Nymphoria
Part 1 - In the woods
Johana Bearden July 22, 2022
I wake inside my tree, a rowan. We're not old as far as trees go, but rowans don't often live too long. When it dies what will happen to me? I have no clue and I cannot care. It is hot in the middle of summer. While I sleep, beneath the bark, in liquid form, I pool in our roots I feel the world around me through the spongy fungus that reads the soil's secrets. Our soil is red and moist, like bloody sand. Our soil is shallow here and our roots reach through it, to the layers of clay and bedrock beneath. We try to pry open the spaces in the basalt with our roots, tendrils seeking a stronger grip, a steadier supply of water. Around us, every year, trees fall before their time. The white spruces and the blue spruces are the worst. They grow so fast, cheekily, all through the winter. When we wake each spring we can scarcely recognize them. Our little sisters from last fall now tower over us. But they pay the price when the winds come from the north, they do not bend the way we rowans do. They have not reached deep enough with their roots. They die with a scream or a gasp, shocked and insulted as much as afraid. Or at least I suppose they die. I do not know what happens to my sisters when their trees die. I do not know and I cannot care.
As for now it is the summer, so all I care for is the Sun; the rain too when I can get it. I think in my childhood the rain came more often, and the Sun hardly at all. I can't imagine why. I cannot think too much about it. That is not the kind of wisdom that grows in me year after year of drinking sun and drinking rain and reaching through the earth with my tree's roots. My wisdom grows not forward into foresight nor backward into legend, but into my heart and out through the moment. Each moment I only grow more aware, more present, more full of longing and satisfaction of that longing. I want and need and I get and I receive and I taste and feel with an ever increasing breadth. When my tree was young I was as a tiny child, a flicker of girl-shaped light, a hint of blossom-scented breath, a trembling heart-beat disguised in the shivering of a single leaf in an invisible wind. When I was so nearly nothing and hardly anything, I felt and heard and knew almost nothing of the moment. But since I have grown now, half a century, I am a hundred times more solid, weighty, significantly present and I am a thousand times aware. When I step out of my tree I am as real as any woman who ever stepped barefoot onto dew soaked grass in the morning. When I walk my feet crush leaves and dead twigs releasing the scent of their death into the air; small stones sink into the moist soil under the weight of my heel. When I sing in the forest, animals pause, children miles away laugh, women smile as though they almost remember something and men become restless and curse or fight, or stride into the woods seeking something to accept this burdensome and burning thing that rises up within them. Some others, who are neither man nor woman, hear my song clear as a clock. They click their tongue at my singing, shake their heads and whisper so low that none can hear save them and I, "not now Nymph, not now."
I am present here. My body is real, it is as soft as my tree is hard. I am as quick as it is still. When the Sun is out, we both crave its light. She turns her leaves to it. I peel myself out of her bark and bathe my entire body in its warmth. I glare into it sometime. My eyes are not like yours and it cannot hurt me. Yet. Will I burn some day later? I can't possibly know, nor can I care. I gaze into the impossibly bright yellow eye with my own two reddish brown irises and I grin. Instead of leaves I shake my hair and let the light wash through it. I reach my limbs up turning them this way and that letting Sun touch every part. I allow my breasts to be caressed and my belly to be stroked and every other part of my to be licked clean as a kitten by its loving golden tongue. And then I walk.
I can walk as far as I wish. My tree will wait for me. Bless her patient silent heart. I am her and she is me and yet we are both as free as the Goddess made us. I come and go as I please. She stays and waits as she pleases. We are bound to each other and utterly unattached. Today I will walk to the stream. Spoilt by Sun's attention, still tingling with pleasure at its touch, I want even more. My appetite for being loved knows no limits. I wish and I am granted wishes. And I wish for the icy loving embrace of the Nymph of the stream. She wants me too. We have been whispering all night long. Giggling like girls; one would never guess she has five hundred years to my five decades. My trees roots reaching through clay listened to her thrumming heartbeat all through the night. We teased each other and made promises that must be kept now under the bright leering light of day.
I see her and am seen. In our bodies, real and solid as sex; shimmering and glistening as sweat, we perceive each other. I smell of earth and wind with sour-sweet rowan berry breath and the faint bitterness of my beloved tree's narrow leaves. The Naied smells of the moss and water beneath which she bides the night. A rainbow trout flashes in the stream between her ankles and she grins with sure and easy anticipation. Her arms are open to me. In two strides I am with her. Oh! She is as fresh and cool as the shade-protected spring that gives her little river birth higher up the mountain. She wraps me in her arms and pulls me down with her into the pool where the water gathers, piling up upon itself until it spills over a tiny dam made where an ancient beech that fell across it years ago. I try to remember if the beech had a nymph like me. Were we friends? Was she kind? Did we ever kiss? I cannot remember. I am distracted. My love has drawn me into her pool, it is not deep but its bottom is thick with silt and mud and our knees are sinking into it so that the water is above our waist.
I stumble and struggle trying not to mire in the mud. She laughs and catches me. I let her kiss me and embracing we collapse beneath the surface. I think that being submerged under the water will give us privacy from the jealous gaze of the sun but I am wrong. A dozen scandalized fish glare their disapproval of us from every crevice in their little pool. I grin mischieviously and my mouth fills with water. I choke and gasp and try to shove my river nymph away from me, for a second she restrains me and I feel both panic and fear and pleasure, pleased with myself for feeling fear. Was this not what we promised each other last night? To touch, to feel, to fear: oblivion, pleasure, destruction? Then she relents and lets me shove her over. I roll atop, my hands on her shoulders; I push her down into the silt. Bracing against her I raise my head to the surface and gulp down air and cough out water. In my selfish panic I forget about her and hold her beneath the surface longer and longer. And then I cry out. She has faded away from me. She has gone deep into the stream. I am afraid I have hurt her. I stand up, naked, streaming with silt and mud, embarrassed by my nakedness for the first time that day. My face burns dark with shame. I look up and down the stream, for her, or for someone else? Am I afraid of having harmed her or afraid of being seen? What is that? I hear laughter and I whirl about again. I feel so naked. I shouldn't be here. But the laughter is only the sound of the brook tumbling eternally over the stones and trees that make its path to the sea so fraught and tangled. The laughter is her laughter. She has had fun with me. I am a foolish girl. She has lived ten times my lifetime and was never in any danger from me. Had she not released me, could I say the same? I do not know. It is not for me to try to learn lessons from experiences like this. It is only important that I felt it, and I did. I felt it all, from the whispers of longing for her this morning, to the lust that warmed by belly when I saw her, the ecstasy of her touch, the fear of her grip and the shame of my crime against her. I was meant to feel such things and so I did.
The water of the pool is still turbid, astir from our aborted lovemaking. The fish still pout at me, feigning horror at my deeds even though they know full well I have not harmed their mistress. I step over the fallen beech and wonder if she did this so many years ago. Did they clasp hands, did they embrace? Did the ancient tree succumb as I was made to think I would and thus fall here? If something happens to a dryad, what happens to her tree? I do not know; I cannot care. Beyond the tree the brook runs swift, shallow, and clear over a field of fine smooth stones. I step on them and bathe myself in the water, washing away the drying silt and all my shame of my slight humiliation. I stand in this ankle-deep water, refusing to step fully out of the stream on principle. But I look back up at Sun, and accepting forgiveness, allow it to clean every drop off water off of me again. Except my feet. They stay wet and they turn downstream because I have heard something new. Faint because of the distance, but relentless and deep, there is another voice calling me. Just as the Nymph of the stream teased and taunted me throughout the night, this voice commands me, beckons me, summons me with an authority I cannot and will not even feign to refuse. It is a spirit of the Sea, and she wants me. I want her too with every part of my tender flesh; I need and desire her. Her voice is baffled by cliffs, and damped by trees, and the babbling brook does everything possible to keep up a racket but her commanding song reaches me anyways and I am of no mind to demure. I step downstream. Just as I am summoned to the Sea, so too this stream is powerless to go to any other place besides her vast embrace, and so I follow.