The Light Behind The Ghost Forest

Notes From the Hollow Bone | Entry thirty-three

Lately I’ve been standing inside a kind of holy uncertainty — a tender stretch of life where nothing is settled, yet everything is speaking. The quiet mornings, the shifting skies, the soft ache of not knowing where my next footing will land — all of it feels like its own kind of prayer.

This poem rose from that space.
From the part of me learning to listen again.
From the part of me remembering that home isn’t a destination at all —
it’s wherever I stand, breathe, and look up at the sky.

The Light Behind The Ghost Forest

The light teaches the branches
what humans always forget —
that all will be well.

Not because life bends to our urgency,
or because we’ve earned the right
to shape the seasons,
but because the world knows
how to return to itself
without needing our permission.

The bare trees don’t argue
with the quiet of their own becoming.
They do not fear the leaves they’ve lost,
nor grasp for the ones not yet grown.
They simply stand,
rooted in a wisdom older than memory —
that what is meant to come back
will find its way in time.

Meanwhile, we —
with our tender, racing minds —
cling to every what-if
as if the horizon were ours to manage,
as if a single sunset required
our supervision to arrive.

But the light keeps trying:
slipping through the branches,
gliding across the bones of winterwood,
whispering its gold reassurance
to anyone soft enough to listen —

You do not have to force your becoming.
You do not have to outrun your fear.
You only need to stand your ground,
open to what is already on its way.

For resilience is not born
from strength alone —
but from patience,
from trust,
from surrender,
from the quiet willingness
to believe that life is not against you,
even when it is silent.

And so the light teaches,
again and again,
the lesson we forget most easily:

all will be well,
even before you understand how.

— With Grace & Ink,
Mai