In the Pines

With a feeling like air, life was blown into the thoughts of a young man.

Yes! Hello there! Feeling better? A voice called out. It almost took him until he was standing upright to know so. His feet were underneath him, but with a more peculiar sensation to them, not too unlike heaviness. When he tried to vocalize this it seemed like his lips no longer worked, along with his fingers. As he kept thinking of more body parts he realized the smaller that they got, the less control he had. 

I see you’re taking your time. You must be thinking a little more rationally now. Try opening your eyes. If it helps you can say your name out loud.

 “I’m okay” 

You’re sure of that?

“ I don’t have a reason not to be.” He was starting to grasp a little more but that odd feeling kept bugging him.

You’re denser now. That’s the feeling. You’re not heavier you’re just… The idea trailed off here, but the man stayed intent on listening as if it was with all of his body.

You’re more. 

“ Should I feel different?” he asked and quickly added, “It’s not bad”.

 Your body has been structured differently. An unbelievable many millions and millions of mycelia are sending lots of information all throughout everything you see. Information about what your senses can identify. It shouldn’t feel bad. Do you remember what bad is?

He laughed as he spoke now,

“ It’s not good.” There wasn’t a laugh in return from the sounds he was hearing, he just felt another kind of warmth. It was a very familiar feeling he had never felt before. He couldn’t find anything to compare it to. It was like holding a piece of a puzzle, but feeling it completed with your hands. In fact, the more he thought about it, he realized he wouldn’t even need a single piece to understand what was coming from inside of him.

Your body’s tissues were designed after mushrooms, actually. Your feet are currently bedazzled with many small tassel-like “feelers” that move dirt away from the other mycelium just under the surface. Those in turn, help to deliver the necessary information coming from the pathways connected to all the other living things around you. In fact, the ecosystem all around is tuned to very tiny tiny frequencies in your brain. Your thoughts should feel denser too, not just your body.

The voice was speaking with an innate sense of truthfulness. It was harder too, to focus on individual things. After just a few seconds of difficult unedited thought he would find some ideas mattering less to him. 

“My thoughts are denser too?”

Yes, you think differently.

“ I don’t feel like I do”

That’s the point.

“ So there’s a point to all of this”

There’s no reason to think there isn’t.

“ True”

Your thoughts are denser because you have more information coming in. Some of this information is not as accessible as the information you’re hearing. Sometimes things just are, but here, here things need reasons.

“This is in my brain.”

Isn’t everything?

“No. I don’t think I can even tell if there is anything anymore. I’m having a hard time thinking of things.”

What kind of things?

“All things”

Do you care about the things you’re thinking about?

“ Why was I given this kind of body?”

The wealth of data sometimes has trouble with the smaller bits of information. The environment around you acts like a quantum computer and it has to translate the flow of reality. Ideas are a little more abstract than an object like your fingers, so they’re harder to focus. I see you still look unsatisfied. Is it because you want to know why? 

“I suppose.”

It started with some people who-

“Am I a person?”

Do you want to be?

“How can I be sure?”

The voice was met with violent silence. The world around him was shooting into form starting with lights and darks. He knew light from dark, but he felt like he was seeing them in their realist form. The differences started to become clear. Borders began to take shape and things became their own. The surface below had obviously become a stump, and a small woodland scenery now stretched around in a circle. 

Small piney trees filled the edges of the clearing and opened up for a small river that cut across the center of the circle. The stump was dead in the center, and the river moved its way naturally, making a small snakelike curve around the stump as it continued its way back into the woodland.

By the time color had surfaced, the spectacle of life exploded into realness. The majesty of the colors made his desires grow feverishly. As he wondered with fragility, great suffering welled in his heart, because he knew there were more beautiful things to take in behind the trees ahead, and his eyes couldn’t see them. He felt his purpose when his calls for understanding reached deaf ears and fell just short of a dream.

“Can I not have it without suffering?”

Would you then know for sure? Would it convince you that it's worth it? Others thought so. They used computers to understand the language of nature around you, and used it to change themselves, to see the true mechanics of the universe.

“Did they?”

 They saw they were burdened by their dissatisfaction. So they let it go.

“How?”

They did what they do best. They built. Into plants, the ground, the sky, and eventually into themselves. They changed the planet around them, allowing them to become singular. As time went on, their thinking evolved beyond what they needed as reasoning;One who abandoned desire.

He sat in thoughtful silence for a moment.

“ I think I know”

How

“Because I am”

What makes you say that?

“I’m not sure,” he said as he walked away in pain. All he knew was that he had never felt better than when he stepped towards the trees.