Once Upon A Time

Once upon a time, there was a woman who had some invisible seeds.

She chose a place to settle down and carefully sowed the land, planted them one by one. She remembered what the elders told her: “These are not common seeds but ones that would take time and effort, ones whose fruits would not appear right away but over the steady practice of a patient, nurturing hand.”

So, she woke up every morning and watered the field. Took away the weeds and kept the birds away. People saw her working happily under the sun and waved at her from a distance. Few, very few, came close and asked her what was she doing, they learned about the seeds and so became close friends with her.

But as predicted by the elders, the seeds didn’t grow right away. Some little buds showed here and there but they were so scarce people began wondering what was she doing every day of every year. A group became stubbornly concerned and some criticism started. They wanted to figure out why this woman was so dedicated to what seemed like an invisible task. They worried about her sanity.

One night, a terrible event shook the town and inevitably, the group blamed her for it. The woman who was so self-involved in her daily tasks never knew what had happened so she woke up early in the morning for her daily chores. The next day as she was watering the south side of the field, two women passed by, the first called her a murderer, the next one called her a freak. She looked behind her to see if there was someone else they were calling these names but saw no one so she shrugged and kept at her work wondering what to make of it, questioning if in a parallel dimension someone that looked like her had done something wrong. She immediately felt sorry for that person.

Summer came and her will started to get tested. Too hot to be outside, she dealt with it as best as she could as she squeezed sweat out of the harshness of the environment but felt happy about her own resilience.

But the group was not happy. Their worries started spreading around and pollinating farther away lands. The woman who used to enjoy sitting in the afternoons by the field started getting uneasy by their looks. Even worse, the wind began to bring to her ears crumbles of whisperings and truncated speculations that were hard to withstand. Some believed she was hiding something, some morbid others, burying stuff under the ground. Sadly, she could only hear bits and pieces so she could never make sense of it and to some degree, she didn’t want to make sense of nonsense. Nonetheless, every day at the field she tried to put it together but finally she dismissed them out of sheer frustration. She had great hopes that the group would find the truth as fast as they had found their way to the lies.

The friendly looks at the coffee shop progressed from cold to plain rudeness so she started brewing her own coffee.

She felt hurt. Offended. All she knew was the work in her field. All she knew was about the seeds that come from hard work, all she believed in was her blind trust around the possibility of creation above and beyond all doubt.

People stopped waving at her. Some of them claimed they saw her dancing naked in an obscure cabaret. People stopped looking at her in the eye, of those few who did smile to her also made a strange and sinister smirk, one that comes from being left out of a joke everyone knows about. The woman no longer wanted to sit outside her field anymore.

She prayed every night for a clue, for something that could make all the pieces come together but silent mockery, mumblings and the brittleness that came from overexposure was what she got in return.

Still, the woman kept at her daily task. This imaginary field was hers. It belonged to her because she had worked for it every day. It saved her from caving into believing into what others thought of her. Occasionally, her friends came over to see her and she shared some tea and laughter with them. This also kept her from shutting down, especially on hard days where she was called a fraud.

Thing is, the woman understood about perception being reality, she always had. She knew the lack of a harvest could be perceived as that, as a terrible hoax but she had no choice, the seeds had chosen her and not the other way round.

The weather became cold and damp, so as she was covering the field with a tarp to keep it warm, she thought about how fragile social constructions were made of. Of how words spread by a group could infect larger groups with the wrong information. It made someone extremely vulnerable. Conjectures thrown as darts, pigeonholing someone’s reputation along their sense of self.

She went to the store one afternoon to buy some chickens (she avoided the diner those days and cooked mostly at her place) but the owner told her she could only have one. A woman who was on the line behind her laughed, it was almost as if this laughter had a tinge of humiliatory redemption, of soiling clean laundry with dirty feet.

The woman stopped going to he store. The woman stopped sleeping. The lack of sleep started to get in the way of her daily activities. Tending to her field, her craft, to her passion seemed obtuse in an absurd world.

She took comfort in reading about the Salem Witches, she devoured books about how some cultures like the innuits used to deal with extreme isolation. There was also a story of how an African American man with an incredibly intimidating physical complexion dealt with racism and exclusion as he was continuously judged in advance by many people.

As she lifted her spirit every morning she tried to believe she had a goal in life and that eventually people would understand or at least respect the way she had decided to spend the time of her life. She fought the fear of opening the door every day, she started to listen to music to avoid the echoes of voices that mimicked hers after she hung up her phone. The woman felt so baffled by people that seemed to recognize her wherever she went. The woman understood the great difference between loneliness and isolation. While the first is a voluntary act, the second only leads people to a melancholic imprisonment.

Yesterday I saw the woman sitting on her field. She didn’t look so scared anymore. I think she understood that the lesson of the elders was never based on the possible fruits of the seeds but on believing in the power of a seemingly “empty field”. Of an uncompromising, unmovable faith in being self rooted within a wondrous, intricate, resilient and diverse land.