The Remembering Tree Belongs Between Your Memory and Reality

Once, long before maps were drawn or borders were argued over, there was a tree at the center of the world.

It was not the tallest tree. It was not the most spectacular tree. It did not have red leaves or silver bark or fruit shaped like diamonds. It was, by most honest measures, a rather common tree, a touch lopsided, with bark that had been scratched and carved and leaned against by so many critters over so many centuries that it had forgotten its original shape entirely.

But the tree remembered everything it had ever heard.

Every whispered prayer. Every lullaby hummed beside a fire. Every argument, every apology. Every child who had pressed their ear to its trunk as if listening to the sea inside a shell. Every sweet nothing that belonged to the initials carved into its trunk. The tree held all of it, like water holds light, quietly, without fuss, all the way down.

Beside the tree ran a river called the Between.

The Between was the kind of river that had no particular opinion about which side of it you lived on. It simply ran, silver and clear and cold and quietly indifferent to the names people gave it: the Great Divide, the Holy Boundary, the Line We Do Not Cross. The river thought these names were charming, the way a very old person finds young people charming when they argue about things that will resolve themselves.

For many centuries, the people of the earth had disagreed rather enthusiastically about almost everything. And so one day, a great gathering was called beneath the tree.

From the east came the delegation of the Thunder Clans, in their armor of hammered bronze, their faces arranged into expressions of tremendous dignity and wisdom.

From the west came the Cloud Weavers, who wore robes that changed color with their moods and were currently, as they always were in negotiations, a quite aggressive shade of orange. Healers reflecting the current mood of the day.

From the north came the Ice Scholars, who wrote everything down and refused to agree to anything they hadn't first challenged.

And from the south came a very small girl named Finch, who constantly sang songs as intricate as the murmuration of birds who tracked her. She had been sent because all the important people of the south were busy arguing with each other and could not attend.

The negotiations lasted three days and went nowhere, because everyone was speaking and no one was listening. The chief diplomat of the Thunder Clans had a pebble in his boot that was driving him absolutely crazy. He felt he could not remove it in front of everyone without losing face, and so he grew increasingly furious, and his fury infected the room. By the end of the second day the Ice Scholars had challenged forty-seven points of disagreement and the Cloud Weavers had turned the color plum.

On the third day, Finch, who had been sitting quietly at the roots of the tree, eating a pear she'd brought from home, stood up and said, in a voice no louder than necessary: "The tree is trying to say something."

Everyone turned. They had, of course, forgotten the tree and nearly Finch entirely.

The Thunder Clan chief said, stiffly, that trees did not speak. The Ice Scholars challenged that there was no precedent in their records for arboreal communication. The Cloud Weavers turned a pea-green shade of yellow.

And then The Remembering Tree, and this part is absolutely true, according to everyone present, though they each later remembered it differently, sighed.

Not a dramatic sigh. Not a sigh that moved mountains or parted the river. Just the long, low, creaking sigh of something that has been patient for a very, very long time and has simply had enough.

And in that sigh was everything it had ever heard.

Every lullaby landed in the room like warm bread. Every apology drifted through the air like pollen. Every whispered prayer hung between the delegates like the space between heartbeats. Every love poem drifted through the intuition of delegates.

The Thunder Clan chief, without quite understanding why, sat down on the ground and took off his boot and removed the pebble. He held it in his palm and looked at it for a long time. Then he looked at the Ice Scholar beside him, who had also, inexplicably, sat down and taken off one shoe, not because she had a pebble, but because it seemed suddenly like the right thing to do sitting on the bank of the river.

The Cloud Weavers turned, for the first time in recorded history, a color no one had a name for yet. It glimmered and shimmered. They tickled each other with delight at their own sight.

Finch sat back down and finished her pear.

No treaty was signed that day. No document was written that day. No proclamation was declared right then and certainly not right there.

What happened instead was this: the delegates of earth walked to the river called the Between. They stood at its edge. They watched the water go.

Not one of them could think of a single reason to dam it up.

Not one of them could think of a single reason to name it.

Not one of them could think of a single reason to fight over which side of it was holy.

The water did not care. The water had always known what it was. Mni Wiconi. Water is life.

That night, the tree's branches were full of small golden lights, whether fireflies or stars that had slipped loose. Not one of them could agree. The people of earth sat beneath it and told stories until the sky went gray with morning.

Peace did not come all at once. It came the way the river came, not crashing in, but arriving, as if it had always been on its way. The Between had simply needed someone to stop damming it up.

And Finch? When she returned to the south, the important people asked what had happened. She said: "A tree sighed. Not one of us forgot who we were. We remembered we were tired of fighting."

They wrote it down. They still argued about what it meant for several decades.

The tree, for its part, said nothing further.

It was, after all, just a tree.

A rather plain-looking, lopsided tree. The Remembering Tree knew, if you pressed your ear to it like a shell, the sound of every kindness the world had ever known, echoed still.

For all you tree-huggers forest-bathing, listen for the River Between all the way down on both sides of the bank.

The Remembering Tree Belongs Between Your Memory and Reality, you choose. You commit. You resolve.