Best For:
grief hikers, long-distance walkers who process emotion through terrain, nature poetry enthusiasts, artistic deep-dive lovers, & those who can sometimes feel their emotions physically.
The Vault:
- Writing through a life’s movements, wherever flow meets me.
- A poem built in real time through movement, talk-to-text dictation, & repeated revision.
- Why the word “Always” became the poem’s anchor point & emotional center of gravity.
- Exploring grief through physical motion, endurance, & terrain rather than direct description.
- A deep dive into spacing, breath, repetition, & visual structure as poetic devices.
- Open reflections on loss, interpretation, hiking, & the relationship between weight & momentum.
Writing through: Moving Houses & Weight – Losing Track of Time:
This came out of movement, exhaustion, and transition. Probably just not the same kind you would be expecting me to say, after you dive into this poem in motion.
As I do load after load, boxed up, bagged up stuff, and some things just carried directly to their new home. That’s where the poem actually started forming, not trekking the wild, not sitting by idle, in motion.
The first line showed up as I was lifting a particular heavy box of course that’s what always happens.
Everything else grew out of that while I was still moving things to my Honda, still going back and forth between spaces; I made sure to leave room to dictate my draft.
Always
Somewhere between
river mist
and ridge lines
time stops behaving
per the status quo.
The horizon dissolves into the fog…
any schedule went willingly with it.
Always;
The pulse in the climb the only clock.
Tick-
Tock.
quieter; even…
tick-tock.
I walk on; Always….
Still noticing the still here.
Always…
Still anchored in the motion;
Always..
Still…
gravity of the path pulling at the slack near my lungs
Always.
A complex geometry of endurance;
The Earth ignores my presence
But steadily holds me upright.
Always
Two heavy things in motion; both needing to stay upright.
my weight meets its mass; colliding.
a
l
w
a
y
s
…
Poet’s Note:
A look into the authors creative flow state starting at the initial spark. Work through the building and editing of this poem with me; find out where the repetitive always came from and when I added it here.
Then discover my final additions to this piece; perspective is in the readers hands once a piece leaves the creators notebook. I will always respect perspectives from readers as long as they are aligned with the piece.
The initial spark:
This started pretty soon after I got home from my shift, in the middle of a day that also started with something big. We got the keys to the new house while I was already headed to work, so it felt like change stacked on top of change before I even had time to process even one thing at all.
When I got home, I went straight into moving everything from my creative garage into the larger garage at our new house about three doors down the road. This is the space where I sometimes come to write, tinker, create, do spiritual things, smoke, think, or even just exist. Shifting it physically already put me in a different headspace.
This is where the first line hit.
“Somewhere between river mist and ridge lines, time stops behaving. The horizon dissolves into the fog.”
It didn’t come as a concept, per se. It came as piece I was already working inside while moving.
Building & Editing Always:
At first it was just that line sitting there.
No structure, no spacing, nothing formal. No real plan on where to take it exactly, I knew it was going somewhere though. So it became something I kept repeating while I kept moving.
Obviously more lines were stacked onto it as I worked. I multitasked by talk-to-text dictation of the additions, while lifting and packing things. Adjusting them in a more fine tuned manner whenever I took a small break.
I came back again and again to adjust this over roughly forty minutes. I never claimed to provide a clean writing moment; I do not know what that would even look like. Mine was fragmented the same way the emotions hidden inside the piece tend to come to me.
The spacing came later, when I read it back out loud and realized the pauses needed to be visible, not just felt. The gaps became part of the actual breath of the poem.
Always:
At one point the poem didn’t include the word always, at all. It was just the original line, motion, and an unknown pressure. At this point it didn’t feel anchored.
Always became the anchor point. Not just as part of the sentence flow, but as something placed into it, something interrupting it, time and time again.
That’s why it’s spaced the way it is. It’s not meant to move forward, it’s meant to pull everything back to a single state of continuity while also acting as a visual breath, or space for pause.
The final Touches:
The line “two heavy things in motion” came almost last. That’s when the whole thing shifted from just observation into something being shared.
The final line about weight meeting mass in a collision was the last addition. That’s where everything stops feeling like an argument or opposing force.
Poet’s Perspective:
This isn’t just about a physical day of trekking in the wild or the occasional battle between the trail and your being.
From my perspective it’s what it feels like when the internal weight and movement through hiking happen at the same time and stop feeling separate.
The feelings I experience and hike through like grief aren not directly called out in this piece. Though it is just as present as if I had.
You can find it in the physical strain, when time shows up different like you don’t know it’s typical, when everything feels like opposition yet nothing is actually opposing you, and in the repetition and reminders always brings.
How long will I grieve the loss of my mother?
Always.
It may even feel like a fight in the moment; I’m actually describing two things moving in the same direction under different kinds of weight.
The body and the world aren’t against each other. They’re just both moving; they collide from time to time. Though the Earth has to care for each of us momentarily, it is whose gravity keeps us upright.
Art & Open Interpretation:
I don’t need or expect anyone to read this the way I described in my own perspective of it. That is unrealistic and honestly unfair to the art itself.
If it connects to hiking and exhaustion, movement with another, transitions of life, or something else entirely, good. Art isn’t meant to have one set meaning everyone is forced to grasp. It is all up to the interpretation of the person currently experiencing it. My perspective, yours, and all others aligned with the art are equally valid and accurate.
I care more way more about what readers come to see in it than forcing anyone into only my perspective on the poem.
With that being said, I am always very interested in hearing what stuck out to readers or what my poems told in the silence between the lines. Please feel free to tell me yours in the comments, I look forward to any and all insights added.
After Motion Ends:
This piece came from movement, not just reflection; built while life was still happening, not just waiting for it to settle.
In some ways, that feels more fitting than I had intended. Do you think life settles often?
Of the experiences that shape us, do many arrive with the courtesy of a quiet room? What about the unlimited time for us to process them?
Grief doesn’t; neither does change. Moving forward doesn’t seem to either.
The words themselves never changed, but I realized they were carrying more than the physical motion that inspired them ever could. They were carrying momentum without moving forward, memory, exhaustion, and the strange way grief can remain present even when life keeps moving around it.
Sometimes grief is found in what is unspoken, repetition, weight, breath in empty space, and in the quiet realizations that certain things are still with us no matter how far the hike was.
Always.
Once a poem leaves the page of its creator, it begins a second life inside the experiences of whoever encounters it. Thank you for spending a few moments inside this one. I greatly appreciate it.
Do you think you will look at your next hike differently? What it becomes for you is yours to share or yours to keep holding onto.
TLDR:
A poem written while moving evolved into a reflection on grief, endurance, and motion. Exploring how emotional weight and physical movement can become inseparable.
The repeated word “Always” acts as both anchor and breath throughout the poem. Its placement reinforces themes of continuity, memory, and persistence.
The commentary breaks down the poem’s creation, structure, symbolism, and personal meaning. Readers are invited to bring their own interpretations to the work.
Threads of Similar Composition:
iOS users me in Daily Gratitude Journal Writing – Hold each other accountable via Storia: Future Self Coach
The Appalachian Trail – Grief, Growth, & Transformation Outdoors
A journal entry discussing how the loss of my mother at twenty-nine changed me
A hiking journal about celebrating life and carrying a bond after the person has passed on
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