One More Glimpse.

On drinking in what is beautiful, what is fragile, and what the earth might be trying to say.

I was on a walk when it happened.

March. Blooming like May. The kind of morning that stops you mid-stride because the world has arranged itself into something so brilliant you forget, for a full breath, that anything is wrong at all.

Pink blossoms and white petals releasing from branches in slow, unhurried spirals. Tulips pressing up through soil that should still be cold, weeks ahead of any spring I have known before. Everything arriving urgently, abundantly, as if the earth had somewhere to be.

I stood there in awe of it. And then the ache arrived alongside the awe, the way it always does when something is both beautiful and well, jarring.. a quiet, bone-deep recognition that beauty and fragility are the same word spoken in different registers.

I wondered.

Is this one more glimpse of her? One last offering of beauty before everything we have known about this world changes beyond recognition?

What normally blooms in May is blooming in March.

There is an urgency to this spring that I feel in my body before the words can land in my mind… something in the pace of the blooming, the early arrival of the tulips, the way the trees are flowering with an intensity that feels like a warning or maybe just a tesimony…

Like the earth is bearing witness to herself.

Like she is saying: look at what I am. Look at what I have always been. Look at this, while you still can, in this form, in this particular and unrepeatable way while its still available.

I felt both things at once, the expansion and the ache, the wonder and the weight and I DID NOT look away from either of them. I let both move through me, fully, the way you let a piece of music move through you when you know it is almost over and you want to hold every note.

My heart expanded. My feet found the ground. Something in me went very, very still.

And in that stillness, something clarified.

I have never been afraid of destruction. Nor death. It’s not brave but it is the most honest thing I know about myself.

I am a woman who understands that she is pure consciousness having a human experience. I know my divinity. I also know my role. And my role is to be here on Earth, fully, fiercely, presently here, in this particular and pivotal moment in humanity’s story.

To show up. To tend the light. To go down, if it comes to that, still fighting for our collective chance at a future worth inhabiting.

That is a choice I made a long time ago, in some quiet interior room of myself, and it is not one I revisit with uncertainty. What I do revisit, what that March morning asked me to revisit, is the question of how I carry that commitment. With what quality of presence. With what degree of openness to beauty even inside the difficulty.

Because the earth, in that moment, was not warning me. She was fortifying me.

She was saying: drink this in. Take all of it. Let it go all the way down into your marrow. You are going to need it.

Since that walk I have been living differently.

I spend my mornings on the rocking chair in my backyard. Noon too, sometimes. And the long amber hours of late afternoon when the light goes gold and slant and everything it touches becomes briefly, achingly itself. The trees are blooming so prematurely the remnants of winter remain alongside spring. The tulips have come out to say hello far earlier than any spring I can remember. And I sit with them, these impossible early arrivals, and I let them give me everything they have.

I am soaking in whatever she will offer. Consciously. Deliberately. The way you sit with someone you love when you understand that time is not a guarantee.

This is presence of the highest order, the kind that is only possible when you have stopped pretending that what is precious is also permanent. When you have looked directly at the fragility and chosen to love anyway, harder, more completely, without the cushion of denial.

It is the most awake I have felt in months.

We do not know what is coming.

And let’s sit with that sentence for a minute, rather than rush past it like we may want to. Because I think the instinct, when confronted with genuine uncertainty about the future of the world we have known, is to contract. To hoard. To look away from beauty because beauty, in the presence of possible loss, can feel unbearable.

But what if we have another choice…

What if beauty, right now, is precisely the thing worth turning toward? What if the ache of loving something deeply in the presence of its fragility is one of the most courageous acts available to us? What if the earth is inviting us, with every early bloom and every petal falling ahead of schedule, to practice the thing that will sustain us through whatever comes, the capacity to be fully present, fully feeling, fully alive inside a moment rather than managing our way past it?

The tulips came early. The blossoms are extraordinary. And something in the urgency of this spring feels like a final goodbye, to the ways things were.

Receive it. All of it. Let it go all the way in.

I do not know if this earth, in the form we have known her, will remain recognizable.

I know that she is changing. I know that we are in the middle of something that does not yet have an ending we can see from here. I know that the stakes are real and the moment is pressing and that the ones who are paying attention feel it in their bodies even when they cannot fully articulate it. I know that we will need our reserves for what comes next, because we MUST ACT, WE MUST FIGHT, WE MUST COME TOGETHER to create the change we so desperately seek. Humanity deserves no less form us.

And I also know this: the morning is still arriving. The blossoms are still falling. The tulips pressed up through soil that should have been cold and opened their faces to a sun that arrived too early, and in doing so gave me something I did not know I needed.

Permission to be here, fully. To love what is, completely. To let the beauty be as real as the ache and the ache be as real as the beauty, and to stand inside both without collapsing either into the other.

The earth is not asking us to despair. She is asking us to witness. To learn. To realize. To see the truth of what is in front of our faces.

She is asking us to show up for her the way she has always shown up for us, in full color, without apology, holding nothing back.

Sit outside this week if you can.

Even for ten minutes. Even on a concrete step or a fire escape or a square of grass you almost walked past. Let whatever is blooming near you, however small, however early, however unexpected, let it actually reach you.

Feel the ache alongside the wonder. Let both be true. Let your heart expand into the discomfort of loving something you cannot fully protect.

That expansion is the whole point. That is the practice. That is what it means to be a conscious human being alive in this moment in history.

Drink it in.

All of it.

She is offering herself, and she deserves to be fully received.

Xx 💋

Nikyla Maria

PS

What has the earth been saying to you lately? I would love to hear it in the comments.