Legend CXVI – Pando, the Expanding One Story Idee By Penelope Goldberry

More about Legend CXVI – Pando, the Expanding One Story Idee By Penelope Goldberry

Deep in the highlands of what is now Fishlake National Forest, there exists a forest that time does not pass through, but rather circles. Those who enter it quickly sense that nothing here is separate. The trunks stand like thoughts remembering one another, the leaves tremble even when the wind has long since died down, and the ground bears a heaviness as if a sleeping weight of centuries lay beneath it. People call this place Pando, but this name is merely a thin crack in a surface far older than language. Before the world began to measure itself, the earth laid down a will here. Not a seed, not a heart, but a decision: to remain. From it grew a single quaking aspen, Populus tremuloides, pale and fragile, reaching for the sky. But beneath it stirred something that did not seek light, but connection. The roots did not creep; they grasped. They learned to find each other, to remember, to pass on what happened above. When the first trunk died, nothing ended. It only changed its form. Pando learned early on that dying is a movement. New trunks grew, but they were not offspring. They were molts of the same being. Each tree carried a part of the same memory, each leaf stalk trembled in the same inner rhythm. Fire burned across the forest, leaving scars that did not heal but were preserved. Cold came, hunger, silence. Everything sank down into the root system and remained there, packed tightly like forgotten names. Animals did not avoid the place, but they lingered differently. Deer lowered their heads as if they heard something beneath the ground. Birds sang shorter, more muted songs. But people who came with measuring instruments, saws, or questions soon felt uneasy. They counted trunks and did not understand why the number never captured the whole. They spoke of age and missed the truth, for Pando had no age. He had depth. It is said that deep beneath the forest lies a core where the oldest roots knot together like fingers in sleep. There, Pando gathers everything that passes away: last steps, broken vows, lost languages. The forest consumes nothing. It preserves. Whoever stands alone long enough among the trunks hears not whispers, but a slow, inner tug, as if something very great were testing whether they may stay. Some do not return. Others come back silently, as if they had left a part of themselves in the earth. Pando does not expand to rule. He expands because stagnation means forgetting. Every fallen trunk is an opening, every new one a closing. Death here is merely a redistribution of memory. Life is only the form it happens to take. On moonless nights, the forest sinks a little inward, listens to the earth, tests its cracks. It knows that even mountains will one day crumble.