You are not a drop in the ocean; you are the ocean in a drop.
— Rumi

The Earth was dying.
She was drying out, her skin as parched as a forgotten desert. The green blanket she once wrapped herself in had long since withered away. A place that was once beaming with life was now inhabited only by the ghostly eeriness of its past. A place that overflowed with birdsong and the laughter of flowers was now filled with the loudest silence.
A home that had welcomed so many was now full of emptiness.

Nights grew darker. The stars dimmed quietly after Joy disappeared. The air turned cold when Peace left. Hope lingered like the last glow on the horizon — but even she eventually moved on.
With no Love left to breathe in, the Earth exhaled one final time.
A tiny cloud gathered in the sky from her last breath.
A cloud made of Love.

The cloud drifted above the barren ground and felt its small heart tighten. It remembered everything.
It remembered every tree and every trembling leaf. Forests that whisper secrets. Meadows stretching under the sun. Mountains humming with ancient fortitude. Fields shimmering gold in summer light.
It remembered paw-prints pressed into wet soil, the wag of a tail, a mound raised by a mole, a spiderweb catching dawn like a fragile net of stars.
It remembered the sound of a growl, of laughter, of birdsong, and the buzzing of bees.
It remembered the roar of thunder, and the soft ballad of the falling rain.

Memory swelled until it became longing.
And from that longing came a single tear of Love — one small raindrop.

When the drop touched the Earth’s barren skin, something stirred.
Its stiff bones groaned as it moved slightly.
The soil remembered the feeling of roots weaving through it like an ancient tapestry, and from that remembering it pushed up a single seedling.
All the elements searched for one another and whispered, “I remember.”

The Earth was waking — awakened by Love.
And where Love returns, Joy, Peace, and Hope always find their way home.

Each of us carries a whole world within.
All we need to do is remember.