2004-12-10
A Wise Man Once Said...

He crouched against the wall, his back arched. A soft light penetrated the darkness and fell upon the back of his upturned head. His widely opened yellow eyes were fixed on a spot on the wall some five feet up. His tail bristled as he cried and mewled in the strange, surreal language understood by all cats. The language with which they spoke to all things slimy, six or eight legged, or winged.

But his cries and coaxes for this creature to play with him budged his object not. For his object was an immmovable hole. A hole which had been sitting idle in the wall for a good many months.

I flipped over in bed and hung my head over the edge, waving my yellow locks around to attract his attention as I laughed at him good naturedly. What a silly boy! I crooned teasingly, It's just a little hole in the wall and it's been there forever! Watch! I'll show you!

With this I tumbled the rest of myself over my head and out of bed. I scrambled across the floor and swooped my little Corin into my arms and picked myself up at the same time. I thrust him right in front of the hole, and he pushed his limbs against the wall for traction, as though he would walk up it. See silly? It's just a little hole! It doesn't move and it doesn't make noise and it isn't alive. There's nothing to be done with it! Just leave it be! We stood there a moment longer as he cocked his head all right round to take in every angle of the hole he coveted for a plaything. He batted his white furred paw and stuck his claw in the opening. He mewled and whined again as the hole neither moved nor responded to his petty threats.

I laughed again and set him down on the floor away from the wall. He stumbled past me and pressed himself against the wall again. He resumed his previous position.

He crouched against the wall, his back arched. A soft light penetrated the darkness...

I sighed and staggered back into my bed and under the covers again. Laughing at his silliness and the stupidity of animals. The hole had been there such a long time and he only just now noticed it. And then, although it continued not to move, he adamantly insisted upon it being a living creature which he could move with his exotic mewls. He has not the sense to recognize it for what it really is.

I didn't waste my thoughts on it and set back to board my ship to dreamland, when a thought crossed my mind.

How much like this kitten can we be? How long can it take us before we see an obvious truth so easily missed? How ready and stubborn are we to paint the truth in a foolish shade of fantasy? To make something into what we want and think we need it to be, rather than what it really is?


I don't believe that my kitten is so foolish to teach me a parable and a lesson. I do believe though, that ordinary things contain a parable, apparently on accident. It depends on where you look. How you look at something.

Flip your honey colored or auburn colored or chocolate colored or platnium colored or any colored tresses backwards over your bed. Stare at the world from a different point of view. What is nonsense to glean? What suddenly makes new and better sense? A different sort of sense? Maybe there is something on the ceiling or fixed in the ground beside your deaf ear which you never noticed before.

Are there holes in your walls which you've (purposely?) missed heretofore?


For as bats� eyes are to daylight so is our intellectual eye to those truths which are, in their own nature, the most obvious of all.

before & & after