MUSES

Even nature has its muses. The weed looks up to the flower. The flower admires the tree. The tree, with all its many-branched attempts at pseudo-superiority, secretly feels inferior when glimpsing the occasional plane soaring past what had once been thought of as its own private, ultimate height. (The tree is not aware that the plane exists separate and above from nature's plan. Faced with such knowledge, confronted by that metallic evidence, who could guess if an oak would topple with the unfair indignity of it all?) Even the sky sometimes seems to want something more. Can it spot outer space a world away? The creativity of the cosmos finds itself at work in the ego of the plant and the dirt, the grass and the twig. One supports the other like a teammate who covertly desires the better player's place on the team. Secretly one suspects that the strange, melodic hissing one sometimes hears in the country at night, spreadout and sourceless, is actually an accumulation of nature's envy, each blade of grass and drop of water diligently moaning against the burden they equally share in each other's growth.