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RE: The woot can wait
This tale grew in the telling, and there are none yet alive in these latter
days that remember it aright as it was told in ancient times when the earth was
young. But this is how it is said in the common tongue, or close enough,
anyway.
In a country hamlet, far from the watchful eyes of the Doges, lived a young
girl who longed to see the world. "All I need is everything", she mused to
herself one June afternoon while wandering through the forest. She came upon a
small stream, in which she paused to splash her feet. Then out of the forest
came an old crone, her back bent with decades of work, but her eyes bright with
the wisdom of experience. The crone asked the girl what would make her happy
with herself, and the girl replied "to fly far from here, to dance among the
stars, and see all there is to see." The crone cackled, but not unkindly, and
told the girl to swim down; her answers lay at the bottom of the pool. "What
pool?" asked the girl, "this is but a stream." "It's never quite what it
seems", replied the crone, suddenly wistful, before she abruptly spun round and
disappeared into the forest.
The girl eyed the creek bed skeptically, wiggling her toes in the sand, when
she felt the support give way beneath them. Her balance lost, she toppled
forward and fell into the impossibly deep waters below the surface. She fell
for a long time, but oddly felt no need to breathe. "If I'm drowning", she
thought, "this is not how I imagined it." All was dark, but she thought she
saw sparks of light at the corners of her eyes. Suddenly she was surrounded by
a symphony of light: swirling clusters of stars in massive spirals whirled
around her. Music filled her ears with the harmonies of voices twined in song.
She reached out to touch these sensations around her, and just as she felt
something brush her fingers, sending a shiver through her entire body, all the
light and sound went rushing away, as if she were falling from a great height.
But her fingers still glowed with the dust from the heavens. She drifted off
into the darkness of sleep. The last thing she heard was a soft whisper upon
the night, and she thought it sounded like "woot".
She awoke in her bed, and although nothing had changed, everything was
different. Colors more vibrant, textures more rich, life seemed to have more
possibilities. She whispered, "I will remember", as she noticed her fingers
still glowed, so she carefully rubbed the dust into a small pearl box, which
she always kept with her to remind her. People noticed the change in her, and
when she was especially delighted, she would cry out, almost inadvertently,
"woot!" When people asked what it meant, she would smile enigmatically, and
say "It's in my pocket."
So the scribes say, and so my father told me, and so I tell you. Perhaps it
was never meant to be shared, and there are certainly those who will scoff,
but there are also those who will catch the echo of glory, and these few
will smile and know what it means.
Tee hee,
Don
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