I stood there, arms, legs, and chest bleeding incessantly from the callous grip and vengeful tearing of wild thorn bushes and razor blade leaves, wishing things had turned out differently, wishing that the wounds of the hsin healed as quickly as the wounds of the flesh; even if scars are left in their wake.

I wadded in three feet deep swamp; mud, muck, and sludge forming a prison of fluidity, jailing me for sins of the father in an aqueous solution of bacteria, algae, and other life. I felt nameless things snake and squirm past my legs and feet like the monotonous motion of seaweed growing up from the bottom of an ocean floor, slimy and elusive.

None of it mattered. What mattered was the lifeless form I now held in my arms. Her body, limp, but still as soft as the first time I touched it. Her hair, matted and mixed with strands of poison ivy and tall grass, clung to her abraded forehead and cheeks, and to my trembling arm underneath. Her body was covered with welts and abrasions; a mixture of dark red blood and green – what was it? Chloroplast? – flowed continuously out of each cut. There had already been so much loss. I couldn't understand how she still bled more.

I cried out words that had no meaning to the human voice, words of power and names of grace, sounds that the universe recognizes even when humanity does not. I felt the wind change and the Earth grumble, the awakening of creatures long forgotten in places too sacred for the sane to venture.

I fell to my knees, pain giving me the final permission, and sunk up to my waist in the biotic concoction below me. I wept... And I waited.

I thought of days gone by and chance meetings, of ferryboats on the Mississippi and poker games in seedy New Orleans bars, while some Jazz guitarist played puppeteer to my soul. I thought of her – protests on the docks and picnics in the park. She bent me to her will like a sapling being tied in knots, or a rice paper cutout floating wherever the wind sees fit.

Was it only hours that past as I knelt there, the offering of my tears and the blood from my wounds saturating the swamp, the lush green vegetation engulfing me in its embrace? Or was it days? Weeks? I cannot remember. Time has no meaning in a place that existed before the first creature crawled its way out of the ocean depths. Time was our invention. It was not theirs.

Finally, somewhere between eternity and oblivion, the flora reach out to me taking the burden from my heart - the brush and thickets entangling her, engulfing her, pulling her to the secret darkness deep within their congestion. I watched as her body disappeared, feeling a hole forming in my chest, and anxiety rising high, as I contemplated whether I ever really knew her; or if she ever existed at all. My pain sang out.

It was then that they blessed me. It was then that they showed me things; a web of life so complicated, so intricate, so interconnected, but just as assuredly, so devastated; its very own fabric untangling into a broken thread of narrow tunnels and ego worship. I didn't just feel the here and now. I felt the gentle prick of pine needles falling from the forests in New Jersey; the scorching heat of the sun warming the cacti of the Mexican deserts; the age and reverence of the giant Redwoods in Northern California; the indolent bending of the bamboo in Southeast Asia...

I was filled with the green of the world above our ethic. I was filled to the snapping point, like my mere human mind was a twig stepped upon by a trailblazing ranger. I collapsed. And just as soon as it all rushed in, it was gone – gone from me, and back to a world of her.