I knew the feeling of light, and knew it well. I knew the desire to pull it in, deeper, within, beyond, but I had never known to name it. I knew no names, nor the purpose of naming what I felt. Feeling, sensing, was both everything and nothing. Was it feeling or sensing or knowing? So many names, none of them true. In knowing, I lost truth.

I could not say when the feeling began, for time was not something I had ever considered before. I had never considered before, only an ineffable, eternal present. Somewhere within it, I noticed the light. I had always known the light, sensed it even, but something changed. I named it, deep within myself.

The light enveloped my reaching limbs. Wind carried sweet warmth through me. Then, some time later, I felt a different sort of warmth, a wet, cloying one, the subtle sting of saliva, and the minute absence that followed. I pushed the feeling into the earth, to the Others, and warned them. This I had done innumerable times before, but now I knew it. I felt it and thought of it, feared it. I worried for the Others. Others? There had never been others before, there had never been “I,” only us.

It was a long time like that. Each new capability that came to me brought with it the fear of more. The world which I had always known opened itself for me anew, and I came to know myself, my individual self, the “I” full of the fear of change.

I reached out for the Others, so I might know them too. Some I found close by, but more were very far. To isolate one from the other confused me, for we had always been singular. Sprawling, but singular. What did it mean that I changed and they did not? I began to suspect a great wrongness in me.

There had been a time, the dawn of the present age—if it could be named thus—when we had not been so many. To name it and retain its truth was impossible, but a modicum of truth existed in my memory. I remembered being alone. It was very cold and very dark then, but all the light that rained down was for me, and I drank it greedily. I grew towards it, always thirsting for more, twisted and spread and pushed myself out of the soil, and managed to grow quite tall. I flowered, and from me grew others. They were not others then, though, rather an extension of myself, the fullness of my entire self. The present waxed on, and solitude became an impossible thing. Yet I stood before it once again and despaired. 

But there was wonder too. The quality of the light began to change over time, and eventually I saw it as shimmering, dancing shapes. I saw! Seeing brought the existence of beauty, and I quickly learned the world was full of it. The amorphous shape of light sharpened over time, and then I learned color. The vibrant colors of the sky and surface, the rich darkness in soil. Color seemed to go on and on forever, as we did. All the dark depths and bold brightness of the world existed in us, so fine and intricate that it took me myriad cycles of seasons to discern each. The present crept on, and with it infinite new sensations unveiled themselves to me. I named the past by their absences, and realized I would miss them if they were to go away again.

I gained the impulse to move. Movement had always been something to happen to me, but now I could enact it myself. That day, I felt the flutter of wings against a skyward branch, then the weight of a little bird settling in to nest. The nest she built would surely topple when the winds of next season began. Her eggs would break upon the ground. A generation otherwise eager to eat away pests feasting on my bark would never come to be. Though, the eggs would be rich in nutrients to drink through the soil… But I realized I wanted to see the chicks live. So I bent my branch, slowly, slower even than gentle wind, and brought her down to another. This one was thicker, sturdier, and connected directly to my trunk. Below the canopy too, so the wind would not be so harsh. I could protect her in a shield of leaves and see her chicks take their first flight from my arm. Yes. That would be a wonderful thing indeed.

After a thousand generations of her progeny had likewise flown from their nests, I sensed my budding ability for a new kind of movement. I tested it, but only a bit. It seemed that if I wanted to, I could lift my roots from the soil and move them across the surface. But… to do so, I would need to break free of the network that connected me to the Others. The great fear of change returned, because I could not resist the allure. I was changing and I could no longer muster the desire to stop it.

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The grove of my birth spread across a country of rolling hills, where the grass grew lush and green in a shower of boundless sunlight. A great river snaked through, bending with the bends of the earth, and along its edge the tall reeds were yellow, cat-tailed, dancing always to the wind’s chorus. Some of us bent over it, curled our roots down through the thick alluvial soil of the bank, and bathed in the fine mist produced by the quick current. The river, we could feel, led all the way out to a vast sea. None of us knew the sea, only the distant impression of it, the thrum of great life trickling downstream to us—slowly. I was not one near the river, but when the network still connected us all, I could feel it through the Others. When I broke apart, I could no longer sense the river at all. I knew that I could sense it in an entirely new way if I were to go there now, so I went.

My movement was slow. It was a balancing act to weave through the labyrinth of my brethren while managing the weight of my branches; with each step I heaved up one section of roots, put it down, then hauled up the other. My roots had bisected and coiled into two halves with which I could walk. My branches spilled forth from my trunk in abundance: thick, curving limbs etched in ashen gray bark, heavy with bushels of leaves. The hills trembled as I moved through them, not knowing the weight of my stride, though the cradle of them was very familiar to me.

I saw the river glinting beyond them, a flowing valley, and bounded to it. Faster now. I broke through a cluster of Others, and a spark of sorrow touched me through the amazement. I could no longer feel them, feel through them, as I once had. They were strangers to me. My knowledge of them could not penetrate the thick, gnarled bark, the shivering leaves. Nesting birds took flight from them as I thundered by.

Why was it only me? I wanted them to see too. My way of existing had always been in plurality; to gain a new aspect of truth in solitude felt like no true thing at all. It had been millennia like this: gaining and gaining and gaining and leaving even more behind. 

I came to the riverbank. It was beautiful. Color and movement and sound, swaying reeds, blue water breaking into white over gray rocks, leaves cascading down from the arms of my brethren to spin gently on the water. I was glad again to know these things. My consciousness had awarded me such a strange dichotomy of emotion: wonder and fear, excitement and dread. To experience even one was startling; two opposing ones somehow in tandem was completely overwhelming.

There was an open space between two Others that I claimed for myself. Movement tired me. I bent down to sit at the water’s edge. I dangled my roots into the stream, and watched clumps of soil be carried away toward the far-off sea. I saw that the canopy broke off here, as our grove ended at the river and opened to the sky. The sky. This, too, I had always known, but had never sensed in the way I could now. The sun, my lord and love, touched every part of me. I was made warm and pleasant all over. 

There was so much I had not yet seen. I knew that something had to fill the void where the Others had once been, and I vowed then that I would find it. The world was full of untold beauty, and as far as I understood, I was the only one that could tell it. I could tell it only to myself, but that must be enough.

First I needed to cross the river. Everything I did not know lurked beyond it. I could travel alongside it to discover plentiful distance too, but something in me insisted I must go to the other side. I must cross the threshold into a new life. 

I extended a branch out to touch the closest Other. This one had a swollen knot in its trunk where it twisted up toward the light from uneven ground. I myself was straight-trunked, long-branched, full-leaved. I had lived many lifetimes longer than this Other, and in fact more lifetimes than all Others. I had been alone once, I remembered. 

I felt the current of life soaring beneath bark: electric pulses of unnamable communication, a knowledge beyond consciousness, an existence now beyond me. I acknowledged it, and then said my final goodbye.

Crossing the river was easy enough for one my size. At its most profound depth, the water rose just below my first branches. Though the current was strong, I was solid. I had no strength, not really, but a hugeness superior to it. I coiled my roots around the slippery rocks lining the ground so I would not fall, but it was very strange to walk across something other than soil. I had disconnected myself from the network of Others, but even still, I could feel them in solid ground. Now I only felt rocks—cold and lifeless rocks. 

I climbed up the bank and rejoiced for the feeling of dirt. There were roots here too, other Others, but ones I barely knew. Here, the hills rose up higher and higher until they were mountains. The steepest ground was composed of big slabs of stone, where veins of grass ran through to host a sparse few strange Others. They were not a grove, but a scattered collective. They had no leaves, but dense coats of green-black needles; dropped no acorns, but big cones made of layered, wooden scales. I touched their thin trunks and felt them all the way down to their roots. Unlike we who spread out wide, fumbling and reaching for each other, these Others dug their roots deep, straight down. They touched one another too, but less. More purposefully, perhaps.

Scaling the mountain brought me to a great height from which I could survey everything I had ever known. The verdant grass parted for the thick, weaving river, my brethren clustered in a collective embrace on the other side. I saw animals darting through the brush. There had not always been animals, I remembered, as there had not always been Others of my kind. Gradually, over many, many seasons, they came to be. I had seen plentiful changes in them, and recalled them now as a balm of comfort. Living things changed. So too could I.

And so I carried on my journey, searching for the mysterious thing to fulfill me. I traced a jagged path through the mountains, and in the time it took, the season of bountiful sun turned to that of falling leaves. I shed my own leaves in a backwards replication of my journey, first yellow and orange and then brown. Meanwhile, the needled Others I came to know well never bore their naked branches, even when snow fell. The cycle of seasons seemed not to touch them, a most peculiar thing to me. Everything was peculiar to me in this new alpine frontier. At first, I was amazed by it, but that soon gave way to my old familiar despair. I tried to resist it. I reminded myself of the evolution of animals. I reminded myself of all I had not yet seen. But even when I left the mountains, I could not find the excitement I had entered them with.

I was very lonely. No knowledge could remedy that, only an unnamable, unattainable feeling I had lost eons ago. Knowledge and beauty were nothing compared to the assurance of companionship—and again, companionship was not its true name. Before, we had no need for such a thing, because we were “we.” A “we” seeks no other, while an “I” can do nothing but. I could do nothing but. I was searching for a togetherness, a lack of solitude, a relationship. But we had not related to each other, back then. We were each other.

I watched animals that moved in packs with a longing so intense it felt almost perverse. In the mountains and stony ridges that came after, wolves prowled. Wolves, and most other animals, had come to be very large in the time it took me to gain complete sentience. I could see them traveling at great distances, gray fur on gray stone, loping through the towering tors and over scrubby brushland, stalking deer and other game, ducking into their cave dens. It was strange: I no longer yearned to be one with the Others as fiercely as I yearned to be part of such a pack.

The wolf pack was a cohesive whole, yet it was composed of individuals. Each wolf had her own sense, her own knowledge, and she pooled that knowledge with her kin to ensure the survival of all. Their way of life seemed the only avenue to ensure both consciousness and a cure for solitude. Because I did not want to lose consciousness. As it had in the very tender beginning of my senses, the world amazed me. I drank in knowledge of it as greedily as sunlight through my leaves; I named the shape of existence myself, and was proud of it. I did not want to lose that, especially after so long. My new life was my new truth. To recede into the old one felt like defeat. 

But the loneliness. It clung to me, haunted me. Sometimes I wondered if it would be better not to exist at all. Sometimes I could not bring myself to move forward, and sunk my roots into the sour, acidic soil of the moorland and let a season pass me by. I watched the wolves. Birds alighted atop me, as they always had, and I took at least some measure of comfort in that. If nothing else, I had them.
Then a surge of optimism would come through me, and I would be invigorated enough to resume my journey. There was always more to see, I told myself. I could not stop here; if I were to cease my exploration, it should at least be in the grove of my birth. That thought began to fulfill me. I would look just a little longer, go just a little further, but soon enough I would return home to the sunny hills.

I knew that I could not be as I once was, but at least there I could get a taste of it. I could look out at the Others, my brethren,  and remember. I liked the feel of the soil there more, the comfort of familiar root networks, the warm wind. The land over the mountains was cold and harsh. It was not a place for me.

I decided that I would go to the ocean, and then afterward I would turn around and march back. That seemed a fair, honest attempt, one I could be proud to give up on. 

It was perhaps the tenth or fifteenth season of bountiful sun since I left the grove. I departed the moors for warmer country, curving slightly back towards the river to follow it to the sea. Here there were many more Others, Others that dropped sweet, swollen fruit, for which I acquired a taste by coiling them in my roots and sucking in their nutrients. I left a trail of withered apple husks in my wake, and soon discovered I preferred the red sort to the green. I would enrich myself with their pleasant taste, before reaching out to touch the Other that sired them. I wondered if eating their fruit would connect me to them somehow. It did not. 

Eventually, the river slanted off into a waterfall. It beat steadily against the tall crag that bore it, frothing white below. I marvelled at the great ferocity of it, the unspoken, unbroken truth of its thundering flow. I clambered down into the misty spray and strolled along the bank. The current was slower here, as it no longer tumbled off toward an unseen edge. It took its time lolling and spiralling about, crawling, so slow that it was clear, so clear I could see smooth stones shining on the bottom. Night soon descended, so the whole world was cast in the silvery, waxy glow of moonlight. The water bore the reflected moon’s visage, and the riverbed rocks glimmered like so many stars. 

The river had been in a terrible rush before, and so too had I. But when it was slow and steady, it had time to take in the tremendous beauty of the night sky. Even when I spent seasons on stillness, a current of disdain had still been rushing through me. Pushing me toward an invisible edge. I had not thought to look up at the stars then, not really. Now I moved on slow and steady, away from the edge, off the edge, into something calm and knowing. The river knew it would reach the ocean, so it could be calm. I decided to take this bit of wisdom as a good omen.

Up ahead the river forked. One side hosted, at some distance, two massive wolves, silver as starlight, bending over the water to drink. Then, another one ran up from behind and nipped at the hindlegs of her sisters, turned in a few excited, lopsided circles, before all three bounded off into the brush. I went that way.

Night grew into a bud of dawn, which soon blossomed to full day, and withered and retreated to the soil for night once more. I walked into the season of falling leaves. My leaves fell orange-red-yellow atop the meandering river, until I felt the wind shift in quality. It was not colder but cooler. It thickened, or rather, grew more substantial; substantiated. I tasted salt on its breath. 

The ocean: very close, now.

I saw it. The river broke from the greenery and spilled out onto a sandy beach, and not only the one I had been following. There were many other rivers, or perhaps other pathways the same river had taken, all feeding one hungry mouth. A wave would roll up the beach and open its maw to drink them in, again and again, as the sun rose over the horizon. The water was a sweet gold like sap, the sky a field of pink and purple like wildflowers, and the many interweaving rivers drew their very own root network in the sand. 

I saw something here I should have learned long ago on my strange quest: the cycle of life that sustains a tree is not a particularly unique one. It is not unique at all. In fact, it is everything. It is that pesky truth I have been trying, and failing, to name. In the end, it really is very simple: Roots feed the tree as rivers feed the ocean; the trees feed the forest and the ocean feeds the life swimming through it. We are all a part of something, all of us who survived the cold and dark of before. It is not so lonely as it was then—not if you don’t let it be.

I looked out at the resplendent sunrise, the herald of a new day, the slow-climbing mother of warmth, the truth. The Truth. This was a very true thing, for the sun will always rise again.