Lifelong Tales

Getting ] to the bottom [ old

Getting old only has meaning if we can stay old and never dies, but everybody deserves a death: one’s death.

This is small riddle that is told, if I may say so, in the North, there where the North ends, and where place exists in which the big seas met.

A certain day, a boy was playing along the beach – in the place where the seas met –, making holes in the sand, and trying to fill them up with the water of the seas. Nearby was passing a knight that stayed astonish with what the boy was doing. Addressing to him, he said: «What do you think you are doing? Do you expect to fill up that hole with all the water of the seas?» The boy looked at him and said: «I don’t expect anything; I just throw water in to the hole, without care if the hole has a bottom or if is bottomless.» Without understanding a word or trying to, the knights speed up asking: «Do you think I that there is bottom – in this place where the seas met – so I can cross to the other edge?» «Of course – said the boy –, silly of you, the seas have bottom». The knight start to cross the place where the seas met and seeing that was sinking said to the boy: «You told me that the seas had bottom so I can cross them! And now I’m sinking!» The boy rapidly agues: «And they have, you just didn’t get there yet».

The bottom – getting old – will be always and forever more a «you just didn’t get there yet».

Livelong Tales

The Bridge

of

Wantage

This is a remote story, a never end tale that have been told from generation to generation – from father to son, from mother to daughter and passed forward from siblings to siblings – as far as memory can reach and remember. It had been so, that the story was become a riddle

“Once upon a time, before the age of men, in the South lands of Pangea, there was a bridge. And how wonderful and impotents she was: arising from the abysses of darkness, she was strong against the shadows of the night and faithful with the light walkers that cross here full of hope. This was the bridge daughter of the goddess Pangea.

But there were days of fog, a fog so dense and so squashed that no living soul could see the other side of the edge. The bridge started to wonder if in reality there was another edge, in the edge of here, when the fog was being all around here: «If I cannot see you, are you still there? If my eyes cannot rest upon your image and draw the outlines of what you are, are you still? How can you be a part of me, being differently?». With time, no living soul had the courage to cross the bridge as she become as insecure as instable and all here structure tremble upon the most light breeze. The beginning of the end as become. Although the bridge is yet remembered, she doesn’t exist no more: the mother Pangea saw, powerlessness, her daughter braking a part – piece by piece, a moment following another moment, day by day, through long months and years – and fall down deep in the shadows of darkness – and the mother that survived the daughter’s death still lives and will live forever, forever unfruitful until the daughter can rise again (when we cannot survive the questions that we brought out, it’s us in the end that’s brought down). There are those – special ones, rare men’s and women’s with a soul-light – that, in fogy days, can yet hear, in the silence, the tears of the mother as the tremendous fall of the daughter happen: when you hear them, be awarded with the questions that you brought out”.

To all of you that had listened to this strange story at your bed time or near to the fireplace in a rainy days, be advised of this riddle: the goal of a bridge is to be a crossing point, but the bridge itself will never be able to cross himself – to do it so, one must be able to see and be beyond of what there is.