The Hermit's Gossip

In the space between once and now, a storyteller lived in the greenwood, doing his job, explaining the forest to itself. . .

When a wind moves through the leaves, it moves you with them, it moves you along away from them.

When there is no wind, you settle back onto the branches and into the ground between the roots.

No one tree can claim to make you, and all the trees together make you, but when the trees are quiet there's no you that you know of, no you at all, although everything that will be you again is still being made as quickly as ever. You replenish.

When they can, the leaves release you. You are all the things they send to each other, altogether, the whole conversation, not the phrases.

Never mind the birds and squirrels, nor any of the nuisances and monsters that carry bits of you off and trouble you. Never fight the wind. It can or cannot carry you. You cannot carry yourself.

You were born because the trees that lived were best at floating their signals simultaneously in the softest and wildest winds, the same.

You will think you are the wind because its movements bring you. You are the use of the wind for the trees to say long winded formulas that are you.

Because you are always in that circling wind, there is no mirror for you but those formulas that remake you in long fragments that begin

In the space between once and now, a storyteller lived in the greenwood, doing his job, explaining the forest to itself. . .