The world is made of the dead

We watch her as she sits at the windowsill watching the leaves twitch in the trees.

Her hands grip a rock while she looks through clear sand. She feels sad and entirely alone, we can see within her an ache that starts as a hole somewhere inside and creeps around her body like roots, taking hold.

“The world is made of the dead.” She hears the words in her mind. She doesn’t question where the words come from, whether they come from her or somewhere else.

She rises with a breath and we see that the air shifts. The vibration in the floor boards rocks a spider from its web in the floor below. The spider hangs there for a little while until a fly buzzes into the web. It flaps its wings in resistance and the spider closes in.

A child stops at the bottom of the stairs to watch the fly get devoured. A reflection of the flow of life and death she is only just beginning to sense all around her.

She holds a stick from her favourite tree. It’s the the tree she climbs up to feel safe. The tree is around the corner and has watched her all her life. It sees her and recognises her energy. She has the energy of someone new. Not the same as an adult, for she breathes more fully. She moves with her whole body. The tree appreciates this, and enjoys her presence, in return it engulfs her with it’s energy, replenishing and nourishing her, through it’s roots and up through her feet, the energy fizzes around her. She doesn’t know this. No one has ever told her of the power, wisdom and consciousness of trees. But she knows she enjoys climbing the tree or sitting at it’s roots to play and she knows when she is not with the tree, this stick brings her comfort.

“The world is made of the dead.” The girl hears these words in her mind as she holds the dead part of the tree tightly in her hand.

The child goes to play outside. She is surrounded by leaves and plants. Butterflies skim past her head and grasshoppers leap away from her feet. She walks through a gateway that leads her to somewhere she has never been before, she vibrates with the anticipation of exploration. The dead that went before her are watching her intently, through the veils of time. We watch her disappear into the leaves, with a strong feeling we may never see her again, at least not in this exact arrangement of cells, this moment of innocence, this age of wonder. We see who she is and we sense who she will become and yet we know she will never be the same again. Her childhood is a series of quiet, inevitable goodbyes, to the child she was a moment ago, yesterday, a year ago. Each step forward pulls her further from the self we once knew, each moment blown away in the wind. Alhough she doesn’t yet understand it, each goodbye is woven into the cycle of life and death, where nothing is truly lost, only transformed.

You can see she has returned to sitting by the window sill. Her heart aches. Her mind foggy. She sits by an altar she has made. Carefully placed objects that she considers deeply and holds close. The rock reaches out to her and she picks it up. The weight of it settles in her chest, as if she’s carrying something ancient inside her, a wisdom older than she can comprehend. We see it projecting the memory of the years it spent at the bottom of a stream, water rushing over its surface, soothing its body. She enjoys the vibration of comfort she gets from it. She places it back on the shelf, a place of honour and reverence, next to a large beautiful candle.

And somehow we know that the candle had been formed by a woman in great pain. She had gathered the wax in the weeks after a great grief in her life, and formed the candle on the first new moon since the event that changed her life forever. As she made the candle she had the realisation “Nothing stays dead forever. The calcium forms new bones. The iron forms new blood. The world is made of the dead. The living are made from the dead.” So now, when the candle is lit, it lights the altar with a dim orange light that carries with it the complexity of darkness, sorrow, hope and gratitude.

She lifts herself away from the shelf and the window, lightly stepping across the floor boards. Her hair swaying with her.

And as she does we can see her as a child, the same child we saw earlier, same time, same place, different day, walking down those same stairs. The same stairs many had walked before her, for she is only a guardian to this place. The house holds her through her life with love and warmth and in return she cares for it deeply. We see the subtle ways in which the house has shifted and changed since her childhood. Without knowing it, we can see she sends her roots out further than her skin. Past the walls of the house, through the soil.

And suddenly we see the reason for the sorrow that engulfs her.

We can see that a man with a chainsaw has attacked the tree she knew as a child. Cuts and rips and vibrations, shaking the roots. The tree is sending out silent cries for help and she feels them in her heart. She will never know that feeling was the tug of grief for her childhood tree. She will never comprehend the connection. She was raised ignorant of the deep connection she has to the living, the dead and the inanimate. She was raised to believe she is alone in her time and that is why she is sad, always sad. She feels the loss of the tree echoing in her bones, a grief she can't name but feels deeply in her breath. We watch her and we know she is not alone, because we are here and we can see the others but we cannot tell her. She has to reach us herself.

And so, without knowing that she is feeling the death of her childhood tree, she thinks “The world is made of the dead.” And she realises the dead are just as alive as the living. Everything is alive and everything is dead in an awe inspiring cycle.

We watch her make this realisation and as we fade away through the veil, we realise that we are both dead and alive too.