The Seed

The sound of distant gunfire rang beyond my view just like the days that came before. I searched the cold morning sky for signs that life had somehow miraculously turned into something I could stomach. The breeze hit my ankles as the mechanical whirring, whispered like a roaring tiger. My hair tangled and matted not having seen a comb or brush in what seemed like a lifetime.

These things all sound like the beginning of a story, but really, they are the thoughts of a person who has no future or at least not one that is to be believed. Before my birth it was said that the dead spoke to my people. Foretelling of a child born to enemies and burdened with the task of changing all mankind. Abandoned by my father and my mother spirited away to watch me from some place unseen, I was fortuned to be that child.

  But in this very moment, surrounded by the physical thing I was born to change, I had no faith in my own future. Even still, the words of the shamans foretelling of my arrival haunted me.

               My mind settled back down to earth as I often took to the skies with my thoughts lingering behind like a ghost. Focusing amid the rampant war raging on behind me, I plopped to the forest floor. Feeling the earth between my fingers and toes and the bark of oldest tree against my bare back. The calmness of this forest always seemed to resonate with my very soul. It was one of the few places that I could find solace because most people were afraid of these woods. The earth shook suddenly and violently around me as the sky miles away glowed red and black with fire and smoke. Another very horrible attack on what mankind called ‘civilization’ whatever that word meant. My people told me civilized was an illusion built to control those who where different. Hearing the cries of so many innocent and guilty alike, who could tell the difference, one could guess that what once seemed real was most definitely being shredded like the illusion it always was. No one person or persons had control over anything or anyone and to believe so would always inevitably result in the destruction of not only the idea, but the physical entity as well.

               Civilization was tearing itself apart and I the foretold one somehow had the power to change what no one could, preposterous! So instead I stay away from civilization and enjoy the woods no one dares enter. The forest itself is apart of a greater mystery to my people. They claim that a spirit guards the very roots of every plant and the blood of every creature that lives within it. The only man animal to ever be allowed to enter unimpeded has been me. Even with the thought of how miraculous a feet that was, it is a far cry from being the savior of an entire species. That would be like asking a sapling to use its new roots to feed the entire forest, impossible!

Sometimes civilization roamed close to my forest, but it never seemed to maintain its civility while doing so.

Suddenly the great Sequoyah spoke to me, moving its branches and warming the trunk and roots that cradled me. I stood up on instinct, something was different about the sounds it made something dangerous. I began to run along the root trail that it laid out for me not aware of what I would find, but somehow unafraid. Just outside the comfort of my forest home stood a man, a ‘civil’ man bleeding his blood into the earth.

               His eyes widened as he saw me, disgusted by his interest I averted my gaze, but even still I could feel his dark soulless eyes trying to bring me to his side. The side of civility instead of savagery which is what he saw looking at me. Bare foot, barely clothed, hair matted and unkempt. I heard his weapon engaging so I stared at him, once again into the depths of his empty eyes. His lips parted as though to speak to me, but his words came to me like electricity almost painful. I cringed and stepped behind a tree. Something crawled the length of my hand to arm. I looked to see what creature was with me, but nothing was visible to my eye. I came from behind the tree, to see that the civil man had retreated or so I hoped.

 The great Sequoyah called me to continue in the way I was going. Once again without fear I continued to follow the ever growing, crawling roots. As though I no longer had a choice the forest lifted me off my feet and guided me to the forest’s end. Whispering, in only a language that I could understand, the earth beneath my feet rose just a bit to set me down outside my sanctuary. As my feet touched the soiled earth, I heard rapid gunfire and terrible screams. I fell to the ground afraid for the first time in what seemed like forever as fire, red and spherical, flew over my head. Quickly I turned my gaze to my forest horrified as the flames rose and consumed them, the tree’s, the grass, the animals nothing was spared. 

I felt a hand on my shoulder again I was afraid. Slowly I turned to see that 'civil' man, the one the great Sequoyah lead me to. He stood tall with broad shoulders, yellow hair, dark eyes armed with a weapon that roared with flames. I cringed and pulled away from his tainted hands. His face contorted with confusion, he tried to speak again, but all I could perceive was the weeping of the forest as the great Sequoyah crackled like kiln and returned to the earth that fed it.

               Before I comprehended all that was happening, the civil man tossed me over his shoulder like a bag of flour and began to run. As the way of most cowards he was attempting to avoid the Sequoyah’s great wrath. I could not let him or any of them escape his wrath. I bit into the mucky flesh of the civil man tearing it from his frame. In pain he dropped me, I stood immediately. I watched as he struggled in pain as he began being consumed by the fire that the great Sequoyah had allowed to escape the forest on its branches. Suddenly I was aware of the many other civil men and their weapons of civility. All, burning in the righteous flames of the great Sequoyah and in the indignation of their own arrogance. I wept as the flames continued to engulf my home and my family. Their cries were far more than I could bare. Wildlife screaming running from the forest ablaze as if the fire had taken on its own physical form. They came and lit the plains ablaze. I felt the earth beneath me rise putting me far above the flames. I fell to my knees now inconsolable as everything that once took care of me was being burned to the ground.

               I laid down in the pillow soft earth that formed around me. What future would be left for me to save? if all was destroyed, by these brutes, these arrogant civilized men. None, nothing It would all cease to exist. Just as I so desperately wished that somehow my future, the foretold future, could be believed. In the end the only thing that my birth truly yielded was the inevitability of my death. 

Tears filled the newly formed earth beneath me like a little pond. It seemed as though the reality of my birth was to suffer this unimaginable source of pain and loss. My people put their faith in a lie, a lie I had never once truly believed and now here alone no people, no forest just death and there was nothing my birth or anyone else's could do about it.

               The cries of both civil men and savage alike ceased. Still I could not get myself to cease the salt filled liquid drops from desperately falling from my eyes. I could not bring myself to move or to even open my eyes. I heard something small whispering to me through the flames and the tears I could hear it call me. I opened my eyes slowly to see my brother, small, green sprouting from my salty tears singing to me. The great Sequoyah bestowed upon me the final gift of his reincarnation. The little seedling rushed into me like electricity filling me with the strength he would have in his prime years. Filling me with understanding. The world of civil men lay in ruin, but I the one foretold and my brother the great Sequoyah had not been laid to waste by any stretch of the imagination. We had both been reborn from the flames of this world and from the connections to it as well.

               Hot searing pain polluted my mind as visions of my people’s hopes spilled into me like thousands of spirits calling out to me. One spoke as clear as my own voice, “you are the savior you see because with you lies all the memories, all the ways, and all of the people who have bled as the earth. Nila you are the seed.” My lips tight, my hands balled, my tears finished.

Now I understood what I was truly saving and how. I was as my brother the great Sequoyah sapling……..

The reincarnation of man……