As I sat one day recently in Bell Park in Houston, I heard over the plash of the fountain a strange, lively muttering. Looking around I saw that the incomprehensible syllables were coming from a slovenly figure making his way slowly along the red clay path that winds through the little park.

Our eyes met, he instantly stopped speaking or whatever he was doing, blushed, and made to walk on as if nothing unusual had happened.

Just before he reached the sidewalk at the street, I called out, You dropped your bag!

For he had in his embarrassment dropped the white paper sack from which he had been strewing who knows what as he walked and muttered.

Stopping, but without looking back at me, he was obviously pondering whether or not to ignore me. At last he turned, came back, and sat beside me on the bench.

Here you go, I said, extending the bag that I’d picked up.

No response. I glanced at him and judged from his clothes that he was just this side of being a homeless street person: tattered black Levi’s, a well-worn blue work shirt—long-sleeved with double pockets from which peeked two packs of cigarettes and other stuff, a shoddy pair of low-top Nike’s, with black socks.

His face, though clearly quite a few decades into the latter part of life, was strangely ageless, like that in a Caravaggio painting. You know the person behind the painting has been dead for centuries but there is no denying the spark of life still burning bright in the portrait’s eyes. And it was this gentleman’s eyes which riveted. Out of, or through, a deep, bright blue they mirrored a soul that had seen much and still either believed or doubted mightily. I couldn’t tell which.

Thank you, he said, and took the bag. There was a slight accent, somewhere east of the Rhine and west of the Volga perhaps.

We enjoyed the music of the dancing water for a time.

You must think me mad, he said.

I smiled and tried to make a joke. Why should I think you mad just because you were scattering bread crumbs and talking a mile a minute to yourself?

Ah. Bird seed, not bread crumbs, and I wasn’t talking to myself.

Another silence fell. For such a noisy lone walker, he seemed fond of silences.

I think I failed to keep condescension out of my voice: Oh?

He looked at me and it was his turn to smile. I was talking to the trees, he said. Most days I only listen to them talk, but when I’m feeling especially strong, I too speak.

What was I to say to this? I have to admit that I fingered for comfort the cell phone in my pocket, ready at any moment to dial 9-1-1. To my surprise I found myself replying: Like St. Francis and the birds?

If you wish, and the stones and the clouds as well.

My pocket thumb itched to punch the nine. And you find these to be worthy conversational companions?

Oh yes, immensely. They are, one and all, great teachers. Like all great teachers, they are lonely and thus happy when any student, even the most backward and slow, comes along.

I pondered the silent stones and trees surrounding us. And what is it that you talk about with them?

Another smile played across his lips. Everything, and nothing, he said. He put up a hand, anticipating perhaps my objection to such sententious garbage. It is, you see, very difficult to translate from their languages to ours. My heart feels we talk of everything, but my ears think we talk of nothing.

If he was mad, he was at least only half-mad and some part of him could see the craziness of his behavior. Suddenly bored, I made to get up and be on my way.

He touched my sleeve lightly and fleetingly and I found myself drawn back down. Have you ever, he said, been to the Prado?

Maybe three-quarters mad, I thought at this abrupt turn. Um, as a matter of fact, I started.

As if my response were of no interest or importance, he hurried on: You may remember how they have Velazquez’s great painting, Las Meninas, displayed? It has one room, one large room, all to itself. You walk in, and there it is at the farther end, filling the wall. I was fortunate enough to be there once in March, when there were few tourists about. I sat on the small bench at the opposite end, and had the painting to myself for a good thirty minutes. I was young, and that was the first time something that we call an inanimate object spoke to me. The museum provides a large mirror, so that one can look into the mirror and see the painting and in it the painter, who was himself looking into a mirror to render the picture that we see.

Now I was silent, curious to see where the madman’s story was going.

As I sat watching Velazquez watching himself watching his subjects and, yes, watching me, trapped between a mirror of the kind we all know and another whose qualities we can only guess at, I slowly, oh so slowly became aware that the room was filled with voices. Well, perhaps not really voices, certainly not of the kind that would register on any of the sophisticated recording or measurement devices of which we are so proud. But voices nonetheless. Deafening, they were, and insistent enough to drown out completely my logical objections. Yes, I thought perhaps I was going mad, but I stayed. I looked. I listened. And a peace settled over, through, in me such as I had never known. I realized that over the centuries the great painting, that thing of cloth and wood and pigment, had somehow absorbed something—call it soul talk—from the thousands who before me had come in and stood in the powerful vortex of its presence. What I was hearing was the lovely—for after my fear vanished it did seem infinitely lovely—chorus of those impossibly recorded "voices."

I had a number of responses ready by the time he finished his improbable little tale of post-graduate art appreciation. I chose to say: It was then only a hop, skip, and a jump to talking with trees, I suppose.

Not in the least offended, he looked at me as if I were a very slow kindergartener. Hardly, he said. Years passed, actually many years, and nothing similar happened. My encounter with Velazquez, stripped of any mention of the voices, became dinner table conversation fodder, a way to convince others of what a sensitive admirer of art I was.

Self-deprecation, modesty, honesty, and madness. An odd combination indeed and at that point I wasn’t about to get up until I had heard where the entire bizarre monolog might lead. I tried to think what I could say to encourage him to continue, but encouragement wasn’t necessary.

Have you been in Houston long, he said.

No, I’m just a visitor.

Few people realize that the city is in fact a forest. If you go up in one of the skyscrapers, you see that the city, except for the tall buildings, disappears completely under a vast canopy of trees. And, because of its subtropical location, the canopy is intact year round. Trees in Houston do not sleep. Permanent green.

Being less than taken by the urban sprawl into which I had flown to deliver a lecture, I bit my tongue and said nothing.

I lived for a time, some twenty years, he continued, under six particularly lovely old oak trees whose limbs sheltered much of the house. A bad Buddhist, I have all my life done meditation in spurts, you might say. Two months and then stop for a year, three months, stop for two years. One morning, seated with eyes closed in a front room over whose roof spread two of the larger oaks, I was watching and listening to my internal chattering monkey, trying to remember he was mine but not me. Abruptly—and with utter clarity—I heard a sentence above and through my so-called stream of consciousness. It came and went, and the chattering monkey continued as if nothing had happened.

The part that will be hard, if not impossible, for you to believe is that I was certain the sentence had come from one of the trees. How did I know? I have no idea, but it was as apparent as my knowing it is you speaking when I hear your voice.

I opened my eyes, wrote down the sentence, and went about my business.

Other days and other sentences, sometimes whole paragraphs, followed, which I dutifully recorded. Comprehensible, coherent, all of them, but their content was against all logic.

Ah, here come the birds, he added without a pause as a small flock of sparrows settled on the red clay path for the morning repast he had provided.

Another silence, which I was determined not to interrupt.

After some moments, he looked at me with surprise. You’re a good one, he said, smiling. Most people immediately want to know what the trees said.

I was quiet, and we continued to watch the birds.

Some weeks later, he went on, I again fell out of meditating, seduced as always by the idols of the age into the usual pursuits of fortune, fame, whatever. No more tree talk.

Years passed, filled with the predictable mix of success and failure. On a hot and sticky August day I was downtown walking hurriedly and purposefully toward some undoubtedly important meeting. I noticed one of my shoelaces had come undone, stopped, and knelt to tie it. As my fingers went through the automatic motions, I looked around and saw that I was between two of those twentieth century monoliths rising 60 or 70 stories that architects in those days loved to cover with mirrored glass. In their cleverness, they designed, you recall, often so that the mirroring extended straight to the ground. One such structure abutted the sidewalk where I was kneeling. Another was facing me across the street. And I saw that I was precisely in the middle of an enormous infinite regress, the kind you sometimes see in hair salons, but this one on a much larger scale.

Out of the finitude of the moment and the moment’s trivial action—tie this shoelace and be on your way, you busy dolt!—I was hurled into an infinity of awareness that by our watches probably lasted a split second but that for me endures still.

He stood and I thought again was going to leave me hanging, a faulty raconteur who teases and withholds the punch-line.

I was wrong.

Looking me directly in the eye, he said: What I saw was an impossibility, a visual paradox to match the verbal paradox the trees had given me. I understood paradoxes are not the answer but only a clue, a hint, like the finger pointing at the moon.

His hands were at his sides. He turned them so that the palms were facing me.

Because you didn’t ask, I can tell you the utter nonsense that the trees said to me and that the facing mirrors in their dazzling way confirmed.

I opened my mouth, started to say something.

END