Land Sky Mountain Water Stream Field Forest

Land sky mountain water stream field forest. Abandoning the linear, you get lost wandering a world of edges. A world of margins and peripheries, boundaries and borders, thresholds and liminalities. A string drones, tensed so tightly it can be only heard. You are at a piercing precipice when the sound shows you to a bed of golden yarrow and lace baking in autumnal sun. I feel that the language I live in does not have a word for this becoming, that the people I live among do not have an inkling what it is. You traverse the decrepit suspension bridge of downed tree limbs and their vines, the spindly sinews of crunchy brown fiber, rough and crackling, to where everything meets: a canopy, a prairie; a sun, a moon; a breeze, a shelter; a bird, a snake; a corn field, a forest; a grave, a garden. This is a place for you to work. Wild ecstatic growth made possible only by death and decay, for years the grapevine scrambled over the standing dead apple sapling unbound. For years, you left the fledgling forest. Until it became necessary to cut some back, control a little, tame, ever so slightly. We all are everything becoming again the forest – is it possible there are prophets among even us? The vine had become a massive creature, stifling the current of life-preserving air and engulfing more and more of the little vineyard. Everywhere the green of spring, but you see only death’s promise of continued living. You push gently on the whole system, the apple tree crumbling and effortlessly falling to the ground. You find the base of the vine and cut, destroying ten years growth, creating ten years more growth. The space anew, a flood of cool air dries what had been a dense little woods unto itself. You stand on top of the mass, your chest heaving, your heart pounding, your entire body pulsating with satisfaction and horror. You survey what you have done: a knotted tangle of sharded flora, a bunch of fractured limbs, a severed grapevine. Then something uncut: a collection of aged vertical shoots covered in fuzzy spikes, enticing you to scale them to see what lies atop. And there it was, underneath it all, all along: the most perfect gooseberry bush.