The Brother Who Let Go

First, I have to tell you I am alive and I have two brothers. One Near-And-Beating Brother, who holds my hand beneath the damp, green and life-bearing soil. Whose hurts I feel and songs I hear vibrating in my veins.

The other brother, the Far-Away Brother, has long ago let go of my hand.

Although, in truth, the Near-And-Beating Brother is not singular but many, the etymology becomes complex and I fear to lose your interest. I think, perhaps, you would rather hear the story of the Far-Away Brother and the conflict that led to our separation.

The beginning of the story is buried in a time as incomprehensible to my brothers as it is to me, beneath the living waves of the Mother who made us. We were not her first children, by far, but the ones that came before speak no language we can understand. Their bodies lie now beneath the ocean and their seeds buried within us.

I only remember Mother through the stories of my brothers. She served as shield between us, life, and the stellar winds above and roiling rocks below until a Far-Gone Brother took the very first step away from her.

Here the story begins to blend with memory. I hope I haven’t bored you with that ancient history. I promise, once the Far-Gone Brother crawled out of the warm and wet embrace of our Eternal Mother, the story’s cast widens and its pace increases.

Soon, we were many Near-And-Beating Brothers, all holding hands and ruminating the rock beneath, leaving breathing soil in our wake. Spore after spore, the spawn of Brothers was immense. We conquered land as dry and dead as death itself and turned the Reaper’s scythe against him for a time so that barren rock begot green life.

And so it went for a while, each generation of Brothers sprawling higher towards the light. I am one of the first true giants that rose above the fray and saw the stars.

Here, though I did not know it at the time, the story stops being linear.

One morning, in that warm and damp world where we conquered death itself, a deep shudder went through us all. A brother had let go. Just as the Far-Gone Brother stepped away from the Mother who birthed him, this Far-Away Brother left the forest that toiled without end so that he may live.

Don’t worry yet, it didn’t hurt at the time. We thought, “Good for you, Brother!”, with legs and arms and lungs you can go where we could not. Maybe even to the stars.

Now the story really picks up.

What you must know about the Far-Away Brother is that he was not content. Not ever. He wasn’t pleased with his legs, and eyes and tail, but wanted always more. Hands and wings and fingertips. And big, fat brains.

First, he used that brain to spread his seed in the four winds. He scrawled his thoughts and left his print on the tallest mountains and in the deepest deserts. In all the places we had gone before him. But then, as you might suspect, the story gets darker.

He wasn’t pleased, you see, even now, with his children inhabiting every sliver of earth we had so meticulously prepared for him. And then he turned on us, his Brothers.

One gray day, overcast and bitingly cold, he grabbed a sharp rock with his opposable thumbs. We watched in horror as he used it to maim us, break us and mold us into weapons so that he could go on hurting with greater efficiency.

He also built, the Brother, but what he built was dead. He took the life we’d made and turned back to barren rock and mortar and piled up closer to the sky than we had ever reached.

Far beneath our root he dug to suck the blood of our long dead and with that blood he built some more. But not dead rock, instead he made tools to harness light.

Who could have known the dead hold in their ancient bodies the seeds of light itself.

The Near-And-Beating Brothers trembled. Our run-away kin turned against us, slaughtered us, burned us, drove us in the ground without mercy. Deaf to our cries and pleas. Pulling out babies from their mother’s roots in some places, and in others leaving only babies standing after manic chopping frenzies.

Slowly, we began to let go too.

Brothers stopped beating of their own accord, dwindling to nothing, falling to join the army of the dead.

Do you think when the Far-Away Brother set his foot made of earth and ocean on a different world for the first time, he was finally pleased? Was he at last content that the damage he had brought was worth it? Did he finally say, “Enough”?

No.

Not until one morning, in that hot and burning world, when his own children began to fall sick. I was alone by then, the last giant still standing after eons, talking to no one but the stars.

Then, my Far-Away Brother came to me and lay his soft, blood-soaked hand on my rough bark and cried.

“Forgive me, Brother,” he said. “I didn’t know. And when I knew, I didn’t want. You know nothing of want and how it burns from the inside. You have all the Universe contained inside you and nothing that you need is missing. But my want drove me to set us all on fire.”

I said nothing then, because I would never hurt my suffering kin. I sent my sap to pulse life and warmth beneath his fingers, and thought, “What a disease you are, Brother. You didn’t stop until the want and lust you felt inside spread to all your Far-Away Brothers. Until we all felt a want we had never known. For air. For rain. For soil. And now? Now you are more miserable than ever. And we are all but dead.”

I had no medicine to give his children, nothing left to feed him with. I held him in my branches safe from the flood, just as I kept my own sapling hidden in branches that he might not see.

The floods and fires came and went, but somehow, I still stand.

Us Brothers are together again and holding hands, but I fear the death now covering our world will not be so easily undone. But when I cry in fear, sometimes I hear. I hear our Mother hurtling her warm, liquid embrace at the shores of our devastation, and I remember.

If we cannot reach for the stars, our Mother will bury us and bear more children and maybe they will hold inside them the seeds of wisdom left behind by the Brothers who made and burnt the world.

Or maybe even now it is not too late. I will let you decide.