Best For:
Hikers trekking through grief while embracing movement, readers who resonate with parent loss & nature-based poetry, individuals who carry memory physically through walking or landscape experience, & those drawn to emotional writing where meaning is experienced through motion rather than explanation.
The Vault:
- Early morning hiking as a lived emotional state where grief & perception overlap in transitional light.
- Mother loss expressed through ongoing motion, memory, & embodied experience rather than resolution.
- Landscape acting as emotional structure where terrain holds & reflects internal states.
- Ghost presence as relational memory carried through movement & environmental contact.
- Writing shaped through repetition of hiking & lived experience, later formed into structured reflection.
- Grief understood as continuity that shifts form but does not disappear.
Early Trek With Grief:
This original poem by Axton Mitchell explores grief authentically as something that does not settle into stillness. This poem shows how grief continues through movement. Early morning hiking becomes the setting where emotional experience and the physical environment overlap.
Here perception is not fully awake or asleep, and meaning forms through sensation rather than analysis.
At the center of “Sunshine and Moonbeams” you will find the brutal loss of my mother, held as both emotional reality and metaphor, but you may discover other things depending on the way you perceive them.
I want to explain that I don’t treat grief as a closed event; this trek continues as presence carried through memory, landscape, and bodily experience. Trails become environments where internal life and external terrain reflect each other without needing resolution.
This is not about healing as an endpoint rarely does a grief like this grace you with an end from it. It is about the continuity of grief year after the parent loss. I aim at showing what it means for me to remain in motion while carrying something that does not disappear.
To understand this, you must step onto the trail with me; let the words below be the landscape where this grief and this presence finally finds a way to exist.
Sunshine & Moonbeams:
Early mornings
half-awake sunshine
half-way asleep moonbeams
a body learning
the shape of
distance.
Trails that erase noise
replace it
with something
harder to name…
Not becoming
someone new…
just
staying
in
motion
She is the
bedrock under the climb
the pulse
in the stone
a rhythm
iron and deep-buried lime
where I walk on my own
This mountain is one
you learn to live with
never fully scaled
Sitting
on
your
spine
lineage locked in
the root and the vine
I do not reach
Nor do I pray
I track the
mountain
until the end of my
days
Early mornings
half-awake
sunlight
half-way
asleep
moonbeam
a body living with the shape of
loss
I now hold dear
Treks
contain conversation
only with your
ghost
maintaining our bond
through
the
terrain.
No longer making it or looking to
something new…
steady
me your ghost
and
our memory.
Flickering light
on the edge of the
glass
where the shadows grow long
yet time doesn’t seem to
pass.
A taste of the wind off
ripples in tall
grass
like a half-remembered
song
it’s a warmth in the way we
follow along
hitting me
squarely
in bone marrow.
a ghost
a glow
places the mind
has forgotten we know
drifts like the
smoke
embers grow
thin
soft
static
under
memories.
I
will
cherish
forever
the times
dear
mother
MOTION AS CONTINUITY:
Motion here is not progress; how could it be?
This piece lives in the persistence seen by those trekking the trail through grief and loss. Hiking is what acts as my way to maintain contact with experiences that cannot be resolved into a final emotional state.
The act of moving through the terrain is what keeps my grief from becoming something able to swallow me whole; my grief however does not reduce its intensity.
Early mornings matter to me since they seem to remove the sharp edges of my perception. I get to exist in a world is less defined, even if it is briefly.
This is one thing that allows my emotion and memory to overlap more freely with physical sensation. It is in that overlap that I do not see my grief as a problem to solve.
I cherish it as something ongoing.
Movement becomes the only stable structure. Not because it heals; it continues much like my grief.
LANDSCAPE AS MEMORY STRUCTURE:
The landscape here is by far more than just a symbolic decoration. Here it is more aligned with an active structure that holds emotional continuity. The mountain is experienced as something that persists alongside the body, not something separate from it.
Stone, wind, elevation, and distance operate as recurring anchors for memory. From my perspective in this poem, they do not represent grief; they hold it through repeated contact and lived experience. Though your experience can be different and remain.
The terrain becomes a consistent reference point for internal states that otherwise shift without stability.
I do not want you to think something false is rooted in truth; sadly landscape doesn’t fix grief. We need to ask our self can anything truly fix it, or do we just live through it?
All the landscape does is give it a tangible place to live. Nothing in the landscape resolves emotion, it reflects its persistence. I give my grief the same home where we used to build the memories I’d live with after her loss.
What is carried internally is mirrored externally, but I do not aim to simplify it.
EMOTIONAL REALITY & METAPHOR OVERLAP:
This work exists in both emotional reality and metaphor at the same time. It does not separate grief from landscape, memory from motion, or internal experience from physical environment. These elements remain continuously overlapping.
That overlap is not confusion. It is closer to the structure of how they work together in my mind though. Showing how my grief is actually experienced when it cannot resolve cleanly over time. Though the meaning definitely shifts depending on your state, but presence does not disappear.
The mother figure exists in multiple registers at once: emotional presence, memory, and metaphor embedded in landscape perception. All readers are valid simultaneously without needing to collapse into a single interpretation.
My work in this poem remains unresolved because the experience it describes remains unresolved.
Writing, Lived Experience, & Creation Context:
My writing here comes from lived experience in the repetition of hiking, long exposure to nature, and movement. Many of these experiences shaped this piece, but the text itself was created in stillness and reflection, including time spent writing in my garage overnight.
Stillness is what settles some words to build my work. Sitting here late, thinking back on our hikes, it’s just what I lived and what I’m still trying to understand for the resource and reading of others.
This is not documentation in real time. It is memory shaped through repetition and reflection after experience.
Grief & Parent Loss in Nature:
Grief connected to parent loss is not treated as a single moment or event with closure. It exists as an ongoing condition that changes depending on environment, memory, energy, and physical presence in the world.
In nature, especially during movement, grief becomes less structured and more fluid. It does not disappear, but it changes how it is carried. This appears as different things:
A weight at times through energy, and other times it was closer to something that existed in waves moving like the sea.
Hiking does not resolve this, but it does help me move through it. It creates conditions where grief can continue without interruption. The landscape does not remove loss or heal it. It provides continuity for its presence.
This is why nature and grief become linked for me typically. Not because nature explains loss, but it allows loss to remain in motion without forcing conclusion.
Take a Hike:
This work does not exist to move toward resolution; grief from parent-loss is not something that gets resolved. It returns repeatedly to motion, memory, and landscape as interconnected conditions of experience.
An early morning spur of the moment hike becomes the space where emotional reality and metaphor overlap without separation.
Mother loss remains present not as absence, but as ongoing influence within perception. The landscape remains present not as setting, but as structure that holds continuity.
Nothing in this work is completed or closed. It remains in motion, as the experience it describes remains in motion.
TLDR:
Hiking gives me experiences. The quiet afterward leads me to understanding.
Each trail stays with me for a unique reason. The most memorable hikes for me usually are emotionally reflective as well.
Reflection is part of the process; these introspective and emotional trail memories making new memories.
Writing helps guarantee your voice will be here still otherwise left to fade with my physical body. It turns scattered memories into something lasting.
The trail does not always end at the trailhead. Sometimes the most important part happens later when there is finally time to think.
Read More Like Topics:
American Hiking – Protect the places we walk.
Storia: Future Self Coach let’s be friends.
Always – another original grief through hiking poem
Find pieces of your identity in his granite skin & De-Masking at the tree line
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