Right now I’m sitting between stops, watching one little Maple leaf.
The leaf is dancing and twisting like a whirling Dervish, embattled by the winds of the Altamont Pass. One little leaf against the mountain, clinging tightly to a branch as thin as a reed, fluttering like the wings of a sparrow. The mountain bellows and boasts, with winds of arrogance and pride, ignorant of the constant struggle in its shadow. The leaf quivers, its verdant hues betrayed by its soft golden underside, teasing flashes of yellow as the hard, crisp light of the California sun bears down upon it. Its veins as tiny as a dragonfly’s tongue, it is immovable, never letting go, with tiny green fist of stem grasped to the branch of community, belonging, and solidarity. One leaf, joined to hundreds, with roots intertwined to more communities, a city of trees, a parliament of forests, a revolution of defiant branches, refusing to let the mountain break them. Its shadow looms large, threatening, imposing, seemingly unstoppable, backed by a range built on a broken bedrock of corruption, one rally cry, one tremor of truth away from cataclysmic annihilation.
And still, they dance.