Trails from the Tree House

You like to Anthropomorphize

After chilling all winter, you rise feeling zesty. Shedding cobwebs, donning your sunny attire to clamber down the rope ladder, spilling outside into fragrant outbursts.

Life gives you lemon blossoms.

Irises unfurling, you breeze by tulips to swirl under parasols of promise.

You try to act normal, but let’s face it, the odds are against you.

“Jasmine makes winter worth having,” you say frondly to a divine little vine, as she sweetly effuses you.

This is what happens to you in springtime. You frolic in the garden, boy-fully.

You are, however, still having mood swings. Heat waves and cold snaps. Your certainties crumbling into record breaking lows. You have tried being rational. Just. Carry. On, you say to yourself. But the garden unblinkers you in flashes of beauty.

“How to metamorphose?” you wonder out loud, watching your world flutter bye.

Keeping it surreal — you slip in and out of a rhyme.

Regaining your de-composure, you kneel in leafy litter, like a humble critter.

“The problems are bigger than one person,” you confide to an ant, who tickles a trail to your finger tip. “How can I save the world?”

“Start by being less grandiose,” zings the blip from your finger tip. Triggering you into tunnel vision, micro-sizing you down to a pencil tip.

Suddenly, you feel quite deflated.

Radically downsized, you follow the ant’s trail, spiraling through corridors in reality. Deep into the gardens of mycelium dreams, where all life is rooted, you visit the queen of antiquity.

The guard ants give you a swarm welcome.

“What do you want?” the throne drones demand, in unison.

“I come here in pieces,” you say, “To speak with Her Tiny Mightiness.”

“You can’t visit royalty looking like that,” the guard ants reply in uniform tones. “You’re all fleshy and stressy. It’s weird.”

Face-to-face with a million micro-aggressions — enforcing their antiquated fashion codes.

Fortunately, you like to anthropomorphize. So you shed your skin like a silky gown, slipping off layers of muscle, segmenting yourself into an armored shell. Sprouting six legs from your thorax, tipped with tiny claws — which come in quite handy.

It’s an out of body experience.

You adjust your antennae to her frequency. Feeling the earth vibrate, you inhale a light gale of their pheromone trail.

Be-throned, deep in her antechamber, surrounded by the pitter patter of little feet, you bow your ant-shaped head. “Your Royal Microty,” you say.

Compounding your insights in her fractal eyes — under the magnifying glass of collective perspective, she makes you feel small.

“We have a problem,” you say. “Bleak in a world of exhausted resources, offering deepest devotion. We seek under surface, all wise hidden sources, to re-dream life’s great forces in motion.”

“You must scale up to save your little world,” she says.

Sharing a tiny seed of swarm theory, she raises her scepter and commands, “Send out the scouts in grounded optimism, to sequester all solutions. Team up into streams. Draw down. Rise up.”

The micro troops begin to muster, under her macro-vision.

“Play your part to upstart,” she instructs, as they spring into action. No matter your task, you add up — hopes intersect, paths re-connect.”

You join their uprising.

“How will we know we’re heading in the right direction?” you ask, as the crowd begins to surge.

“In tender surrender to the greater good, re-seed yourself as life marches forward,” she says.

Treading lightly, you return from the earth to your hearth. Trailing to the surface, emerging to fresh wonder.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel.

Back on the surface, regaining your sense of disproportion, you raise your front leg in farewell, “Thanks for re-animating me,” you say to the ant-trail.

“Stay cray,” they say, in their antsy way, as you unsprout your antennae and unbuckle your thorax. Rewrapping yourself in muscle, gently patting your skin back on.

It feels good to regain your humanity.

So you mulch about the garden ’til dusk as the sun dips down in the hills like a slice of fresh lemon.

Bitter-sweet, in this beloved garden, wishing the world well under spring-scented skies, you whisper, “Tomorrow we rise.”

Thank you for reading.

Read more Unicorny Tales here.

Other stories and poems here.