You think it’s an ordinary day, although warm for early morning in the desert sun. You decide to nap in the shade of a Palo Verde tree, but your mind is heavy with remembrances and regret, so many days wasted in self-absorption while affections went neglected, the rewards of compassion you worry are no longer yours to claim.
The burden feels too heavy for the soil beneath you. As if in quicksand, your head starts to sink as your limbs begin to stiffen. What moments before had been your amble body loses all proprioception.
You want to cry out, but sound disappears. You lose all traces of sight, but sense your feet are now the crown of a Saguaro. You want to panic but your emotions have left you with only sensations.
Even your thoughts no longer seem your own. Like many rootlets, they search for meaning and nourishment elsewhere. Still, in that ancient seabed, the nursery tree fertilizes your metamorphosis with its own life, confident one day you will give so much more than you took when you roamed freely, guided by you own intentions.
Seventy-five summers pass before your arms pull free and stretch for sunlight, but winter’s frost dashes your haste. Now one arm is broken and forever bends downwards.
Still so young, you have yet let go of earnestness, the desire to excel, the need to impress.
When you finally surrender to stillness, you notice bees feeding from your fingertips, bats dining on your fruit, woodpeckers burrowing homes near your heart, migrating songbirds nimbly making branches of your spines, jackrabbits nibbling patches of grass moistened by your shade.
No longer alone in yourself, you discover you are part of everyone.
You grow two stories tall and sprout more arms as another seventy-five years pass. By then you forget time as you forget all that came before. Only then do you become wise enough to surrender to your part in the plan: to be sturdy for others, to keep kinship alive through soft breaths of pollen above and sturdy rhizomes below, to put trust in the Milky Way as it marches across the sky, to wait the nourishing deluge of summer monsoons, to accept risk of limb in dead of winter, to rest easy knowing even in death your decaying body is a gift to those still struggling to live. The love you once mourned becomes all that you are.
