INNER KINDER COLLECTIVE Healing through Poetry

   You didn’t come to the orchard. Not when I was small and the apples hung low like lanterns begging to be picked. You didn’t come when the pumpkins started to grow. Or when Cider was well and brewed. Ready for the sip of joy and laughter. I used to think if I did everything right, you’d show up like the end of a movie, applause in your eyes. Proud smile on your lips.  But life wasn’t a movie. And you never showed. You didn’t take me to the orchard. You were busy, or angry, or gone. Or you just didn’t see why it mattered. But I want to tell you something you might have missed: The orchard isn’t about apples or pumpkins and cider. It’s about showing up. It’s about walking together without a reason except that we can. That we want to. It’s not too late. We’re not little anymore. But the trees- they still grow tall. The air still smells like forgiveness if you let it. You don’t have to say the right thing. You don’t have to explain the past. Just show up one day with a quie...

 The love of a mother. Like a candle lit with breath instead of fire—Delicate, flickering, but still warm enough to ward off night. When it’s there, it wraps around the bones like linen soaked in rose oil. Gentle, but binding. It softens the corners of a world built from stone and long days. A mother’s love.  An invisible architecture. You don’t see it until the roof caves in. I remember static screams more than I remember lullabies. I remember watching her mouth move like a prayer I wasn’t meant to hear. She smelled of iron walls and too much restraint. And when she held me, it felt like standing beneath a sky that might rain, but never wetting. Sheilding me from puddles of rot. For some, a mother’s love is a garden. Tended, watered, blooming year after year. For others, it is the memory of a seed that never broke soil. I grew up making maps out of her absence. Never center focus. Learning to read between the pauses, and attempts at interpreting sighs like scripture. She taug...

 Some days I feel like I was born in pieces.  Like the world grabbed one part of me too early and forgot to put the rest back. I don’t even know when I stopped being a kid. I just know one day, I looked up and nobody was holding my hand anymore. And I didn’t ask why— I just figured it meant I had to grow up. Fast. But there’s still a small version of me that cries when the room is too quiet. That doesn’t trust the good days because she remembers the bad ones too well. She didn’t disappear. She got quiet. She made room for everyone else’s voices until she couldn’t hear her own. And somehow, that silence —that quiet ache just below the surface— became my normal. But I’m learning something now. Something no one ever taught me. That forever isn’t a big dream out there, or some finish line I haven’t reached. Forever isn’t what happens when you finally get it right. Forever is that little girl inside me, the one that never left. She’s been here the whole time. Watching. Waiting. Ask...

 I didn’t learn control from holding it tight— I learned it from letting go and watching the pieces float. Like feathers, or dandelion wishes I once made when I didn’t know what I needed, just that I wanted something more. There were days I spilled over— too much feeling, too much reaching, like waves that forgot the rhythm of the moon pulling them back. And still… I came back. Not perfect. But softer. Now, when I think of control, I don’t think of locked doors. I think of nature— how it changes and changes again. How it stays wild and still somehow steady. A breeze doesn’t ask permission. It just moves. A tree doesn’t rush to bloom. It just grows. And maybe control isn’t about being still— maybe it’s about moving gracefully, intentionally, with love. If I could hold it again, I’d hold it loosely. With open palms, like catching fairy dust. Like trusting the wind knows where to carry me.

I wasn’t taught how to want more. I was taught how to not ask. To sit in silence. To smile through it. To be grateful for scraps and call it a blessing. Most of the people who raised me only ever survived. So dreaming felt selfish. Wanting peace felt dramatic. And hurting? That was just called life. I got used to pretending I was okay. To carrying things that were too heavy for me because no one else was coming to help. Because I didn’t want to be a burden. Because I was always the strong one, right? No one tells you that strength, when built from trauma, becomes a cage. You keep wearing it even when it’s cutting into your skin. Some days I still wake up in fight mode and I don’t even know who I’m fighting. Myself? The people who hurt me? The world that never stopped to ask what I needed? I walk with ghosts. Memories that don't leave. Mistakes that still sting. Versions of me I buried because they were too soft to survive what I went through. I’m ...

I heard a poem once—not from a book, but from somewhere inside. It sounded like laughter, like light through the trees. It felt like joy. Like home. It whispered: “Look! It’s here—but not for long. One day, it’ll be gone again.” Mom was there, grinning like sunshine. Dad—soft-eyed, just once—stood beside her. And me? I was small, but I was whole. We were all together. We were there. But not anymore. And oh, how I’ve wished to rewind, to press pause, To crawl back into that moment and stay there. But I can’t. Not now. Not ever, really. So I have to look hard at what’s in front of me. Feel it. Live it. Hold it tighter than my old wishes. Because if I keep missing what’s here while mourning what’s gone—I’ll miss both. So this is my promise to the present: I’m not blinking anymore. I’m here. Because this? This is now. And if I don’t catch it, it’ll be never again.