A Fable

Once upon a time, people opened their eyes and were in some place they didn’t know. They didn’t know what they were doing there or how they got there, but other people seemed glad to see them and held them and mostly took good care of them. So, they learned the ways and to speak the language of the other people and grew and grew, never really knowing how they came to be them there nor where the others went when they left their bodies.

They realized all the others did this, too, in different bodies-animals and butterflies, birds and plants, fish and reptiles and insects and trees. Everything appeared, grew a while, and left or dis-appeared. Maybe some did know from where or what goes on, but they never said. Or if they said, few believed or understood them. But it never varied. They all showed up, and they all went away.

The only things that seemed to transform and move and change yet never quite went away was the air and the water and perhaps the rock or soil. These were always there.

Maybe, wondered some of the people, we too are like this. At one time like ice, melting, it “disappeared” yet then it was water, who then disappeared into the soil or the stream which dissapeared, too, over time, but really just became the water underground who dried up in the well but really was in the trees but then they died but rose up into the mist and became clouds that dropped rain somewhere.

epilogue

There is the sweet interval, though, like when the members of an orchestra all pick up their instruments, poised, and you hear the final few turning of pages on the music stands, where each individual picks up their lives and begin to play it out, never in isolation though often feeling alone. Like the musical notes, the emotions and actions; the struggles and goals and accomplishments create unique arrangements depending on who is in the band and what they think the song is supposed to be. And like a good concert, it moves those around us, it moves through us, it lingers but can never be recreated in quite the same way twice.

And even after this has disappeared, like the long note that rang steady then melted into the all-around, suddenly somewhere, some other moment, it reappears, idly being hummed by a woman hanging up the laundry, or softly singing her baby to sleep. She isn’t aware she has plucked the vibratory strings of a long thread of light that began way before she joined in.

moral of the story: