parable

It happened that I looked around and found myself in a dark, miserable, slimy place while a barrel of equally unpleasant monkeys hung from my neck. A stair climbed straight up to a shining world, but I couldn't get there for all the monkeys, and from the exhaustion of dragging my wearying bones and lengthening burden through the labyrinth.

I realized that I had been trying for quite some time to climb the stairs, and visions of stepping up and sliding back to fall on my face in the muck slid into my mind as translucent as dreams.
So I decided to put the monkeys down. And all that I could reach slid easily off; evidently most of the monkeys that jump from one's own labyrinth onto one's own back don't latch as tightly as the ones that sneak up and siphon energy like mynocks.

By the time a big ol pile of silverbacks littered the floor, I climbed quickly and easily up to bask, squinting my eyes shut in anticipation.
But something was wrong.
The glow wasn't warming. It wasn't coming from the right place in the sky. It wasn't warming my body. And my body--it felt awkward, ungainly, unnatural.
I cracked my squint and peeked out: still surrounded by trees and mountains; dense evergreens punctuated by granite outcroppings and walls of near-vertical earth and rock.
I began trying to walk around and stumbled and shuffled about. I called out to find someone else, anyone else, and was met with distorted echoes of my own croaking voice.
I staggered and limped toward a hill from which I might see something significant, but after much painful effort I found myself back at the mouth of the cave. I tried again, and again found myself struggling in ragged circles.

From behind me, a voice said, "Good God, what happened to you?"
I spun around and fell into an unexpected sludge puddle. By the time I heaved myself vertical, I was a disgraceful mess and the speaker had gone, although there was an afterglow as if I had seen a light that had been switched off.
I looked at myself and tried to scrape off the muck. And I realized that after such a long time craning my neck to negotiate the labyrinth, my head had screwed itself on backwards.
As with the monkeys, it was surprisingly easy to rectify; I simply spun my head back around. The body, it seems, would prefer to be in its natural state.

Head forward, progress was fantastically easier, though I still had nowhere to go. I wandered, chasing shadows, looking for a clear view, and succeeding in sapping my energy until my feet drug furrows and my progress ceased.
I struggled until I fell, and then I kept struggling because I knew not what else to do. After some great time, I lost my sense of disorientation and fell into exhaustion.
A dream world passed, flashing images of the world before the cave flitting into uneasy and unnatural shapes that disquieted just enough to dread the next vision.
Some great time passed and I felt myself an utter failure after facing an inexhaustible stream of disappointment. My view of the world was clouded, but this time by confusion and distress, not visions of failure. Or maybe it was itself a vision of failure as I could tell where I was no more than what time it was or how I might return to somewhere I would want to be. I could see a forest of trees I should be able to recognize, mountains I should be able to identify, but I was lost. Utterly. My body, packed in muck that had settled after my struggles, was numb and frozen in place.
I called for help, louder and louder until I was hoarse. And someone came, a blessedly corporeal vision bearing the hope of amelioration.
"Help me! I've lost myself!"
"Really?" she said. "How so?"
"I came out of a labyrinthine cave in which I wandered for what felt like a lifetime, attracting parasitic monkeys until I drug a trane, and now that I've come back to the surface I don't know where I am!"
"A labyrinthine cave? What do you mean?"
"I fear it was of my own design, walls I formed to protect me from something threatening at the time. Gradually, the walls occluded the sky and turned into dank tunnels lined with terrors and disappointments."
"But you're right here, there in front of me."
"But my body is no more, my head is spun! I can't feel who I was, don't know where I've been, and now that I'm out, I don't know where I am!"
She looked at me and blinked at long intervals. "So?"
"So?" I was angry. "So? So all I have is the memory of who I was, and that is not at all who I am. I remember the world I left, but that's not the world I've found. Nevermind what I am to do in the world, how am I to discover who this new person is and how this new world works when I cannot see to stand, have not the energy to to explore, and I wouldn't know where to begin! Lost, lost, I'm all lost!"
She blinked at me, shook her head, and said, "Look around. Look at me. No, AT me. See me. See?"
I nodded.
"Now look down. See where you are? Wiggle those pink little piggies. See? That's you."
I could see, and I could even feel the toes wiggling, but the vision was unnatural and difficult to connect. How could what I saw be what I remembered?
"Now look around you. Look at the world. No, not at the shapes and colors of things, but at the substance. Do you see that over there is a tree?"
"But no such things live here!"
"And look beyond it, see that there are hills? They are the same as you remember."
"But the hills I knew looked nothing like that!"
"Ah, and here we reach the crux. Did you not tell me yourself you've been oblivious to the world for some great time?"
"Lifetimes, it seems."
"And did you change in that time?"
I looked back at my toes and wiggled the unfamiliar things. "More than I can recognize."
"And yet you expect the world around you to be the same?"
"But the hills are different! The trees are different! I cannot recognize any of it!"
"Look past the trappings. Everything might be different, but nothing has changed. Nothing. So the trees on the hillside look different; is it not still a hill? So the foliage on the trees looks different; are they not still trees? See past the trappings, see into the substance, and ask yourself if it is truly a new world."

It was as though a curtain lifted. I could see the hills, the trees, forms of the world I remembered.
"You're right! It was not an alcove with a single entrance but a long tunnel that came out in a different place. It is a new world, but still contoured with hills and mountains, textured with trees and shrubs. Everything is different, but it is I who have changed. I am the one with new vision, the one adhering to old memories. It is I who need to accept this new world. Of course it has changed--if I have traveled through a tunnel until I am unrecognizable to myself, how could the world not have changed?"
"Exactly," she nodded.
"And it is up to me not to resent the change but to use what I remember, what I learned of myself in the darkness, to make sense of this new place."
"Yes!" she said.

So I stood up, shook off the muck and dust, recognized the new appendages for extensions of myself, and went exploring.