Granny's Dream
Kinship mineral memories
The midday heat made her sleepy. With her wild, rough skin warmed by the sun, Granny dozed off, falling into the dreams of the world, claiming deep memories, recollections of her long life.
The daydream brought her back to when she was still sovereign, when men called her Elder. She missed the shady presence of ancient oak and chestnut trees and the fresh, sweet waters passing by. Together for millennia, they were the caretakers of the vibrant life unfolding around them: from mossy fungal coves to bears, beavers, and humans. Ancient human clans requested permission, told stories, sang songs, and left offerings. Communities asked for advice and knew how to listen—a big family made of granite, bark, fur, skin, scales, and feathers. Granny Granite’s plutonic body could still hear faint echoes of the dances and the many voices that sang them. Rhythmic drumming, feet pounding, heart cries, bird melodies, howls, and roars. Togetherness whispered in conversations, shared secrets, communal accounts, revealed stories, prophetic rumors, and sensed ceremonies. Joys and mourning. Collective rituals and living pain. With her vast crystalline, granular heart deep buried in the ground, Granny rejoices in the flickering ghosts of these nutritious and vibrant conversations of multi-species kinship. Unlike the feeble human memory, her deep mineral recollection did not forget that, before the grand silencing, kin sang together with the winds, the storms, the stones, and the mud.
The Old Granite Stone revisited over and over again the unfolding of these last moments, brief times for an ancient being like her: of how she became alone, dry, and hot, with the great muteness settling around her.
Granny had long observed the cutting and hammering of Trees, twigs, wood and bark, into tools, houses, and boats, firewood for cooking, heating, and lighting, charcoal for furnaces and writing, and ash for soap. But attitudes changed, and Trees, along with Stones and Rivers, were no longer inviolable; from now on, the divine was solely in the sky. Human communities stopped listening to the cries of the Ground and Forest, cutting and burning indiscriminately. Voraciously. Men succumbed to war, fear, cold, and hunger, forgetting that these more-than-human Elders were their original family and custodians. Humans severed their kinship ties, disregarding the songs and stories from the Trees, the Stones, and even Fire’s ancient wisdom. Eventually, they just forgot. These newly orphaned and mutilated human communities only remembered pain, suffering, and demise. The vast, stormy body of the Granite Elder, remembered when her sister Trees could not withstand the quick and violent cuts of hungry and ragged men. Because of the unleashed wildfires and the accelerated amputation, the animals that sought refuge in the woods also began to vanish. Bears were hunted to extinction because kings yearned their hands as trophies. The Beavers were stripped of their skins and were also gone, for without the Trees and their roots, water would not stay, drying up everything. Granny Granite grew bare and alone under the scorching sun.
Although not only hunger and misery motioned the forceful human extraction, greed, and insatiable desire also annihilated the place. The houses and new oceanic warships grew bigger, the glass and lime furnaces hotter, the lines straighter, the walls higher, and diversity tragically dwindled. In her apparent plutonic impassiveness, the Granite Elder, observed as men no longer asked for consent; they just drilled, pierced, tore, and hoarded, looting land for their crops and homes, while domestic herds ate what little was left.
Granny awakens on the barren and sterile land around her, yearning for vibrant and nutritious stories again. And, in her vast life of internal and abyssal revolutions, she may witness the return of the oaks and chestnuts, the waters, the bears, and the beavers.
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