The Sorrow Keeper

There was once a girl, a girl who walked in the ways she found woven into the world around her. These were the ways of the spring grass before it has been trampled, the ways known only to the ants and the deer, the ways that seem always to find the oldest trees. 

One day the girl followed these paths to a city, a small city, but a marvelous one. It had high white walls and its houses and streets mounted upward to a hilltop where the girl could see beautiful trees watching over the people beneath them. 

The girl came to the city gates. The guards were kind and welcomed her and told her she could stay as long as she liked, but on one condition- she must surrender her sorrows before entering, for the city held no sadness or regrets. The city was home to the gladness trees, which watered the city from above with joy and light. No sorrows were allowed in the presence of the trees.  

The girl was sad, for she wanted to enter the beautiful city, and to walk its streets, and to laugh with its people, and to sit beneath the gladness trees, but she carried many sorrows, and they were dear to her. They were the remembrances of the many paths she had walked and the people she had walked with. They were the bees’ nests and the broken sticks and the hills that ended in the clouds. They were the rivers and the bright sun and the deer in the wheat fields that were sorrows simply because the girl was no longer with them. They were the people who had walked with her but did so no longer. 

She sat outside the city for many days considering whether or not to enter. At last she dug a shallow hole and into it she laid the wooden box where she kept the collected wind and stars and warm eddies of her sorrows. She opened it slowly, looked at them one last time, then covered over the box with the stalks of grass which had offered themselves to her for that purpose. 

When she entered the city she found it to be as marvelous as it had seemed. The houses were full of light and laughter and the shops sold whatever was beautiful and good and could be grown or crafted by the imagination of the people there. The hill and the gladness trees were as wonderful as she had hoped. The girl stayed for many days, then many weeks, until she could not remember how long she had lived there. 

One autumn day as she read with her back against one of the gladness trees, an acorn fell down into her lap. It was a perfect acorn, all gold and dark red. The girl wondered at the acorn in its perfection, for it reflected the soft light and the shadows and the cold rumors in the air the way a leaf of living green could not. The girl’s memory reached back to her box buried outside the city and she deeply wished to place the acorn alongside the winds and the cold rains and the roots in the hard earth which she held in the box.   

So that night the girl left the city, for the first time since her arrival, and she searched for the place where she had buried her box. When she found it she carefully opened it and placed the acorn inside, but then she paused, captivated by the beauty of the sorrows there before her. Without thinking, she took a few, tucking them into her pocket, and returned to the city.  

Over the following days the girl would sometimes reach into her pocket, and feel the sorrows there. She would run them through her fingers, feeling how some were rough and some were soft, how some would catch on the lining of her pocket or cut her hand, and how some were hard to feel at all, seeming always to be just beyond her rummaging fingers. 

One evening the girl was on the hill with the gladness trees and she took out one of the small sorrows, to see what it would look like in the fading light, and it was just as she remembered. It was small, not much to look at, but it carried inside it all that swam through the stars as they began to emerge over her head. She stared at it so intently that she did not notice a woman come and stand next to her. The woman gazed at the sorrow and said nothing, but closed her eyes and slowly moved her hands, one to rest on the girl’s shoulders, and one to reach out above her toward the trees. The girl asked the woman why she did this. The woman shared quietly that seeing a sorrow up close reminded her that no gladness tree sapling had appeared in many years. The acorns fell from the trees, but they did not grow. 

After this the girl came each night to the hill and each time she would hold a sorrow in her upturned hand, sharing its light with the trees and the open sky. Sometimes no one came, but most nights she would have a visitor, or sometimes two, who would sit with her and watch and wait and breathe in the breath of the grass and the trees. 

Finally the night came which the girl had known would come. The city guards approached and asked if she had brought a sorrow into the city. She said she had, and she showed them what she carried in her pockets. The guards bowed their heads and escorted her down the hill and through the city gates. She was left outside, and the gates shut silently behind her. 

The loss of the city and its people and the trees was a new sadness. She could feel it finding its way through her, seeking the other sorrows that it knew must be there. It was cold and whispered in her heart that the world is not beautiful. The girl let it make its way up and down and through the many tunnels of herself. At last she took the sorrow and held it out into the light as the sun rose over the city. It rested in the air of the morning and everything which had come and gone- the laughter and the bright stone and the crafted things in the marketplace and the gatherings on the hill, and the sorrow admitted that the world was still beautiful.

The girl took the new sorrow, and the old ones she had with her, and she found the box. The acorn was there on top, just as she had left it. As she knelt on the ground and considered how she might again make her way into the many paths of the world, her heart stumbled on a new thought which had never before passed through her. She tenderly dug a small hole, and into the hole she put the sorrow of leaving the city. Nestled next to it she placed the acorn of the gladness tree. She covered them over with the warm native soil of that place, and then waited. 

She waited a long time. The sun and moon came and went. The sun sent its warmth and the moon sent its silent presence, like a friend sitting patiently with her. For many months nothing happened, but the girl continued to water and tend the space where she had planted the acorn, for she could feel the sorrow there was still alive. At last a tiny plant broke through the soil. It looked like any other plant at first, but as the leaves emerged and grew the girl’s heart leapt to see it was a tiny gladness tree. The leaves unfurled into new colors, blue and purple and even silvery white, colors different from any other gladness tree. The girl tended the tree for many months until she was sure it was strong enough to grow on its own. 

The people of the city came to wonder at the tree and to ask how it came to grow here. The girl shared that she had planted one of her own sorrows with an acorn. They asked her to stay and show them, but the girl knew it was time for her to follow again the ways laid down for her by the ants in their work, and the deer as they played, and the old trees who had seen the sun when it was a pure pale yellow in the days before the moon came. 

And so she left.  She chose a path, a very faint one, that ran into the mountains she had seen from the city but had never visited. She carried with her the box she had always had, but also a tender leaf and a tiny new acorn from the tree that was growing outside the city.