Maya wears dove gray ballet flats as she glides across a glassy smooth hardwood floor.
In another country, her sister Mary is barefoot, piecing her way across a black sand beach littered with broken sea shells as sharp and painful as shards of glass. She is headed toward a granite mountain, its slope as unyielding as concrete, all sharp edges and vertigo.
The girls are twins.
Maya is a dancer. She lives in a land of temperate weather and gentle breezes. Food and fresh water are so abundant there is no need for petition or prayer. Words have become unnecessary. The people communicate with flute notes, rhythmic drumming, and with a code conveyed by the color of carnations. More complex messages call for a sophisticated arrangement of prime numbers but this is seldom necessary.
Mary lives on an island of contrasts. The people have created an elaborate language to describe the varied terrain: the awe-inspiring ocean waves, too high and too rough for swimming or escape; the impervious mountain, its stones too hard for human backs and biceps to break; the dry and lonely canyons, dusty with shale so flaky it shatters beneath bare feet. Words are needed to instruct, alert, and warn. Thus they have become people of story—to evoke patience and hope, and to invent a happier vision. An ambition or a fantasy? Who can say?
When Maya sleeps she lives Mary’s life toiling in the fields, digging yams and potatoes. Every morning when she wakes, she cleans the dirt from beneath her fingernails.
When Mary sleeps, she lives Maya’s life dancing with the other children in soft leather shoes. She eats almonds and mandarin oranges, happily licking the juice from her sticky fingers.
we are the children of light
we are the children of darkness
we are a world of inequality
we are a world of creativity.
we must not forget,
neither nightmares
nor dreams
and so we remember
we are a people of story.
Photo by Astrid Schaffner at Unsplash
Wonderful story!
Thanks, Dick!!