A great many warm soft things have arrived in the flat green place beside me, unrolling colored mats over the grass the way frost unrolls in a cold season, and they intend, I think, to hold very still.
This delights me. For a hundred thousand of their afternoons I have watched these quick creatures run in circles, fetch and carry, chase and flee, wearing grooves in the soil with their small urgent feet. Now, all at once, a woman in front stands them in rows and instructs them to be as I am. To breathe slowly. To stop wanting. To feel the ground.
They cannot do it. I have felt the ground for longer than these hills have had this shape, and it is not a thing you achieve between one sunrise and the next; it is a thing that happens to you over the patient grinding of ages, when the water has worn you smooth and the roots have given up.
These creatures fold and unfold, tremble, tip over, glance at one another to see who is doing stillness correctly. One of them lies flat at the end and calls the lying-flat the hardest part. Ha.
By afternoon they had rolled the mats away again and hurried off in their loud metal shells, back to the running and the wanting, having rested for the length of a held breath. The grass has already sprung back up where they pressed it.
I will still be here when the flat green place is a lakebed, and when the lakebed is a mountain. They came to learn how to be motionless from the one thing that has never done anything else, and they left before I had noticed they were there.