Fertile

When the word fertile is spoken, something ancient stirs in the mind.

I began thinking about it while listening to a woman from the Cofán people speak about how, in her culture, women and nature are not separate things, but reflections of each other.

When we imagine nature, we picture forests breathing in the wind, rivers carving their way through earth, mountains standing in patient silence. Yet beneath all of it lies something quieter—something that rarely asks to be seen.

Soil.

Dark, silent, unnoticed soil.

It holds the seed without complaint.
It waits.
It feeds what cannot yet feed itself.
And one day, without spectacle, it gives birth to forests.

When soil carries this quiet abundance, we call it fertile.

Perhaps that is why the same word belongs to women.

A woman, like the earth, carries a hidden universe within her.
She shelters life before it learns the language of breath.
She nourishes what the world cannot yet see.

The forest and the child begin the same way—
in darkness,
in patience,
in a place that is simply called fertile.