ON BEING ALL AT ONCE

Suddenly, I am all things. I am an old woman running naked from a burning hut, carrying a child that is not mine but which I have found. I am an old woman with weathered skin, and I am crying for the child's loss of mother and father, not because I knew them and not because I am afraid, but because I am that child, and I have lost my parents simply by growing up. I am the child, crying too, not for the loss of my parents because I am too young to know, but because I am seeing flames for the first time. I am a neighboring villager who has forgotten how to cry, and instead of crying I am beating the dirt with my firsts and screaming, not because of the fire, but because the land is barren and the crops will not grow this year. I am beating the ground because the earth has failed me, or as is more the case, I have failed the earth in asking for it to provide that which it cannot. I am the earth, crying in the form of rivers that shoot over stone faces of rocks and fall recklessly on the rocks below. I am the rocks, and I am older than I know, and I have no hands on which to count my age, nor eyes with which to watch the sun come and go. Yet I feel the water on my back, and it reminds me that this - this is life, in every form, and so long as the redwoods die I will not forget that life exists. I am the redwoods, and when I was young I was surrounded by the others, but now I have grown so tall that I am alone up here in the air, and my years are passed by watching the birds come and go, and feed one-another, and flap their wings at one-another in attempted declaration of dominance of the sky, a realm unable to be dominated by any one being because it is all-encompassing. Most of all, I am vastness, and space, and something that is able to exist only in the absence of other things: something that fills space up with its presence and because the clouds make room for it, we know it is there. I am tiny, and I am humble, and yet I feel surrounded by things so much bigger than myself, and it is this state of being surrounded by things that have a sense to them, and an energy to them, that reminds me of the preciousness of everything that surrounds me. Not only stones come in the precious variety, but also experiences, and also people. And this gift is worth more than ten-thousand lifetimes of accumulated gold and riches because it is something that can be transferred to the rest of the world and to the people around me, not through trade or economy but through love.