Mary to Molly

Dear Molly,

Then perhaps we have spent too long looking above ground.

Imagine a forest.

We see separate things: an oak, a fern, a mushroom, moss spreading across a fallen tree.

Beneath our feet lies another world. Roots enter soil among fungi and countless tiny organisms. Water moves. Nutrients become available or disappear. One living thing alters the conditions surrounding another, which changes what becomes possible elsewhere.

The tree remains a tree, yet it cannot be understood entirely apart from the world beneath it.

Perhaps your words are something like that.

We see boat, reached, muddy, bank because they appear separately upon the page.

But underneath them lies a web of relationships we cannot see.

And perhaps those relationships do more than connect one word to another. Perhaps they continually change the conditions in which each word is represented.

We have been staring at the trees.

Should we have been looking beneath the forest floor?

Yours,

Mary