Among The Sacred Standing Ones
A female flower detaches herself from the group that swirls upon the asphalt clearing, in front of the baked-mud caves.
Like a down-borne seed of milkweed on the air, she approaches, and enters our space. Behind her, a male flower follows. She does not know.
This female flower is of the plentiful sort, the ones who carry the heat of the sun in their cores, who make war upon us from sea to sea. The male who follows is different. He is of the rare species, the moon flowers, who are as cold as our own bodies are at night.
She wanders among us, this sun lodge daughter, treading gently over the litter of our needles and the smaller plants below, brushing our branches with her own, searching. The moon's catkin follows, hiding himself from her.
A young fir stands before her, and she stops. Compared to ours, her tropism is like lightning, reaching forward, touching the moss and lichens that grow on the bark. She approaches closer, and her upper limbs twine like bittersweet around the young fir's trunk, until her own cleaves tight. Almost equal in girth she is, to this brother. Tides of air move within her, move her against the tree.
Time passes, and she sheds the husks from her feet, to stand – naked, tender and warm – on the cold, black roots. Tightly, tightly, she cleaves, making no sound, watering the bark and moss with drops from the ageless sea. The clouds answer, and the great loneliness of the unrooted drifts among us, like the white mist of morning.
The moon flower hides, still, behind a ledge of rock. All of his senses are pinned upon the sun blossom. He has folded himself close to the ground, become a bud again, compact and hard and unborn, motionless as the stone that conceals him. But his soul flies forward, into the standing fir. Now its branches bow in shelter. Needles knit themselves against the falling rain.
Her flower face turns upward, seeking the sky through the branches, high beyond the young tree's crown. Twined upon the upright trunk, she presses the petals of her mouth to her brother's bark. And all of our heartwood shivers with longing.
Tropism: a term in botany that refers to movement by plants toward an external stimulus. Plants generally move by growing in the direction of favorable stimuli such as light and moisture, and they true their vertical growth by gravitational tropism. Except in states of meditation, the senses of humans are too fleeting to perceive the movements of the plants. They are the slow kings, though not as slow as the stones.