The Garden of Hope — Worlds Within
And did the world provide! When you stop being afraid of it, reality opens up to you to reveal all its beauty and its mysteries, and they are wondrous and strange, and so far from what you can even imagine that the only response you are capable of is awe.
Humans may not be able to understand without limits, but they have an extraordinary capacity for wonder, and their wonder creates its own magical realm of splendid things, a realm where the human spirit as a whole comes alive.
It lives in stories, and in art. It lives in science and discovery. It shines its light on valor and on faith and always yearns for transcendence.
To the human spirit, a beautiful red rock is not an inert detail, it is potential.
Somehow, the spirit secretly knows that the whole of reality is there to nurture its development and provide opportunities to grow.
The philosopher’s stone, they called it in jest; a found magical object, which brought upon them the wrath of Bertha, who saw it as yet another time waster on Cimmy’s long list of useless enterprises, but which was so much more than that.
There is the physical aspect of things, the solid reality of the substance they’re made of, their shape, their color, their properties, their limited footprint in reality, and then there is another aspect, that of what the things represent.
In this aspect, objects are not inert lumps of matter. They always mean something and carry inside them the kernels of becoming more; they embody all their future uses and all the discoveries inherent to their nature and all the feelings they inspire in all of humankind.
In this way, they transcend their mere substance and turn into an endless spectrum of potentiality.
So this amorphous red rock became curiosity, an avid thirst for knowledge, confidence in one’s scientific abilities, and in the mastery of extensive practice.
It sparked the imagination, lead it in directions it couldn’t see before, and allowed hope for a better life.
After all, life is as much about what things mean as it is about what things are, and what the red rock was about was daring to walk past the boundaries of the unknown.
Cimmy’s little shed became so filled with samples and experiments in progress even Josepha stopped dropping in, for fear some of the airhead’s experiments might jump out of dark corners and eat her alive.
“What’s that, Cimmy?” Rahima masked her apprehension while she pointed to a bubbling alembic whose ominous fumes cast a greenish evil aura around it.
“Do you want to see something wonderful?” Cimmy asked, uncovering a table whose contents telegraphed through the sheet thrown over them to conceal them from sight like the ghosts of reality.
“Did that used to be Josepha’s copper pot? Cimmy, if she finds out, you’ll never see the end of her unpleasantness! What were you thinking?”
“I’ll make her another one. Watch this!”
The pot had been painstakingly refashioned to add a soldered lid and spouts in strange places, and the leftovers of the process had been chopped into tiny pieces which Cimmy fed one at a time to a vat of vinegar underneath the alembic like one would offer little morsels to a caged snake.
The vat had copper threads growing like hair from its outer surface, all attached to the monstrous apparatus above.
Two of them accidentally touched, generating an unearthly spark which turned Rahima’s apprehension into pure dread.
The contraption huffed and puffed, creating pressure and steam, distilling and separating, moving the evil vapors through its intricate set of pipes, and finally condensed them by passing them through an ominous looking coiled tube into a viscous liquid which started accumulating, one drop at a time, in the bowl at the end of the still.
“It’s glowing!” Rahima gasped, and took a step back, against her will. “That’s not natural! It can’t be! Please don’t do this! Throw it away before it’s too late. That’s fox fire, Cimmy!”
“Exactly,” Cimmy continued, unperturbed. “But there is more. Do you know that place in the forest where the trees were felled by the storm?”
“Yes,” Rahima regained her wits. “We sometimes go there to pick mushrooms after the rain.”
“Well, last time I went there, I found the glowing ones. There were so many of them, the entire place lit up at dusk.”
“You didn’t!” Rahima burst in outrage. “Gathering devil’s mushrooms! Cimmy, how could you?”
“They’re not devil’s mushrooms.”
“Yes, they are! That’s what people call them.”
“Just because you want to call me a tulip, that doesn’t make me one.” Cimmy didn’t falter in her pursuit of logic.
“You boiled devil’s mushrooms in Josepha’s pot! You’re going to poison us all if she doesn’t kill you first!”
“Actually, I don’t think they’re poisonous. I saw Fay gorge himself on them earlier and he’s fit as a fiddle.”
“What could possibly be the use of this evil soup?”
“I’ll think of something if I must. Why does it have to be useful? Why isn’t simply discovering we can do this enough?”
Rahima warmed up to the merits of the scientific process for its own sake, so she picked up the bowl, whose contents had spilled a little on the outside, and stained her fingers as she lifted it off the table.
“Great, now I got demon soup on me. If this ends up killing me, it will be on your head, Cimmy!”
“As I said: not poisonous.”
Rahima did her best to wipe her fingers on her apron, and since the substance didn’t seem to stain, the incident was soon forgotten and they both went about their daily chores.
As dusk arrived, both of their fingers started to glow, faintly at first, but growing brighter the darker it got, stirring Rahima into a full panic.
She rushed back to Cimmy’s shed, and the latter could see her friend approaching from afar. One could make up Rahima’s movements in the dark by the ghostly light of her fluttering apron and the swinging of her glowing hands as she ran.
“It wasn’t hard to find you,” the latter started breathless the moment she was close enough to her friend. “Do you know how brightly your hands glow, Cimmy? I’m surprised nobody noticed yet, but they will, they will…” she started crying, dejected.
“Every problem comes with a solution,” Cimmy reassured her. “Take off that apron and we’ll just wear mittens.”
“And how are we going to explain to Josepha why we’re wearing mittens in July?” Rahima didn’t relent. “Besides, she will have noticed her pot is missing by now, and you’re her usual, nay, her only suspect. You know everything that goes wrong in this village eventually ends up landing in your lap.”
“Excellent point! Do you know how Bertha always preaches proper girls should keep their hands to themselves and out of sight? Here’s a new apron. I’ll wear mine. We’ll both be modeling behavior for the other girls tonight by keeping our hands tucked under our aprons.”
“There isn’t a chance in places that this harebrained plan of yours will work. You know that, right?”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Resigned, the two of them started off towards the community bonfire, hands neatly tucked under their aprons and quiet: the picture of propriety and obedience.
They sat very close to the fire, hoping that, if the ominous glow on their fingers showed, it would be dulled and maybe even explained away as the glare from the flames.
An hour in, just when they started breathing easier, a terrifying sight prompted the entire audience into blood-curdling screams: walking slowly across the meadow, Fay approached the fire surrounded by a ghastly green glow, so bright it made him look twice his usual size.
“It’s a demon! Kill it!” Bertha jumped to her feet and started gathering rocks to throw at the poor creature, and in that moment of panic, Cimmy forgot her problem and jumped to protect her friend.
“No! Stop! Stop! It’s Fay!” she beseeched Bertha with her outstretched hands, which were now glowing much brighter than the rat and more intensely green.
“Grab her too! And that gullible friend of hers! We’ve seen enough of this evil, Josepha. I keep telling you people, but nobody ever listens!” She looked around, more annoyed than terrified, maintaining a posture that screamed dignified outrage. “Where’s the demon rat?”
Fay slithered under the thicket of thistles, getting deeper and deeper into it until his bright glow turned into a faint flicker and disappeared.
“Your rat bested us again,” Rahima whispered in Cimmy’s ears, annoyed that her epic efforts to conceal her involvement in this drama were foiled by a rodent. “I wish I were born a rat sometimes, you know?”
“Away with them, I say! Begone, demonic spawn!”
“What?” Josepha asked. “In the middle of the night?”
“No! Let’s keep them here till dawn to fulfill their evil plans!”
Once again, Cimmy and Rahima left the village behind to find their way through the fields in the dark by the light of their fingers.
“See? It is useful.” Cimmy commented, and the glow of her hands was bright enough to see the spark of outrage and revolt in her friend’s eyes. The latter was too angry to talk.
“It’s not like we haven’t done this before,” Cimmy argued. “We’ll take the float to the island tomorrow. It’s really nice there, no?”
Rahima’s ire started mellowing in anticipation of her favorite activity, but she kept stubbornly quiet to make her point.
The trip to the beach took over an hour, during which the light on their fingers showed no signs of abating. It was a beautiful night, and they knew the fields well enough by now not to worry about dangers lurking in the shadows.
As they approached the beach, the vegetation started morphing into the wispy sand and salt grasses that grow close to the shore, and once they got to the top of the dunes on the edge of the sea, an enchanting sight welcomed them.
Half of its surface glowed bright blue like a giant spotlight was moving underwater, an ethereal blue so otherworldly Rahima forgot to keep up her outraged wall of silence.
“It comes in blue as well!”
“And it’s even brighter!” Cimmy responded, in awe of the world’s hidden wonders.
They gaped at it in disbelief for a while, their amazement accompanied by the soft lapping of the waves on the shore, until a little green dot started gleaming in the distance, growing larger as it approached.
“Fay found us,” Cimmy breathed, relieved.
“Like there was ever any doubt about it!” Rahima remembered her ire. “That rat is the luckiest creature alive, or he’s magical. Either way, he’s playing a better hand than the both of us.”
The rat stared at them with his innocent eyes, whose dark glossy pebbles took on a bluish cast from the glow of the luminescent sea.
“Oh, come, Rahima!” Cimmy burst out. “Don’t tell me you’re going to miss your chores! You love the island, remember?”
“You mean the one with the demon rocks that sweat metal?”
“That’s the one, yes.”
“Well,” she started out slowly. “I have to say I feel awful every time I get shunned, Cimmy. I mean, how many times do people have to tell you that you’re worthless and evil until you start believing it for yourself? But all in all, I wouldn’t have missed this adventure for the world. I already knew how my life was going to unfold by the age of ten, but it turned out not to be like that at all, and I’m grateful.”
She paused to think and restarted, excited.
“Hey! Since we’re doing this anyway and the float finally stopped taking in water, can we sail to the farther island in the distance next? I’m burning to find out what’s out there!”
She pointed a luminous finger into the dark of night, in the general direction of said island.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Cimmy dampened her enthusiasm. “We’ll get to our island tomorrow, build shelter, gather provisions, and plan our next steps.”
“Yeah. Maybe find a way not to wake up in a puddle this time,” Rahima griped.
“See how quickly you’re learning? There is no substitute for experience.”
