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Tree doesn't go anywhere. Tree has stood through weather it doesn't have to like. Tree taught Buffalo that you can stop running before you've figured it all out. The ground is still there, even when the mind insists nowhere is safe.
Buffalo had run until the field stopped making sense. Then Buffalo found a Tree, old enough to have stood through storms Buffalo hadn't learned to survive. Buffalo stopped in the shade. Frog was nearby in the wet grass. Eagle moved overhead. Nothing announced itself. Buffalo just felt the ground, and the running slowed on its own.
Tree teaches ground. Feet, weight, the plain fact that you're still here. Not a holier place to flee to. This place, this breath, this patch of ground.
Stand or sit. Feel your feet, your seat, the weight that's already being held for you. Don't try to be peaceful. Just stop long enough to notice you haven't fallen.
The urge to bolt. Numbness. The fantasy of disappearing into somewhere safer or holier. The mind that won't stop scanning.
These are contemporary trail tales from Matthew J. Dyck's lived and imaginative world, offered in respect for oral storytelling as a living way of carrying teaching through relationship, land, weather, animals, and memory. They aren't presented as traditional teachings on behalf of any Indigenous nation or community.