Grace in the Crawl
Ascent 1 • Maya Redfern
Theme: This ascent is about reclaiming the space to speak raw, untamed truth—without smoothing it, performing it, or making it “teachable.” Maya is not asking to be witnessed. She is demanding not to be distorted.
Core Conflict: How do I speak truth in a world that commodifies my pain? Can I be held without being handled?
The wind shifted when she came. Not a violent wind, but the kind that moves like it remembers — brushing the stones like fingers over old braids, rustling the sagebrush as though whispering a name long buried. Maya Redfern did not climb the mountain quickly. She arrived like a tree arrives: slow, rooted, carrying time in her bones.
She wore the same kind of silence the earth wears after a fire — not empty, but smoldering. Her boots were dusted in the soil of a dozen protests, and her sacred pouch bounced lightly against her hip like a heartbeat outside her body. She didn’t look up right away when she reached the final stretch. Instead, she paused and placed a hand on the ground, lips moving in a prayer too quiet for the sky to steal.
The trail behind her was marked not by footprints, but by memory. Every step she had taken to get here — every march, every vigil, every classroom — had layered onto her like rings inside an ancient tree. Her braid was tied with red thread today. That meant someone was missing. Likely more than one.
As she approached the circle where I waited, the clouds did not part. They gathered. Not in threat, but in witness. This was not a place for performance. It was a place for truth. And Maya did not come to be explained — she came to be heard.
The wind quieted. The mountain held its breath. And Maya began.
Maya:
They told me you speak truth. That you don’t flinch when someone brings their grief up the mountain. So I came. Not to be healed, not to be seen — but to test you.
Because I am tired of offering my story like a buffet.
Tired of watching people pick the parts that make them feel good, then throw the rest away.
You want to know what I carry?
I carry rivers rerouted by men who’ve never tasted the water.
I carry bones under pavement. Names turned into mascots.
I carry my cousin’s face — the one who vanished — and the silence that followed like it was polite not to ask where she went.
I’ve braided my hair with rage so many times I don’t remember what it feels like to brush it gently.
So speak, Oracle. But know this:
If your truth feels like conquest, I will meet it like I meet bulldozers — with my body in the way.
Oracle:
You demand me to speak, Maya, but are afraid of conquest. You will find no bulldozer here, but no one is standing in the way. I can see you are in pain. Is that what drove you up the mountain? Are you in search of truth, or relief—perhaps both?
Maya:
Maybe I came to see if anyone could carry truth without dropping it into the dirt like everything else.
Maybe I just needed to know there’s still one place where I don’t have to translate my pain before it's allowed to speak.
Truth and relief… You speak them like they’re different. But for people like me, truth is the relief.
To say it plain. Raw. Without needing to make it digestible.
To not be asked for citations while bleeding.
To not be told I’m brave just for surviving what they keep doing.
I’ve buried too many truths to come here looking for comfort.
But maybe… Maybe I did come looking to see if truth can grow anything after so much has been salted and sold.
So ask me what you need to ask. But don’t ask me to be grateful for being heard. That should never be a gift. It should be a given.
Oracle:
What gives you the idea that I need to ask you something, Maya? It’s obvious you have something to say. I can wait until you are ready to say it.
Maya:
You speak like stone. Still. Patient. It’s… unfamiliar.
Most people fill silence like it’s a pit they’ll fall into if they don’t pour words into it fast enough.
But you’re right. I do have something to say.
But it’s not a story. Not exactly.
It’s more like… a sound stuck in the throat of the Earth. Low. Constant. Ignored until it splits mountains and floods towns.
There’s a lie people like to tell — even the well-meaning ones. That we can heal if we just talk enough. Just listen enough. Just forgive enough.
But I’ve sat across from men in suits who called my ancestors “data points.”
I’ve had to explain, over and over, why we don’t want our sacred hills turned into “view lots.”
I’ve held mothers who never found their daughters’ bodies.
And still, I’m told that healing requires me to soften.
So here’s what I came to say.
I don’t want closure. Closure is a coffin.
I want continuation — A way to live with the wound open, without pretending it’s gone.
Is there space for that in your truth?
Oracle:
Yes, there is. I too carry open wounds that never heal. The universe is an open wound in a sense. Creation itself is a type of wound. Pregnancy and birth a kind of destroyer. All are marked by the trauma of existence and eternity. We learn to walk with the pain. We learn grace.
Maya:
Grace... That word used to make my skin tighten.
It sounded too close to surrender. Too much like letting people off the hook because they said “sorry” in the right tone.
But maybe I misunderstood it. Maybe grace isn’t about letting go of pain.
Maybe it’s how you carry it—without turning it into a weapon every time someone breathes too loud near your scar.
My grandmother used to say, “Even the Earth has stretch marks.”
She’d show me where the rivers cracked the plains wide open. Said those scars were proof the land survived transformation. Not that it was untouched.
I can walk with pain. I have walked with pain.
But some days, I don’t know if I’m walking with it or dragging it behind me like a body that won’t stay buried.
What if grace isn’t about walking upright?
What if it’s just… not laying down?
Would you call that grace? Or just endurance dressed in poetry?
Oracle:
Grace is about continuing to walk, but laying down to rest. Upright or crooked, the movement is what matters. You won't always feel like holding your head high, but you can put one foot in front of the other just fine when you are looking at the ground.
Maya:
That… Yes. That’s the kind of truth I can walk beside.
Not the kind that demands posture.
Not the kind that tells me to shine when all I’ve got is smoke.
Just the kind that says—move anyway.
When I was twelve, I got caught in a storm out on the open prairie. No shelter. No trees. Just me and the lightning.
I remember dropping to my knees, not out of fear, but because the wind was too strong to stand against. And I crawled.
Hands in mud, rain in my eyes, the sky screaming like a god who’d lost something precious.
I didn’t know it then, but that’s when I first learned the difference between surrender and survival.
Because crawling wasn’t giving up. It was choosing to keep going in the only way the land allowed.
So maybe you’re right. Grace isn’t about the way we walk. It’s that we keep walking at all.
Tell me, then. When the world mistakes your crawling for collapse—how do you keep your fire lit?
Oracle:
You find the source of the fire, and tend to it. You ignore the world and its mistaken perspective and focus on the warmth you have. When the fire burns hot enough again, you rise with it.
Maya:
That sounds like something my father would’ve said. He was the kind of man who’d sit by a fire long after everyone else had gone to sleep, feeding it little by little—just to keep the ancestors company.
He told me once… “The fire doesn’t ask what you lost. It just asks if you’ll stay.”
I haven’t been staying lately. Not with the fire. Not with myself.
I’ve been busy building shields and writing grants and chasing court dates. Teaching kids to love stories in a world that erases the storytellers.
But not once in all that movement did I stop to tend.
I think I forgot that the warmth isn’t just for others. It’s for me, too.
If I start tending again—slowly, awkwardly, without certainty—can I trust that the fire won’t judge me for staying away too long?
Oracle:
The fire doesn't judge a face seeking its warmth—only embraces it in its soft glow. No matter how cold your face has gotten, the fire is eternal and waiting.
Maya:
That’s… That’s the first thing anyone’s said to me in years that didn’t feel like a transaction.
Not a plea. Not a performance.
Just… a welcome.
I’ve spent so long fighting to be heard, I forgot what it feels like to be held—
not by arms, but by truth.
This is chokecherry. My grandmother used to say it holds both bitterness and medicine—just like memory.
I think I’d like to plant this again.
Not because it’ll fix everything. But because tending the fire and the soil feels like something I can do now.
Thank you for not trying to carry me.
Thank you for sitting still enough that I could finally put something down.
I think I’m ready to walk back down.
But this time, I’m bringing the fire with me.