The Self I Left in the Forest

By Jade Earthshaker

I went to the coastal retreat with no plan beyond sitting still for one hour. I am not good at sitting still. Ask anyone who has watched me circle a room, check the horizon, or start planning the next trail before I have finished the one I am on. But the full moon was up, and the woman beside me said the sound bath would meet me wherever I was. For once, I decided to let it. The first quartz bowl sounded and I felt it in my sternum, like someone had struck a bell that had been inside me all along. Then, without warning, I was walking through a forest. Not remembering one, not imagining one. Walking one. The trees were old and the light was green, and I knew, the way you know things in that state, that I had been here before and somehow forgotten it. Ahead of me on the path stood a woman with my hair and my hands and a face that was younger in a way that had nothing to do with years. She

was not surprised to see me. She looked at me the way you look at someone who is very late, and she did not speak, because in that forest I was the one who owed her an explanation, not the other way around. ## The Habit of Leaving I have spent my life being very good at moving on. It is the thing people praise me for: the new trails, the hidden doors, the open roads. I grew up under New Mexico skies and left them for Los Angeles, and I have left smaller things too. Routines, apartments, versions of myself that no longer fit in the suitcase. It never felt like running away. It felt like seeking. But here is the truth the forest gave me: every time I walked toward a new horizon, I was also walking away from someone. And she was not gone. She was standing on the path behind me, holding the things I had told myself I would come back for, and never did. I am an explorer by nature. My chart

says it, my friends say it, my own restlessness says it. But an explorer who never returns is just a person who is lost with better shoes. ## What She Was Carrying I have wondered for days what was in her hands. It sounds strange, but I could feel the weight of it even though I could not see it clearly. I think it was the small promises. The journaling practice I promised myself and set down. The patience I had before I started treating stillness as a place I had not yet reached. There is a phrase in the alchemy I keep on my shelf: \*solve et coagula\*, dissolve and recombine. I have spent most of my life in the solve. Dissolving into every new moon, every new city, every new face, until I was so scattered I could not remember what the whole of me had looked like. The forest was the first time I saw the coagula as something I could want, not something I was running from. A friend once

told me you do not lose yourself all at once. You leave yourself behind in installments, one dropped promise at a time, until the person you were is carrying so much of you that she cannot keep up anymore. I laughed when she said it. I am not laughing now. ## The Forest Was Not a Destination The easy reading of that night is that I met a past life, or a ghost, or a symbol. I am an astrology consultant; I could turn her into a node or a house or a transit. But I do not want to reduce her to a chart. She was not a past life. She was a past me, the woman I was before I learned to move so fast that nothing could catch up. And here is what shifted for me: I have spent years assuming the answer to my restlessness was another horizon. A new city, a new project, a new hidden door three blocks away. The forest did not offer me a horizon. It offered me a woman who had stopped walking and was

simply waiting for me to notice she was there. Maybe that is the shadow work for someone like me. Not to stop exploring, but to stop using exploration as an excuse to never be found. To let the women I have been catch up to the woman I am becoming, and walk the rest of the trail together. ## Coming Back to Myself When the last bowl faded I was sitting on my mat again, my face wet, and I was not sorry about it. The woman beside me asked if I was okay. I told her I had just remembered where I left something, and she nodded like she understood exactly what I meant. I have been gentler since that night. I still walk the trails. I still sit with my charts and my teas. But I have started a small practice of returning: to the journal I keep meaning to write in, to the people I keep meaning to call, to the version of myself who used to believe staying could be an adventure too. I will not

promise I will never run again. I know myself too well for that. But the next time I do, I want to run toward something I mean to keep, not away from someone I was afraid to face. The forest is still there, I think, and the woman in it is not waiting for me to change. She is waiting for me to come back. This time I am leaving the path lit so I can find her again. ## Closing Reflection I do not know if you have a forest like mine, a place where the person you used to be is still standing with the things you forgot you left behind. If you do, I hope you go there on purpose, with your eyes open, not by accident under a full moon. Bring her a cup of tea. Tell her you are sorry you were late. Ask her what she has been carrying. Then walk out together, not as two people but as one. The cosmos is a dance, and I am still learning the steps. But for the first time, I think I have stopped dancing

alone.