• The Pheasant and the Elm.


    “I know the bottom, she says, I know it with my great tap root:
    It is what you fear.
    I do not fear it: I have been there.”

    Once upon a time there was a Pheasant,
    It journeyed the vastness of country and continent; through isles of trees and green and the endless dew before the sun. It glided into the essence of winter sleep and thro endless summer days and as it glided it brushed and chased other Pheasant with nature’s ambition; it soaked into itself the full, infinite essence of life and one day it perched on an Elm tree, and it died. You see, the Elm tree was bitter; it was black and scorched, and the Elm couldn’t fly, or walk, or glide- it could only stand on it’s minor, low hill and watch as Pheasants passed. So when the Pheasant perched on its long brittle branch the Elm enveloped it in its shadow and drained its life
    .
    The Pheasant fell and landed in the moist black soil, still and dead.
    In the summer it was scorched and burned by the harsh, unforgiving sun. The Pheasant rotted. It’s bright, proud feathers faded and detached revealing it’s bare wrinkled skin. In it’s overwhelming malevolence the Elm taunted the Pheasant: “It is here you have died and will decay; you never will glide again- your elegance and beauty is lost”. In the winter it was tangled and consumed by the desperate groping grass reaching for the meager sun under the Elm. It was pulled down through the gravel alongside the roots of the Elm, through the claustrophobic smothering depths of the earth where nothing else grew- nothing but the Elm.

    When there was nothing else but the nothingness of soil and the damp dry roots of the elm tree the Pheasant was pulled and pushed still. In it’s pressure of depths of the earth the Pheasant could hear the Elm through it’s hollow roots: “It is here you have died; you will decay and be forgotten in the depths of nothing.”

    Without warning the Pheasant was pulled through the top of a vast underground cavern. It fell from the high mythical ceiling and dropped helplessly into a lake at the floor of the cavern. For the first time in two thousand years ripples bounced and repeated over the surface of the dark still lake. The Pheasant drowned; it’s dead and lifeless lungs filled with still water ,slowly, it hit the bottom of the lake, alone – except for the Elm tree.

    For the great tap root of the elm tree stretched magnificently and threateningly from the roof and plunged into the water of the pool, and with its final dark tendril, grew to the bottom of the lake as well, to finally brush the Pheasants gentle and suffering body. The pheasant lay for a hopeless and limitless length of time, hearing only it’s own sorrow and the taunts of the Elm tree; “It is here you have died; this water will weigh you down, and this lake will be your cage – you will never see the sun again.”
    There in the still lake the water seeped into, and through the Pheasants filaments and absorbed it.Slowly the Pheasant was absorbed into the roots of the Elm. It ran through the thick roots and when it reached, slowly, the leaves of Elm it was released from the dark depths, and rose into the world. It was released, and with the heat of the sun became vapor. It drifted into the air, high alongside circa clouds , closer to the warm rays of the sun.


    There the Pheasant was able to look down and see the countries that it had travelled through, the vastness of continent; the isles of trees and green, the landscapes of winter sleep and summer days - those it had met and lost. The Pheasant felt rapture and peace. Now it travelled over, above. Sometimes the clouds condensed and dropped, but the Pheasant only fell to the farmlands of the people, and it’s purity fed and strengthened the crops of the workers. To this day when it rains it is the Pheasant that descends over you, to pass on the essence of what it is to live.

    The Elm also still stands today, dark and feeble, on it’s queer isolated gradient. It still reaches with its darkness and there are the blades that cannot escape from it but the rest of the world carries on, and the travelling Pheasant does not fear it, because the Elm cannot fly, or run, or glide.