Landscape painting comma wordy

This is a story where nothing happens and there's barely any characters. It's also very short. Some stories have to be direct, without diversions or ornament, even if it makes it easy on the writer and harder on the reader.

Bronze, if well made, can theoretically be more molecularly stable than pure gold. And it's only made by human hands. As much as there's nothing less natural about things humans make than things that grow in nature because humans are still a part of nature, it feels like that matters.

THE BRONZE GARDEN
(Syndetic, symmetric, not synthetic, not cyclic)

Metaphor is the wellspring of human language, stories, abstraction, reflection, self-awareness, everything that makes us people.

The valley lies next to the mountain, but never under her shadow. The sun loves to see them together and walks long, lingering loops to give them all its light. The rain also loves them and gives the mountain a rich growth of flora, yet still sparse compared to the valley, when the water runs from the mountain in a flood through the valley and she's drowned with green, hot and wet and filled with deep, loose earth being bound by the deep roots of the trees. Life blooms everywhere.

The name of the mountain is Impulse. The name of the valley is Intention.

A rainbow appears in the cascades of the waterfall. The human sees the beauty of the rainbow and seeks to depict the beauty, to show it to their brothers and sisters. There is no human here. No hand guiding the growth of hanging moss in the branches of the trees, reaching down the the ground. A forest of curtains with no rooms to close in.

In a grand old alder tree, among a hundred shades of green and white, rainwater gathers in an indentation and drips in slow fat drops. A drop falls on a spiderweb, where it sticks. A lone ray of sunshine among the shadows of the leaves reaches the water drop and it glitters like an infinite universe. There is no sun and the stars glitter over the mountain, quiet and lonely in the night. One perfect moment hangs in stillness for all time. There is never enough time. Time marches on and the wounds heal and the vegetation spreads.

A wide reach of trees sprawl across the valley and covers much of the river. Standing, glowing, growing, living and dying. And underneath the wondrous green gold they die and rot, turning into black earth that nourishes the life. An ant waits in the dark, after losing the chemical trail it has followed. Without sensory stimuli to respond to it's as good as lifeless. A seed falls in front of the ant, so slightly sweet, and the ant comes to life to feed. A small lizard eats the ant, a fish eats the lizard, a bird eats the fish and the bird, with a broken wing, dies alone. Germs eat the bird and shit fertilizer and the cycle of life goes on. The ant is all things. There is no ant.

Summer lasts forever and a day. Winter comes from time to time. Blinding, howling storm covers the mountain. Precarious sheets of ice and snow topple over in avalanches of unstoppable force. The valley is a field. She is shining white in the sun. She is smooth, quiet. She lies still, forever.

Life in the valley never goes away. It resumes when the hot rains come down and the snow melts away. It sparks amid the brutal floods and on bare rock washed clean of soil. It grows into a fire that burns all the green to ash. It grows again, nurtured by the fertile ash. Always moving, growing, verdant, angry, irrepressible.

The edge of a tart fresh leaf cuts the paw of a lemur picking berries. The lemur, startled or angry, crushes the plant. The sap poisons a small patch of the ground where it falls, killing budding moss, making the soil barren. A termite colony steers away from the dead land. A number of birches grow stronger and taller in the termites' absence. In the birches' shadow an ancient and irreplaceable strain of ferns withers. This violence, this chaos, is part of the order of nature, is balance.

And the continents shatter and the mountain tears apart from the valley and the continents smash together and the valley and the mountain form. They are together for one of the planet's heartbeats. They end. They are forever. They are not alive. They live in our minds. The mountain and the valley.