After the keeper returned from the pathless valley, she began to see relations everywhere.
At first they seemed obvious.
The river flowed around the stones.
The roots of the trees entered the earth.
Birds moved through the air.
Clouds crossed the mountains.
Everything appeared to be connected to everything else.
But the keeper was not satisfied.
She had learned enough to know that saying everything was connected to everything did not yet explain very much.
She wanted to know something more difficult.
If relations made things possible, could a thing exist without them?
So she decided to perform an experiment.
She chose the oldest tree in the forest.
It stood on a hill above the village, its branches reaching wide over the grass.
The villagers called it the Old Tree.
Children played beneath it.
Travellers rested in its shade.
Birds nested in its branches.
Its roots held the hillside together.
The keeper stood before it and said:
"I want to know what you are."
The tree, being a tree, did not answer.
The keeper began removing its relations one by one.
First she imagined the tree without the soil.
She pictured its roots hanging in empty space.
The tree remained in her imagination.
But it could no longer draw water.
Its roots could no longer hold the earth.
Its trunk could no longer receive what the ground provided.
She tried again.
"Still a tree," she said.
Then she imagined the tree without the air.
No wind moved its leaves.
No air surrounded its branches.
No exchange took place across its surface.
The tree remained.
Or so she thought.
Then she imagined it without light.
No warmth.
No changing angle of the sun.
No distinction between morning and evening.
No source from which its leaves could make what the tree required to grow.
The tree became strangely still.
She imagined it without the seasons.
No winter.
No spring.
No summer.
No autumn.
The tree had no history of growth.
No flowering.
No shedding.
No dormancy.
She imagined it without insects.
Without birds.
Without fungi.
Without the creatures that carried things to it and from it.
She imagined it without rain.
Without gravity.
Without the changing temperature of the air.
Without the hillside.
Without the forest around it.
Without the distinction between inside and outside.
Without anything against which its boundary could be maintained.
At last she stopped.
She looked at the tree.
It was still there.
But she could no longer tell what she meant by there.
She sat beneath it.
The old painter found her there.
"You look troubled."
"I tried to find the tree itself."
"And?"
"I removed everything that was related to it."
"And what happened?"
She pointed upward.
"I don't know whether anything was left."
The painter smiled.
"Perhaps you were looking for the wrong thing."
She frowned.
"I thought the tree existed first, and then entered into relations."
"Does it?"
"That is what I am trying to discover."
The painter picked up a fallen leaf.
"Is this part of the tree?"
"Yes."
He placed it on the ground.
"Now?"
She hesitated.
"Yes."
He pointed to a leaf still attached to a branch.
"What makes that leaf part of the tree?"
"The connection."
"Then the relation matters."
"Yes."
He pointed to the roots.
"What makes those roots part of the tree?"
"Their relation to the trunk."
"And the trunk?"
"The branches."
"And the branches?"
"The leaves."
He looked towards the earth.
"And the roots?"
She understood.
"The soil."
"And the soil?"
She looked puzzled.
"The roots change it."
"Yes."
"And the tree changes the soil."
"Yes."
They stood silently beneath the branches.
The keeper looked upward.
The tree was not a thing sitting inside a network of relations.
It was a pattern sustained by them.
Its roots were not merely attached to the soil.
They lived through their relation to it.
Its leaves were not merely exposed to light and air.
Their activity depended upon those relations.
Its growth was not merely something that happened to the tree.
Growth was part of how the tree remained the tree.
The keeper thought of the stone.
She remembered the river flowing around it.
The stone had persisted through change.
But now she saw that its persistence was also relational.
The river wore it.
The earth supported it.
Rain altered it.
Light revealed it.
Animals moved around it.
People recognised it.
Its identity was not hidden somewhere inside the stone like a secret name.
It was sustained across a pattern of relations.
She looked at the Old Tree.
"Then a thing is not what remains when we remove its relations."
The painter nodded.
"It is what remains through them."
She smiled.
"That sounds almost like the stone."
"It is."
They began walking through the forest.
The keeper now saw things differently.
She saw that a bird was not simply an object that happened to fly.
Its body was maintained through its relation to air, food, temperature, gravity, other birds, predators, seasons.
A river was not merely water moving through a channel.
Its identity depended upon a pattern involving rain, gravity, earth, banks, tributaries, evaporation, and the landscape through which it flowed.
Even the forest was not simply a collection of trees.
It was a stability achieved through relations among trees, soil, water, fungi, insects, animals, light, and weather.
Nothing had become less real.
Everything had become more interesting.
Then the keeper remembered the planet.
She had once thought of a planet as something that existed in space and happened to move.
Now she wondered.
What made it a planet?
Its mass.
Its motion.
Its orbit.
Its relation to the star.
Its gravitational interactions.
Its position within a larger system.
Suppose these relations changed enough.
Would the planet remain the same kind of thing?
Perhaps.
But perhaps not.
The question was no longer simply what the planet was.
It was what pattern of relations allowed it to count as what it was.
The keeper stopped beneath the trees.
"We have been putting the relation in the wrong place."
The painter looked at her.
"How so?"
"We thought there was first a thing."
She picked up a stone.
"Then relations happened to it."
She placed the stone back on the ground.
"But perhaps it is often the other way around."
She looked at the forest.
"Relations hold."
She looked at the tree.
"A pattern becomes stable."
She looked at the stone.
"And within that stability, a thing appears."
The painter nodded.
"Then the thing is not dissolved into relations."
"No."
"The tree remains a tree."
"Yes."
"The stone remains a stone."
"Yes."
"The planet remains a planet."
"Yes."
"But their being what they are is not independent of the relations through which they persist."
The keeper smiled.
"Exactly."
They continued walking.
At the edge of the forest they came upon a young tree.
It was barely taller than the keeper's shoulder.
Its trunk was thin.
Its branches were few.
Its roots were still shallow.
"Is this the same kind of thing as the Old Tree?" asked the painter.
"Yes."
"Why?"
The keeper looked carefully.
It was not because the two trees had the same size.
Nor the same shape.
Nor the same number of branches.
Nor the same age.
They were alike because a pattern of relations was already holding.
The young tree was becoming the kind of stability that the old tree had become.
The keeper suddenly saw something she had never quite seen before.
A thing did not have to be a finished object.
It could be a way of holding together.
A pattern could endure while its material changed.
A relation could alter while the larger pattern persisted.
Growth could occur without destroying identity.
Change could be part of continuity.
The thing was not the opposite of becoming.
It was a particular achievement within becoming.
The keeper returned to the Old Tree.
She placed her hand upon its trunk.
Beneath her palm, the tree was alive with movement.
Water travelled upward.
Sap moved.
Cells changed.
The bark expanded.
Roots grew deeper.
Leaves exchanged substances with the air.
The tree stood still.
And yet almost nothing within it was still.
She laughed.
"The tree is standing."
"Yes."
"But it is also becoming."
"Yes."
"And its standing depends upon its becoming."
The painter smiled.
"Now you are seeing the tree."
The keeper looked up into the branches.
She no longer saw a solid object occupying a place in the forest.
She saw a stability.
A remarkable, temporary, persistent stability.
Something held together while continually changing.
Something that existed through relations rather than apart from them.
She thought of her maps.
They had drawn things as if they were islands.
Perhaps they should have drawn the currents between them.
But then she realised that even this was not quite right.
The currents were not merely between the islands.
They helped make the islands what they were.
The relation was already working behind the thing.
And when the relation held strongly enough, something appeared stable enough to be called a thing.
The keeper closed her eyes.
For a moment she imagined the world without things.
There was no empty void.
There was movement.
Exchange.
Difference.
Continuity.
Constraint.
Patterns forming and dissolving.
Some holding for moments.
Some for years.
Some for ages.
And within those patterns, things becoming recognisable.
She opened her eyes.
The Old Tree stood before her.
She smiled.
It had not become less of a tree.
It had become more fully one.
Not because it stood apart from the world.
But because, within the ceaseless movement of the world, enough relations held for a pattern to endure.
The keeper understood at last.
A thing was not what remained after the relations had been removed.
A thing was what the relations allowed to remain.
And perhaps that was why the world seemed so solid.
We noticed the stability.
We forgot the becoming.
We saw the tree.
We forgot the soil, the water, the air, the light, the seasons, the roots, the leaves, the fungi, the insects, the gravity, the countless exchanges through which the tree continued to be a tree.
We saw the thing.
And behind it, almost invisible, the relations were working.
The keeper looked towards the forest.
The trees stood quietly in the evening light.
But now their stillness seemed miraculous.
For beneath every still thing, something was moving.
And beneath every stable form, something was holding.
She took out her map.
Then, for the first time, she drew no objects at all.
She drew lines.
Not boundaries.
Not roads.
Not paths.
Relations.
She drew them crossing.
Supporting.
Converging.
Separating.
Returning.
And as she drew, something strange happened.
The lines began to gather into shapes.
The shapes became patterns.
The patterns became things.
The keeper lowered her pencil.
She understood.
Perhaps this was how the world had always been.
Not a collection of finished things waiting to enter into relation.
But a field of relations in which patterns could achieve stability.
And whenever a pattern held long enough, strongly enough, coherently enough—
a thing appeared.
Not outside becoming.
A stability within it.
The keeper looked once more at the Old Tree.
Then she whispered:
"Perhaps the world does not contain things."
The painter stood beside her.
"No?"
"Perhaps the world contains ways for things to hold."
And the evening wind moved through the branches.
The tree remained.
The leaves moved.
The roots held.
The seasons turned.
And the thing called the tree continued—not by escaping becoming,
but by becoming, again and again, the same kind of thing.
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