There was once one of us, early in the spring of the Tree, that loved the Tree so much. Some may say maybe too much, but it is not our place to pass judgement on what is. This one of us, we will call her Maiden, she loved Tree like she loved to breathe. She saw that the Tree gave us breath, and she knew this made her and it two parts of something. But Maiden felt there was something missing in her half, that she wasn't giving enough. She talked to the Tree, she tried to braid its hair like hers, she treated it as equal. This may seem strange, like one of them must be greater than the other, but she knew this not to be true: the Tree and she could both give life. One night, while she was tending to branches and newborn growth, she fell asleep on the forest floor beneath the swinging swaying boughs. It was as if the flowing blowing leaves were rustling a lullaby to her; she lay down curled up next to the great big roots. While in dreamtime, she dreamt she was waiting for something. But even when she had only just entered the dream, it felt like she had been waiting for millennia - she saw the stars move through the sky and drift further apart, she saw countless sunrises and falls, innumerable moons and eclipses, all in retrospect. But now she could feel proximity to the end, that she was entering a temporal space of between. Between the end of waiting, and the beginning of the waited-for.
Maiden never woke up. Tree loved her back, you know. So much that Tree embraced Maiden in her dreamtime. Her long hair, entwined with Tree's roots, turned to fern. Her braids to bracken. Her transformation happened so silently, so sweetly, we know not to grieve for her.
As for the rest of her, she did not disappear. Her body became a blossom, wrapped in maidenhair. As it takes time for new caretakers to come to being, it was not for some time that her metamorphosis was known. Until then, this flower in the fern bloomed and bloomed. Unseen, she was able to show herself fully to the world that wasn't bearing any witnesses. The fern and its flower, beneath the tree-boughs, stayed that way comfortably for quite some time. When the next caretaker did appear (and we will come to the how, later), the fern-flower closed up and disappeared, not wanting to be found. Every day, this young carer returned to the spot of the maidenhair and her flower, and every day she still would not show herself. It was only on the night of the longest day of the year that she shyly opened to the world again. The Caretaker happened to be sitting next to her, tending a fire, watching sparks fly into the night, when he saw the beautiful bloom. Nobody knows if it was his patience, the long sun hours, or the smoke of burning wood, but she opened up again. The duty-bound carefully and with reverence took from her a petal - but really Maiden had offered it freely, with understanding. He gently pounded the petal with a pestle, whispering sweet thanks, and boiled the powder in spring-water. It smelled like its lilac color - soft, sweet, but strong. He drank deeply. When he did, he felt his head light up in new ways - he saw the world differently, because he heard it differently. All around him, he heard everything. Not like he didn't hear it before, but like he wasn't listening, wasn't tuned in. The crickets' song turned into a plea that he understood better than before, the owl's warning claiming his space in the forest, the pheromones of fireflies and their photic dance. He could understand it all, as if he could respond easily if he only had the anatomy.
He told no one of the ability imbued in him from drinking the fern flower's tea, but there are forces in this world that can't be understood, and the people came to know anyway. For this, and many other reasons, it has become custom for people in parts of the world to head into the midsummer night forest. All because a maiden loved a tree.