Hide and Seek

Monoflora: Part Eight

Behind the beauty of the moon is the moonmaker.

—Rumi

Tonight marks the New Moon.

It is a pause in the sky when darkness swallows the faintest crescent.

I resist the urge to light my lamps early, knowing the moon's absence is nothing to fear.

There is wisdom in this rhythm of rest and return.

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-From Greta Anderson's Nature Journal,

Vaasa, Finland, 1893

For five more days,

Annu carried the choice like a prayer, walking the forest paths in quiet meditation. Her steps kept time with word and breath.

On the night of the New Moon as sunset deepened into darkness, she came to the grove where Olli the Oak, stood rooted. She knelt beside him in the silence.

Annu’s heart was divided.

“Olli, rakkani, I cannot bear to abandon you forever, but my hands have work to do. There must be another way to bridge this distance between bark and flesh.”

The wind blew through his leaves. Only this, and the distant call of an owl to its mate across the blue veil of the evening. She leaned down closer to the earth and saw something move, raising its delicate head like a flower testing the air. It was a pale bloom that seemed to be lit from within. Like vines that climb towards sunlight, life finds its way through the smallest doors.

Underground, we will meet at a vanishing place,

some night in a dream where the ghost flowers sleep.

“Yes,” she said. “I understand now.”

Annu allowed the change to begin in her fingertips, becoming pale as moon-water. Xylem pulsed in her veins. Light gathered beneath her skin spreading through her arms and her torso. Her hair flowed silver-white like petals that needed no sun.

She became beautiful in a way that was electric and impossible—neither fully plant, nor fully woman—a being the forest had dreamed into existence. Still herself. Still human. But also, Monotropa uniflora, a ghost flower drawing life through the finest filaments connecting all growing things, and filled with wild intelligence.

For one night, Olli and Annu were together again, beyond every barrier that separates plant from flesh. His consciousness: a towering pillar reaching toward sky. Her awareness: a small luminous bell, translucent and glowing. Together, they shared a feast through mycelial fibers that fanned out beneath the carpet of leaves between them.

The echo of their merry laughter sounded across time—beloved to beloved, essence to essence—like the conversation among Beech trees when leaves turn copper across a thousand forests.

Annu returned to human form with the sunrise, but the knowing remained threaded through her cells. Love created what had not existed before—connections made from the alchemy of water letting go of hydrogen, from the slow respiration of a tree, and the fierce tenderness of what blooms in darkness.

By day, she was still the village healer, tending to her neighbors with skillful hands. She moved through hours caught-up in her work of caring and mending, all the while comforted in the knowledge that she would return to Olli again very soon.

On New Moon nights, she became a ghost flower, rising beside her Oak-beloved to receive what he offered through his gathering of sunlight. He fed her with sugar made from the green of their eternal bond. And every twenty-eight days, she was at peace, undivided—proof that some hearts refuse to be diminished by impossible choices.

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In the oldest forests, you might still find ghost flowers—translucent and glowing like captured moonlight, growing beside ancient trees.

Sometimes, when he calls her name through the wind in his leaves, she rises from the forest floor with the same joy she felt when they were children playing in these woods.

Their eternal game of hide and seek.

Here I am! she sings, bursting forth

with childhood’s pure delight.

Olli-olli-oxen-free!

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The End

⌘

For Anders Anderson & Greta Lisa Johnson

m. 1885 - 1905

Previous chapters: Part One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven

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Photo One: A hazy moon glows through branches in my backyard.

Photo Two: Monotropa uniflora, Brumley Forest Nature Preserve, Hillsborough, NC

Photo Three: Beech trees, Johnston Mill Nature Preserve, Chapel Hill, NC

Photo Four: A much less common pink variety of Monotropa uniflora, Johnston Mill Nature Preserve, Chapel Hill, NC

Video: Taken at the end of my hike on May 25th, 2025. I was overjoyed to find ghost flowers growing here, near my favorite pair of gemels at Johnston Mill Nature Preserve, Chapel Hill, NC