Title: Tortured Tortoise
Co-authors: Bill and PM--Suzanne
Completed: Feb. 15, 2002
The pain of my friend's tortured life is with me tonight. Try as I might to regain my friend's
tortoise, his wife, in her constant preoccupation with magic details is sketching
its features in the sand; hoping it will rain. As the sand shifts the sketch reveals a simple solution to coping
with the changing nature of reality, but try as she might the wife still does
not understand non-attachment and holds tight to the tortoise even though it
causes my friend so much pain to be without it. Reality comes and goes, shifting as the sand itself, in the
Mother Of All Desert Storms.
"Is this all there is?", the wife wails as the rain washes her
sand sketches away. Which way would a
witchy wife wail, she wondered, as the rain washed, and the wind whistled about
her.
"I have the answer Madame", the tortoise muttered. "Furthermore, talking tortoises always
tell the truth, and are to be trusted," he said, adjusting his toga and
striking a pose reminiscent of some famous Greek orator. "No matter how you try to capture my
features in the sand they will always be illusive," pronounced the
tortoise, "and as soon as you accept the fact that life is illusion, you
will find happiness." Being the
skeptic that I am, I first had to decide if the tortoise was telling the truth,
as he claimed to be; and if he was, whether or not the promise of happiness was
also a deceptive illusion which would leave me like a tortoise, squirming on my
back in the sand, confused, staring into the sun and slowly going blind. There lies the real truth, that we can only
count on death to end our tortured lives.
"Then again", replied the tortoise telepathically,
"although I'm hnot really a believer, myself, you might just reincarnate
as a parasitic hookworm and have a great time in somebody's intestinal tract;
kicking up your heels (so to speak) and partying with your buddies until the
cows come home every day, so don't let your present dismal state get you too
depressed."
The tortoise, the wife and the tortured
soul all laughed out loud and vowed not to take things so seriously. What with all the back slapping and guffaws,
a casual bystander would have probably seen this as the final scene in the soap
opera, but it was actually only the beginning.
Because after a nice dinner and a round of wine they all went to sleep
and therefore to dream.
The tortoise had the raciest dream, the wife's was completely divorced
from reality, and the tortured soul danced all night with the iron maiden of
his dreams.
"My shell just gets in the way," moaned the tortoise in his
sleep. "Wuzza harfan ig nabu
vuvlehuf," chortled the wife, as she rolled around on the ground,
gesticulating wildly. The tortured soul
slept fitfully and checked all the doors and windows in a vain attempt to
protect his iron maiden. His efforts
truly were in vain, however, because his iron maiden was not under attack from
outside the room, but rather from the very tortoise (the dream tortoise) who's
shell was getting in the way of his carnal pleasure with the iron maiden in
Dreamland.
So, the tortured soul's life spins in and out of my realm of experience
and I wish him luck with his tortoise of illusion. As dawn approaches and the illusion of sleep elusively joins the
illusion of a new day, I am tacking on my slippery sneakers and bracing myself
for the brilliant insights of this wonderful life inside my head.
The
End
