🌼The Girl Who Left the Orchard

Not all departures are escapes. Some are callings.

Did you hear about the girl who felt she wasn’t whole?

She left The Orderly Orchard

when the breeze outside the vines

called her name.

Not a shout.

Not a shrill.

Just a quiet shift in the wind.

Something inside her trekked forward,

and she stepped outside

the straight and narrow path.

She did not pack sorrow

but it still slipped into her bag,

tucked between the need to grow

and the ache for something more.

The village she left did not wilt

or deviate from what it built.

But it whispered without her.

And in her chest,

a seed wasn’t being cultivated.

She wasn’t sure if it was the Oughts,

or the Orchard,

or the Order

that she left behind.

Only that she was hiking

with half of herself.

Still, she danced when no one watched.

She laughed louder with strangers.

She stared at the night sky

and the stars blinked back.

Adventure became the medicine.

But even in joy,

even in the wide open fields,

she wondered:

Will I ever be whole again?

And that’s when the Sun came.

Not with answers.

Not with arguments.

Just arms.

Bright Mother Sun wrapped herself around the girl

and whispered:

“I have never left you,

and there is nothing missing.

You can’t be uprooted.”

With that, the girl did not return

to the Orchard she came from.

But she carried affinity within

and it carried her.

Onto new grounds.

Into new gardens.

With new growth.

And with time

and tears

and tender guidance from the Sun who never left,

the girl who once hiked with half of herself

began to bloom into the Buttercup she’d always been.

She found laughter that lingered.

Hands that held without holding her back.

Eyes that saw her, not as she had been,

but as she was becoming.

She did not return to The Orderly Orchard.

But something sacred met her on the path.

Familiars. Friends.

A grove of courageous Wildflowers kissed by the Sun

and drinking from an ever-moving stream.

And in that warmth,

the Buttercup remembered:

She was never lost.

She was always becoming.

That was enough.

More than enough.

That was whole.

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✨This reflection is part of my poetic series: Path of Becoming. A certain cookie-sized adventure is coming soon. 🍪