NaNoWriMo 2016 — Day 6 — The Peddler Sage

“There are many wise men in this world.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I admitted. “But okay.”

“Well, there are.” Lynn rolled her eyes. “Not that all of them are really wise. But lets not get off on a tangent. I’m bad about that I should have you know so I try not to. Fail all the time, but never the less I do try to make the effort.”

“I think you might be doing that right now.”

Lynn coughed.

“Right. So, I was saying wise men. Most of them agree that there is one thing in this world that is the most powerful thing.” Eye brow raised she gave me a questioning look. “Do you have any guess?”

“Umm.”

I didn’t but I tried anyway.

“Money?”

“Nope, too materialistic and ultimately transitory.”

“Um, respect?”

“Not bad, but that’s externalized and dependent on others.”

“Okay I don’t know.”

Lynn laid back, looking up at the sky above us.

“So the poets say love is the most powerful thing. And the philosophers say ‘no, it’s the will’ that is.”

“I thought you said you were speaking about wisemen.” I mimicked her actions already to be imprinted on with my young and impressionable mind.

“Oh, right, I was. So the wisemen now, see, they say knowledge is. But there is a problem with their assumption there.”

“What problem?”

“What is that?” Pushing herself up on her elbows, Lynn pointed at the dying rays of the sun as it neared the end of it’s journey beyond the horizon.

“It’s the sunset,” I replied confidently, by this time accepting of her more odd ways and willing to play along. Ready for what ever she had to say.

“Indeed…and it’s more than that. It’s the refractions of light rays through the different layers of the atmosphere as the earth beneath us both rotates itself about every twenty-four hours and spins around the sun in a roughly fixed orbit about every three hundred and sixty-five days. Or more simply put, that is the echo of the dance of astral bodies which have been hard at work for eons before now and will still be working at it eons after.”

I hadn’t been ready for that.

“I…”

“But that doesn’t matter.” Lynn winked at me. “Because all that knowledge I just have given you will take many on this world thousands of years more to fully accept. Though some of your own astronomers have privately said as much, but again not my point.”

Lost again, just I just gave up to listen.

“All that knowledge I have just given you and yet you are no more empowered than you were before. Perhaps there is some seed there that you might nurture, true. But right at this moment you have no more or less than you had before.”

“So it’s a sunset?”

“Yes! For all you know more now, it is just a sunset.”