Found in the Bare Silence
Irvine, CA
2025, Senior, Poetry & Spoken Word
I stare outside.
Not to escape,
but to return.
The sky is a soft mirror,
bruised with light.
It spills light across the earth
like an old friend coming home.
It does not ask me who I am,
or what I’ve failed to become.
It only offers wind.
And that is enough.
I had forgotten how to breathe until the wind reminded me
what silence can hold when the world won’t.
I breathe in,
air laced with pine, salt, and memory.
I breathe out,
a version of myself I no longer need.
Leaves break free like they’ve rehearsed this all along,
brushing my skin with their paper-thin goodbye,
drifting not downward,
but inward,
into the soil, into the truth
I’ve been too busy to feel.
When I was small,
my grandmother taught me to press my palms
to the bark of the old tamarack and listen.
“The trees remember,” she said.
Now I know what she meant.
I close my eyes,
not in fear,
but in trust.
And when I open them,
the world is still there,
wider than my grief,
quieter than my doubt.
The creek sings in a language older than time,
part hush, part ripple, part stone-kissed laughter.
Tide pools catch the sun like open palms.
Salt-crusted shells.
Plastic ghosts, curled like regret,
nestled beside coral bones.
The ocean doesn’t rage, it remembers.
Each wave carries stories,
too heavy for even whales to sing aloud.
Birds write sonnets in flight,
their wings a kind of prayer.
The air smells like wet cedar and ocean wind.
Somewhere, an egret lifts into the sky,
slow, white, deliberate,
like forgiveness learning how to move again.
The earth doesn’t just forgive me,
it invites me back.
The quiet force that held me
even when I forgot to hold myself.
I used to think survival meant running.
Now I know it means standing still.
Here.
Where the air listens.
Where the light doesn’t judge.
Where the trees do not flinch
when I speak my name out loud.
This is the breath I lost years ago,
found again in the hush between leaves,
where dappled light dances over moss-soft ground.
A hush that says:
you are not broken,
just buried.
Even the dirt,
black beneath my fingernails,
makes room for something to grow:
milkweed for monarchs,
wild mint curling by the rusted fence,
a tomato seed I plant
just to see what remembers how to live.
Maybe the earth isn’t asking for apology.
Maybe it’s asking me to begin.
Reflection
Reflection
“Found in the Bare Silence” began as an attempt to breathe again. In the middle of a loud, overwhelming world, I stepped outside one evening and simply listened. The wind, the trees, the water, they didn’t ask anything of me. That moment reminded me of something my grandmother once told me in India: “The trees remember.” Her voice, paired with the quiet of the natural world, became the seed of this poem. Nature, especially the ocean, doesn’t just reflect beauty: it remembers. It absorbs not only our waste, but our stories. In the line “plastic ghosts curled like regret,” I wanted to show how human impact lingers, even in sacred places. Coral bones beside plastic remind us that nothing disappears, it only transforms. My writing process was intuitive and rooted in presence. I kept returning to the idea that environmental awareness doesn’t always begin with action, rather, it begins with listening. The more I stood still, the more I realized that the Earth isn’t asking us for apology, it’s asking us to return. To reconnect. To begin again. Through this exploration of Connections to Nature: Looking Inside, Going Outside, I’ve learned that advocacy can begin with quiet noticing. My message is this: we are not separate from the Earth. Even in a time of ecological harm, nature continues to offer forgiveness, growth, and resilience, if we only take the time to listen.