6.6 — The Seasons, Counted Without Numbers

The forest changed around me more times than I could ever have counted, had counting been something I possessed the means for. I understand now, looking back with a mind I didn't have then, that what I lived through was seasons — spring's slow green insistence pushing new growth upward from the dark soil, summer's heavy gold weight pressing down on everything, autumn's cooling retreat when the light grew thinner and colder and moved more slowly across me, winter's long, patient silence when the world seemed to stop moving altogether — but at the time, I lived each one only as itself, entire, without any comparison to whatever had come before it or would come after. Each season was the only season that had ever been. Each season was forever.

Rain came, sometimes gentle enough that I barely noticed the change in weight around my roots, sometimes violent enough to bow the small stem that held me nearly to the ground, testing whether I could snap or whether I would bend and hold, bend and hold, and learn to straighten again once the storm had passed. I do not remember fear at it, not in any way a person with fear would feel fear. I only remember the plain sensation of water finding the soil around my roots and being taken up, slow and grateful, into whatever passed for my body — roots drawing the water deeper, stem carrying it upward, every cell of me drinking the abundance after the long heat that had come before.

Snow came, some years — or what I understand now must have been snow, a heavy white hush settling over everything, muffling even the small sounds of the forest's other lives, and I remember, if memory is even the right word for what a flower keeps of experiences it couldn't yet name, a long stretch of stillness deeper than my ordinary stillness, some deep instinct pulling me inward, conserving whatever thin thread of life I had, drawing everything down into myself and waiting, without any word for waiting, for warmth to return.

It always did. That, I think, was the closest thing I had to a belief, in those early years — not a thought, not even hope, simply a pattern so consistent it had become, without my ever choosing it, something like faith. Warmth left, and warmth came. Light dimmed, and light came back. The cycle turned, and I was still here, and the cycle would turn again. I did not know these things would keep happening forever — I had no concept of forever, no way of measuring time against itself to know whether the patterns held or were simply coincidence. I only experienced, each time, that they had, and turned my small self back toward the light exactly as I always had, and existed in the certainty of that returning warmth as surely as I existed at all.

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Other lives moved through my patch of forest floor across all of that long, uncounted stretch. Small quick things with legs, moving fast enough that they were gone before I'd fully registered their shape, passing me without ever slowing, as if I were simply one more stone for them to navigate. Larger, slower things, sometimes brushing near enough to bend my stem or scatter dirt across my petals before continuing on, indifferent, toward whatever purpose drove them — purpose being itself a concept I had no access to, so I simply felt the pressure and the movement without understanding why the movement needed to happen. Once — and this I remember more clearly than almost anything else from that whole vast stretch of stillness — something with wings, small and bright, settled directly on one of my petals, resting there for what felt, in whatever timeless way I measured things then, like a very long while, before lifting away again into the green dark above.

I did not know, in any way I could have named, that the visit had meant something to me. I only know that some part of me, in the long stillness after it left, held the memory of that particular weight and warmth differently than it held the memory of the wind, or the rain, or the ordinary, regular passing of any other creature through my small patch of ground. Something in me marked it. Something in me kept it. Perhaps that was the very first thing I ever learned to want more of, though I had no words yet, and would not have any for a very, very long time still to come.

Years passed. I understand that now, counting backward with a mind that finally has numbers to use, finally has the concept of "years" to divide time into manageable pieces. At the time, there were no years. There was only light, and its absence, and warmth, and its absence, cycling through me in a rhythm too large and too patient for anything inside me, then, to measure — a rhythm I simply was, rather than one I watched happen to someone else. I was not experiencing the rhythm. I was the rhythm. I was the turning. I was the waiting. I was the returning. I was the whole, unbroken cycle, from beginning to beginning again.

Decades passed, though I had no word for decades. Centuries, though centuries were meaningless to something that did not count time. I grew. The forest around me grew. Older trees fell, sometimes, and new growth pushed up in the space they left behind, and I remained where I was rooted, small and patient and waiting, through all of the endless returning seasons.