There is a moment in Princess Mononoke
when the forest holds its breath—
and I held mine with it.

The trees hush.
The moss listens.
The air becomes velvet and still.

And then—
he appears.

Not a boy, not a beast,
but something else.
Antlers crowned like prayers made stone,
limbs moving with the silence of wind through silk,
eyes like midnight wells where starlight grieves.

The Spirit of the Forest.

I was watching the last of the sacred
being hunted by the machine.

Those were his eyes.

Not just deer eyes.
Not animal eyes.
But eyes that had seen the other side.

Eyes not made for fluorescent rooms
where profit margins masquerade as progress,
but to witness
the golden mean spiraling through leaves,
the sacred geometry hiding in pinecones,
the galaxies wheeling in puddles.

My grandmother's voice returns to me,
whispering Tagore's golden deer—
Lagai chhokhe dha dha—
dazzling to the eyes,
too beautiful to hold, too sacred to cage.
She knew, even then,
that some children come as messengers,
bearing light too bright
for this world's small rooms,
too wild for its budget sheets.

Too beautiful to hold.

My son came to me with those eyes.
Not as a lesson, but as truth embodied.
As prophecy made flesh.
A walking reminder that wonder
still walks among us.

They tried to name him.
Label him.
Reduce him to syllables on reports,
numbers on scales,
deficits in neat columns.

But you cannot place a price tag on what is celestial.
You cannot budget for the infinite.
You cannot cut costs on the cosmos
living inside a seven-year-old
who sees fractals in his cereal
and hears the music of the spheres
in the hum of the refrigerator.

He was not neurodivergent.
He was numinous.
A nature god in dinosaur pajamas.

And I followed him.
Oh, how I followed—
through the bramble, through the rainlight,
through those sterile waiting rooms
where fluorescent lights buzz like mechanical wasps
and strangers speak in acronyms
about the boy who maps constellations
on his bedroom ceiling.

In one courthouse hallway,
while lawyers debated his accommodations—
fifteen minutes of sensory breaks, maximum—
he pressed his palm against the window
and whispered to the birds outside.
They stopped mid-flight,
hovering like question marks
in the autumn air,
as if even they understood
that some conversations
cannot be billed by the hour.

Even the sparrows knew
what the budget committee could not see.

I followed him
because he was the Deer.

The Golden One.
The Seer.
The last sacred thing
in a world that measures worth
in productivity metrics.

And in chasing him—
in watching him dart just beyond the clearing,
in being dazzled, confused, awestruck, exhausted—
I discovered what every mystic, every mother, every artist eventually finds:

He moved through my life
as that forest spirit moved through Miyazaki's fading world—
carrying ancient knowing in his wake,
leaving footprints that glowed
with the memory of when
the earth was young
and everything was holy.

He brought the rupture.
The holy rearranging.
The blessed unbecoming
of everything I thought I knew
about normal,
about valuable,
about what this world
can afford to lose.

He was the fulcrum.
The turning point.
The place where two worlds touch—
one obsessed with efficiency,
one drunk on infinity.

And I, the seeker,
learned to stop chasing
and started growing roots.

I became the forest—
deep, patient, listening.
A sanctuary where nature gods
can rest between their wanderings,
where the light they carry
finds safe harbor
in the cathedral of my arms.

Where wonder
is not a diagnosis
but a birthright.
Where sacred geometry
is not a disorder
but a gift.

And every day,
when he looks at me
with those eyes that have seen the other side,
I remember:

Some children do not come to learn our world.
They come to remind us
what we're forgetting.
They come to show us
what we're losing.
They come to save
what we're selling.

In a world that would cut down forests
for the quarterly report,
he is the last tree
standing.

And I am the soil
that holds him steady.

The cosmos living inside a seven-year-old who sees fractals in cereal and hears the music of the spheres