Many years ago a stream bisected my route. It was too wide to jump lest I should ruin my shoes. The hide was not stripped from a cow’s rump to so readily go to waste. In search of the largest branch I found that alas, there were none. There stream did however run by a boulder field, and such as it was, there were plenty of boulders from which to choose.
Selecting the largest boulder that I could heave, I positioned it on a slope such that it would come to rest amid the stream once I had set it loose. I let it loose. It came to rest. I proceeded to repeat the process until the stream was passable.
When I returned the stream had grown. It had not swollen from flood, but grown in the way that a boy grows into a man. I was left with no option but to add more boulders to the crossing lest my leather shoes should go to waste. The boulders that I added were mere pebbles to the boulders I had positioned before. It was as if they too had grown to maturity.
Once more I returned. Much time had passed and the river had grown into a sea. The boulders I had positioned initially had become so grand and so distant that I needed to add boulders between them in order to cross. The water was deep. It might have been more beneficial to build a boat.
So the next time, that is what I did. The trees that were mere twigs had grown into towering titans. I used their thinnest branches to make for myself a sailing boat. It took me many months to build, and the crossing took me many days.
When I reached the second boulder that I cast into the stream, I found that the people that lived upon it had named it Corsica. Travelling onward, I reached the first boulder that I had cast into the stream. I found that the people living upon it had named it Sardinia. The other side of the stream was so distant that its occupants had decided that it was a different land entirely, and the inhabitants of that land did not like the inhabitants of the boulder called Sardinia.
Earth had grown from a modest boy into a confused man. I turned my sailing boat to the sky and left it in my wake. I am now cultivating new life, on a new planet, near a new star.
T
Tandi Tales 