The Fox and the Meadow

A fox lived in a meadow and was happy to have seen the glorious springtime arrive.  For that spring, in this particular meadow, the fox had a great many rabbits to fill his belly.  As we all know, rabbits breed like rabbits, and the rabbits of this meadow did not differ in that respect. The fox grinned and hopped about all day as he took his fill of at least six or seven bunnies, or more, as he pleased.  As a young and sprightly fox, he ate more than enough bunnies to satisfy any fox, but he never grew a pot belly as he hopped and leaped and laughed each day from morning until night.

One day, the fox approached an orange blossom.  He skipped as he approached, and he gleamed with happiness.  He whispered to the orange blossom: “You, my dear, are the most beautiful rosebush I have ever seen.”   At that, he skipped away to eat more rabbits.

Later, the elder rabbits heard from the field mice that at the edge of the meadow ran the waters of a stream.  Across the stream and through the brush the mice had found another meadow, far grander and much more pleasant than the meadow of our fox.  Even more, said the mice, the other meadow had no foxes to fear.  The large ears of the rabbit elders heard this counsel well, and so the rabbits left the meadow of our fox for greener pastures. 

Weeks later, the fox grew tired, haggard, and hungry.  With no bunnies to fill his belly, the fox took to eating earthworms, snakes, and the occasional snail.  Our fox no longer smiled and no longer skipped.   He limped and dragged himself in misery.

Eventually, the fox staggered to the corner of the meadow, where the orange blossom still stood in full bloom.  “You are the ugliest weed I have ever seen and you make me sick,” said the fox to the orange blossom.  However, the orange blossom had not changed.  It had never been a weed and it had never been a rosebush, but always an orange blossom.  The fox was just hungry, irritable, and grumpy, and the orange blossom never paid attention to the fox anyway.   

Yeshua and Johnny Wilderness

In a camel’s hair get-up fastened by a leather belt, Jean-Baptiste sat about the banks of the River Jordan munching locusts laced with honey. “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come?” He was Johnny Wilderness and he washed the people in the river water, cleansing them with the riparian tides of Jordan.

Yeshua came to Johnny Wilderness from Galilee. Yeshua the Nazarene came to Johnny Wilderness at the River Jordan and said unto Johnny Wilderness “wash me, Wild Johnny, in the river water.” And Johnny Wilderness gave protest to Yeshua, bidding the Nazarene to wash him with the river water, but Yeshua insisted and so Johnny Wilderness baptised Yeshua with the sparkling drops of the River Jordan.

Light of the eternal refracted from the surface of the river droplets and, in due course, reflected from the back of the river droplets. A thousand painted spectra for every mask for each human face; red for the Queen’s mascara and blue for the army’s warpaint and a thousand chromatic dancers arced and bowed and this pleased Yeshua very much.

“When at last there came into the world a naked eye, it was blind, or the lights had all gone out. The shadows of eyelashes made the world striped like a Bengal tiger. The shadows of eyelashes give shade upon shade for the dancers refracted and radiant. Refracted dancer, take your rest in the shade of an eyelash.”

Glistening with the waters of Jordan, Yeshua emerged and the drops fell from his head and he splashed about in the river. As the drops fell from the head of Yeshua, the Great Spirit moved under the wings of a feathered creature which Yeshua took as an auspice of the Holy Ghost. The sky opened up and Yeshua divided it as a temple to the Holy Spirit, and he read the auspicia as the will of the eternal. He knew that the dove was the heavenly beauty that descended upon him and he read it well that the sacred will had it so and was so pleased with that moment which would be forever and eternal. And following the auspice of the holy will, Yeshua arose and took his leave of Johnny the Wild and left for the wilderness.

“Refracted dancer, take your rest in the shade of an eyelash and lay your weary head on the pillow of the iris. Now slope, now arc, but see and be seen. Feel the calico and the grey and the golden and the magenta covering even the winter forever under the moon.”

The Butterfly Tribe and the Electric Orb

Thomas Edison was Nicola Tesla’s nemesis in this version of time, but he nonetheless gave life to the desires of the insomniac butterfly.  Before Edison, there were butterflies: delicate travellers, battering wings to buttered wind.  There was, of course, the pupal stage and wormy adolescence; but then there was glorious flight, always in the glow under the sun, whose children were days.  

In ancient pasts, say the elder butterflies, bands of buttered wing-things left the blanket of the solar gel for the cloak of night.  They became the pale shadows of the butterfly aviators.  Insomniac butterflies chased in vain the caprice of the moon, and the moon marked the moth-child tribe with a pallor that told of exile.   The shadows of butter-wings flapped pale, chasing the moon-rock, who shifted and made the tides undulate and ebb.  Then a creature with no wings, who missed so dearly the sun and its children, had a brain.  

The melon-jar of Mr. Edison was not a firefly, but it preferred thought-making with the moon.  In that, he was a kindred spirit of the moth-child tribe.  Despite Mr. Edison’s lunar inclinations, the deep love his melon-jar had for the moon did not fix the shape-shifting that moon practiced so devoutly.  The Edison melon-jar moved the Edison body to make orbs which mimicked sun and had small day things aglow in the night: shadows of the sun’s children.  From then on, the moth-child tribe clung to those orbs.  They forever thank Mr. Edison.