The elder’s staff, carved with flowers as if the wood had grown them. When it strikes the boardwalk twice, the next thing she says is for the child you were.

The digital mist that falls when the network synchronizes. It leaves nothing on your sleeve, and your shoulders come down anyway.

The root under the roots, where the fungus and the pipes agree. If you hear it humming, don’t answer. Unless it’s Thursday.

A ReLeaf scientist who turned rebel when she saw what the Gardener was doing to the ecosystems. In Tangled Frequencies she steps out of an oak’s bark on her own, changed, still herself enough. Her voice rattles Langley’s chest.

Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right.

The lattice under the plazas and the rooftops, humming a geometry nobody drew. It remembers how to hold water and how to bend a rumor into a shape. The GreenSpire stands on it.

A vertical garden tower grown from remixed materials and tended by everyone. The silver cube appeared inside it at noon in 2046, and people drifted toward it as if drawn by tide.

A network of small water-cleaning modules chained across the lake, pulsing with currents you cannot see. In Shifting Channels they work in silence while the city decides whom to blame.

A copy that comes out different is not a mistake. It is the next generation, each mutation another leaf on the same branch. Teo knows his own cubes by how he folds the corners, and there are cubes at the top of the wall that nobody he knows folded.

Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city.

The light rail with the living walls on its flanks. It passes overhead and the shade structures adjust for the late afternoon, and neighbors greet one another without looking up.

The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over.

I’m a middle school librarian, and I first saw a free little library up in Seattle this summer. I’ve seen them popping up around town and told my husband I would love him to make me one. Never did I imagine he would produce such a fine piece of woodwork and construction, a mini replica of our house. Now I can be a 24-hour librarian.

At the Seaholm Intake the creek runs both ways for a breath, a light on the rail comes on when the current flips, and people leave rested and clear, as if a long afternoon had just ended. Come without hurry. A tin plaque on a boulder downstream says LISTEN HERE, and the metal under it is polished by hands.

Biology and engineering as co-authors. The drawing has two sets of marks on it, one in pencil and one made by something growing toward the light. Neither is allowed to erase the other.

The seed that grows the next tower. It is a node on the W.A.S.T.E. network, like the compass rose engraved in the walkway at Congress and Cesar Chavez.

A low vibration underfoot when the mycelium network recognizes you, and a faint light on the footbridge that follows your step. It is not an alert. It says: here you are.

Two vertical gardens at Congress Avenue and Cesar Chavez Street, with a compass rose engraved in the walkway between them, one node on the W.A.S.T.E. network. Whatever goes in as waste is meant to come out as green building material.

The agreement between the self that doubts and the self that dares, struck across the years at dusk. Doubt makes you gentle. Courage makes you wise.

Words Assisting Sustainable Transformation & Ecology. Also the underground post in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, with its muted horn on the box and its letters that travel outside the official mail. Put a word in. It will get where it is going.