Best of Miami Portfolios 2001 - Units.muohio.edu

pent-up fury on that wood. In the middle of the chaos, the ancient tree sat, locked in a blissful
eternity of time, waiting.
And the lightning struck.
The white fury of the bolt tore into the tree and, shivering the outer limbs from the trunk,
burrowed its way inward, splintering the old bark as a giant wave would a toy raft—and still the
tree waited. With a cry that wrenched the tree from its lowest roots to its loftiest bough, the bolt at
last sprang into the guarded, iron heart. To the harsh rumble of enormous drums, the great tree burst
asunder in a blast of searing fire. The moment had come.
And the tree understood.
The winds faded and the rains shed their final tears. On the steaming ground, the old tree
lay silent, its cambered limbs crumpled, its mighty trunk cloven in two. The wood still sighed and
moaned softly in the storm’s wake, yet around the tree, a great stillness lay. An ineffable sense of
peace, like moonlight diffused through silvery clouds, bathed the spidery roots. In its last moments,
the tree seemed to rise up in that moonlight, a glowing tower overlooking the fast flowing river of
time, higher and higher, until its lofty summit shone down on the heavens themselves. Yet the
moment fled with the retreating breeze, and the tree sank back to the ground, its twisted mass
strewn across the moist earth, dark and still, its light extinguished.
Even as the last light of the tree escaped the mortal grasp of the tenuous earth, it found its
way up, up into the clouds themselves, and scattered them as one would mere mists and vapors.
And in that lofty canvass of the sky, the light was born again, and the stars reappeared in all their
glory. They had been hidden as the sun was now, hidden behind the orb of the earth and the
shadowy clouds, yet their light remained, inextinguishable, eternal. The cloud was a passing
moment, nothing more, and had been dispersed. Now the eyes of the heavens stared down on the
eyes of the earth, and, through the wreckage and ruin, they smiled.
On the ground, near the roots of the old tree, the star’s light was intercepted by green shoots
and small, crinkled leaves— last season’s seeds. Tiny children of the mother tree, they were
doomed to live out their lives under her suffocating blanket of branches. Now as they gazed
upward, innumerable points of light gazed back. A light wind rustled the miniature stalks of the
saplings, blowing the new debris around in short-lived eddies that danced softly through the night.
Then, slowly at first, but with ever increasing intensity, a small glimmer appeared on the glossy
leaves. Through the whispering blades of grass, a brilliant fire arose from the depths turning the
lingering water droplets into liquid silver that dripped from expectant leaves and flowed gurgling
into shallow puddles, bathing the young trees with the succulent taste of a new day.
And the golden morning sun rose.
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