“I’m supposed to be meditating.” I knew damn well meditation for the day was over. He had pulled me out of my head and I couldn’t even feel my physical body anymore.
“You’re supposed to be paying attention.” Snark is good. Snark means I haven’t fucked up, too much.
Above the birch grove, spring storms raced silently over our heads with a nervous pace. As if the clouds did not want to intrude on the events around the barrow.
The Antler Crowned and Green Masked Figure grabbed my right hand and with a smooth motion of his thumb, cut across the inside of my wrist with his sharp thumbnail. As the blood flowed over his grip to drip off my fingers, he reached up and pulled a low hanging birch branch closer. He dabbed some still connected leaves with my blood in a way that left a particular mark upon them. I could see the mark clearly but I was ignorant of what it meant.
When he released the branches, I became weak and collapsed. He made my descent graceful and laid me out at the foot of the same tree he had marked. He pushed my still bleeding wrist into the earth though he didn’t need to push at all. The ground itself rose as if a gopher were at work under my hand. My hand up to my elbow was soon covered in dark and damp soil.
I could feel the greedy earth sucking on my wound, wanting to soak each drop of blood from me. It was not being cruel or evil. It was as it is.
“It is spring.” His voice picked up where my thoughts had left off. “And new growth requires new food. But foolish is the farmer who grows only one crop without concern for what follows. The land is stripped bare before the season ere finishes. This is the way of the parasite. A mutual system, however, feeds even as it is fed from. Tell me, [Weaver]. What is the symbolism of your right arm, the very arm that has been planted?”
Oh hell, even here, too? “It is a root.“ It was a great effort to speak even those four words.
“Then be as you are.”
He turned and walked out of my fading sight. Above me, the leaves marked with my blood turned in the breeze, flashing all around with glowing red lines. While I still did not understand the mark itself, the lines reminded me of rooting propagations.
My arm is a root, meant to seek deep under calcified faith and artificial barriers, meant to pierce through and reach…
How do you encourage a cutting to take root? You slash it at a bud, at a joint, and bury it in rich, damp, fertile soil.
The ground still sucked on my blood, but my hand reached into the same soil now fertilized. My consciousness went into the earth and forgot how to think in human ways.
Above my paling body, the marks turned quickly in the stiffening breezes heralding a spring storm.