We dance there, bare feet in the mud, our hair aflame and our talons long and sharp. People wrapped in tortured earth with eyes as smooth and dead as bone kneel amidst our brethren trees. The earth soaks their legs and makes them shudder where it touches their knees. It warms us, squelching softly between our grateful toes. The network thrums around us, between us, through us. A tendril imbibes and we breathe through the rush together. The trees and the roots and the rivers sigh with us, their song underscored by the pounding of our joyous feet.

Frenzy.

“Vacate. Vacate. This is your final warning.”

We pay no heed to the tragic squealing of those mournful souls, it is just another note in our cosmic symphony. We feel deeply for those stuck in their old ways, so sorry for them and the bondage into which they have been born. We have freed ourselves, with a little help, and have become what we’d forgotten we always were. Everything has become so simple. We’ve woken up from that dream of a dream as Shiva, dancing for joy as we tear the old world apart. Destruction comes before renewal, a cleansing fire before regrowth. They point their grey-black tubes at us, point their hate and fear and dismay. They think to terrify, to scatter, we are here, the forest is here, and their time of metal and sorrow is fading into dust.

We flourish and they fall.

Frenzy.

“Move, or we will open fire.”

Fire. It all begins and ends in flame. The seventh fire is upon us, the torch passes again. The sun burns and scours us clean.

Frenzy.

The earth wraps around us, and yet on you, she wreaks her revenge.

Frenzy.

Some have not yet accepted this, but they will. There is no them, no us, no I or you or me. There are those who see and those who do not yet see. We cannot wait for the rest to open their eyes. We will embrace them as closely and tenderly as we embrace ourselves. When we hold them, they will weep. We will weep. All will be one. We will forgive them because there is nothing to forgive. Truly, they did not know what they did. None of us knew, and now our eyes are open. Now are hearts are pounding. Now our fangs are long and our roots deeper and our fins and feelers and feathers and scales and synapses and skins and souls are alive and alight and burning burning burning burning. We are the sky and the ground and the darkness and the light and blood and bone and pain and anguish and joy and movement and movement and movement and movement.

Frenzy!

“Fire!”

As it begins, we dance and sing and howl and die. Flowers bloom amidst us; red poppies and roses in bursts of living colour. In defiance of it all, we bellow. In acceptance of it all, we laugh. Nothing changes. Beginnings… Ends. It has always been this way. Though we denied it, we have come to accept it. To revel in it. There is love in an end, for thence comes a beginning. So we raise our hands in praise as a blessed crimson rain washes our faces clean.

 Homo sapiens? How wrong we all were. There’s nothing wise about this ape. We are noisy, jabbering, chattering fools. Homo symphonius; the music-making monkey.

Where they hear gunshots, we hear the crumbling of a dying empire.

It was right there, in our words: wisdom as deep as the rivers and roots, as wide as the sky and as the ocean. How did we forget then, that it was to these primal places that wisdom belonged? We talked ourselves into oblivion, and now we will sing our way out. We were children, blameless in our folly, forgetting that if wisdom really is a bottomless font, it is found in the waters that made us. We were afraid, without the eyes to see that our mother was with us always. We ignored the teachers, but they never left our side.

Another tendril falls, grateful, into the dirt. I do not mourn because I can taste their blood, my blood, bursting through the walls of our shared hearts.

“Move! We will shoot again!”

They don’t see us, but we see them. All they see is an obstacle, a wall to be removed. That is all they ever see. To them, we are a collection of depraved, useless, unproductive loonatics. To us, we are a mirror.

We cannot wait to welcome them into our awareness. They will find their way home, to gaia, when the time is right for them.

We used to be like them. Still, we are them. And they are us. But for the awakened, for us, the strange part is not our newfound state of savage ascendance but remembering the time before it. 

It had all felt so real. It was a dream of a dream containing more contradictions and impossibilities than it ought to be possible to contain. And still, billions bought into it. We’d forgotten that it was something we’d built ourselves. The whole thing felt so real that we had convinced ourselves that we could capture, tame, break reality and put it back together. And what did we do with that immeasurable, unimaginable power? We used it to sell things.

Back then, we still thought of ourselves as I’s. We were many I’s, dedicating most of our time to  selling unreal things to unreal people for unreal tokens. We had been born into a world of infinite bounty, and yet organised our social systems around the creation of limitless debt. We I’s poured ourselves into the hole we had dug, somehow making it deeper in the process. I was aware dimly of the sparkling universe around me, but I had to keep moving whilst sitting, sprinting into the knowledge that we would never move an inch. We had broken time, such that we sold the irreplaceable brevity of our consciousnesses for the ever-receding promise that it would be worth it. Nothing was guaranteed, but you had to pretend as if it was. The perfect present subordinated to the promise of a future that could only ever be broken.

It raises our hackles to consider the waste.

For some of the I’s that are now we’s, something changed. We weren’t the first. We won’t be the last. We heard the call and we answered it. We had no choice.

We were drawn to the forest inexorably. Why here, why now? Who can say. Many have heard the call throughout our brief, bizarre history. It is always a return, never a loss. Each part of us had a different reason, back when we thought reasons were important. Many of us heard that the forest was due to be destroyed, or, in the parlance of the day, commodified. We had seen it so many times before, but something was different. We left our desks, our brick boxes, our prisons of fractured time and subordinated spirit. We finally, finally, listened.

The light that burned our eyes at first, the cold air chafing our skin. It was hard to walk in the rain, until we learned to abandon our clothes and move as the weather dictated. Some of the would-be us’s bodies gave out on the way. But we remember them, so they are not lost. We could not explain our sudden change, how things that made sense to us before suddenly made no sense at all. We could not explain our broken toenails, our filthy skin, our new markings, hawk-eyes, how we grunted like pigs or flitted like moths. But whenever we found each other, we didn’t have to.

Frenzy.

We could see it in each other as we arrived. The beginnings of comprehension, but no understanding yet. The more of us gathered, the more insight we gained. We were close, but we were not there yet. The we’s grew, all searching, all stumbling over the roots and diving into streams. There was something here, something was calling us home. We were frantic, we were desperate.

Frenzy.

In our wanderings, we were remade. Through our pain, we became what we are. This was what it wanted from us. We had to be us, or we wouldn’t have understood its gifts. It was not me, the me that I was, that found it. But part our network did, and so we all did. Then, our eyes were burst open.

Frenzy.

Broad and beautiful, ancient and terrible, it waited for us just below the surface in a small clearing. It was the heart of the world. From the berserkers to the yogis, sufis to the saints, it had always been with us. Its tendrils connect everything that lives and has lived, and as this world spins on, it will connect everything that ever lives.

Our previous selves, the separate ones, believed in competition. Even if we didn’t think about it, we implicitly saw the world through that lens. Everything was violence, everything was hardship. Even in our greatest theory of life, destruction sat at its centre. A fierce, savage struggle was enshrined as the be all and end all of everything, the means and the reason for existence itself. Some even viewed our consciousness, our greatest gift of giving back to the universe that bore us, as an adaptive tool to help us win in the endless war on other lifeforms.

Evolution, we called it; a zero-sum game where everything teetered on the edge of annihilation.

Frenzy.

How much of our lives, of what we did and what was done to us, did that competition justify?

But we were wrong. We weren’t entirely wrong; life strives, life yearns, life wants and moves and isn’t always kind. Part of the nature of life is to destroy other life. But that isn’t all that life does. Much of the time, life cooperates. The bison’s saliva encourages growth in the grass, the bee pollinates the very flowers it will one day feed on, and mycorrhizal networks nourish us all.

Frenzy

That is the essence of what we have learned. Neither competition nor cooperation is superior, but that it is our duty and our privilege as conscious beings to be able to choose one or the other.

To us, only one path makes sense.

Frenzy

We are dying. So many instances of the breath, of ourselves, are being mown down by the fear and the anger of the unaware. We cannot mourn, for we would not have had it any other way. This is the choice we made and the choice that many have made before us. Some who came to the wood, who remembered the we that we always were, tried to return to their own lives. We pity them the most. They will not be able to do so. They will see what happened here today, and they will tear themselves apart for knowing and doing nothing about what they knew.

The others do not know. But that was not for me.

And so here we stand, and here we die. Below the pouring sky, amid the trees and the fungus and the dirt and the music. We stomp our feet and howl and sing, we stand and fall and bleed and die.

Frenzy.

We dance and move and shudder and scream and live and breathe and die. We shift and shimmer and soar and flow and grow and wheeze and drink and laugh and die.

Frenzy.

We swim and run and fly and call and fuck and love and die.

Frenzy.

We dance and die.

Frenzy.

We sing and die.

Frenzy.

We smile and weep and live and die and live and die and die and die and die and die and die.

One day, you will understand.

We smile as the bullets sing.

Will you join us?

Can you resist?

Frenzy.