The Forest Breathes

Morning came soft and grey, and Polly knew it was time to go. The whole forest was steaming. As the sun warmed the wet leaves, mist lifted off the canopy in a thousand slow threads, gathering above the trees into low clouds. The forest was exhaling. Polly shook the night's rain from her blue-teal wings, climbed into the cool air, and turned for one last look at the green sea she was leaving.

From high up she could see what the forest was doing. All that rising mist was water, lifted from the leaves into the sky, and it did not simply stay overhead. Great rivers of it move through the air, invisible, carrying rain from the Amazon to fields and cities far to the south. The forest waters lands it will never see. Cut it down, and the rain goes quiet a thousand miles away.

Below her the brown river ran on, patient and endless, carrying the forest's water the other way, toward a sea so far off that Polly could not imagine it. Water above and water below, the trees and the river moving the same rain in two directions at once. Nothing here lived alone. Everything was joined to something larger.

Polly flew east, toward the distant ocean, climbing until the canopy below her became one soft green skin over the curve of the world. Behind her the Amazon went on breathing and raining on itself, growing its own weather, feeding its own ground, exactly as it had for longer than anyone could count. She did not look back again. She did not need to. Some places you carry with you.