The Beast and The Old Wisdom

2021

Ohhhhhh what is it, then? The great battle of the good vs. the evil beast? No, it is worse than that. Because the beast has long since lived in its most deadly state. In the 20th century, the beast was able to leave its body and infiltrate the psyche. It grew and grew and its tendrils reached the farthest corners of the Earth and the furthest corners of the mind. It employed the people to churn its gears, they believed that they were liberated. The people were swallowed up. At first they bowed to the beast, and then they became part of the beast, in all its glory. Together they wiped out children and nations, whole peoples far and wide. The beast made their clothes, their plates, their planes, their pills and even their pens. The beast’s slimy tendrils soaked into the social, they drove convenience, they played their part in the tiny and in the large, they became the mechanics, and they pulsed endlessly through the night, flood, fire, mud, and laughter. 

But alas, the people knew that the beast was born of men in suits. And then the people began to revel in the simple story, for indeed the good had lived. They realized that they were the small and mighty, and like the microns that drove the guts and forests, the small and mighty always won. So they began to inconvenience themselves. They had to shed what they knew in order to peel the beast out of the corners of their own minds. They began to move slower, which made the beast move slower. They began to scream, and wail, and fill with grief. 

They began to push the beast off their lands. They learned from the elders, they brought their friends, and the people grew. Many of the people died, and the beast went on, and the others never noticed. But as the deaths grew, the Old Wisdom rose. 

The Old Wisdom had slimy tendrils too. But the Old Wisdom’s tendrils were hard to see, because they slithered through time instead of items. These tendrils crept underneath, and sprawled through grasses, branches, rivers, dirt and capillaries. The Old Wisdom’s dendrites fell across trillions of years, often residing deeply in the crevices of the soul. The Old Wisdom had to be born, again and again and again, and it also had to die, again and again and again. In the end, the people could not deny the rise of this wisdom. It turned some to stone, it turned some to ghosts. It turned some to mud, and some to water. But mostly, it grasped the people who marched, and it never let them go. 

And so the beast began to wither, because it had not built itself to withstand the footprints of mystics, memories, fortune, and grace. As the people re-learned the simple tomato’s reliance on the soil, they began to unfold. They began to feel, to hold, to open, and to heal. And after that, the Old Wisdom drowned them. But they drank the waters of the poignant spirits, and passed them to their children. They stopped with the need for more, and looked deeply at the ground. And slowly the beast began to leave the psyche and die, tendril by tendril. 

So yes, all of the stories of all of the times have been about good vs. evil. But it’s never as simple as that. So now you, deep and trusting one, must hold tightly to the moments when the Old Wisdom soaks through you.