This story was told and performed by the First Unitarian Dance Team
NATURE: High in a far off mountain a little spring sprang from a hidden source. It flowed down the mountain over all different kinds of terrain, sometimes leaping and bubbling, sometimes drifting lazily or going underground. But it was never stopped by any obstacle that might have gotten in its way until one day when it reached the edge of a vast desert.
The stream flung itself at the desert. But each time it did so its waters simply disappeared, vanishing into nothingness, swallowed up by the dry hot sand.
DESERT: You won't be able to cross the desert using the old ways. I am not like a boulder or a tree or a rock ledge. It is no use hurling yourself at the desert like that. You will simply disappear. Or turn into marshland. You must trust the wind to carry you across the desert. You must let yourself be carried. You must let yourself be absorbed into the wind.
STREAM: No! I am a stream with a nature and an identity of my own! I don't want to lose myself by being absorbed by the wind.
DESERT: That's what the wind does! Trust me and trust the wind. If you let yourself be absorbed by the wind, it will carry you across the desert and let you fall again on the other side to be a stream again.
STREAM: But I won't be the same stream I am now. I won't be this particular stream.
NATURE: The desert understood the dilemma. But it also understood the mystery.
DESERT: You're right. But you also won't be the same stream you are now if you fling yourself into the sand and turn into a marsh. Let the wind carry you across the desert and the real you, the real heart of you, the essence of everything you truly are will be born again on the other side to flow a new course to be a river that you can't even imagine from where you are standing now.
NATURE: So the stream thought for a long while. And deep in its heart it had a memory of a wind that could be trusted and a horizon that was always out of reach, but was always a new beginning.
So the stream took a deep breath and surrendered itself to the power of the wind. And the wind took the vapor of the stream in strong and loving arms and carried high above the desert, far beyond the horizon, and let it fall again, softly, at the top of a new mountain. And the stream began to understand who it really was and what it meant to be a stream.
return to main page