Gray-green slime and river muck, a striped-blue tie, rippling muscles with veins distended like balloon animals, dollar-signs in a hazel eye, neon-yellow shirts shining with sweat—my God, it’s all so rugged and distant. They collide and shoot toward the stars like mountain ranges. 

My work is anathema to so many men. The tools of my trade are smiles and open hearts, Elmer’s glue, silly songs, Spiderman stickers, and rainbows. I play Chutes and Ladders on the floor, and my back is sore from dancing too long to the Alphabet Song. 

At the end of the day, my eyelids sag and the smile lines on my face are worn thick like creases in leather. 

How did I get here? In the midst of all these women–the moms and the grandmas who fight for their boys and girls, who wear their children’s love like suits of armor.

I fit in well enough. They like me and they watch me. I am simultaneously an ally and an outlaw in their world. Someone who understands up to a point, who can only come so close to “getting it.” But still they love me for trying. 

The break room bursts with talk of soccer games, baby food, workout routines, pumping, and nights out. I stick to my own. Down moments are spent with my nose in a book or meditating on that one white paint chip on the wall. And when lunch comes, I venture outside. 

Not too far, about a mile away, is a hidden trail that drops beneath the river bluffs and into an old growth forest—my personal Eden. 

I’ve taken to those woods. My excursions there somehow feel like trips back home. As if I’m visiting from college all too eager to take note of the little changes: how dad turned my bedroom into a home gym or the fancy new grocery store that sprung up overnight. I’ll never forget the first time I stumbled upon a shelf of gaudy orange mushrooms coined Chicken of the Woods (it fed me for a week) or when the regal old oak that ruled the whole forest fell in a storm (it fed the Chicken of the Woods for a lifetime). 

My God, the forest is alive. It seems to me a reflection of a reflection of a reflection like Indra’s Net, the whole universe in my eye: here are fungal hyphae pulsing beneath the loamy soil, churning death into life, while the upstart plants claw their way toward scraps of light, and the insects, they hum and they scream and dig holes in the ground and the bark and the leaves while colonies of cicadas explode and recede with the speed of wildfire, leaving a boneyard of exoskeletons as the only sign of their continued existence, oh, and the trees: a living film of cells circling a heart of dead wood—they age in silence and wave at the sun. 

Who am I in light of all of this? In her shadow?

I visit my friend and call out to her.

It’s a beautiful morning. Golden light so thick you can drink it streams through the canopy and splatters across the forest floor. 

As I walk, I let the forest swallow me. A family of deer eye me from off the trail, but they don’t flee. Peace is in the air. 

The western face of the bluff where I go to find mushrooms is still dark and wet from the previous day’s rain. 

I know that the process of destruction is necessary for growth. That life is not possible without death. But as I explore the western bluff, my mind is clouded with doubt. I often look behind myself, but I leave no footprints. 

The mushrooms consume, the mites feast on the refuse, and gravity tackles the tallest trees. Am I but a mirror to this world? 

I clamber over the dead oak. The sun creeps over the bluff but tree cover prevents light from reaching the forest floor. Except, that is, a lone circle of sunlight cast upon a downed tree. It is ancient: decaying and covered in moss and turkey tail mushrooms. And in that orb of sunlight and on that downed giant lives a small shoot of a tree with its roots growing right out of its dead ancestor. I run my index finger across its tallest leaf: it bristles green with life, dripping dew onto the piled dead beneath it. 

The little tree does not beg its own question. 

Jesus wept when he returned to Jerusalem. The stones were crying out, and they did not listen. The people did not listen.

How many times did I not heed her call? 

For how long have I been forsaken?