deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: The meadow was alive. If you went in with so much as a scratch, the fl
deepwaterwritingprompts:Text: The meadow was alive. If you went in with so much as a scratch, the flowers would smell it and put you to sleep, then slowly, lovingly, take you apart. The meadow was alive, unlike all those other meadows that were, you know, dead. Those other meadows were mostly beneath the soil, in the same way that you or I are mostly beneath our skin. The grasses and flowers and herbs that sprang up so sweetly were transient, surface-deep. Had they composed the meadow, you could have come back in another season and found an entirely different meadow waiting for you. And so those other meadows were dead things, filled with rot, the lifeless and complacent earth. This meadow, though, was very much alive. You could walk through the meadow, feeling the grass tickle at your ankles, testing the curious springiness of the soil beneath your feet. You could, if you were so inclined, be momentarily overcome with a sentimental holisticism: that you were a part of this scene, walking through a meadow on a bright spring morning, as natural as the flowers and the herbs and the grass; that it was right, and good, and fitting, for you to be here, now, among everything; and that the Earth had been made for you to walk upon it, and you to walk upon the surface of the Earth. And then, if you so felt like it, you might crouch to find a thorn to prick your finger, or scuff your foot against a particularly sharp stone, or scratch, however unthinkingly, at a pimple or bug bite on your face, and so breach the thin layer of skin separating you from the world, the vital blood within you diffusing now, escaping into the air, and so letting the meadow in. The flowers would respond in kind, petals dilating, tissues flush with airborne calls. You would take their scent deep into your lungs, breathe out, the plants drinking in your respiratory waste in a circuit of breath exchange. You would understand intuitively that you had been breathing in the meadow all this time, and it you, the particles of it diffusing through your lungs, into your blood, an organ suspended in a living body, falsely separate, part of the whole, and then you would lie down on the grass and go to sleep. The meadow would dissect you, lovingly, blades of grass growing upward to slice neatly between cells, the fertile earth drinking in your blood. Stems would sprout to graft to your arteries, your veins, connecting to roots deeper underground. The soil would grow wet. Your body would sink into it, slightly, the new mud seeping into orifices and wounds, filling in cavities that had previously been drained empty. Your heart would stop beating, pores opening in your skin to exhale wet breath into the world, blood drawn upward by capillary action. The various parts of you would be drawn deeper, deeper into the earth to realize the fullness of the meadow itself, until it would not make sense to speak of ‘you’ anymore, or ‘I’, or anything but the meadow: the life that weaves its web across the world. -- source link
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