I am green. You do not know that yet for I am hidden.
I am contained here, protected, entombed, and I am waiting here below. I don’t know how long I’ll be waiting. Maybe you do. It doesn’t matter to me. When my waiting is over, though, you’ll see: you’ll see that I am green.
I can wait, and I will wait. A year, two, more. Even much more. I will wait.
Or.
Maybe.
I will die.
If I wait too long.
I can’t wait too long.
Or I may swelter, in a fever —
that might see the end of me, too.
I fear I could die.
Maybe.
For now, though, I am buried, I am secret, and you don’t know I’m here, here where I’m a memory, a remnant. I’m ready. I’m down here, underneath, below you in underland, where I need to be. I’m waiting, ready. Ready for what? Ready for … for my time, my renaissance, my emergence. And then you will see me, you will see that I am. I am green.
I am.
I am green.
I am green, but I am hidden.
You’ll know me when you see me. You know me already. You have seen me everywhere I appear, in truth, in metaphor, in imitation, so common you’d overlook me. I’ll remind you.
I am green.
I have always been.
At the beginning of colours, I was. I was green at the beginning of things, though these rocks, this stone, these minerals, this water, this air, they were here before. They were here, in the light, in the dark and in the light again. They were before me, they were first; twice as long as me, I’m told.
But then.
I was.
I was green.
And I started off.
I changed things, because I was green. I gorged, fed and fed, on light and liquid, and I changed things.
New stuff, and lots of it, more of it than anything else. I made it, I made it happen, this stuff, this breath-of-the-world stuff, this soul-gas stuff. I make it for you, freely. It’s yours, I give it to you, for you will need it while you call this place your home. It’s yours, and you need it, you all need it. Bone, muscles, sinew. I made it for you: it’s yours.
I am green.
But for now I am hidden,
and you can’t tell that I'm green.
There is something happening, though, a stirring, a shifting. I feared I had died, and it looked like I had, for months, for years it looked like it. Maybe I will still perish and my greenness drain away, who can tell. But not now, not yet. I appeared to be dead but I was only asleep, slumbering here below, in underland where I have been hidden away all this time.
Water. I feel water.
It has touched me, woken me, brought me back before Hypnos could deliver me to his brother, Thanatos.
I have been roused at last, and I sense something happening.
It felt the quiver. My husk, my wombish shell that has been my home, my safety all this time, my comfort, it’s felt my possibility, my viridescence. It’s felt the change and it has fractured.
Free. I’m out.
I am a memory of green. I’m a green so pale it’s as if I am not there, but I have a panache in me, in the recollection of the green that I was once before and will be again. The memory is fragile, the green that I was, but I have it. You might know me already if you could see my safe place, my origin, the outline and form of my time-shelter.
But I have escaped, and so now I run.
Leg it.
I stretch. My legs stretch, slowly stretch, and I leg it.
Things return to my mind and I work out which way is up. No, I don’t think. I don’t need to think because up, the way up, is in me, a knowledge before thought, consciousness before synapse, impulse without need for transmission. It is instinct; it is innate. Up is up. It just is. My thin legs, my delicate green that's as pale and pinched as my recollections, turns upwards, through soil and silt and sand, through thick, heavy clay, finding cracks, circumventing stones, caressing boulders, and upwards, always upwards.
There is something else in this dark place. An impression.
Others.
In underland.
I feel it: my self.
My echo-self, my other selves.
Deep knowledge in this deep place.
I hear my many voices speaking in tendrils and in filaments, mycelial pulsation with the language of the earth, my soulful verdant voices singing in unison and in harmony, singing an old song new to me of joy and hurt and care and fear that saturates this world below, this underland. A song to nourish all, sustain all, heal all.
Chorused voices of my otherselves urge me upwards, towards the light and the air. Upwards, to the place where my verdurous reminiscences and theirs will coalesce and touch the sky again. I catch them and I hold them, those cords that tie me to all my other selves.
I am green, and all of us together: we are all shades of green, and we are one green.
Here, in the open once more for the first time, at this frontier where air touches soil and infiltrates it, I am green. My whiteness is transformed in this liminality, and I am green again.
I am a green so new and fresh and bold that there is almost no name for me, and words like chartreuse and spring and neon and harlequin are impersonations too hollow to contain my vibrance and abundance. I won’t be this untamed and fervent for long, but for now that is what I am. I am wild green.
You do not know me yet but you know me already, as you have always known me.
I was there in the Scottish play, the undoing of the Thane of Cawdor who quaked for fear of death and bane when my great oaks moved to high Dunsinane, but maybe you looked past my green. I was a virescent prison for Coleridge when his friends wandered in gladness and left him confined beneath lime bowers. Green. When I was Yggdrasil’s ash, the Norse gods came and sat beneath me daily for a thing, a folkmoot, and my green branches reached across the sky. I was there when Tom Ripley wished his oar an axe to hack at the tree of Dickie Greenleaf’s neck. The dwellers in the Cherangani Hills and by the Paraná River, on Nullarbor Plain and the mountains of Santa Ynez, all know my possibilities and I am to them minister, therapy, remedy. I was there with Thoreau beside Walden Pond, and me it was who whispered with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves to take away his breath. In that totemic ancient garden, my forbidden fruits granted knowledge all that is good and is evil (and all things in between), merismatic knowledge of everything there was to know, a last supper before falling in an earthly alteration from innocence to corruption. Cut me, will I not bleed? And though my blood is thin and watery and you will not think of green, it carries within it an essence, my life, my satisfaction and blessing, and also my remains. You know me, you see me without seeing me, and my personality is so huge, so vast that I am everywhere, if only in imitation, in simulacra in art and fine bodily adornment.
I am green, and now I embrace the sky, and though I reach up I still feel the ground, listening to the earth, the song in underland.
But my hearing is muddy: I don’t hear the alarm, the fear in the things they sing, the fear of the things they say.
There is a tune about a malaise.
It’s different this one, they say.
I’m deaf to what makes them worry; I will not be an anxious green.
I stretch upwards and my green is fresh and new and hopeful nonetheless, a gemstone just unearthed, a green so fierce it makes your eyeballs ache within their sockets.
I am here, I am green, and I stretch up, up, despite the warnings, up towards my friend the Sun, eager for the light my playmate, cosmic wanderer, offers to the universe, a bequest that travels here through void and nothingness and brings energy, pure energy, visible and infrared and ultraviolet, bright light and radiant heat, illumination and warmth that stirs the wind and churns the seas, tempting the waters to lift into the sky where they can fall, fall, fall down on me and soak my being. For I am green, and I need light and warmth and nourishment and moisture to make this world-breath. It is our joint gift, the game we play together, the Sun and me.
Aah! It’s happened.
Bifurcation.
My first change above the land, here in the air. Too early to see what this splitting means yet, what it will tell about me, because for now I look like all the others, like green everywhere. I look the same, but I am not.
I am me.
I am green.
I am fearless now, a brash and heroic green with courage to press on despite the rumours. I am the green of a shield held in front and overhead, valiant green, a green repeated in the heraldic vestments of beetles and bugs, ants and aphids and arachnids, katydids and lepidoptera and mantids and neuroptera. And so I go onwards with fortitude, audacious, onwards and upwards, too, despite what my other selves tell me.
Upwards, and I flatten as I ascend (my old home, my old me, my now me, all tell me what to do), I become thinner, wider, and as I broaden I get seriously to play. A plane, I toy with being a plane. I curve, I bend, I pleasure in being flat, frolicking with fractions, frisking with fractals that Mr Mandelbrot would enjoy, though his aim was to simplify the rough and messy and that is not what I want. I want to play as I grow. Or, just for fun, here and there, I am completely smooth.
Here I am green. There I am green. Olive. Orchid. Cedar. Celandine. Seagrass. Sorghum. Saguaro. Barley. Begonia.
Here, beneath the soil.
There, beneath the sand.
Elsewhere, beneath the sea.
A crack in a rock.
A gap between paving.
A damp roof beam.
I am all and I am green.
I grow.
I am green.
And I grow.
I grow and some of me darkens. As I get taller and wider some of me darkens and my green is reminiscent of the sea, the swirling, wild waters under heavy clouds, darkening and turning, turning to the sallowest of green, a green that is brown, all manner of brown. I am a brown-green, pale and pitch, strong and sturdy, firm and flexible, reliable and resilient.
But that is not the only thing. I am listening and I am hearing things, in my many voices that resound throughout underland, stories that are told between ourselves, about illness, about disorder.
I know about sickness.
It happens to me often.
Everywhere it happens, and those tendrils make sure that I am never alone, never suffering alone, never struggling alone. I speak, and I listen, and if I need me, I will come.
If I need me, I will give me what I need, food and health and light. I will even be the light for me. If I do not have it for myself, then my self next door, or my self beyond, or beyond, or beyond beyond, will give me some of my own light-made-energy, and my alternate self, my fungal other that is not me, is not green, but is my soulmate nonetheless, will make sure I have it. Or if me can’t be helped, if me is diseased and incurable, I will protect the rest of me, I will protect all of me from myself that is blighted. I know, I know what to do.
And I protect you, too, if you need me, if you reciprocate.
So.
I grow.
Through years.
Through seasons and weather.
Through storm and flood and drought.
Sometimes pausing, protecting myself.
Still, I grow.
And I listen.
I listen now to myself, and I hear.
I hear me, and I realise what I’m hearing.
It’s mournful.
What I hear is sad.
It’s a sad song that can be heard on the strands here below, these hyphae, this hyphenated web that binds me to myself to I who am, who is green.
It is sad.
And more than sad: it is a lament.
There is a keening.
The voices in underland are wailing.
There is a doleful groaning for the places we have lost to the remorseless light, the unbroken heat, the places where we once were, where there once were so many of me, all of me who is green. For those places that are taken from us now, where we can be no longer, no more.
Lamentations. For there is never an honest answer to pain, to suffering, that is not also a lament.
I have heard it now, and I feel it, too.
I feel it: the fracturing, the breaking.
I feel it in myself.
The threads grow quieter, the voices broken, broken, broken off. The voices are dying, dying off, drying out, baked to death, dying away.
I know how to survive, it is part of me, an instinct. I am green.
But I am not immortal, I am not ever-living. And if I go my gift will be gone too, my gift to you, my world-breath, my gift for you while you call this place home, it will leave with me.
The song grows quieter. The lament can be heard, it is sung still. It grows quieter, dimmer, yet I hear it more clearly now.
It is a requiem, a funeral song.
A weeping for the ones who are no more.
I am weakening.
I feel it.
I am green but I am weaker now, weaker than I have been before. I am a blanched green, pale and thinning, not the vibrant, energetic white-green of my days underneath, but a pallid green, ashen and leached of colour. I am bleaching in the unflinching sunlight that was my friend, my playmate, who made the water to rain down but has somehow forgotten our pact, our joint promise to each other, and now I am too thin, too tired, without the tickling wet.
It is draining away, my green, and this, this hot-dry is too much, too much.
I am a fading green, fading away.
I am washed of green.
I am a forgetting to be green.
Am I green?
I was green.
I was.
Was.
I.
.