Once upon a time there was a beautiful world, a world filled with beautiful beings and all the abundance those beings needed to live.
It was a perfect world where everyone and everything lived in balance and harmony. No one kind or individual took more than needed. It was the natural order of things that some beings died to be food for others and no kind of being was exempt from this. All beings died at the end of their kind's life cycle and became food for the world.

All beings used only their own attributes, skills and training to live in the world—their speed, their strength, their patience or their ability to hide or blend in. If the balance began to slip, if one kind of beings became too numerous, the world would shift in some way—the temperature would change, another kind of being would move in to feed on the too plentiful ones, or there would come a fire or a flood—and after a time, balance would be restored.

Everything fit and worked together in a miraculous pattern, a complete and wondrous whole, where everything was needed and nothing was left out, and no kind questioned the wonder and perfection and rhythm of it all.

The beings of the world varied greatly from one another. Some beings lived in the water, some on land, some moved through the air. Some were rooted in the ground, some swam, some crawled, some walked, some flew, some did more than one of these. There were many, many beings of all kinds and each was part of the whole and helped to keep the beautiful world balanced.

Then one day one kind of being stood up on two legs. That kind started to use its front feet as hands. It learned to use tools, to make fire, to make art. It had, like all other kinds, language, but it learned to write its language. With its tools, it began to build machines. It became the only kind that could make noise other than with its body. It became the only kind that could, with its tools and machines, make light.

Some of that kind began to use more than its share of the bounties of the world, more than they needed, from a sense of want, of not having enough. They began to believe they were better than the other kinds, higher, even than others of their own kind. They began to kill for reasons other than food. They put other kinds of beings in captivity for their own use, even for their own pleasure, including others of their own kind.

A few of this kind and their machines and their use of the resources of the world, their pollution of all kinds of environment—water, earth, air—caused other kinds of beings to completely die out. These few greatly disturbed the natural and necessary balance and harmony of the beautiful world.

These few beings, thinking themselves superior in so many ways, began to believe they were exempt from dying, from contributing their bodies to the world as food and resource for others, for the continuation of all life, of balance and harmony. And their numbers became larger and larger, with no other kind able to limit them. And these few of this one kind began to make the world bad for all the others of their kind and for all the other beings of the world.

And so the beautiful world began to shift, as it always did when some part of itself became out of balance. The changes were very subtle at first. Disturbances began to occur here and there on the surface of the world—rumbles and shakes, storms, wind, fires. Some kinds of beings multiplied—microbes, viruses, small ones that the larger ones could not see, and could not control. The temperature began to rise, and with that the water level. These effects were small to the world, minute in the world's long, long life, mere twitches or blinks of an eye.

But after a time, to the kind that walked on two legs, the ones that thought themselves so powerful, so much better and above the other kinds, these shifts and twitches became larger and more apparent, and began to undermine the fragile existence they had created for themselves on the surface of the world.

Some of these ones had massed together in the more vulnerable places, perched precariously in fragile towers, on edges of the land that had never been, were never meant to be and never would be stable.

The efforts of these few were insignificant to the world, a world which acknowledged no being as better than any other being, a world which was neither kind nor cruel to those who lived on it, a world in which only those who could and would live in balance and harmony, who wouldn’t question the importance of giving back at least as much as they took, could survive.

The world simply was, and had been for millions of years, far longer than any one kind of beings, much longer than the two-legged ones, and would continue to be so for many more years, when many beings had come and gone, when the world had shifted, and once again was a beautiful place filled with beautiful beings and all the abundance those beings needed to live, a perfect world where everyone and everything lived in balance and harmony.


August 30 - September 13, 2006
© copyright Maggie Wilson