Elena: Reading from The Garden of Belief - Work in Progress

It doesn’t take much to make the mind wander, especially when one is engaged in tasks that don’t require any mental processing.

Cimmy got mesmerized by the silky texture of the onion’s skins which slipped under her fingers when she sorted the seeds by size into large wooden vats.

Lost in her inner world, she went over the smallest building parts of matter again and again, wondering how come they stuck together in consistent ways, so that their composite was always a rock, or a girl, or a fronded leaf.

None of it seemed random, as if reality itself bowed to a higher law with reverent obedience.

After her random wanderings through reality and her unexpected growth leaps, Cimmy wasn’t sure about anything anymore.

She wasn’t anxious, or afraid, because a deep instinct she couldn’t express told her she was precious and protected in this realm, or whatever one wanted to call this ever shifting reality; she was always its center and the reason for its accommodating changes.

She felt like her whole life was nothing more than a conversation with this much larger intelligence, to which she herself belonged, a part of it, but not small at all, and imbued with the same gift of creation and change.

Whatever this was, it was alive; she was sure of it. Probably made of the same living blobs that moved around, guided by unknown reasons, to keep it healthy and in balance.

“Rahima,” she started suddenly, startling her friend, who was lost in her own world as well.

Maybe everyone had his or her own world, and those small personal realities touched and merged into each other for brief stretches of time, and then became disjointed again.

“Yes,” her friend replied.

“Do you think there’s something up there?” She pointed to the sky.

“Or someone,” Rahima nodded. “Who are you and what have you done to my friend?”

“I’m serious. This, none of this, feels random.”

“You think a higher power purposefully put Bertha and Josepha in charge of your life to torment you, stunt your growth and steal your joy?”

“Maybe, in the large scheme of things, I’m not that important.”

“How does it help you to know there is a higher power, but it doesn’t even know you exist? On the bright side, if it never pays attention to you, you can do whatever you want.”

“True,” Cimmy thought.

She enjoyed the freedom to follow up on her curiosity wherever it led, even to the metal-sweating rocks, if the spirit moved her. She returned to the subject that had been occupying her mind for some time now.

“Think about it: if it has to follow up on everything to make sure the rocks rock and the plants plant and the humans human, how could it possibly have time to deal with me, or Bertha’s musings? We’re not that interesting.”

“Maybe it runs out of thinking space, you know? Maybe that explains all the things that look ugly and unfinished: smelly swamps, barren lands, awful people.”

“You know what that means, right? It means that when we were desperate and barely scraping by, eating bitter roots and starving, we probably were in the unfinished portion of the higher intelligence’s work.”

“What bitter roots? What are you talking about, Cimmy?”

And again, the reality bubbles, which had so easily merged for a while, suddenly bounced apart, making each of their personal worlds impenetrable to mutual understanding.

Cimmy couldn’t understand her own jumping through realities, where everything was almost the same, almost, and because she couldn’t understand it, she always forgot that this Rahima, although she looked the same, had never shared those early experiences with her, like the other Rahimas did, and all the references to those times were wasted.

“Never mind. Here. Now. Does this look like finished reality to you?”

“I suppose. This is good: there’s an abundance of food and comfort, we’re in good health, and the meadow is beautiful. The world is beautiful, Cimmy, that’s what I think.”

“We must be in the finished portion of reality, then.”

“Why don’t you ask it, whatever it is? If it is a higher mind, it should be able to hear you.”

“Especially now that we’re in a part that it already had a chance to work on, I suppose,” Cimmy agreed.

That was a very good idea.

Rahima never ceased to impress Cimmy with her unexpected insights: under a silly and easily distracted exterior, she concealed a deep fountain of wisdom.

One must stay true to the scientific process. If one has an idea about how things are, one has the obligation to test it and accept the results, wherever they may lead. That was universally true, and what is universally true must apply to what kept the universe running smoothly, whatever one wanted to call it. If it had a mind, she should try to communicate with it and find out what it wanted, what it was like, and how she fit into its story.

She did not know how one communicated with non-human entities, so she closed her eyes, trying to figure it out.

Time passed around her, while she stood still inside it, like a boulder in the middle of a bouncy brook, until its spirited waters got blocked suddenly, drowning her in all their happenings, by Josepha’s angry shout.

“What have you been doing with those onions? Bertha, come look at this: the whole day she did nothing at all! Three onions sorted, that’s all she accomplished today. And they’re sorted wrong too!”

Bertha arrived, with a full head of steam, to throw more kindling on the fire of Josepha’s ire. She examined the contents of Cimmy’s bucket and then got in the girl’s face to intimidate her.

Cimmy looked unimpressed, which infuriated the latter even more.

“We can’t have someone like you ruin the efforts of every hard-working person in this village. When you were a child, we put up with your bad seed because we felt sorry for you, but not anymore. Bear witness to me, Josepha, when I declare she doesn’t belong to this community anymore. Go wherever your twisted soul leads you, girl, as far away from here as you need to be so I never have to see you again.”

Cimmy got up, surprised by the insane request, even now, after Bertha’s deranged and abusive behavior had bulldozed her work and purpose so many times, unsure where to go, and what to do, disoriented by the abrupt and destabilizing intrusion upon her life.

Most of all, she was sad to part from Rahima and wondered if the latter would eventually forget her, just like she would if she were to die.

What happened after death, anyway, if there ever was an after?

She put that on the list of things to ask the higher power, if she managed to get in communication with it, looked around to see if Fay was nearby, because she was absolutely determined not to leave him behind, and once she found him, left the village again, at sunset, without looking back.

The familiar scents and colors of the meadow welcomed her, as she made her way to the seashore, in a daze, thinking for sure Rahima would try to look for her there, or come after her to the island, and she should try to leave a message by the raft, to let her friend know her whereabouts, so many thoughts, racing, racing, no longer held at bay by small and mindless manual chores.

The moon rose over the ocean, and the luminous creatures that formed large pools under the water surface flashed blue and green under its silver light.

Rahima was right; the world was beautiful, and if that was true, then this place where she found herself now was part of the finished reality as well, and as such safe and welcoming.

Cimmy found a patch of tall beach grass on the shore and made her bed in it, from which she could look up at the bedazzled firmament, where a profusion of stars filled her with wonder.

How could the higher power have time to talk to her when it had to work so hard to make that infinity of stars and keep them steady in the sky?

She pondered whether all those lights she saw up there were finished, and figured maybe some of them were not, maybe some were unstable, ugly, and scary. Who was to know? She had no way of telling, since they were impossible to reach, at least for now.

And thus Cimmy solved the problem that had tormented sages and saints forever: if there was a God, how did he allow so much evil in the world?

It was very simple: God’s reality was still a work in progress, as of yet unfinished.

Thank you for reading.

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