"beautiful like the earth"

I've been noticing that the flowers sense that spring has arrived. It's always a hopeful sight, and makes me aware again of the insistent life in growing things.

So I was in the right mood this morning to really enjoy the short story that Heather has been revising. Here's an excerpt (the main character here is Eve in the garden of Eden; "Ya" is her name for God):

I stood by the water feeling the drops slide off my skin, feeling the sun's light calling them into the air, and looked. In the water I could see the sky and the trees, but moving, always moving, and the light moved so quickly on it, so joyfully, like his eyes on my face, that it made me want to do something. To move my feet on the earth as the light moves on the water, move my hands in the air as the swallows move in the sky. To dance.

When he came to the water I showed him. I showed him, and the water ran down his cheeks and the sun danced on it, and he was beautiful. He said I was beautiful like the sky and the leaves in the wind and the light on the water, but more. Then he said “more” again, and then again, and I kissed him.

He is beautiful like the earth. When he lies asleep on it I don't see a man asleep on the earth, I see the earth sleeping, deep and rich and brown, dreaming of the roots of trees reaching down like fingers. His fingers hold the earth when he sleeps, and I run my fingers through his hair, thick as grass and black as the earth and the sky when the sun is gone.

He does not see me then; I see him and he does not see me. The first time I woke in the night and found him sleeping there was a strange feeling in my chest, as if a hand inside was clasping itself too tight. I looked at him and he was not-there. Beside him there was a vine climbing a tree, a vine with tiny white flowers that have red in their depths; but now under the black starred sky the flowers too were not-there. Closed like a closed hand, pointed and white: no red, the depths hidden. And in his face that lay just under them there was no him, his mouth and his eyes were closed and he did not see me nor know I was there; his depths were hidden like the red heart of the flowers. I thought that if I looked away and then looked back he would be not there at all. He would dissolve and fall back into earth, and I would be left alone in the blackness of the sky.

It happened in the time it takes a bird to fly from one tree to another, or an otter to slide down the brown bank into the water. I woke, and looked, and the hand tightened in my chest, and then a bird called three high short calls that were like three stars, and I looked up. The shadow of wings over the river; the bird called again, and the stars danced on the dark smooth skin of the river, and I remembered that Ya saw us both.