches, as you peer past the foliage into the endless horizon.
Enchantment Learning & Living is an inspirational blog celebrating life’s simple pleasures, everyday mysticism, and delectable recipes that are guaranteed to stir the kitchen witch in you. If you enjoyed what you just read and believe that true magic is in the everyday, subscribe to my newsletter below for regular doses of enchantment. Want even more inspiration? Follow me on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. Here’s to a magical life!