A Living Thing

He returned each morning, as he had always returned to the rope. The waiting was a familiar rhythm, a space he knew how to inhabit. But this waiting was different. It was not the taut tension of a line drawn tight between two hands, but the silent, patient unfolding of a life he could not command.

He had no craft to bring to bear on it now. He could not draw it up as he drew a cord, nor set its pace as he set the turning of hemp. He could only watch, and wait, and trust the slow work of the soil to keep its own counsel.

And then, one morning, he saw it. A spear of green, almost impossibly small, had broken the dark earth. His first shoot. His first living thing—grown, not bound; given, not made. He stood over it a long while, and for the first time the patience did not feel like waiting at all.