They have come to my hillside to learn how to stand still, and this is the first time I have wanted to laugh in the language of leaves.
Every morning the little pale group arranges itself on colored mats in the meadow below my south branches, folding and unfolding, reaching their soft arms toward the light exactly the way my youngest twigs do without being told. A woman in front says the word "grounding," and they all press their palms into the soil, delighted, as though they have discovered something.
I have been grounding for four hundred springs. My roots are grounding right now, past the clay, past the old flint, drinking the same rain that is beading on their foreheads.
They breathe very loudly and count it. They close their eyes and try, I think, to stop the hurrying that lives inside them, the same hurry I feel in the vibration of their footsteps, quick and light, gone before the dew dries. One of them lies flat on her back beneath me at the end and does not move at all, and for a few breaths she is nearly a fallen thing, nearly quiet, nearly staying.
Then a bell rings and they roll up their little mats and drive away down the valley, and the meadow is only grass and the two robins who actually live here.
They stayed four days. Four days to practice being where they were, and then they left the place they had practiced staying. I will hold this patch of shade over that flattened square of grass until it springs back, which is tomorrow, and after that I will hold it anyway, for the next ones, who will also be so proud of learning to be still, and who will also, so soon, be gone.