Paul awoke one afternoon at the foot of an old tree. He had sat down in the shade for only a moments rest but the breeze was so sweet, and the air so fresh that when he heard the trickle of water from the nearby brook, his lids lowered and he dozed. When his eyes opened and he rediscovered the beautiful day, he looked around with a new found sense of contentment that he had never known before. It was as if he understood the intricacies of the world, if only on a basic level. It was then that the tiniest of bugs crawled up on to Paul's naked toe.

"Hullo, there," he whispered to the ant. His eye followed where he imagined the ant's path would have been, down his foot and onto a blade of grass. Then he thought of how a single blade of grass was part of an entire network of blades all weaving their roots into the ground. The ground was what connected everything to everything. That was what we all had in common.

Paul decided to follow the ground and see where it would take him. He journeyed over sand and stream, hillside and valley. There were stones and gravel and fields of wild flowers. Paul walked along, with sharp eyes, thinking to himself about how wonderful it was that everything was so connected. "Even under the water," he thought, "the ground holds it all together."

Paul found a path that led through a forest and smiled at how the trees sprung from the ground just as the bushes, the flowers, and the grass did. "How wonderful of the ground, to hold everything together like it does," he thought. But it was there, at that moment, that Paul stopped short of his step and his smile faded. He wondered, why was it that he was not so well rooted into the ground? Why was he not a part of this grand scheme?

Paul ran back to his house and dug a small hole with his shovel. He buried one foot into the dirt. How wonderful it felt; how cool and secure his foot was under the ground. He decided that just a foot wouldn't be enough. Paul wanted to be completely rooted in the ground just like the trees and bushes. He pulled up his foot and spent the rest of the day digging. Paul dug a hole big enough to fit his whole self in. He jumped happily down in and wriggled his naked toes with the dirt. In the moonlight he pulled handfuls of dirt back to fill in the extra space around him.

Paul spent the last of his days buried to the waist in his yard. When he passed on his body sunk farther in and disappeared into the Earth. Every summer that followed a red rose bush would bloom on that spot of earth, it's roots deeply embedded into the ground. (For Matt)