Chapter 218 The Forty- Second Spring

Chapter 218 The Forty- Second Spring
Chapter Two Hundred and Eighteen
The Forty-Second Spring

She went to Vermont on the first of April with Ethan and Ama and Sarah and Wren and twelve other network members who had felt through the connection the quality of what was preparing to arrive in the Vermont garden and had understood, from the quality of the feeling, that they needed to be present when it arrived.

Eleanor was in the garden when they arrived. Of course she was. She had been in the garden since before dawn, as she was on every morning of every year, and the quality of the Vermont April morning told Lily before she pressed her palms to anything that the forty-second spring had arrived. The specific quality of the air in the Vermont garden on that April morning was different from any air quality she had encountered in the Vermont garden in any of the previous visits. Not dramatically different. Different in the specific quality of something that had been in the forward motion's winter of preparation since June of the previous year and was now, in April of the forty-second spring, expressing what the preparation had prepared.

She pressed her palms to the Vermont April soil beside Eleanor.

The forty-second spring's quality was extraordinary in a way she could not have anticipated because she had not been in a garden that had arrived at the forward motion's first spring before. She had read about it — the dissolution completing and the medium space receiving the dissolution quality and the forward motion carrying the dissolution quality in the direction of the world's own most natural expression. She had felt the forward motion beginning in the Boston garden's ninth spring. She had felt the enrichment of Eleanor's dissolution quality moving through the geological network since July.

But the forty-second spring's quality in Eleanor's Vermont garden was not the forward motion that she had been feeling since July. It was what the forward motion had been preparing for forty-two years. The forty-one springs of foundational work and the dissolution and the forward motion's winter of preparation had produced, in the forty-second spring's Vermont soil, a quality that she read for seventeen minutes and then sat back from and simply held in the quality of the foundational awareness without trying to read further because the quality was too large for reading and could only be received.

She received it. The full quality of what the forty-second spring was.

It was the world's own most natural expression.

Not the direction of it. Not the approach toward it. The quality itself, present in the Vermont April soil, in the geological foundation of the specific Vermont hill where Eleanor had been pressing her palms to the soil for forty-two years, in the forty-second spring of the gift's spring given without reservation.

Not the full world's most natural expression — not the Fez stone's one-hundred-and-twenty-million-year expression of that quality. The Vermont garden's version of it. The specific quality of the world's own most natural expression in this specific Vermont hill in this specific April morning in the forty-second year of Eleanor's work. Local. Specific. Exactly the right size for this specific corner of the world.

But real. The quality the gift had been building toward since the Saharan sea's sediment first received the gift's organizing spring. Present. In the Vermont April soil. In this specific morning.

She looked at Eleanor.

Eleanor was pressing both palms to the forty-second spring's soil with the quality she had in the garden on the mornings of the most significant arrivals — not dramatic, not performing any particular quality, simply fully present with what the soil was offering and receiving it with the full quality of sixty years of the gift's development in this specific person's specific life.

"It is here," Eleanor said. She said it quietly. Not because the saying was restrained — because the quality of what had arrived did not require volume. The world's own most natural expression, in the specific form it took in the Vermont April soil, was quiet. Present. Self-evident. The way true things were always self-evident once they had arrived.

"Yes," Lily said.

The fifteen members of the network who had come to Vermont pressed their palms to the soil in various sections of the garden and received the forty-second spring's quality in the specific form their specific gifts allowed them to receive it. Ama received the experiential quality of the world's own most natural expression and understood immediately what to do — she sealed the receiving in the Vermont garden's soil itself, not for the archive, for the garden. The garden received what had arrived in it and held it the way the Ghana sanctuary held the first convergent's restoration quality. The Vermont garden, in the forty-second spring, held the world's own most natural expression as its own nature.

The chain had done it. Forty-two years of Eleanor's spring given without reservation. The dissolution. The medium space. The forward motion. The forty-second spring. And in the forty-second spring, the arrival of what the gift had always been building toward, in the specific corner of the world where the specific convergent had given the most consistently and most completely.

Lily thought about the first convergent pressing her palms to the Fez stone one hundred and twenty million years into the geological record and feeling the world's own most natural expression in the specific form that one hundred and twenty million years of the gift's organizing spring had produced in that specific geological formation. She thought about the first convergent understanding what the quality meant and building the seven spaces and the chain to produce that quality through the human-mediated gift's spring in the world's gardens and buildings and communities.

She thought: the first convergent saw this April morning in the Vermont garden four thousand years ago when she pressed her palms to the Fez stone. She saw it and she built toward it. She trusted the chain to produce it.

She thought: the chain produced it.

She thought: of course it did. The chain does not break.

She pressed her palms to the Vermont April soil and felt the forty-second spring's quality — the world's own most natural expression in the specific form of this specific corner of Vermont in this specific April morning — and she was simply and completely glad.

Glad. The right word. Always the right word.