Our land

My grandmother told me once that the earth keeps our footsteps. Long after we are gone, she said, the ground remembers the weight of our bodies, the warmth of our blood, the echo of our voices. 

“Listen,” she whispered, pressing my hand against the soil, “the land will tell you who you are.”

I was young, sitting on the porch of her weathered house on the reservation, when she raised her hand and called to a crow perched in a cottonwood tree. To my amazement, it came down, wings rattling, landing gently on her wrist. She fed it crumbs, murmuring words in our language, words that tasted like wind and smoke. In the stillness that followed, I became aware of my own pulse thrumming in my throat, matching the rhythm of the crow’s bobbing head, the sway of branches, the very breath of the land itself. I thought she was magic then, that she could bend the world with nothing but her voice and the steady beat of her heart.

Stories are always around me. They find me when I am walking under old maples, the air heavy with crushed leaves and honeysuckle. The idea for my first story came as if a sliver of sky had broken open above me, and I understood that life is stitched together in invisible threads of observation, memory, and sensation. Whenever I feel lost or stuck in my work, my grandma’s voice returns to me, soft as wind through pine: Touch the soil and feel the breeze, place your hand over your heart, you will feel our family beating there. 

When you walk barefoot through a garden at dawn, you feel the pulse of the earth beneath your feet—and then, in that sacred quiet, you feel your own pulse answering back. In spring, the soil smells of damp clay and buried seeds breaking open. You kneel, pressing both palms flat against the ground, and your heartbeat travels down through your arms into the waiting earth. In summer, crushed mint and basil stain your fingertips, and the air tastes of citrus and sun-baked stone. You bend close to wild roses and black-eyed susans, feeling your chest rise and fall in the same slow rhythm as their growth. 

Even in autumn, when sunlight tilts gold across the fields, the air carries a memory of every living thing that has touched this land: rust of leaves, spicy asters, the warm breath of soil fading into frost. I remember sitting in that same light as a child, my grandmother’s weathered hand resting over my heart.

“Feel this?” she asked. “This is how the earth speaks through you.” Her tales carried the rhythm of rivers, the sway of grass, the distant calls of owls, and the pulse of native ancestors.” 

But even the land, in all its vastness and endurance, cannot hold on forever. 

Grandma died on a morning in late autumn, when the cottonwoods had shed their leaves, and frost turned the grass silver. I was holding her hand when her heartbeat stopped. One moment it was there. It was faint, irregular, but present. The next thing, nothing. The absence of that rhythm felt like the earth had stopped spinning around me. 

I pressed my fingers to her chest, as if my own heartbeat could somehow restart what had stopped. But the stillness remained, and I was left with this terrible pulse that reminded me that I am still trapped in this world. 

At her funeral, I stood by her grave, feeling my heart hammering against my ribs. Around me, people wept, but I could only focus on that rhythm. After everyone left, I stayed. I pressed my palms into the damp earth of her grave, and for the first time since she died, I felt something supernatural. My heartbeat slowed, steadying itself against the cool soil. And in that quietness, I remembered what she had taught me: enjoy our earth bounded root? 

In the weeks that followed, I returned to the places she had shown me. I walked barefoot through the garden she had tended, feeling the pulse of earth beneath my feet. I waded into the creek where she had taught me to listen to the water’s rhythm. I sat beneath the cottonwood where the crow had once landed on her wrist, and I placed my hand over my heart, feeling the thuds warmly wrapping around my body. 

One morning, I woke before dawn and walked to the creek. The world was gray, suspended between night and day. I waded into the shallows, letting cold water wrap around my legs, and I stood very still. I could feel my heartbeat pulsing through my body—in my fingertips trailing through current, in my feet pressed against smooth stones, in my chest rising and falling with each breath. And then I felt it: the creek had its own pulse. Water murmured over rocks in a rhythm that matched my own heartbeat. Wind through aspens rustled in time with my breathing. The distant call of a hawk echoed the cadence of my grandmother’s voice in my memory.

There is a quiet, almost holy comfort. The land remembers those who loved it, tended it, grieved upon it. The earth carries the sweetness of wild plums my grandmother picked, the bitter richness of herbs she used to heal, the warmth of her hands pressed into soil. I could picture the warmth of her hands as she held tightly upon my hand, pressing on it and never letting go. Even after death, what we leave behind nourishes the earth, and in turn, everything that grows again carries our heartbeat forward—in butterfly wings, in opening flower petals, in wind through prairie grass. 

Now, when grief rises in me suddenly, I go to these places. I press my palms into the damp soil of her garden, inhaling the sharp scent of mint and sage, listening to the hum of bees and the coo of mourning doves. 

If you pause long enough—bare feet pressed into cool clay, palms brushing leaves slick with morning dew, one hand resting over your heart—you can hear it too: the whispers of those we loved and the birds messaging us through their calls. They are all united under the same rhythm. This is what my grandmother meant when she said the earth keeps everything. Our heartbeats don’t disappear when we die. Our heartbeat will eventually become the Earth itself. 

You close your eyes and sink into earth and water, letting sun warm your shoulders, and the wind ripple through the leaves above. You breathe in the sharp scent of cedar and crushed clay, the honeyed perfume of late-season flowers, and you let it all flow through you in waves timed to your heartbeat. Slowly, the whispers of wind, the rustle of leaves, the soft tread of deer, even the distant call of an eagle, gather your sorrow like a river gathering rain. They carry it across the land, spilling it into streams, scattering it into grass, hiding it in the roots of ancient trees, letting it rise in mist and dust and sunbeams, until it becomes part of the world itself, held and cradled by everything that lives here. 

And at the end of the day, our ancestors call out to us, through the chirping of the birds, through the everlasting brook, through the earth-bounded roots.