I’m not sure when, exactly, I stopped listening to myself. When I stopped feeling my place in the family of this world. When I stopped trusting the never ending staccato of life—break and heal, break and heal, break and heal.

In my earliest memory, I am on a red tricycle with white handlebars that sprout plastic streamers. The sun is high and white in the Arizona sky. My father, calloused hands on the back of my seat, is pushing me along the driveway. I see a ladybug on the scorching concrete, and bend toward her at the waist, concerned about her tiny black feet, and because I don’t want to squash her, I tuck my right foot safely through the spokes of the front wheel. My father’s attention must have waivered, because I feel a jolt, then another. I sit up tall and grasp the handlebars to keep from toppling over, but my leg is caught now, trapped in the spokes. My father gives one final, massive push and the bone in my leg snaps.

I don’t remember the pain in that moment, but I do remember screaming, my mouth wide as a rattlesnake devouring a jackrabbit, my mother running from the house, her face a mask of anger. “What did you do to her?” she screamed at my father, who shrank and stumbled backward, hands fluttering uselessly. Later, at the emergency room, wet plaster slithered around my leg from the base of my knee to the arch of my foot.

My first memory of the pain was that first night, sleeping between my parents in their king-sized bed, my head resting on the tiny, embroidered pillow that I had slept on as a baby in my crib, the one my mother now kept in a dresser drawer in her room. If I had a nightmare or a stomachache, I’d pad into her room, open the drawer, pull out the magical pillow and crawl into bed, curling into her, into this body that had held me and nourished me. But this night, neither the pillow nor my mother brought any comfort. I writhed and squirmed and whimpered. My mother whispered over me, “This poor baby,” and I wanted more than anything to be a baby again, with no pain that a mother’s hand couldn’t heal.

I never asked my father what happened. I never asked him how he felt, or what he thought during those long, sleepless nights while my leg healed. My mother’s fury settled into an icy contempt. “Don’t you touch her,” she’d hiss when he got home from the copper mine where he worked. My world condensed into pain and pooled around my mother, around the maternal. I have no memory of my three older siblings during this time. They faded into background static as I focused only on this bone that once propelled me through the hills and canyons and cracked clay of my home, the bone that now lay stumpy, broken, and useless.

But the bone healed, as bones will. My legs grew sturdy and tanned again. I spent the summers running barefoot through the desert, stopping to hunch over a nest of centipedes, to feel flies crawl on my arms, to let ants stream up my legs. The natural world didn’t scare me then. Everything was worthy of attention, worthy of a gentle touch. Worthy. My mother despaired of ever keeping my rough, blackened feet clean, of shielding me from insects and rodents and snakes.

On the weekends, my father disappeared into the foothills of the Superstition Mountains to hunt for food, bringing home scrawny rabbits and thick rattlesnakes that he skinned in our front yard. I’d collect the rattles from the snakes, and sometimes a tooth or whole jaw. I laid them—these holy relics—carefully in the bottom drawer of my dresser and covered them with a scrap of lace from an outgrown dress. Sometimes, I would run the dry, fragile husk of a rattle over my lips, blow gently into it, and shake it until I shivered over the predatory sound of a rattler caught off guard in a ravine. It was the sound of death, of dust storms spiraling off the mountains, of bones and fear. But it was also the sound of life. The sound of power, glorious and untamed.

As I look at this girl-child through the lens of memory, I am awed by her. I only now remember she existed—born of bones and desert and life and death—herself powerful, glorious, and untamed.

I didn’t know I was once that girl.

I was feral.

I was unafraid.

I see her now: legs curled around the spine at the top of the rusted-out swing set frame, watching the purple-black bruise of a storm spread across the desert sky, the wind raking my sunbleached hair and electricity skittering along my arms and neck. I see my arms and mouth spread wide, my head thrown back against the drama of the land’s shifting moods.

“Crystal!” my mother shouts over the wind from the back door of the trailer. “Crystal Ann! Get in here! Don’t you see those clouds?”

Of course I can see them.

I hook one knee over the topmost bar of the swing set, loop my body around, over, and drop lightly to the ground just as the first drops of water hit the earth. Drops as big as fists. Thor hammering the earth. I run through the sliding glass door, pulling it closed behind me, and I sink to the carpet, where I lie on my belly and watch the storm unfold. A growl rises from the canyon beyond the trailer park, shuddering and creeping across the highway, over the prickly pears, trampling the metal of our trailer. Rain splatters onto the clay of the yard, scattering like luminous ants into the cracks and fissures left by drought, until the yard is creamy mud. An orange cat runs under our house for shelter.

Arizona is dry as parchment until, suddenly, it isn’t. I heard stories—true or not—of flash floods carrying trailers like mine away like prisoners of war. Our lives were ruled by the extreme lack or the unexpected abundance of water. But once the storms passed, they always left behind the sturdy bedrock of a land that was made of bone.

Back to this girl, though: lightning arcs over the distant line of hills and she starts counting: one-Mississippi-two-Missisippi-three. Crash. Another vein of lightning, as rich as the hardened copper and turquoise scattered through this land. One-Mississippi-two-Miss—crash. I grin and settle myself on my elbows and forearms. Here it comes. It’s almost over us. The sky breaks and bleeds.

And just like that, it’s done, the lightning and thunder moving along, the rain steadying itself into a cheerful drumbeat on the roof, my mother telling me to go take a bath and, for heaven’s sake, wash those filthy feet. I stretch my browned body in the tub and wiggle my toes to make tiny waves that lap at my ankles. This little body of mine (six? maybe seven?), like the body of Mother Earth and Father Sky, is wild and free. My bones break and then they heal. My skin splits and then sews itself up. I pull a tooth from my jaw and another bigger, stronger tooth takes its place.

This body, and the space through which it moved, was a miracle.

Young adulthood found me in the lush Pacific Northwest, where moss and evergreens and sodden loam obscured the bedrock of the land. My feet were no longer blackened and rough, my lawn and the small garden that surrounded it manicured and symmetrical. I scurried through the rain, hood up, head down, from house to car to store and back without looking up, without watching the clouds roll in, without catching my breath at the lifeblood of this landscape that poured from the clouds. Nature had become something you retreat to, like a camping trip or a weekend at an Oregon coast hotel, not a force living inside your body, dancing on your skin, and humming through your backyard. My relics were long gone—those sacred reminders of rattlesnakes, chunks of raw copper and turquoise from the mine where my father worked, a striated roadrunner feather, a pinecone from the Pinal Mountains—probably lost or thrown out in our move to California when the mines closed during the recession of the early 80s. Whenever I thought of my body, I didn’t see a miracle. Like most women my age, conditioned by the glossy spreads in magazines and the cookie-cutter beauty of celebrities, I saw all that was imperfect. I saw only brokenness, not strength, not inevitable healing. The fierce staccato of life skipped a beat, stuttered to an arrhythmic discord. Something was wildly off, but I was too busy keeping my head down to notice.

And then, in 2009, I lost my eldest son. Like my leg so many years before, something elemental snapped, leaving me hobbled, my life shrinking and coalescing around a hard, bright, and blinding pain. Only, by then, I’d lost faith in the ways we break and then heal. I certainly saw no healing from an agony like this. The fracture was too deep, too fundamental.

A therapist once told me that broken people can see the broken with clear eyes. He meant, I think, that suffering makes you empathetic. That’s true, but the empathy comes later. At first, when you’re finally able to look outside of yourself at all, the only thing you can see is brokenness, like a crack in the lens of your glasses. All I wanted to do was run from the pain, the distortion, a life that had lost its sense of holiness. Nothing felt sacred anymore. Not the landscape, not the rain, not my body flowing through space and time, not even my family. I needed a fresh start, away from ghosts, a place with a sturdy bedrock and clear skies.

The next year, we moved to the dry rain shadow of Eastern Washington, landing in wine country. Grapevines patchworked their way along sunny ridges, the stripes and plaids of olive green outlined with irrigation ditches that ran cool and sparkling in the summer and lay bare as bone in winter. My backyard held a pond filled with carp and river otters and turtles lounging in the sun. It froze over in the winter and in the summer bloomed with the inevitable spread of milfoil that threatened to choke out the native plants. Great blue herons, witchy as they are, lingered at the intersections of water, land, and sky, hunched crones silent in flight, silent in hunting, the fronds of grey-blue sketched in an everlasting stillness.

Eastern Washington, like much of the interior West, is built by and on volcanoes. The treeless hills, ridges, and mountains surrounding my home in Zillah, just east of Yakima, were once a network of volcanoes so ancient that nothing is left of them except the hardened cores, compressed basalt covered in sagebrush, the imperiled cushion daisy, phlox and lupine, larkspur and balsamroot, and the occasional rattlesnake that reminded me of my childhood home.

The first winter brought a dry, blowing snow that made us light the fireplace and cracked my skin. At first, I walked the nature trail that ran alongside the lakes and ponds south of my house and then I ran, bundled in Under Armour, my heart and lungs and feet beating a rhythm that brought me back to myself in a way I hadn’t felt since I was a child. When I was running, I felt something close to whole again. I thought of the wild horses running in the Horse Heaven Hills to the south, legs stretching and compressing, their muscles hard and glistening under a wide, pale sky. This land that looked so barren, so blasted by primeval volcanoes, cradled life close to its bones, close to its heart. My broken places started to stitch together. I began to trust again my place in the mesh of this world.

American white pelicans arrived in the summer. One morning I jogged up a small rise overlooking the lake just as a flock burst from the surface of the water, great shining birds with wingspans up to ten feet. I’d never seen a bird so big, so graceful, even more silent than the heron. I stood still that morning, feeling the air throb around me. I threw back my head and remembered. I remembered that day when the thunderstorm broke over me as a child. I remembered that I was not alone in this desert of a life, this heap of broken bones and spirits that I carried inside me. I remembered that the world is wide and holy and, like me, it breaks and heals and breaks and heals, like the Morse code of white-black-white-black of the pelican wings spiraling high above me.