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A Hush Over The Land
the story
I want to hear ...
no words
Once upon a time, a town had two parallel streets. A Sufi dervish passed from one street to the other. As he reached the second, the people there noticed his eyes gushing tears. They did not know he had been peeling onions. They cried out, "Someone has died in the other street!" Soon all the children had joined in the weeping. The dervish was baffled as to this sudden lamenting.
In a short time, the sound of the sobbing had reached the first street. The adults of both streets were so distressed they dared not make full inquiries about the cause of the stir.
A wise man tried to reason with the people of both streets; he asked why the two streets did not question each other about what had happened to cause the furor. Some said, "Perhaps, there is a deadly plague in the other street." This rumor, too, spread like wildfire until each street's citizenship thought the other was doomed.
After the people of each street settled down enough to reason among themselves about what to do next, each decided to migrate to save themselves. Soon, both streets were entirely emptied, the people headed toward safety.
Centuries later, the town remains deserted, and nearby are two villages. Each one has its own tradition of the migration long ago. Each year, the villages hold separate celebrations in the spring, including reciting contrasting stories of how the ancestors escaped a doomed town. Each village refuses to consider the other may have the truth about what happened. Neither people question that both traditions may not match what really happened at all.
And what started all this hoopla? A Sufi peeling onions. And so it is traditions of what supposedly happened that create divisions among us - humankind.
* * *
The Truth is not a tradition, not something that did or did not happen - Truth is free of happen. And the experience of Life cannot be put into a story.
a tradition, a story
feel yourself
falling through
* * *
All tradition is metaphor (What is not metaphor?), and myth may be more true than what happened truly.
they say
and they say ...
the Sun shines
* * *
*(C) Brian K. Wilcox, 2020
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse. The book is a collection of poems based on mystical traditions, especially Christian and Sufi, with extensive notes on the teachings and imagery in the poetry.
*To contact Brian, write to LotusoftheHeart@gmx.com .
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