The World Above Me, The World Within

Notes from the Hollow Bone  |  entry twenty-nine

There are days when the sky feels like a mirror—not because it’s clear, but because it’s honest. Storm-heavy, unfinished, full of edges. And somehow, that’s the kind of beauty I understand best. I’ve always found myself drawn to the parts of the world that most people overlook— fallen branches, dried roots, forgotten corners of land. Not because they’re pretty in the traditional sense, but because they carry truth without pretending.

People call it “seeing beauty in the small things,” but it’s more than that. It’s recognizing the quiet ones. The misunderstood ones. The things that don’t shine on command but still hold a kind of steady, unshakable grace. Maybe it’s because I’ve lived long seasons as the overlooked one— misread, underestimated, or simply unseen or who I actually was.
Not in bitterness, but in that familiar ache of being deeper than people assumed, and softer than the world expected.

So yes— I notice the oddities, the anomalies, the almost-beautiful things the eye skips past.
Because they speak my language. Because they remind me that beauty does not need permission to exist. And because belonging, for some of us, has never been loud. It has always come quietly— in roots, in storms, in bare branches, and in every overlooked thing that keeps on holding its place in a world that barely notices.

Nothing is wasted.
Nothing is without story.
And sometimes, the most beautiful things
are the ones you have to learn how to see.

The World Above Me, The World Within Me

The branches know my secret name—
the one I only speak in storms.
They tilt toward me like they understand
the way a quiet heart transforms.

I’ve walked the world half-overlooked,
a soft thing in a world of noise,
the kind of beauty seldom seen,
the kind that shyly holds its poise.

But broken things still catch the light,
and almost-beautiful still gleams.
The world above me mirrors back
the hidden world beneath my seams.

And maybe that is why I look
for truth in all the tangled places—
in weathered bark, in crooked roots,
in every flaw the wild embraces.

For I belong to what is real,
to what grows honest, rough, and free—
the world above me, world within—
two halves returning home to me.

With Grace & Ink,

Mai