Francis Meyrick

Dis-Missed as a Fool

I knew they dismissed me as a fool.
It was okay. Mostly, I really wasn’t too worried. Occasionally, I felt a bit hurt. An honest emotion. But then I would just kind of smile to myself. It was the way of my road. The ambient color and resonance of my immediate surroundings.

Heck, I was curious, and I just couldn’t help it. I simply sensed much, much more was going on around us than we realized. But the vast majority of my compadres were totally, totally disinterested in my ideas. They didn’t listen to me. They were sneering, or quietly contemptuous. My little story wasn’t even worth ten seconds of their valuable time. They would shake their heads, in a mildly irritated, borderline disgusted manner. I was obviously a nutcase. I needed help. I was a retard, who craved attention. It was all a cry for help. Tisk, tisk.

Some mothers do have ’em, eh?

I had a couple of friends. Well, 2 actually. They seemed to like my musings, or at least they humored me along. Occasionally I wondered if they too, secretly, felt sorry for me, and were just trying to be kind. It was possible, I knew that, but somehow I doubted it. I thought then, and I still do, that they genuinely liked my babbling. So I just soldiered on, doing the best I could. I tried to live a decent life, a good life, and I worked hard. I dug away at things, collecting the small but necessary grubs essential to our existence. I saw the fruits of our immediate, daily labors merely as a means to an end. Not a goal in itself. But always, always, I sensed there was much, much more going on around us than we realized.

In our twilight world, we felt safe. We knew our immediate surroundings, and there we felt comfortable. Nobody seemed to really want to dig deeper, or reach higher. When ever there was too much light, it hurt our feeble eyes. So we instinctively recoiled from it, preferring the shadowy make-believe world we could sense and touch around us. To many of my neighbors, the entire purpose of Life was to collect and gather together provisions for tomorrow. To hoard, to savor their stack, to revel in their collection. To me, that was a puzzle. Kind of silly. It was an all-too-common way of life, but it seemed to elevate gathering above living. Collecting above thinking.

There came the day I started purposefully out to reach the Great Light. My two friends tried to stop me. They warned me it was bad for me, and that it was the wrong time. But, stubbornly, I persisted. Others, as per usual, sneered, and were mocking. It was okay, I thought, I’m not hurting anybody. I’m just doing my thing…
When I broke through, in my simple way, naïve and blundering, I felt I had run into something I had never experienced before. It was painful, but it was beautiful. I remember I squinted so hard, and strained and strained, to understand, the unfamiliarity of it all.

* * * * *

I know now, much later, that I was being observed, kindly, warmly, with caring, by Beings far greater than I. If only I had understood the higher language, I would have smiled to myself at what they were thinking.
For the One said to the Other:

“Oh, look! It’s a tiny mole, peeking out at the big wide world!”

The Other said, kindly:

“Poor thing! The midday sun is too much for him. Look at his little pink nose wrinkling! Those fine whiskers! You see his little eyes struggling and squinting? They are nocturnal creatures, who prefer the familiarity and comfort of their Darkness. I wonder what this one is doing, going against the flow? Must be a solitary soul, an adventurer. Brave little thing… I wonder what is going through his tiny mind?”

* * * * *

And I, for my small part, reveled in the sounds and the smells, the sense of a Great Eternity, and the abundant Light that was far too much for my feeble eyes. I was happy, in my own, simple way, to be here, to be peering out from my Darkness at a Great New Universe.

And the necessary gathering of grubs, and worms, and snacks and titbits, could wait.

THIS… was Life.

Francis Meyrick

Last edited by Francis Meyrick on July 4, 2014, 9:58 am