I enter to contemplate the world from another vantage point, I sit and meditate. Today many strange things have happened; there is a general unease in the atmosphere and my being becomes unfocused and demoralized easily. I'm scared. I pick up the pieces and take a breath again, take my body. But, again, everything falls apart; there is a storm of thoughts, lightning bolts falling from all four latitudes. My head hurts intensely in a very focused point in space, but I can't relate it to anything; I can't find its root and I feel sold out. So all that's left for me is the will to remain in the storm, relax and wait for it to pass.
I don't relax, but it ends up passing. Suddenly, everything shines with a peace and a radiance already known, but more intense because of the contrast with the past. Now yes, I breathe the minimum breathable, I hold the moment and I give it away. And I feel paired with an old tree, it breathes CO2 and gives me oxygen. I breathe oxygen and give it CO2. He takes the light and gives me beauty, fuel and fruits; I take the beauty and its fruits and its timbers and I distribute its seeds; I give him my gratitude and I give myself as fertilizer.
Our intelligences are in tune and, wherever we look, bacteria, insects, reptiles, mammals, algae, lichens, herbs, plants... everything is the same. Suddenly, I feel a tremendous unease and the stab returns somewhere in my head that now has no limits. I follow the pain, I enter into it, it is a reddish, wrinkled tunnel with little light; I advance for a while and, suddenly, I "hear" some very strange voices. It is another language, another way of communicating. It's more like smelling it than hearing it, but I have no problem understanding it. They aren't even words. But in my mind they are translated into words.
I understand. A posidonia, a pine, a cypress, a yew, an olive tree and some more are conversing. They are the oldest on the planet and they are restless; they discuss respecting the turns, but with great forcefulness. It reminds me of the western movies when the Indians sat down to debate what to do with those white men who wanted to possess everything and wanted to give nothing. Men who thought that life could function only by inhaling. And that when they realized that it didn't work, they exhaled all the shit together. Tons of waste that they had been accumulating, radioactive, CO2, plastics, chemicals, etc. impossible for the rest of life to inspire like that suddenly. Like trying to breathe by sticking your head out the window of an airplane.
After a long debate in which the main idea was to modify the system and that the vegetables exchanged respiration, that is, to start taking oxygen and releasing CO2. And after hearing many arguments for and against, most of it was in the sense of letting things flow without intervening. But the youngest, again and again, spoke of the unbearable pain to which they were being subjected. But the old ones reminded them of the amount of innocent life of species that were going to fall and what that was going to drag to others of their plant world. The flowers, said the oldest, how many flowers will we lose after so much creative effort. Also, remember when we lowered you from the trees, the illusion deposited in that incipient and new intelligence. And in the hope that they would spread us throughout the universe.
In those they were giving me a lesson of the life unimaginable for me. Because time is different when you listen. Suddenly, I don't know how, the cypress that was the or of the oldest, looked at me, because I was inside its roots. He looked at me.
The language. Words are not yet evolved to define that "he looked at me"; we don't know it, but when they lowered us from the tree they turned us into words. And words, whether numbers or letters, are still very basic languages to understand the world, not even to understand ourselves.
I left, I came back to myself. I breathed, then I breathed as little as possible, I held the moment and gave it away. There is no difference in opening my eyes in the patio where I am than in the cemetery. Smells, birds, a distant dog, a plane passing by and the way home. And there the universe continues waiting if that incipient intelligence is able to remember that the base, here and there, is to take and give in a balance that only love can establish. But that is another word for which the word has no words.
Mr. Cypress, I can only cry. And I cry and cry and that was just the headache, a cloud that didn't break.