The Forest Remembers
Most don't comprehend that a forest has thoughts. Human minds are just too fast, too fleeting to understand forest thoughts. Forest thoughts are slow thoughts.
There are the long cold dreaming thoughts, when everything sleeps, and the sap is cold and still;
There are the tentative green thoughts that start with a cautious swelling of buds before the urgent thoughts of sap rising and blossoms bursting with nectar and leaves springing forth;
There are the hot urgent thoughts of leaves, and fruit, and seed, and long days of heat and sun;
This year, there are no thoughts of the hot dying that claimed some trees in years before; the hot dying that sends creatures fleeing; not this year;
There are the calm cool thoughts as leaves dry and sap slows and trees and creatures prepare for the long cold dreaming; thoughts of acorns buried, some of which will become future trees, buried hope, insurance against storms and the hot dying; so that the long forest might continue.
...
There had been a boy. A boy who came with the greening. There had been an adventure. There had been a new thought? What was Jaysome? The boy had become a tree, and many acorns had become trees. Had the trees walked? ... and then a man had come and the trees had slept and plunged their roots deep into the earth. And it wasn't an "oops".
...
Many many thoughts later ... some men had come, with axe and machine; intent on killing. There had been a dying. Trees slain and hauled away to some unknown fate. But, there were acorns buried for just such an eventuality ... and when the next greening came so did the new trees, and enough of the old trees remained, to remember it was a forest.
...
A tree had become lumber, and that lumber had become a table, and a couple had built a home, and bought the table to go in that home.
The table didn't have forest thoughts, no long cold dreaming thoughts, no tentative green thoughts, no urgent thoughts of sap rising; no hot thoughts of long days and sun; no cool calm thoughts of acorns and the long forest.
But some part of it remembered. It remembered the boy, It remembered Jaysome, and it remembered the man who had helped it plunge roots deep into the earth and some spark flickered at the thought of roots and growing and the promise of the greening thoughts. But they were excited urgent thoughts that promised adventure.
...
A small child, a glass spilling, and there was water on the floor ... touching the table ... a few cells awoke, became a root. A root that needed earth.
Breakfast dishes hastily caught, a couple looked on in horror as their table bolted for the door like a suddenly freed puppy. A child giggled.
Legs found earth, became roots, and a table became a stump, became a tree that remembered a forest, that remembered Jaysome. But in this new development of "affordable entry point" homes, there were no other trees; just "Home Owners Association" approved neatly trimmed rectangles of grass.
So, roots extended, and in each neatly trimmed rectangle of grass a single sucker appeared and another tree roared into the sky. Each tree was the same tree but different; and it had a mind like a hive, like a forest. But the trees remembered the saw and the axe, and each tree grew wood harder than iron. It could have been an "oops" if the trees had continued to spread; magic drawing media and scientists from afar.
But a man and a boy came, and the boy hugged the trees, and the man spoke to the forest; and there was a compromise and a binding.
No-one remembered the trees hadn't always been there; and the new forest went back to having slow forest thoughts.
@randomlyjay
