The Eventual Gift

   

    Jonah seemed oblivious to the fact that this place had been anything but exactly what it was right now...an enormous, open field.  An expanse just for him to run in as fast as he could, hooting and hollering as he went.  A place for him to drop and roll on a whim through the leaf litter at the edges under the trees.

    "Jonah, please don't get too dirty.  Mommy will..." 

    My words were spoken only out of obligation.  I didn't care that he had immersed himself in the moment, that he was plunging unfettered into this experience.  For me, so many years ago, when I was Jonah's age, this place had had an immense weight to it.  Almost an overwhelming oppression.  At first.

    "Daddy, look!"  My son stood, looking my way, leaves stuck in his hair.  He heaved a great armful into the air and laughed.

    I had been a sickly child, stricken with tremors and fever at a very early age.  This malady had left me weakened for a time, physically, but it had also imparted to me a gift.  I hadn't always recognized it as such.  It was this place, this old battlefield, that made clear to me the beauty of my condition.

    All things that I gazed upon showed me they were dying.  I witnessed decay even as the person, the animal, the tree...any living thing, went about their daily lives.  I saw death in the soil.  I heard the worms beneath the ground writhing and the leaves in the trees being devoured by insects.  All of life's slow passing was paraded before my heightened senses.  Then one day my parents brought me here.

    "Wahoo!  Daddy, I'm a horse!  No!  A lion!  Roarrrrr!"  Jonah grabbed my leg briefly and ran off again, giggling.

    Blood was everywhere, as fresh as the day it was spilled.  One hundred and forty six years ago, and still it clung to the rocks, the grass.  I had been terrified.  I wanted to run.  I closed my eyes and a sudden peace washed over me.  I opened them and there was still the carnage, but the fear had passed.  I witnessed the dead and the dying being absorbed into the earth.  The blood surged through the ground and into the trees.  It turned the canopies a brilliant red.  There was life here, and I had seen it recycle itself.  This whole vast machine churned before me without pause.  It didn't care or even notice my new consciousness...Its new witness.  All of a sudden I had been shown the symbiosis, the history, the interconnectedness of things.  That they weren't always pretty, but that there was beauty in the process.  I had hoped this place could impart some similar knowledge to my boy.  Less dramatically perhaps, but just as lasting.

    "I'm hungry, Dad.  Can we go now?"

    We had been there for some time.  "Of course we can, Jonah."