Deep in the forest.
"Mother?" a voice says.
This could be any forest, really, so long as it's been around for a while.
"Yes, my child?" a voice answers.
And not just ‘a while’ in terms of those who wake up in the morning and die at sundown, but ‘a while’ in terms of those who might take a century or two off from their other occupations to break a rock in half. ‘A While’ in terms of the rock that has wistful memories of slushing about all warm wonderful beneath the mantle before its flows were froze as it neared the crust and then was thrust up in jagged lines as the rocks of one plate sought to slip beneath another.
"When will I be allowed to grow tall and strong like you." a voice asks.
Deep in any forest, conversations like these take place in a language that seems so foreign to those who, like the writer, will probably die before they fully remember what they are.
"When I am dead." a voice answers.
It is a language like words would sound were they speaking through your blood.
"When will you die, mother?" a voice asks.
And through those veins slipped the words and meanings, strange noetic shapes running lightly under your skin.
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"One day. Maybe today. Maybe before the end of this." answers a voice.
Certainly this is a translation of intention rather than a literal transcription of the thought of one young tree to an older one whose many leaves share genes with the scraggly sapling far below.
"I hope not soon, you've yet to share what you did when it snowed for three years or when our brother rain was a stranger." worries a voice.
These conversations take place over years as new seeds split and twist into young trees who hold court on the forest floor and await the time for them to take their place in the canopy. While they wait, they nervously exchange glances with their neighbor siblings sitting scrawny and patient, placidly praying they get the chance to drink the sun before deer and disease strip them of life.
"I dug deep. Deeper and also outward."
These monks of the trunk spend their sunshine starved time growing harder and stronger but not taller or fatter. 100 years packed into an inch and a half of tree trunk as it sits, preparing for the day it can explode up into the loving sun and grow leaves that weave sugars from sunshine and air.
"I found things I never thought I would."
No sufficient sunlight reaches these young and ignorant. Instead, the forest nurtures them. Individuals and groups, alive and connected by a great brain of mycological magic beneath nurture different species and sorts so that as the forest crashes through time, across harsh winters and endless droughts, through fires and washing soil. It isn't individual trees having the conversation but the conversation happening in the forest, through trees trickling messages to each other. Strange hands of roots and fungus embraced warm and sticky beneath the soil.
"Places and people, new people where I thought there were old people. New places that I had been to a hundred times. Carefully. Patiently. Courageously, we made it through."
There is a pause in the conversation as a long summer scorched the shielding leaves.
“Some of us made it through.” the answering voice amended.