Joel was out walking in the woods one day when no one else at was there, and he saw a really Very Beautiful Tree.

It was covered - just covered - all the way around the entire whole of it (even probably on the underneath he couldn’t see, because it went clear right down and curved around the bottom), with bright green moss that was cushy and soft and clean looking and he wanted to sit on it.

But he thought he might crush it, so he didn’t.

Lucky for him, though, that same cushy and soft and clean looking moss (or a moss very much like it) was beside the tree, too, in a roundy patch that was just perfect for a Joel to sit on, so he did.

And then he wondered why he hadn’t worried about crushing that moss, but really, he was pretty sure it would be fine.

The Very Beautiful Tree had all sorts of lovely plants growing out of it. There were tiny little baby trees, and teeny tiny little white flowers, and something with nice glossy-green roundish leaves, and bitsy ferns, and even teeny-tiny-er red flowers on little stalks that you couldn’t see unless you looked really close (which might have been part of the moss. He didn’t know for sure.).

He wondered what the tree would have looked like if it had been able to be covered in moss and have lovely things growing out of it when it was standing up way way high, but he looked all around and way back into the darker places off the trail that he couldn’t get to (even if he hadn’t been so thoroughly happy sitting just right there), and didn’t see any trees like that, so he figured out that you couldn’t be this particular kind of Very Beautiful Tree until you fell over.

Which he thought was actually kind of a nice thing, and hopeful a bit.

Joel sat there for a very long time with the Very Beautiful Tree, just thinking about a lot of things and not much, and then it was getting a wee bit darkish, so he went home.

But I’ll bet he came back.

LLH 03.29.20

More story here.