Among the Silent Trees

Gentle rain fell with a sound like tinkling bells to the ears of the hermit. He had learned to hear the music of the woods when he was a boy, though when exactly he had gone from boy to man was lost to him now. In a way, and after a fashion, the trees would speak to him sometimes. Not in the language of his parents, no. Those words and meanings were all but lost to him now, rather in a secret way he had learned… now when had he learned it?

Opening his eyes, he watched the ripples as the rain splashed down into puddles. Turning from the sight, he watched the rain obscure the world beyond the clearing in which he sat. Again he turned his head, casting his eyes skyward to watch the clouds as they formed their immobile, cave-like ceiling over the world. The rain would last a while yet, and he was in no hurry to do anything, nor go anywhere.

Vaguely he remembered, as he often did when he sat and watched the rain, that life had once been more interesting. Was that the right word? Interesting? Hmm. Anyhow, there had once been a good deal more doing deep in the annals of his memory. Not so much time to sit and think to himself about the rain and the sky.

There had been other people too, back in those days. He remembered his mother and father, of course. They were giants to him, even as old as he was now. Which was how old again? No matter. He could still walk, and from what he remembered, the truly old could not do that. And his arms were strong, he felt certain that the genuinely old could not boast that. Keeping track of time, the passing of the days or the seasons just was not important to him. It had once been though. Long, long ago.

Parents, yes that was what one called one’s mother and father. Parents. He tried the word out, his voice croaking like an old bullfrog’s after so long without practice. Well, perhaps another time. He was in no hurry now, not when the forest provided for him.

Why had keeping track of time mattered? It had been rather important once. He would wait a full season cycle… there was a word for that too. A season cycle. He was dead certain of that. It rhymed with something he had two of on his head, though he couldn’t recall the word for those, either.

Idly scratching at his nose, he tried to trace back what he had been thinking about. Much like himself, his thoughts tended to wander around until they had quite misplaced themselves. He supposed that made sense, given that they were his thoughts and so they should be like him, though it was frustrating too. Of course, as with getting back to his own dry places, all he had to do was turn around and trust the forest to guide his steps where he needed to go.

Years! That was the word he had been looking for. Yes, of course. They started and ended at some point, probably on the anniversary of the day he was born? That made sense, since he had always been counting down to that day because… why? There, he had found the thought trail again. The passing of the years, he had been in the woods for a good many of those now. Long since the last time he had seen his parents.

Of course, he did not fully remember when that had been. There was a break in his memory, a stretch of time between the end of one life and the beginning of what he was now. They had been going somewhere, he could remember that. Visiting yet another member of the family, then he had been in the woods.

Time was a strange thing. Even after he had been reborn, if that was the right word for it, he still lost time on occasion. It was an odd thing that he did not much like to think about, the stretches when his memory was empty. As though he had died before being reborn again.

Speaking with the trees, in the way that he had learned to do after some seasons in the woods, he had learned that his parents were dead. Had been since the forest had first become his home. But the trees did not fully understand how or why, they were trees and the destruction caused by his parents’ travelling machine when it entered the woods was all that was truly remembered. So, he did not understand it either. He only knew that he had been one way, long ago, and now he was different.

Leaning back against the bowl of the willow tree which sheltered him from the rain, he watched as it fell. Watched it tumble from the still mass of clouds overhead before breaking, drop by drop, against the damn grass of the clearing around him. It was calming, and helped his mind cease its wanderings down the broken trails of memory. Bringing him back to one thought that seemed important, the passing of the seasons.

Being the only thing that really mattered in the woods, he reasoned that passing should be what he focused on. The woods told him, in their subtle silent way, that the time of rebirth was nearing its end. Meaning that the time of heat and life was nearly upon him again. He smiled to think of that, it was his favourite season – and near as he could remember, it always had been.

He loved to sit under the shade of the friendlier trees and watch as clouds scuttled across the sky. Loved to swim in the wide, cool pools of clean water hidden in the forest depths. Loved to hear the birds sing their summer songs from their nests and watch as the deer strode brazenly through the clearings and bushes, white tails down when they were at peace.

But there had once been another time when summer had called to him. It had to do with when the year restarted. Once he had known what it was, and tried to keep the reason in his mind. It had been important to him. Deep in his memory, he knew that he had always looked forward to that time of year before he came to the forest. It had been… a time to remember something. A time to celebrate. A time when the world had come into being. When time itself had began.

Once upon a time, he had tried to explain to the trees why the season mattered so much to him. Sadly, they had not understood him. They insisted that time was a cycle in four parts, with each part broken down into four more, continuing ahead and behind forever. It neither began nor ended, the cycle simply continued.

It was a concept that he struggled with, no matter how many times the trees had explained it. Though their explanations were strangely tree-ish to him, so he assumed that much like he could not explain his own perceptions, neither could they. The seasons worked in a cycle, though it was not perfect. The weather too, he assumed, worked in a cycle, though he had never managed to work out exactly what that was.

Thoughts continuing to wander down the endless looping trails through the forest of his mind, he tried to remember what had brought on this reflection. There was the rain, but rain was nothing special. There was the cave of the overcast sky, much like the one where his memories truly began, but it was no more special than the rain. When there was rain, the sky looked like that. It was constant. Then there was the sense that something in his life was not as it had been.

Oh. There was a thought, he took gentle hold of himself and targeted that line of reasoning. Yes, the memory that life had once been busier, brought on by the rain. Vibrant and unnatural combinations of colours flitted at the edge of memory. Red stiff things on his feet, a yellow, slick something on his body, water fountaining around him as he fell from a short distance. He had been jumping in puddles, wrapped in something stiff and hot that kept the water from his clothes. So much action and activity.

Above him, the willow shifted, singing its song and he had to bend his thinking to understand it. Willows were always hard to listen to. Too many flowing trains of thought for his mind to wrap around, blown this way and that by the wind, their meandering meanings were as difficult to keep track of as one of their trailing branches in a gale.

Hidden in the dancing, whipping branches, secreted among the sighing rustle of its leaves, the willow tried to make something clear to him. They were strange trees, willows. The other trees had their own unique difficulties with them, even among the million minds of the forest, the willows were always apart. Distinct and unknown. He felt a sort of kinship with them, as with himself, they were not like the rest of the forest. One entity in the world, rather than one among many.

Slowly, the meaning became clear to him as he sat under the canopy of its branches and watched the rain fall beyond the shifted, whip-like branches. The tree was telling him that it had, for lack of a better word, done the math. It knew the trails he had to pace through the forest of his own thoughts. It knew where the answers to his questions were hidden.

Willows are different from the other trees. And this one had bent its thinking as the passing of the years twisted its long, supple branches to more closely align with his own. The infinite cycle of the seasons, the rising and the setting of the sun, the coming of the cold and the heat and the rain, could be made to match his own childhood understanding, if the effort were put in by a mind flexible enough. So the willow told him what he wanted to know.

Like the rain beyond the canopy of the tree, tears dripped into the tangled growth of the man’s beard. The tree had made its point, in the slow, quiet way of the forest. It had told him why his mind was filled with thoughts of how strange life had been before he found himself alone among the trees. Made clear the reasons for his sense of melancholy as he watched the all too familiar rain fall on the quiet world.

Time had not started when he once thought it had done. But his time had, and the anniversary of that day, the day his world began, was only a few sunrises away. But that day, the one where the bearded hermit sat beneath the spreading, drooping arms of the willow, was a special day in the reckoning of humans, if not of trees. It was the soul same day that, so long before it faded into the grey fog of memory, he had come to the forest.

It was the same day that, in the blank spaces that consumed his first weeks among the ancient, whispering trees, his parents had gone. He could not remember the event, could not remember what the willow told him about the thunderous noise, broken trees, poisoned soil, and horrible fire. But he knew that before the empty memories where his new life had began, his parents had been taking him somewhere. And after that he was alone.

Death was nothing new to the hermit. Living as he did, among the trees, it was something he must confront. But those had been different deaths, unconnected and all but unnoticed. One tree hardly noticed the falling of another until a new one grew up to take its place. But they had not been trees, he was not a tree. Despite the decades spent wandering in their glades, beneath their shade, protected by their curiosity, he was not one of them. Could never be anything than a man.

So, huddled now with legs pulled to his chest, he wept.

The willow watched him as rain fell from his eyes. It told the other trees what their human did, and asked them if they could understand it. Sap occasionally fell from them, the tall conifers in particular, but they did not know what caused the human to leak as it did. Long as he had spent among their kind, he was distinct, apart.

If the willow, reasoned the other trees, could not know what the human did or why, then it was beyond all of them. Nonetheless, when the human stood and stepped out into the humid after air once the rain had stopped and went about his life as ever he had done, they felt relief as they might when a fire died before reaching them.

Simply because they could not understand, simply because they could not bend their minds to conform to his own thought trails as could the willow, that did not mean they did not care in their own tree-ish way. And the hermit’s return to himself relieved a tension they had not known they held, nor one they could explain.

Life in the forest continued from that day. Though, much to the confusion of all except the hermit and the willow, on a certain day in every cycle he returned to the canopy of that one willow and rain – or sap the other trees never figured it out – fell from his eyes as he listened to the wind as it rustled the branches around him.