This One Clearing


There is a clearing in the wood where the trees rise tall and stately on all sides, high as the

redwoods in California, though they do not seem out of place for there is nothing to compare them to as

there is no underbrush, only soft green grass spreading out for as far as the eye can see in all directions,

and also because the trees are thick and massive, proportional to themselves, and it seems not so much

as though the trees are great in size but more as though the observer has been shrunk, and perhaps this

is true, for there is no way of knowing, because not only the trees are larger than life, but also, as one

begins to look closer, all other things too– the grass is longer than normal, rising up from the ground in

great arcing leaps of luscious green, soft and comfortable underfoot, and the boulders, where they

appear scattered throughout the wood so that they break up the monotonousness of the trees radiating

out, are also great, hulking masses of grey stone, cool and impassive under scrutiny and each large

enough to easily conceal a human being or in many cases something much larger, and even the very

leaves in the trees, though they might seem average from beneath for the trees do not bear branches

until high in the sky, are abnormal as they are really many times greater in size than even basswood,

and they are spaced at greater distances apart too than is normal, allowing, were it day, great shafts of

sunlight to pierce the canopy and sprinkle the ground with a dappled pattern similar to that of a new

fawn– this is the appearance of the clearing, though currently night reigns and all that can be seen of the

majestic trees are great smudges rising ever heavenly, disappearing into the dark before the tops can

be discerned, and all there is to give any indication of where they will end are the branches, starting a

third of the way up, each thick enough to walk upon with no reasonable fear of falling and each strong

enough to support the weight of the walker a long ways from the trunk, and yet even as thick as they

are, the sky never becomes cluttered with an excess of branches and the starlight is allowed to shine

through, lighting even the forest floor so many feet below and allowing a vague impression of the

surrounding forest to be seen, which is surprising, because as all other things in this wood seem vaster

than on Earth, so too are the stars and the sky, for though they appear no bigger than they would in any

other night sky on any other day, they give the impression of being immensely far away, cold and hard

and unreachable, though still brighter than any stars you or I have seen, and even as it seems that when

looking deep into the spacious woods that the looker becomes small and of no more threat to this place

than an ant, when one looks up into the sky, it is the same feeling but a hundred times stronger, for

though the sky is as black as any here, and maybe blacker, the color does not hide what exists up there

but simply shows all the clearer how vast and open the universe is, a place containing many things and

still having room for emptiness, a place that has seen all of eternity and will see you too die with no

more feeling than one feels for those that die on some other planet in the deep reaches of space that are

far away from anything ever known, and one feels once again small and insignificant, for there is no

possible way that the existence of one being in this one clearing looking up at the heavens can affect

anything that is seen there because the distance is too great and unimaginable and too separate a life

from the one being lived here.