Two Shaky Towers : A Fable

by Joe Blow

the boy to the men and women hanging from the two towers. "I've found the spider and pulled it's fangs out. It can't hurt you now!"

  "What do you mean, a spider?" asked the expert of the fruit-eaters. "There are no spiders. We are up here because it gives us a better view of the world that we are studying." And he tried to use his telescope with one hand and hang onto the tower with the other.

  "What do you mean, a spider?" asked one of the fish-eaters. "We are up here so that we will be the first to see the return of the Son of the Lake."

  "I know why you are up there," said the boy. "And you can come down now."

  A few of the fruit-eaters and a few of the fish-eaters climbed down from their towers. It was hard, because the towers were rocking and the stones were lose, but eventually they joined the boy on the ground.

  "What do we do now?" they asked themselves. "How do we get the others to come down." And then they turned to the boy and said, "You were right. It was the spider that scared us. But we didn't want to admit it."

  "That's O.K.," replied the boy. "But those towers are going to collapse any minute. We need to do something fast."

  And so they all went into the forest and cut branches from the trees. Then they stripped off big pieces of bark and bound them to the branches to make giant nets. And then they returned to the two towers.

  "Jump! Jump!" they cried. "We will catch you!"

  And as the people who were still clinging to the two towers saw that the towers were about to fall they began jumping into the nets.

  The work went on until late in the afternoon, but finally all of the fruit-eaters and the fish-eaters had been caught.

  It took a while for everybody to get used to being back on solid ground again. But with plenty of water to drink and plenty of fresh fruit and fish, everybody quickly regained their strength.

  Now there are no fish-eaters and fruit-eaters. Everybody is simply a ground-dweller. And everybody swims in the sea and everybody walks in the forest and studies the trees and the birds and the insects. Some even swim underwater and study the fish. And everybody now knows that there wouldn't be trees without a lake.

  And an orchard has been planted on the land under which the spider once dwelled.

  The End

  For more by Joe Blow (and his alter ego Aussiescribbler) :

  Contact me : mailto:aussiescribbler@dodo.com.au

  How can we free ourselves from mental suffering? How can we unlock what the poet William Blake referred to as “the mind-forged manacles” - those unhelpful, unfounded and inflexible habits of thought which keep us from reaching our true creative potential?

  This book provides practical advice on how to achieve this.

  But it also offers an imaginative holistic theoretical framework for an understanding of the nature of the universe, the psychological history of the human race and the meaning of life.