so the eight of us -- we call ourselves the pod -- our self-selected learning group of members of alathea community aged from thirteen to seventeen years, decided to walk over to the falls of the raven
as we walked we played logical and critical thinking games and together we invented this puzzle:
a city back in civilization time
had seven toll roads from one end to the other; at each toll booth you
had to pay one half of the number of coins you had in your pocket as a
toll, and if the number of coins was odd you had to pay half of the
(number of coins plus one); but the toll collector always gave you
change of one coin -- given this information, what is the minimum
amount of money you would need in order to make a complete round trip
across the city and be able to pay all the tolls?
i'll tell you the answer later
we discovered and logged eight new species of insect and named one of them after each of us, once the library confirmed our findings after we electronically sent a sample of their dna to them
and then we talked with the birds -- zari taught us some of the
language of the jays, she's the newest member of the pod and came to us
as a wanderer last month; she has studied the languages of birds for years
in return jaco taught her some finnish words and we played a twenty
questions game with the questions asked in finnish and the answers
given in hawaiian (oliana corrected our hawaiian)
and then we did our sensing exercise: we decided on smell
this time and agreed we could smell musk, though we didn't know if it
was from muskrats or beavers, and we smelled wild blueberries and
angelica and jack in the pulpit and went on to identify thirty-four
other smells but we can't give you all of their names because for this
english history writing exercise we are only allowed to use words that
existed before the madman's plague and back then in their global gulag they had pretty well lost their sense of smell and only had words for unimportant things
we took some air samples and sent them to the library
and they told us which smells we had misidentified and which ones we'd
missed, but we did get an award for identifying a new smell that was
not in the catalogue and it is the smell of the dung of the insect we discovered that we named after venn so the new smell has venn's name too
and then we came to the glade forest
and the trees were covered with water droplets from a recent rainstorm,
so we took pictures of the droplets and the light through the trees and
the water on the spiders' webs and each of the eight of us looking at
these things, and then we tasted the water droplets from each tree, and
the water from the spruces and the water from the ferns and the water
from the birches and the water from the maples all tasted so different
and we ran through the glade forest showering each other with the spray from the trees until we came to the falls clearing
the telling of stories in this ancient linear english is difficult --
we are tempted to start every sentence in the story with 'and' or
'then' and it is hard to know when to stop; and telling how several
things happened at once, using a format that allows you to tell only
one thing at a time, all in order, is very challenging
we think the english people in the time before the madman's plague must have been very boring to have invented a language of such expressive and imaginative poverty
we don't like studying the period of the global gulag just before the madman's plague
because there was so much suffering and misery and it hurts us to learn
that people could do that to each other and to gaia but we know it's
important to learn it so we never let it happen again
it is hard to imagine people so squished together like that, so many
billions each traveling each day from the office-work prisons to the
family-house prisons, never questioning because it was the only life
they had known for millennia after the ice ages and the extinction of large prey and then the civilization time with its great forgetting until everyone thought that was the only way and were afraid to live differently
it makes us cry to think of this; how could it happen? and we also know that with everyone
having babies back then because their religions and governments told
them that was right there were a lot of very ugly and unfit and sickly
humans and that too is hard to imagine -- ugh! no wonder in those days
humans wore clothes
at the falls clearing we stopped to rest; we picked some wild currants and raspberries to go with the nuts and berries we had brought from the alathea grove and ate them with crispbreads and garbanzos and raw vegetables
zari and i sat face to face and fed each other berries and caressed
each other and started feeding each other from our mouths and then got
carried away and sixty-nined for awhile; she tasted new and foreign and
delightful and i was glad she had joined us from the wanderers,
and then when she came lots and laughed and cried out 'no more' (in
danish which she is also teaching us) we lay for a few minutes and she
taught me more jay language and then i pulled her up and we joined the
others
they had been watching us and we had precipitated a bit of an orgy but
we had outlasted them and they were playing keep-away with a
reproduction of a relic from pre-madman's plague
days called a 'nerf ball' -- we joined the game and it was wonderful;
there is no better way to stay fit than playing a vigorous game that is
challenging but which no one wins or loses, and soon we were so
exhausted we were falling down and laughing so hard it hurt
so for awhile we just lay in a big pile, heads on each other's laps
staring at the sky and playing with each other's hair and talking with
the birds until anneke hushed us and we stayed very still and six
graceful white-tailed deer walked into the clearing beside us and we
spoke to them in human and bird and mammal tongues and lief made his
wonderful impression of the sound of a running stream and one of the
fawns bounded over and licked him on the face
and we all laughed and got up and played hide-and-seek with the fawns while the adult deer watched and grazed
anneke told us that in the time before the madman's plague
humans ate deer and kept animals as food-slaves (shudder!) and the
other animals all told each other how humans treated gaia so all the
other animals were afraid of humans and ran away as soon as they saw or
smelled them so man was left alone and lonely, never playing with other
animals -- this too makes us sad
so we ran around and played with the fawns and we nuzzled them and they
nuzzled us back until the adult deer told the fawns it was time to go,
and they walked over to the clearing stream and drank and then crossed over and disappeared into the forest on the other side
by then the sun had gone behind some storm clouds and we sat together
and did our meditation and it began to rain but we sat in our circle in
the downpour just letting it fall over us and we told each other how
much we loved each other and our time and this place, our home
for our composition exercise we composed a poem out loud, and restating
it as each part was added so we would not forget it even though we were
not writing it down, since this was also an oral culture lesson, and
the composition was about a first kiss between two people and it went
like this:
it is the waiting, the anticipation,
that makes the first kiss so exquisite:
our eyes soften, and we signal its coming, its desire
by glancing between each other's eyes and lips
and as our mouths open, it is in a smile, coy, inviting
and our mouths salivate
in anticipation of its sweetness
and we get close enough to smell each other's breath
as soft as a whisper
and sense each other's breathlessness
and the few seconds as our mouths draw close
stretch out to an eternity, as time stops:
(if only this moment could truly never end!)
and as our lips touch we slow our approach even more
relishing each millisecond, each micrometer
and then our hearts pound and leap, and we are one,
and we begin to explore each other, as a wilderness,
the discovery of a wondrous new territory,
the learning of new wants, pleasures, gentle joys
we taste each other with abandon, as we would
if starving, and given bread
or expiring of heat and thirst, and given water
we gorge ourselves on the sweet flavours
of each other's souls
it is as if the rest of the universe is rushing away from us
at the speed of light
there is only we two, one, together, locked, lost
and we must close our eyes
or go blind with the sheer intensity of this instant
this first kiss is a gift we give each other
its power as intense
as the explosion, the infinitesimal instant
when the universe began
and then lissa taught us some new tantra and we kissed and made love to
each other very slowly for a long time, teasing and making it last and
holding back, especially the guys, and it got very intense and we were
all crying and saying how much we loved each other and oliana said if
she was ever parted from us she would die
and then it was time to go home -- we walked slowly, hand in hand, and
told each other stories from the lore of other cultures we had studied,
including an amazing one that zari told about the innu peoples before
the madman's plague: it seems
they lived in a climate that was very cold so they studied the wild
animals and birds and they made their clothes like the fur of the
wolves and feathers of the ravens and so they were the only humans in
that time who didn't need to build and live inside 'buildings' apart
and cut off from gaia and each other, because their clothes were
their buildings; and they laughed at strangers from other cultures who
visited and felt sorry for them for having such poor 'buildings',
because these strangers just didn't understand
it is hard to conceive of living in the time of the great forgetting
when people had such poor imaginations and were so full of fear -- i
think if i had lived then i would have killed myself, though maybe if i
was like them and couldn't imagine another way to live and was told all
humans were meant to live in a world of struggle and suffering, and
that killing yourself was wrong, i would go on living even though i
think such a life would be worse than death; maybe i would have become
the madman
as we got near home we came upon a pack of wolves and we nodded to the
alphas and acknowledged them as our brothers and sisters and they
acknowledged us back, and one of the baby wolf cubs came over to us,
smelling the deer on us perhaps, and gnawed on jaco's hand, so we gave
it the 'nerf ball' and it played with the ball just like a dog would;
and then we took our leave and returned to the alathea commons and did our chores and studies until it was time to sleep
this is the end of our composition in antique linear written english --
i know the syntax and flow are not correct but i think the words are
all authentic from the time before the madman's plague
and the grammar is correct; it is a terrible, confining language, so
inflexible, and poor in important vocabulary and sensory and emotional
nuance, so i guess it is no wonder that the people of those times
lacked imagination and lived in a fearful world, hidden inside their
own minds
oh, and the answer to the puzzle, of course, is two coins, any two coins
[written on behalf of the pod of alathea, by gregor, date AMP 546.217]
|
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
