Woodpecker

As we continue to compete for oxygen and life with a menacing world of microorganisms, all the weary and gloom led to the memory of a place which seems very familiar now.

A deepening blue smeared the dusky winter sky of a forest. Wind seemed to gasp, barks brittled, branches hollowed and leaves dead- invaded by a mass of barely visible insects, the ailing trees howled in silence. Tall and tough as they must look, yet they stood stout, stretching all-out for the last rays of the passing sun for the day.

Soon, a crusty drumming broke into the melancholy of distressed winds. Much like an ambulance sirens through numb-struck lanes of the city. We followed the sound, only to spot sparkling hues of a flame against the dark of the wood body of a tree. A Greater Flameback Woodpecker clinged to the bark, donning a familiar alarming red on his crest. They say he could hear the insects burrowing wounds into the flesh of a trunk. And he perches on, for every single rescue operation with stunning precision. He chiseled into the bark, pecking holes to cut off the infected parts from the healthy ones, ensuring no disease progression. He then swallowed up the insects, sticking in his tongue, only taking off after the woods were clean and healthy, like masterful doctors. He sure earned food, but much more gratitude.

My picture of divinity lies in the miraculous awareness of the forest as one body- how organisms are organs, divided by skin but unified in consciousness, form an invincible body that has survived for a million years and will survive for a million more.

On the other side of those blues, was a recovered forest where every healed tree homed birds and bees and love in its holes and scars.