the council of the elders had stood for a thousand years.
their four-pointed grove oversaw that which few mortals strive to understand, fewer still can abide: the supremacy of nature left to its expression.
creating their own rain, from crescents green the night's dew drips at the silver dawn, breaking over a horizon afar and unseen, for this valley runs deep and its days are short, all too short.
a morning ritual unbroken for twenty thousand years, since the melting of the ice. the drips make music, notes determined by that on which they land, the low e of thud on sandy bank, the tinkling a minor of leaf and ochrey shale, the tones muted in forest proper, for all is wet and all is soft, and all is the quiet of love.
even in midsummer, the elders and their intimately connected progeny, mycelial comrades and the myriad forms of interwoven, interdependent, intercellular oneness of beings casts a shade deep and luxurious, filtering the harshest of suns to a cool, moist evermoss tranquility so that the humous shall never dry, so long as the elders stand.
vines as old as the council, that first sent a tremulous, trusting tendril toward the newborn children and gently, mindfully, bound themselves to these lightseekers for life, now a spiralling gnarled ladder into the sunny spiderglory heights, three feet thick at the base, adorned and symbiotic with the mosses of yestermore, strong enough to hold a dozen hew-men, should they so wish to climb.
and one such as they did, against the lingering doubts, the horror movie version of the forest as something to be feared, placing his fate in the wood borne of sacred chaos, up and up, ten, twenty, fifty metres into the canopy alive, bejeweled with nest and shiny tiny eyes…
and could feel the vine holding him, could feel it reassuring him “you can trust in me, i will bear you as surely as the scorpion must sting” and his lightness in comparison to its strength, also, never left him…
and saw the illusion of individuality clearly, for the first time certain of something- this is the way.
cyclical changes in the distribution of foliage, as the councils let go what no longer served them- just the leaves at first, the branch and twig remain, for the spiders and the sugar gliders and the quick wise flying feathered seed spreaders a perch, a framework for life, from which to sing, to launch, to glide and to swing in the cool brimming breeze.
the earth beneath the moss, the fern, the lichen, the liverwort and the sweet decay upon which all life depends, was twelve feet deep in protection for the gurgling, undulating centre of this tapestry, lowest of godly beings spare Ocean- the god called River.
here and there, among the southern wait-a-while, stood the mud towers of land crays, in a feat of antigravity known only to their builders- full to the brim with water, feet above the surface of the stream.
treeferns’ fractal structure indistinguishable by he from one another, as distinct from each other as light from dark to the ants, their navigational system far beyond the pseudoknowledge the hew-men depend on, able to find their way home by the different curl at the tip of one minifrond among a million, as all work together to simply live, and protect that which protects them from the killage of the unmitigated sun-worshippers greed.
soon, the d7s did come. the assault akin to warfare. soon, the elders did fall. soon, the River was choked with the corpse of Eden. soon, stripped of its living talisman, goolengook did burn. but in the heart of the hew-man, they live forever, as do his forlorn tears.
Such a beautiful tribute!! 💚
A true cathedral