par Bill Tiepelman
Echoes in Bark and Bone
The Tree That Dreamed of Flesh Long before the sky was called the sky, before even names had names, there stood a tree upon the spine of the world. Its roots burrowed into the bones of the mountains and drank from aquifers of memory. No one planted it. No one dared cut it. It was older than the seasons and wiser than the moon, and it dreamt in slow circles, age by age, century by century. One day — or perhaps it was a thousand years stitched into the shape of a moment — the tree dreamed of becoming a woman. Not just any woman, but one who remembered what the earth forgot. She would wear bark like skin, breathe wind like prayer, and carry the rustle of autumn in her voice. And so the dream unfurled into waking. She emerged from the trunk like mist from moss, her face carved from the wood itself, her hair woven from silvered root-fibers and sky-strands. She did not walk — she creaked. With every motion, her joints echoed with old wisdoms: the groan of shifting tectonics, the sigh of forgotten rain. She called herself no name, but the ravens took to calling her Myah’tah — the Woman Between Rings — and so that was what she became. The people, the few who dared to remain near the mountain spine, knew her as a story told in ash and fire. Children left offerings at her trails: feathers dipped in ochre, tiny flutes made of bone, strands of hair tied to pine needles. Not in fear — but reverence. For she was said to walk into the dreams of the dying and whisper what lies on the other side, leaving the scent of cedar and the taste of soil on the tongue of the awakened. One winter, a time when the wind gnawed like hunger and even the stars seemed brittle with cold, she was seen weeping beneath the oldest maple. Not loud. Not broken. Just a single tear that soaked into the frozen earth. That spring, a grove of fire-colored trees erupted from the spot — as if grief could be made beautiful. And from then on, whenever someone passed from the village, a new tree would grow in that grove, each with a bark that bore a faint imprint of a face. Quiet reminders that no soul ever truly vanished — only changed shape, and sang differently. But the mountain remembers everything. And mountains grow jealous of those who carry stories deeper than their stone hearts. As the world below became louder and greedier, the Woman Between Rings began to crack. Splinters appeared in her thoughts. The trees above her crown began to argue among themselves in the voice of dry leaves and snapping twigs. Something was unraveling, and the earth trembled in its knowing. And so it was that the legend of Myah’tah, the tree that dreamed of flesh, began to take root in the hearts of those willing to listen — before she would be forced to choose: remain and rot... or journey into the deepest grove, where even memory cannot follow. The Grove Where Memory Ends The path to the Grove Where Memory Ends was not marked on any map, nor did it welcome travelers who walked in flesh alone. It was a place that recoiled from language, where names turned to wind and footsteps vanished into moss. Only those who had nothing left to forget — or everything left to remember — could find it. And even then, the grove had to want you. Myah’tah’s feet cracked the earth with each step as she walked. Roots recoiled, unsure whether to yield to her or embrace her. She had been part-tree, part-woman, part-myth for so long that even the crows grew quiet as she passed beneath the bleeding canopy of autumn fire. Leaves rained in spirals, whispering in a tongue older than stone. The mountain watched, but dared not speak. It had lost its dominion over her. The stories she carried were too deep now — buried in her marrow like old seeds waiting to bloom in bone. By twilight, the grove found her. Not in welcome, but recognition. It had been waiting. The Grove Where Memory Ends was not a single place but a convergence: of forgotten dreams, unborn futures, and everything the world had tried to silence. Trees twisted in slow agony, bark splitting to reveal glimpses of lost souls—eyes peering from rings of age, mouths stretched open in silent song. Time did not pass here; it paused to listen. At the heart of the grove stood the Memory Tree, blackened with sorrow but vibrant with an eerie luminescence that pulsed like a heartbeat. Its trunk was etched with the glyphs of a thousand languages, none spoken aloud in centuries. And at its base was a hollow, gaping like a mouth awaiting confession. Myah’tah did not hesitate. She removed the feathers from her hair, untied the sinew cords that bound her braids, and laid them before the hollow like relics. Each feather whispered as it touched the soil, telling a story of a child once comforted, a village once warned, a death once honored. They were more than decorations. They were her memories, woven in ritual and rain. She stepped forward. The bark of her legs cracked, flaked, and fell away in dark spirals. Her skin no longer obeyed the form of a woman; it stretched and rippled like sap boiling beneath the surface. Her fingers grew long and rootlike. Her mouth receded. And when she touched the hollow with what remained of her hand, the grove exhaled. All at once, she saw it — not with eyes, but with the marrow of what she had been: The first fire, lit by trembling hands in a cave painted with blood and ochre, watched over by a woman who sang to the smoke so it would rise straight. The wailing of mothers whose sons were lost in battle, their laments turned into wind that now howled through the canyons at night. The ceremony where a child was turned away for hearing the trees speak too clearly — and the silent rage that grew into wildflowers at her feet. And a time that never happened — where no forest burned, no tribe scattered, no names were stolen — a world preserved in a single breath held between the beats of her bark-carved chest. Myah’tah wept. But her tears were not water. They were amber — fossilized moments she had carried longer than she knew. One by one, they fell and sank into the roots of the Memory Tree. And as they were absorbed, the tree began to change. Slowly, agonizingly, it twisted and thickened, cracking open like a chrysalis. From its center emerged a sapling — young, pulsing, tender — but bearing Myah’tah’s eyes. She stepped back — or tried to. But her legs had rooted. Her voice was now only wind. Her hands stretched toward the sky and split into branches. And then, stillness. The Woman Between Rings was no longer a woman. She had become the story itself. Seasons passed. People returned to the mountain. They built altars. They carved totems. They came not to worship — but to remember. Children with second sight swore the leaves on her branches whispered dreams in their sleep. Lovers came to ask the tree if their bond would last, and the leaves would either tremble or fall. No one cut the tree. No one even touched it. They simply sat, breathed, and listened. Because now, the tree held every story the mountain tried to erase. Every name that was renamed. Every woman who refused to be quiet. Every soul who chose memory over survival. And on rare nights — those whispering-edge-of-autumn nights when the moon bled red — an old voice would rise from the leaves, half bark, half breath, and ask a question that would lodge in the listener’s chest for the rest of their life: “Will you remember… or will you vanish?” The Voice That Grew From Ash Time lost its grip in the grove. The people who came did not age while near the tree, or perhaps they did in ways that didn’t show on their skin. Children returned home with silver streaks in their hair and dreams too large for language. Elders who had long forgotten their own names would sit beneath Myah’tah’s branches and, with trembling fingers, recall lullabies from lifetimes ago. No one knew how long she had stood rooted — a century, perhaps more. But she was no longer called a legend. She was simply called the Tree-Who-Knows. Then came the fires. They didn’t start in the mountains. They started in the veins of men. Men in steel machines who spoke in graphs and numbers and progress. Men who looked at the land and saw contracts instead of stories. They came not to pray, but to pave. Not to listen, but to map. The groves were “untapped.” The earth was “underutilized.” Even the bones of the mountains were “mineral-rich.” And so, the digging began. It started with trees falling outside the sacred perimeter — “just to make room,” they said. But the grove shuddered. Birds vanished. The soil turned to silence. Then they came for the trees near the Memory Grove itself. Old-growth forests, gnarled with age and soul, were flattened in weeks. But they could not touch the Tree-Who-Knows. Not yet. It was the one anomaly — marked on their maps as “unremovable.” Chainsaws dulled. Bulldozers stalled. Drones malfunctioned overhead. Still, they persisted. One day, a new crew was brought in. One without belief, without reverence, and armed with fire. The first flame licked the edge of the Grove Where Memory Ends at dusk. By midnight, the sky itself seemed to scream. And that was when the voice returned. It did not come from Myah’tah’s branches, nor from the hollow beneath her roots. It came from the sapling that had once grown from her sorrow — now a towering second tree, standing close, too close, too proud for its years. It had been quiet until then, a witness. But as flames encroached and smoke coiled through the canopy, it shuddered — and spoke. The voice was not a sound, but a pressure. A thrum in the bone. A knowing in the gut. It called to the dreamers, to the sensitive, to the mad and the mothers. And they came. From nearby villages and far-off cities, from reservations and forests and places so lost to time that they were only remembered in breath, they came. Not as an army — but as a memory. They brought water and song, ash and offerings. They formed a ring around the grove and did not speak. Instead, they hummed. A hum older than language. A vibration that stirred the ground and made even the machines hesitate. And in the middle of that hum, Myah’tah awakened. Her bark split — not in pain, but in rebirth. From her trunk flowed sap like blood, amber-rich and thick with symbols. Her branches rose higher than before, splitting clouds. Her face reformed — the same as it once was, but now illuminated from within, as if firelight and moonlight had made love in her core. She was no longer bound by the laws of nature or story. She was legend manifest — memory given form. She was not just the Tree-Who-Knows. She was the Tree-Who-Remembers-Everything. And with her awakening came change. The fires halted — not by rain, but by will. Flames curled backward, smoke bent away. The men in machines felt their hearts seize — not from fear, but recognition. Each one saw, just for a second, the face of someone they had lost: a grandmother, a sister, a lover, a self. And they turned away, unable to face what they had tried to erase. In the days that followed, the mountain grew again. Not in size, but in soul. Trees once fallen re-rooted themselves. Flowers bloomed in colors no eye had seen in centuries. Animals returned — even the ones spoken of only in legend. The grove became a pilgrimage site, not for religion, but for remembering. Artists, healers, warriors, and wanderers all came to sit, not at the foot of Myah’tah, but among her roots — for she now stretched across miles. Her branches braided with other trees, whispering through entire ecosystems. And the sapling — now a tree of its own — had birthed a seed. A child was born beneath the canopy during the first spring after the fire. A girl, quiet as dusk, with bark along her back and silver in her hair. Her eyes held galaxies, and when she laughed, the birds followed her voice. She did not speak until the age of five, when she placed her hand on the Tree-Who-Remembers and whispered: “I remember being you.” She would go on to plant forests with her footsteps, to restore languages with her breath, and to teach the world that memory was not a thing kept in books — but in bark, in bone, in breath. Her name was never given. Like Myah’tah, she became a story, not a statue. A feeling, not a figure. And though her flesh was young, her soul was old — old as the first fire. Old as the dream of a tree who once longed to become a woman. And thus, the circle closed. Not in silence. But in song. A song that echoes still — in forests, in whispers, in the lines of your own palm — if you dare to listen. Because some legends do not end. They grow. Bring the legend home. If the story of Echoes in Bark and Bone stirred something ancient in you — if it whispered truths you’ve always known but never spoken — you can carry that spirit into your own space. This evocative artwork is available as a Canvas Print for sacred walls, a Wood Print etched in natural grain, a Fleece Blanket for dream-wrapped nights, or a woven Tapestry that hums softly with ancestral echoes. Each piece is more than decor — it’s a portal. A branch in your own home that leads back to the grove, to memory, to her. Let it root in your space, and listen closely. The tree still speaks.
