I had to step away from our makeshift camp for a while. He was playing guitar, and normally that would be great, but I know that often when I am on psychedelics, I desire nothing other than total silence. I need peace, and nature, and space to allow it to come to me unperturbed. The guitar, the voice, all of it grounds me back into my ego, pulls me back into my modern self, draws me away from the experience, and maybe this is just a weakness or a lack of experience in me, but I know that I need to take the time away and let this spirit come out of me. I almost feel like I am being dragged by my pupils to the two dead trees, the Sentries, north of camp. I am hardly even looking at the ground, though I’ve traversed it enough times to be comfortable with the little streams and hummus mounds that live beneath me. I pass the rose bush, the witch-grass, the dead log slowly getting immersed into the pond, and touch the first tree. Its bark is glowing white with an almost Tyrian purple undertone, caught by the diffuse light from above. The microfissures and bug-borne pock-marks create a wondrous mosaic, and in a moment I almost see the shapes as the tree’s eyes and lips. Beyond it are the illustrious patches of arumleaf, sprinklings of duckweed and mosquito fern, and an iridescent surface tension, teased and toyed by the endless recess that the whirlygigs are enjoying. The plantlife is leaning in, calling me to it, whispering of friendship. I keep walking and I encounter the second tree. The root of the virgin-creeper that has climbed all the way to its highest vantage is hairy, disheveled and complexly tinted. Rather than Tyrian, its bark is plum-like, with a ghostly farina. The tangles of its aerial roots are brown-orange, and the whole root is bespackled with mint-green shield lichen. Beyond… the water is as the tree. The glimmering surface is the purple; the bushes and ferns the green; the decaying trunks and tannin-rich leaf-litter the brown-orange. As above, so below. Finally, I turn to the north. Nothing restricts my view across the water to the endless Midwestern rainforest straddling the shoreline. The oaks, hickories and maples are all in tender accord, dancing a singular rhythm as the roiling winds push into them. The lightest branches in the upper canopy move briskly and fevered, the excitable youth; and the deeper, verdant core sways decorously, betraying the experience and resolve against the forces of air. Every plant wants to hold me and love me. I can’t take my vision off of this space, and yet at the edge I can see the sky, which isn’t gray anymore but a shocking sunburst from orange to blue. Triangles beget diamonds beget triangles, and they interweave as jewels into the sky. I consider not my death, or really myself. The only earthly consideration I have is of my partner, how I would give my life to let her experience this kind of euphoria. I turned away and saw the southern shore, and the canopy there formed a stark shape against all the movement: a man leaning over his wife in a deep, sensual embrace. Twain lovers. How could this be any sign other than that it is good to create a new life, and share in the splendor of existence?