Breaking Through Again

By

Michael F. McCarthy

Contents

Pre-birth

Birth

Adult life

Nirvana Stage 1

Nirvana Stage 2

Pre-Birth

It is almost time to be a carnal being again. My quarters are very cramped. While I have been here, I lost track of time. I have been contemplating my past lives while I develop into my next form.

In my last life, I was a village chief. One of my top duties was to settle disputes between people. The ugliest were the ones between family members. By the time the disputes came before me to settle, they had a good long time to fester. Each side treated the other as if it were an object to be manipulated for maximum gain. They thought that the other side was not human. I never got a dispute at the beginning when it would have been easy to resolve.  My resolutions to the problems left no side happy. Whatever the solution I came up with to resolve the problem, I soon found that l had a better chance of all parties carrying out the solution if I always cloaked it in religious overtones.

The other main duty was to lead our village’s religious services. Our religion is polytheistic. Each region of our culture had its’ own patron demigod. Our demigod is a winged dragon, Panquest. According to the lore Panquest was on his way to give us the secret of fire. Panquest’s father did not want us to have Fire. So he killed him by having a bolt of lightning strike him. In his death throws, Panquest caused a tree to catch fire and seared an animal that he had just killed. This how we came to have fire and cook our meat. Our area is the place where Panquest died. For centuries there have been festivals to commemorate us getting the gift of fire. Every year the faithful are supposed to make a pilgrimage to touch the remains of the tree that Panquest is supposed to have lit on fire. There are merchants selling trinkets with magical properties as souvenirs to the pilgrims.

In recent years dragon sightings are down. Some say that the reason for this our encroachment on their habitat. Others say it is our lack of genuine belief in dragons that has caused them to be reclusive.

I had lost my faith in this tenet of our belief system because if it were true it would say that humans are not capable of figuring how to start a fire and how to cook meat.  We now can start a fire by numerous methods and have chefs that create different ways to prepare cook meats. We can plan and erect buildings all without a god’s intervention. I could see why most of the people believed in this legend since it gave people strength to get through their daily trials and tribulations.

There were many rituals I had to lead. Each ritual had to be performed in a particular sequence to produce the desired effect. I tried to perform my part of our rituals as if they had an effect on the world around us. This act was very hard for me to do.  But what right did I have to take their comfort away? Anyway, it was easier to go along with societal norms than to contradict them. If I said we got fire when lightning struck and we learned to cook our food by accident, I would have been branded a heretic and perhaps lost my life.

Birth

The wall is very smooth and curved. I have to get out of here because this space is much too small for my body now. I keep banging my head against the wall with the hope of someone hearing me and helping out of these cramped quarters. But wait, with the last bang I felt the wall give way a bit. So I try to keep banging the same spot. It is hard to do because my muscles don’t always coordinate with my thoughts. Suddenly, though, I see a small ray of light. I bang my head against the wall there a few more times. All of a sudden I am in bright sunlight. I feel two heat rays cross very close to my back, just missing me. I look around a see two baby dragons trying to get enough flame up to torch me again. The instant I saw these two dragons I think to my self “My God it was true!!!” Then I hastily turned my attention to avoid being fried by those two baby dragons and I cry, “Wait, we can work this out.” One of the dragonets was much smaller than the other. As I later learned the variation in the size of dragonets is due to hatching order. Within six weeks of hatching the size differential due to hatch order disappears. I was the smallest of the three dragonets. I looked directly into the eyes of the smaller one of my siblings and said, “If the both of you succeed in killing me, how long do you think it will take before that one tries to kill you? Your desire to kill me is about all of you getting enough food to develop and prosper. If we are not pigs about this we can get enough food so that we don’t starve.” From then on my smaller sibling and I took turns sleeping so that we could guard each other against our larger sibling.  Under my leadership,  we shared all the food that our parents brought to us instead each of us fighting to get the attention of our parents to drop food into our gullets. All three of us were able to fledge.

Most of the time I have been here, at regular intervals the heat source from above is removed, and my living space gets turned upside down. Now I feel two more heat sources have magically appeared, one my right and one on my left. I push the walls with my head and feel them for any weakness. I don’t find any. In the past, if I found a weakness in the wall, or birth canal, I had pushed on it until I popped out. Not this time. Not yet.

Adult life

Mating was difficult for my smaller sibling and me because of my “strange” idea of making sure that each hatchling got enough food.

Years later, when I had my broods,  my mate and I sat our dragonets down and told them we would make sure that each would get enough to grow up nice and strong. However, if anyone died due to sibling rivalry, we would kill the rest of them. This threat ensured their co-operation.

After a  while, other parents began to see that the number of our offspring that survived to adulthood dramatically Increased compared to the number of their offspring. So they decided to imitate our practice of ensuring that all of their hatchlings were guaranteed to be fed enough food to reach adulthood.

I made it a practice to tell our hatchings before they left, that they were always welcome to come back to the nest with their broods and mates. Once a week my mate and I would plan a get together with our offspring. Whoever showed up were welcomed. We understood why some choose to come and why others chose not to. We enjoyed each other’s company, sharing events since we last communed with each other. Since each time we gathered, group membership was different, there was always someone there to tell your story to for the first time.

And so I ended my days surrounded by beings that cared for me and for each other.

Nirvana Stage 1

I feel that I am predestined to land on this square. I don’t think I had done anything to warrant my coming here now.

I thought my innovation of guaranteeing my hatchlings enough food until they could fledge was a failure. After many batches of hatchlings I noticed a very small percentage hatchlings could not fledge and had to be supported long after their siblings had fledged. Still others died a painful death due to some illness that heretofore had been unknown. I think that these outliers would have died much earlier and suffered much less had it not been for my program of guaranteeing them sufficient food to attain adulthood.   Some dragons parents used this fact in a campaign against guaranteeing enough food to each hatchling to reach adulthood. This troubled me greatly. I was never to come to terms with is this fact entirely. The only way I could justify this was that a lot more dragons got to fledge than before. 

I see a small blue wall forming and coming my way…

Nirvana Stage 2

I see now in my role as village chief settling disputes between parties I had become like those entities. I treated them like inanimate objects to be manipulated by me. I had an I-it relationship with them. Similarly, when I conducted the rituals for the village, I was always asking for something from the spirits. If our petitions were not granted, then I must have made a mistake in my performance. It was like magic. My interactions with my adult offspring were so unlike my relationships in my public life. I treated them like beings that mattered. When I asked them how they were doing, I really wanted to know. We had an open two-way relationship, an I-Thou relationship. I wish I felt that I had that type of relationship when I performed the religous rituals.

The blue wave is engulfing me…   

The End