The Parable of the Rock

When we travel, it is lightly, seeking to see newly and at sunset everything that lies hidden at home behind bookshelves and between the pages of.

We are a dark people, we awake at the sunset and begin our stories and collectively our everyday business in the evening. Crepuscular. The grey dawn is a going down for us. We live in tents. We travel with the winds and pitch our tents on the shifting sand, Our Prayers are not written on leaves of paper but on grains of sand flowing.

Last year we traveled beyond our normal lands of (nomad) our god whistles around our ears, something like this sometimes like a djinn, sometimes a snake's shadow sometimes the stars, always changing.

We travelled last year beyond the seasonal edge that spread fattly outside its normal limits. And so it was that from under a sand dune that had no doublt moved at least two and probably three kilometers from where it had risen on our last pass, we found the foundations of what must have once been a huge solid building.

We camped around the buckled floors, cracks trickling sand. Scattered for hundreds of miles around were diamonds, balls, bricks and squares of coloured glass that might be part of a huge jigsaw or mosaic of a building. A silence of prayer surrounded the scattered stone.

And where is their god now, the god of the rock? Shattered and scattered for miles in the desert.

Resilience is the god of wind and shifting tides that the survivor knows. Rock eventually shatters. Rock eventually becomes sand, sand always flows and shifts. Like clouds. Our gods are of rain, wind and flapping canvas. Our god is the movement of the lines, resting, moving, light or dark. You cannot remember his name. Her children get fat, then thin. Sometimes we starve on the sands. We are one and we are all dispersed.

Our god is the shape of the water container, the container is the shape of the air between the paper and the nib.