Meditation in Muir Woods, June 26, 2010.

Creator, I am a slender fern growing here in the shadow of these vast red trees. For a thousand years they have listened to the soft murmur of the water running over rocks worn smooth. They have listened, and remember everything wrapped within their slow growing rings. They remember storms and fires and droughts when the creek fell silent and moisture came only from the omnipresent fog. They remember looking down at my fern ancestors, clinging tenuously to damp life like tiny acolytes serving nervously at the redwoods’ feet. They remember silent Indians, moving swiftly through the forest in search of better hunting grounds. They remember men with saws and teams of huge horses, hacking at the boundaries of this sacred place, cutting, sawing, hauling, burning, building, piling up money along with boards, while the trees still loomed and grew ponderously overhead.
They remember it all, and the memories reach so high, up toward you, the creator, and down deep into the earth toward you as well, and I am lifted and drawn deep with them. They sing with the people walking by today, speaking Italian and Russian and Alabaman. “Theyuz a whole whoppin’ beeg fambly ub’m ovah theyah,” they proclaim in wonder, their necks crained backward and their voices muffled, as if they were pilgrims in an unfamiliar church.

A leaf falls on the page where the man is writing, making him another memory enclosed within the trees, making him bark and branch, fern and fog, silence and water-song.
His friends are waiting on the footbridge. All are remembered, all have gone.