Win, Lose, Draw

Wind and rain blew into me, through me, cleansed me and filled me. A rippling green, encompassing presence whispered cool music. Tall trees, long dark fingers, reached up for me, and I was floating in their touch. Its touch. An immense being, lush and expanding, full of mysterious forces and smaller lives surging through it. Through me. My body? No, I couldn’t let it.... But I was only a bubble of water and air, enclosed by boundless green and the infinite design of a tracery of leaves and needles.

A cool wind—music—voice whispered, telling the living pattern in words I couldn’t understand. I was only a tiny drop, shimmering in the sunlight on the tip of one new leaf beneath the overarching ceiling of branch and sky, flowing over the countless whorls and veins in the intricacy of that one leaf among the inconceivable number of leaves and trees.

And through the infinite and infinitesimal flowed a presence, a fleeting caress of something other, touching me but untouchable, kissing my face with air and water....

Cool and wet. Something dropping onto my cheek and rolling smoothly away. I was floating in the darkness. No. I was a leaf. I was lying on leaves. The darkness burned at its edges with sun.

I blinked.

And opened my eyes to pale, scrubbed blue overlaid with an intricate mosaic of dark, twining branches. Golden shafts of sunlight lanced drifts of mist and arching green fronds. Poised above my face, caught on the tip of a thin leaf with its delicate pattern of veins glowing green against the light, a drop of dew flashed and winked, glinting the reflection of the forest encapsulated. It trembled, dropped, and splashed onto my face.

I was smiling.

I blinked again in confusion, twisted my neck to look around me. I was entangled in my sleep cocoon, half out of the waterproof shell and rolled away from the cover of overhanging rock onto a slope of moss and ferns. I rubbed my eyes and struggled out of the tangle to sit in my damp wickweave. I took a deep breath of cool morning.

My ledge perched on the lip of curling mist rising upward to dissipate in the thin warmth of sunlight slanting between dark trunks. The rays haloed wet berry bush and fern in iridescent, colored pearl. Only the muffled murmur of a stream hidden in mist below touched the deep hush. A russet skial darted into the sun speckling a fallen limb and stopped to eye me without the usual high chirp of alarm. We shared the morning with the trees, the mist, the lichen on the bough. The other.

And for the moment, I was strangely content in my smallness. I wasn’t meant to matter to the forest, any more than the skial or the moss beneath me. I was part of it now. Maybe it was part of me. But this world was its own reason. It wanted nothing of me except to be left to continue.