From Eden

There was a young man named Amaris, born in the Valley of Orphalese.

As a child, he was one of the few that heard the prophets teaching,
But he found himself confused, at the mercy of imitators, storytellers.
Ones not of truth but of fiction,
They shaped his eyes, as he was beguiled.

As he grew, he became disheartened.
He could not see hope from fear
or fire from water
and was often burned.

Amaris decided to mend
his burden of blindness.

So he reached back to his childhood,
recalling the voices of the prophets.
And remembered some were true.
In desperation he again sought presence with them.
and in the stillness of solitude they came to him,
upon a river in the wind, in whispering voices.

And from those whispers rose teachings
And from the teachings arose meditations
And from these meditations arose a spring in his mind
And the spring fed his eyes, which began to change
In pain and stillness, he grew.

As he returned home, something miraculous occurred.
In in his village, walls began fading away.

Timeless walls of stone and mortar, laid by ancestors
became wispy like silken thread, fluttering in the breeze

When he spoke the his finding to his people,
Most were amused.

So he decided to walk
through the vail
despite concern from his people.
It hurt him, it burned his skin,
but Amaris succeeded, and was rewarded.
Then villagers approached the same walls,
and were pleased to find
the familiar stones of reason stacked high.
and they continued about their business.

Amaris with his new eyes, became lonely.
Although the path to the temple was a wide road,
most of the Orphalese did not believe in the temples existence.
And he found solace only in those that did.

And over time, with his new eyes,
Amaris felt different from his people, misunderstood.
All the while the whispers from prophets
slowly morphed the world
into wide open expanse.

Amaris was disturbed
that his new eyes were guided by the same heart,
of which no prophet could reach.

Then in love and in pain,
his loneliness broke
When he saw the same heart in his people
and he realized that it was not separate
it was one in the same.

Time refined the wisdom in Amaris,
his internal spring began to flow
And he spoke as a prophet.

As words flowed through him, it flowed to the villagers
and he found himself a vessel of truth.

And the same whispers which flowed from him, counseled him:
“You have drank from the river, deep enough to become a spring
But a spring is all you are and all you can be,
and how many springs does it take to form a river?
like the river of your valley, or the river of the wind?”