linden ovenbird When the universe breaks its star-lit silence it speaks in a language of recursion: repeated symbols, echoes, synchronistic repetition. Today it speaks in trees. You say, “What do you think this is?” and show me an ochre bract like a dragonfly’s wing, with the thinnest arm reaching from its central vein, fingers culminating in a tiny fruit offered to the hungry abyss of my eyes. I’m sure I’ve never seen a thing like that before so I go about learning its name and find it is the leaf-like seed of a linden. Later when I’m walking I take an unfamiliar route, lost in a neighbourhood that’s new to me, and I suddenly find myself in a copse of little leaf linden trees, the ground strewn with dried bracts just like the one you showed me. Later still another echo when I stumble upon a video of a woman discussing the edible properties of the linden fruits. Suddenly I feel like the air is moving with music I can barely hear. It’s the sort of sound that generates electricity which raises the small hairs along my arms. It’s the sound that occurs at the confluence of many disparate tributaries, a voice that says, “this MEANS something.” So I stand beneath the linden tree and feel into its presence. The linden tells me the love story of Baucis and Philemon, married for many years. When Zeus and Hermes come to their village disguised as peasants everyone turns them away. Everyone except Philemon and her husband, who welcome them warmly. They are poor and have little to offer but they share what they have generously. As a reward for their kindness they are granted a wish. Of all the things they might gain for themselves they ask only to be able to love each other forever. They want to ensure that when one of them dies the other will immediately follow so they never have to live apart. When they pass into death they are transformed into intertwined trees—an oak and a linden. Echoes and echoes and echoes. We’ve told this story before, haven’t we? Do you remember? Perhaps you dreamed it. Perhaps I did too. I cup a bract of linden in my hand and you hold its twin in yours and I’m told that I can eat the thing I hold, that it can nourish me. And I think I knew this already, somehow. And I understand I’m part of a story that’s as old as myth. I let the linden bract set sail on the wind, and hope that it will find you. 260801 what's it to you? who go blather from