Every day she walked for hours, after her son died, in the nearby
woods. She had an unintelligible energy—
too much to sit still, too much to focus, too little to do anything, at
all. So, she walked in the woods. Some days, she would walk and end up lost in
the woods. She felt happy when she got
lost for a moment. For a moment, she
would stop thinking of him. Then, one
day, she stood still, as did the woods, and she thought of the word or the term
‘
lost’. And she thought, on this still day,
is anything ever lost? Does anything really exist? Did it ever exist? I no longer possess it. Can you ever possess anything? Did I ever possess it? Her heart ached, no longer thinking
lost, but feeling
lost. Feeling every letter,
and then his voice enters her heart ‘L’, his smile ‘O’, his touch ‘S’, the last
moment she remembers seeing him ‘T’. Her
heart came so close to bursting, that day the woods stood still… she never got
lost again.
On another
day, many many after the lost day, she found a place in the woods where rays of
sunshine lit up the ground the largest.
She liked this spot very much, as most of the woods were shaded, but it
was because of the immense shade that made this place so special. She felt a deep peace here and found herself
many days staring into the light. This brought
her a peace she rarely felt anymore. She
continued to visit this special place, and on a day quite similar to the lost
day, she looked to sky as usual and then she sat. She sat, stretched and looked around. There in the shade of the taller trees, was
one smaller tree. To her, it appeared
all the trees looked down onto this one tree in a mocking manner. She felt a sudden rage come over her, here in
here peaceful place, a rage that consumed her being. She picked herself up and ran home in a
blur. She grabbed an axe determined to
cut all the large trees down. When she
returned to her special place with the axe, she approached a large tree and as
she swung the axe, a melancholy sensation ran through her. She dropped the axe and began to howl in pain
and cry.
She passed
out and awoke determined to care for the little tree. Every day she carried water with a song
on her heart, day in day out. But time
proved that this little tree appeared smaller or all the woods were growing
higher around it. She felt the rage again,
but the pain to howl or cry had left her body and gone too, the energy to wield
the axe. At the moment of rage, or the
moment she felt it was to emerge from her being, she looked upward and the sun
caught her eye. The calm returned. Still determined to care for the tree, she
returned daily with water, a song on her heart, but this time she brought
mirrors to redirect the sunlight to the little tree. She continued this daily journey until her
little tree was the largest in the woods.
