Lately, I’ve been playing around with something a bit like automatic writing.
With a problem in mind, I fix my attention on my imagination and watch without any conscious intervention. I tune out my critical intellect. Whatever words arrive first in my mind are the right ones and I jot them down.
Generally, they’re quite helpful. They’re usually brief and vague. Often, I don’t understand what they mean until the problem is solved, but it’s usually solved shortly after and the writing always manages to contain the solution.
Anyways, this piece was different. Much more structured. My friend must have been very sure of what she meant.
At the end of the ninth day, there came a man from the place of the skull.
And he said: two of my sheep went missing. The one I found in a hole where he fell down.
The other was snatched up by the lions, and I found his blood a short distance from where the younger sheep fell.
And the younger sheep wailed when he smelled the blood and I knew it was the blood of my lost sheep.
Blessed was the sheep who fell down, for the lions did not find him, or if they did, they did not go down to him knowing they too might become trapped.
But misfortune befell the elder sheep who did not fall down, but wandered sure-footed with his eyes upon the Earth before him.
Wise was the lost sheep who was looking up at Heaven, and Wisdom hid him that he might be spared.
But foolish was the sheep who looked at the Earth.
So too, what is folly to the world is often wisdom in the eyes of God.
And what is wisdom to the world delivers us unto death.
This little story solved my problem.
I took an I-Ching reading after. Hexagram 5 changing to hexagram 28.
One of the changing lines is line 4. The book reads: “Waiting in blood. Get yourself out of the pit.”
Glad to hear I was the younger sheep.
I truly appreciated your friend's parable. It reminded me of the notion of what it is to live through the human experience and endure suffering. The lost sheep who'd clearly suffered from becoming lost in the pit was inevitably saved due to their initial suffering. Meanwhile the sheep who lived in comfort, never truly suffering, succumbed to the fate determined by the predacious figures of the lions.
To live without suffering, is to miss the entire purpose, the significant framework of the human experience.
It also reminds me of Dante's quote, "The path to paradise, begins in hell."
What a very beautiful poem!