don't go to sleep
this night
one night is worth
a hundred thousand souls
the night is generous
it can give you
a gift of the full moon
it can bless your soul
with endless treasure
- Jalāl ad-Dīn Rumi
translated by Nader Khalili
from Ghazal 947
Fountain of Fire
Greetings,
Before I became a storyteller I was a listener. I traveled the world listening, collecting creation stories, myths and legends. I listened and collected sharing these stories with others so they would know, understand and feel the energy, the power inherent in the stories. They listened. They absorbed the creation stories into their creation stories, expanding their universe. They became storytellers. They accepted their nomadic storyteller destiny to listen, walk and tell stories.
One listener in a village was not really a listener. Listless was, in their language, lazy. Pure and simple laziness. Listless passed their lazy disease to others like a story, or in Listless's universe, a nightmare. Listless was a living, breathing artifact of Neanderthal survival instincts. Hunt, eat, sleep, procreate, dream.
Listless loved dogs. Listless was clever, trapped wild dogs and beat them. Listless was the Alpha animal.
Every night Listless and their pack of dogs hunted. It was around midnight when the dogs began barking. They patrolled around rusty steel gates, junk yards filled with broken machines, abandoned colonial buildings, detention centers and narrow paths near caves where women addicted to controlling their men continuously gave birth to howling children.
Around midnight wild dogs flushed rats. Big rats. Rats prospered because humans casually discarded fruit rinds, meat gristle, fat, corn, fish paste, vegetables, and children in trash containers fashioned from old tires. Listless sent 20-30 dogs after the rats, all yipping, baying, quarreling, angry, hungry for blood. They cornered a rat, it cried Yip! Squeak! as sharp white teeth pierced its neck.
All the dogs howled, shrieking long guttural ravishing celebrations of the kill. Deep, shallow, sharp. This chorus echoed inside a black night, as Listless listened to Hellhound on My Trail by Robert Johnson.
Metta.
It was waiting on a bedroom wall. A Navajo cloth, gently.
It walks up a fold and rests. Big black eyes, soft brown speckled wings.
Slowly carry it out of the room, across bamboo floor mats toward night, into an open garden under half moon, shadowed morning glories, papayas trimmed in darkness.
The moth feels this air, a sound of humming night below the surface, adjusts its antenna and lifts off into a shadow, silent wing flight free.
Metta.
Share Article