ramayana · Day 143 · Week 21
Every Leaf
Some loves are too large for one word and too quiet for many — your body is writing one such love into every cell tonight.
If the forest will not stop being a forest, then every leaf will say His name.
After the great war was over and Rama had returned to Ayodhya, after the crown had been set on his head and the city had wept and laughed and lit lamps it had thought it would never light again, Hanuman could not settle. He sat in the corner of the court. He stood at the window. He walked the gardens. Everywhere he went, his heart was too full and his hands were too empty.
One morning he took a small reed and a pot of ink and he walked out of the city, past the river, into the forest where no one would call him. He sat under the first tree. He pulled down one leaf. He wrote on it, in small careful letters, the name Rama. He let the leaf go. The wind took it.