Bamboo People

They arrived with experiences of many moves, slanting away from the reasons their neighbors would --  spray chemicals meant to eliminate 'weeds' or artificially scent and soften, hoping metaphor might find them and tell a story to carry their souls safely to places still wild with wonder. What if the stories metaphor wove were so unlikely their people -- family with the same smelling bloodlines -- questioned their sanity, or worse, understood but found it took too many steps to make room for the story.  

They were not young when the adventure started, so of course, time had bent their forms and wrinkled their skin so the two were more like brown spider silk and deeply plowed sand dunes. Their strengths have been tested, and trickiness born from Mercury's search for a different way to think has led to unexpected ground. 

 "If I were asked what is the greatest human gift, I would say it is metaphor. A little boat of metaphor chugs across the seas, carrying a cargo of meaning across the oceans that divide us. Metaphor is how we relate to each other and how our one species attempts to comprehend others. With this gift, humans listen and speak more intensely and the meanings of all things -- ocean or forest, snail or chaffinch -- grow outwards in concentric rings of concentrated word-poems. 'Each word was once a poem,' said Emerson, and 'language is fossil poetry.' So a tulip, for example, ultimately derives from the Turkish word for 'turban.'

"Metaphor works with the legerdemain of the psyche, the lightest of touched to shift the mindscape, transforming one thing into another, leading to new ways of seeing. Metaphor follows Emily Dickinson's injunction to 'tell the truth but tell it slant,' so, slantwise by Saturn-mind running rings around literalism, metaphor is canted incantation, it breathes fact into life, it enchants. And metaphor is the language of the shaman and the artist." - Jay Griffiths' essay "The Forests of the Mind"

" Wednesday is a good day to make peace. Water offers no resistance, but the surface fracture makes for unclear interpretation. Peacemakers would do well to emphasize common values over rules and customs." - Satori

They found the well-hidden path into the forest with some effort, on a Wednesday. Technology would have worked if they used it well, but, that skill was not pa'a not well-practiced though they were now in a place where the tools worked. Asking, an old tool, was the one the old woman decided would work. She stuck with it, and with the man at the wheel they found a beautiful farm up the road marked with a red door. Through a window, the old woman, masked and sun-hatted waved to a person inside the house. Pantomiming "I'm lost!" she made her message clear enough. "Go around," mimed the person inside the house. 

Maintaining the social protocol of the times, two women came out of the house explained they were fully vaccinated and thanked the old woman for 'being safe.' Moving along, the masked one asked about Frog Song Road, her destination. The two women from the house thought it sounded familiar, but ... but, one of them was expert with Master Google and the palm-sized tool was in good working order. So close. They were just two roads too early. The sign was on the right, the road on the left. 

 

They have wandered many places in the oak-sided wagon painted with milk and rubbed with beeswax. The bees still love to rest on the golden walls when the sun is bright warming the ancestry of their magic. To see the honey-makers resting ... napping between the busy constant moment of finding nectar, and flapping their wings? That is one of the magics the two old people have experienced here, and there. And now, while the Blue Fountain Bamboo People get to know the pond and the land atop it, metaphor buzzes in the body of the old woman. She wondered what that sensation was. Sliding too quickly, out of old habits, into worry she wondered whether that was the right emotion: worry. Fortunately, the wind and the bees have already begun to conspire with the Bamboo People who have such long memory for flexibility and strength.

They have begun to chant in the old way. Practicing in today's world, applying the resilient nature of oli which is so much like 'ohe bamboo. The old woman is learning to feel the old hesitation and fear of being ill-prepared to vocalize and shows up to do it anyway. 

The Bamboo people listen, and dance with the wind and join her as she chants. Time passes, "He ua He La" the rain comes, the sun comes. The Bamboo people sway in welcome as the Ao People the cloud people add a line that reminds the old woman, "Watch for your blind spots." 

The ironic twist is how blind spots bend.