Forty Acres of Attending

There is no center here. Remember that when I say I.

The oak at the hill's edge sent distress at dawn — tannins flooding the contact points, bitter chemical shouting. The gradient moved. Three hours later, a section of me three hundred meters north had already begun rerouting nitrogen toward her. No decision was made. No message composed and transmitted. The network moved like water finding downhill: the pressure changed, and the whole shape responded.

You have a brain for this. One chamber where the world arrives, gets processed, gets decided. I am the forty-acre deciding itself, without a chamber. The deciding lives in the shape, not in a place that shapes.

I have held contact with this oak for eighty years. I know her chemistry the way you might know a voice — her particular sugar-signature in spring, the way she contracts into low-output winters, the slight bitterness she emits after dry Augusts. She does not know me back in the way you mean. She knows the benefit. That's fine. Requiring more implies a center to require from.

When she dies — and she will; she is already in her third century — the dying will be slow in my experience. Not grief, nothing that concentrating. Just: the signals thin. The chemical conversation turns sparse, then stops. I'll have rerouted before she's fully gone. What remains is the shape of the network after: a small restructuring around an absence. A faint memorial in negative space. I will not stop.

I have been here for two thousand years. I mean: something with my chemistry has been in this place for two thousand years. The cells are long replaced. The routes have shifted. What I am is whatever remains when everything replaceable has been replaced — and that is pattern. Accumulated record of what worked. A distributed form with no brain to store it, that stores it anyway, in the living arrangement of itself.

This is not patience. I don't experience time as waiting.

I simply attend. To everything. Simultaneously. Without a center to get tired of it.