He worked in the morning, when dew still clung to the spiderwebs; at noon, when the light grew almost palpable; in the evening, when the shadows lay down like tired animals. His confidence grew.
He learned: prune the shoot here, and it would bear more fruit there; turn the stream a little to the left, and the mossy stone would cease to rot. His hands were growing skilled. At times he acted first and only afterward caught the approving silence — or a faint, barely perceptible sigh that might have been assent and might have been regret. He could not always tell them apart.
She was often near, feeling the same rhythm, but differently. She did not change the course of the stream — she sought the one stone without which the water sang more purely. She did not cut the shoots — her fingers found the one point on the stem where the cut would become not a wound but a request to grow otherwise. Their labor was a dialogue, but of late he worked more and more often without pausing for breath, without meeting her understanding gaze.
One day he saw the cypress.
The tree grew at the edge of the clearing, in a hollow where cold mist stood in the mornings. It was slender, but somehow constrained. Its branches reached upward too timidly, as though afraid of their own height. He came near, laid his palm on the rough bark. The tree shuddered.
“It is dark for it here,” he said aloud. He waited for an answer. From the scent of the resin, from the whisper of the needles. No answer came. There was only the stillness of waiting.
“It needs light,” he went on, persuading himself. “It is suffocating in this hollow.”
The chapter goes on in the book.