The smell of damp white oak filled my nose. Mosquitos swirled around. The sky was dark–threatening rain clouds, yet no rain. The air was heavy with restless, ambiguous humidity.

To be a piece of pine…quietly decomposing at the base of the tree it used to belong to… To be a pine needle, floating from up high, gracefully meeting the floor below… Bugs carved pathways and designs into pieces of rotting pine…transforming it into something else. Into art. Of some sort. Of the truest sort? A sincerity exists in the Pine Knoll. Leaves rustle, birds chirp, the cars on Central Street slowly become a part of the experience rather than detracting from it.

A melting occurs–a loss, a humbling fall, then a return to land under our feet. Though, Kristina told me that there really isn’t much difference between the branches and roots of trees…so what if there actually isn’t any distinction at all? No loss, no fall?

What if it’s just a flip? The roots as, essentially, upside-down branches…or, the branches, upside-down roots…?

It makes me think of time…we are at the end of our six-week internship…but it’s also just a flip of the beginning. The heavy, restlessness ambiguity in the air, was, perhaps, the embodied experience of the “flip”–I don’t want this internship to be over. A sadness lingered. But not a loss…just a flip? The end as the flip of the beginning. The beginning, the start of the end… or, the end as the start of the beginning?

No loss, just a flip. Welcoming the heavy uncertainty and restlessness with all the discomfort it brings. Grateful for the Pine Knoll, for the fallen branches, for the internship, for all that the flips will bring. Learning that I have space to hold it. There is a joy in that.