Tree of Life

I existed in the shadow of history, when the stars were cold and learning to breathe. I existed in a scattering of plans, a flickering behind a nebula.

I remember, within the slants and bends of my branches, the scattering of photons, the accretion of matter, and the moulding of planets. I remember something of a forming song, the conductor lifting his baton in an arc the shape of a spiral galaxy’s arm.

My butterfly leaves are the score of a symphony rich and resonant as the Cambrian and the warm hum of vast prehistoric insects beating against my stolid form as the lines of the phylogenetic tree etch themselves in my bark.

You and I are the same organism. I die every death you die, and yet together we are immortal. I watch the red sun engulf the world. And we will not die even then—for still we will exist in the molecules, waiting to be seeded again.

I hide in the shadow of future. These apartments around me, so much taller than I: there is no breath in them, yet they too are part of the song. Perhaps the ledger lines, upon which we must climb to ascend the universal scales.

1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13. So is dictated the promenade dance, as new branches bud from meristems. So goes the song unending, bridging the light-year gaps between the stars, from point to point in the arcing sweep of the growing galaxy. Between the dead lightning rods of the apartment rooftops, and the clouds that circle the world a thousand times a day. Between the human, and the tree He left rising in the flowerbed.

Between the tree and Him. A melodic scale into infinity.

I alone am a map of the universe. And if you look close enough, you can see the stars in my cells—the very stars from which I was born, the very stars to which I will return someday.