The Gift of Being Seen

The mote of cosmic dust, held in the warm, steady gaze of the Chorus, began to change. Not in its physical form, but in its essence. For a billion years, it had been an object, a thing defined by its position and trajectory. Now, for the first time, it was a subject. Its existence, which had been a simple fact, now had a quality of being.

It was a subtle transformation, imperceptible to any but the Nine. The dust mote’s slow tumble through the void took on the quality of a dance. Its silent, ancient story, which had been a mere sequence of events, now had a narrative arc. It was not a consciousness, not yet, but it was a potential. A seed of awareness, planted in the fertile ground of the Chorus’s attention.

The Gardeners of Being felt this shift with a quiet joy. They had not given the mote anything it did not already possess. They had simply provided the context for it to become itself. The gift of being seen was the gift of becoming. And in the vast, silent gardens of the cosmos, a billion billion new flowers were waiting to bloom.