The pink roses climbed the old arbor without apology, and a man who stood before them long enough would begin to feel something uncomfortable stirring beneath his ribs, that slow and unwelcome recognition that he was not only the one doing the looking. Nature has eyes of its own kind. Not the soft animal eyes of sympathy or the forgiving eyes of someone who loves you, but something far older and without the slightest trace of sentiment. The flowers did not care whether you understood them or whether you went home changed or whether you went home at all. They bloomed because blooming was the only answer they had ever needed to give, and they had been giving it long before there was anyone standing in the garden with his hands in his pockets and his heart full of unasked questions.

That is the thing we forgot to ask. We stood among the green and the pink and the white and we saw ourselves reflected back, our longing, our brief and desperate beauty, our ancient tendency to reach toward whatever light we could find, and we called that seeing wisdom. We decided nature was holding up a mirror as a kind of gift to us, a courtesy extended to the most complicated creatures in the garden. But the roses were not being courteous. They were bearing witness to something they had watched for a very long time. And if a man stayed quiet long enough, and honest enough, which are harder than they sound and almost never happen at the same time, he might begin to suspect that what nature saw staring back at it was not a man of accomplishment or failure or good intentions. It saw something that had forgotten it already belonged here, the way the vine belongs to the arbor, not because it was told to, but because belonging was always the only truth there was.