Your first scar is not your last scar.

Prose poem for hot August days.

Your first scar is not your last scar. That time you fell, your body taught itself how to sheathe your cut. It is a beautiful thing, how ducks return to the same swamp every year. How trees remember last year’s thirst. How, when you tripped on that old memory and spilled your words, they floated off to new fields. How grass braids in your hands, the taste of green in your teeth. How you always believed the sapsucker’s song, how you and the hummingbirds followed it, searching for stabs of sweetness. •

“Moringa” by Maaike VanderMeer, watercolour.

Have you heard about biomimicry? It’s a design of an institution, or architecture, or discourse, that learns from patterns in nature. “How does nature heal trauma?” Krista Tippett (

The On Being Project

) asked in an interview. If you’re looking for a writing prompt, search for a way (or many) that nature responds to trauma, and write that into a piece.

P.S: It’s been a week of international travel for me, so Field Notes returns next week!