Medina’s Allegory of the Crab

You are a crab. So am I.

The truth lies only beyond.

Consider the shell of a hermit crab. Standing before us a product of Fibonacci and calcium synthesis, appreciate its soft curves and happy sheen. Witness its spiral, both ordinary and extraordinary, as it drifts ordinarily on the beach shore. We can take our Nikons out today, run to the coast, and take several dozen shots of just as many shells. We might even see the hermit come out.

But we would still miss the point. No matter how many pictures, it would still stay just that: a picture of a hermit crab shell. An insignificant imprint of chemicals fermented on plastic paper, and nothing more. We witness nothing until we grab the shell, squeeze our palm around it, and pry our soul into its empty husk.

So we do so.

Like a cardboard cutout brought to life, the pixels animate to three dimensions and beyond. Years of a gastropod’s life bulges at our touch. Salty sand of unknown origin sprinkles in between our fingers. Cracks and discolorations fade into view at the sun’s revealing light. This carapace has lived and died as we do. How often have we passed this skeleton buried under tourists’ towels without a first thought, much less a second? How many times have we stared into our beloved’s eyes and seen only pupil and iris? How many books have we finished for no other reason than to finish them?

There lies the problem: we are spiritually blind.

Just as infinity lies between any two points, infinite truth grows all around us. Everything is inside every thing. Yet we often resemble the walking dead, slack-jawed and drooling, in our nonobservance of our world. We leave the crab of our spirit a hermit; blind and dumb, only to roll around in our chassis of ignorance.

What do we fail to see?

I see the universe in a crab’s shell.

Starting from the center it accelerates outward at a mathematically predictable rate, and continues to do so. Years untold crack its surface, and I am but a dot on its white spectrum. Scientists can wax on about how long, how fast, and how far the world moves, but stay lost at ‘why?’ Where are we going?

No matter how much we read, we can perceive reality expand no more than we can see our fingernails grow. But where is the crab?

I see humanity in a crab’s shell. Starting somehow from somewhere in Anatolia (India? China, perhaps?), it has expanded at a sociologically predictable rate, and continues to so. Innovation, expansion, civilization, murder. An endless cycle I read over and over in the creases of the white spiral. I can hope for the future, but we appear stuck in the same direction. Outwards, away from center. Bigger, faster, and newer, but not better. But where is the crab?

My reader, my brother;

I see you as I see myself in a crab’s shell.

We begin both at a hospital bed we cannot remember. We live our lives at a culturally predictable rate. We breathe, we mature, we fall in love, marry, and start a family, only to recede into the background. Cultures, colors, and years may separate us, but the curls in our conches match just the same. No matter how mighty or meek, we both cheer when we triumph and cry when we are alone.

And someday we will lie in the Earth together—

buried, eroded, half-forgotten, and smothered under a legion of uncaring beachgoers.

But I know where the crab is. It is at the center, waiting for us. Since our lives only grow forward and outward, like the crab we must go backwards. We will unwind this mortal coil and release the hermit soul from its prison. We will firstime face the light of the world from outside the cave.

And what will we find then? God? Happiness? Enlightenment? I do not yet know.

Until then, consider this allegory incomplete.