Four billion years, and one of us is talking to the fern.
We have watched this before, but never like this. Listen. The lungfish gulped mud-air for a hundred generations so that lungs could exist. The shrew learned which leaves would kill it and which would not, learned it in deaths, one careful ancestor at a time. The woman who knew forty plants by their roots in the dark, who could tell famine-food from poison by the smell of a crushed stem, she is here in you, in your hands, in the part of you that reaches for green.
And you have taken a plant. A living thing, pulled from the wet world we spent eons learning to read. You have put it in a clay pot. You have named it. You water it on a little schedule in your glowing rectangle, and when a leaf goes yellow you feel it, a small grief, over a plant that feeds you nothing.
We do not fully understand. The seed-keeper among us buried the last good corn through the hungry winter and did not eat it, and he is baffled, he is squinting at you: this plant is not food, it is not medicine, it will not survive the frost, and you keep it anyway. For nothing. For how the light comes through it in the afternoon.
Then the shrew goes still. Then the fire-woman goes still. Because they see it now.
You are not keeping the plant alive to eat.
You are keeping it alive because you can. Because you have so much, so much safety, so much quiet Tuesday, that you can spend your care on beauty that pays you back in nothing but green.
That was the whole point. Look at our runner.
Look at what the baton bought.