When you are king of Spain

by

Richard Kurtz

When from your palace balcony you see the other children climbing the old fig tree, you miss the child you will never get to be. A king must show dignity, says tutor. What is dignity? you ask. Dignity is to be like a king, says tutor. So you are on your own with it, and in time it becomes clear: dignity is never do you get to climb a tree.

As king, it is your job to meet with visiting dignitaries and talk knowledgeably on various topics you know nothing about. To put the knowing into you, there’s a script to learn, what they will say to you and you, to them. Word for word and natural it must sound, says tutor. Over and over late into the night till your voice gives out and tutor is yelling how useless you are. A normal childhood to you. It’s the only one you know.

The dignitary shows up from Mongolia or Switzerland and begins saying things not in the script. You look to tutor, No help. How can someone like you be king? You can’t even say things they don’t write down for you.

Your history book says a king in other places is born in a palace to a king and queen who live there too. Here, anywhere at all a king is born, the parents unknown even to themselves. To locate a king you go to King Finder who has a vision of the child’s whereabouts: a village in a place with no trees, big red dog outside a hut. The search party then sets off on horseback to retrieve them.

Over snow capped mountains, across dusty plains they ride. No map to go by. A matter of reading signs in the landscape. They arrive at a cliff. Days it takes to retrace their steps. For weeks they ride on, under a grumbling cloud. Till they arrive at a village in a place with no trees, big red dog outside a hut. It is a cold and hungry cheer.

To be told one’s child is king is just how it is here. Search party bows to you, parents bow, off you go. You are thirteen months old. You think it normal. At thirteen months they bow to you and take you to live in a palace.

Lots of tall trees at the new place. You’ve never seen a tree before. How very high up they go. What keeps them up like that? Why don’t they fall over?

When you are two it occurs to you no talent have you to run a kingdom. Somebody made a mistake. Not King Finder. If the vision shows a village in a place with no trees, big red dog outside a hut, there a king will be found. All you can think is, the big red dog, whose dog? Big red dog must’ve mixed up which hut to go to.

When you are four you need to consider your future. Picture after picture they show you of prospects for queen from the usual royal families, Bhutan, Denmark and so on. Always they are teasing you, who do you fancy?

From the day you first met her in the gardens you knew. For you there is only lemon tree. When you are four, you know things.

Some days in the pouring rain you’d send away your attendant and umbrella and sit with her in the gardens, a little king statue on a bench getting drenched to the bone. Always it was sunshine to be with her. To picture her on a throne beside you was a secret daydream all your childhood years.

But you know how secrets are, always they’re wanting to tell someone. It’s nights they find hardest not to tell. So when you went to bed, reluctantly, your secret had to wear a muzzle.

If only you’d had someone to tell how much she meant to you. But who listens to a child speak of the lemon tree they will marry? They’d just smile and tell you, “If it doesn’t work out, you’ll be fine, sir. Do you know how many lemon trees there are in Spain.”

Many was the night you’d lie awake in your big high bed, aching with joy to know she was out there in the gardens below. In the pre-dawn hours, you’d stroll the palace halls, skipping and twirling with thoughts of her. One time your education minister came out his office bleary-eyed and startled you mid-twirl.

“May I inquire, sir,” he said, “as to what makes the king so exuberant?”

You had to explain, your skipping and twirling was because that’s what children do. Your minister got out his pen and wrote that down.

Not till you turned eight were you confident to call all your ministers to the great hall and name the one you’d chosen to be your queen.

They already knew.

Probably it was when you were sleeping your secret managed to slip their muzzle off and go room to room to where your ministers slept and enter their dreams and tell them.

So you asked them to consult the stars and get their thoughts on a good day on your calendar for a royal wedding.

You don’t recall which minister said, “What a wonderful thing to be in love! How happy we all are for you. Your majesty does know your lemon tree cannot be queen of Spain."

Your ministers were always playing jokes. As if the king doesn’t get to choose his queen! They just wanted you to lose your temper so they could tell everyone you fell for it.

“Yes, clearly, for good reason, that lemon tree could never be queen," you said. "Maybe someone can just remind us again what that good reason is?"

You never saw so many ministers all decide at once it was the minister next to them you were talking to.

It was your education minister who finally spoke up:

“If I may speak to that, sir. Your lemon tree as we know shares her lemons with whom she pleases. That is her nature and a fine one it is. Only, we live in Spain. The people here know how a queen is to be. She may share lemons with the king alone. One who shares lemons with whomever, that is one ‘whomever’ too many. A queen of Spain she cannot be.”

No joke, this you now knew. Your education minister was still taking notes on how to tell one.

“I see what you’re saying,” you said. “One cannot have every desire. So, we keep it white and traditional. The Royal Lipizzaner stallions pulling the wedding carriage, white they remain. Too bad. No chance for the crowds to behold those magnificent horses all dyed the perfect lemon yellow to complement the bride.

"I am saying, it cannot be. A far too dangerous thing, sir. It will bring ruin to the kingdom, ruin to the king.”

“I have no choice, then. I understand. I must face yet another far too dangerous thing."

As king, it falls to you to seek out and destroy far too dangerous things. Usually, you get out your sword and lop the head off. But something told you this time the usual wasn’t going to do it.

You tried to think.

Were you up against a Sickly Thing that whispers the Buzzing Dog virus in people’s ears? Once infected, you can’t see a king even when you see one. You see lying there in the road only a dead dog buzzing with flies. You hold your nose, step around it. The king dies and nobody knows it.

Or was it an Amputated Thing, born with no arms, legs or head? They have you over for a tasty dish of boiled toes and gravy. For desert, they swell up into a giant sponge and leap on to your face. They plug eyes, nose and mouth and suck your brain out your ears.

Or was it a Sideways Thing who looks you in the eye and smiles and isn’t there? Sneaking up sideways on you it is, preparing to make a meal of you. Swivel fast to slay it, it smiles and isn’t there. Sneaking up sideways on you it is, preparing to make a meal.

"A true unflinching king you are!” said my minister. “But I fear you will need to remove all heads in Spain and replace them with lemons before people will have her. They won’t be made fools of, sir. They’ll not have the whole world laugh at them.”

“Is that all it is, the world laughs at you? All our great kings knew it well. How dazzling it made them!”

“You must know how dear to the people you are, sir. As long as she’s by your side, they will put on a good face. But one day you’ll be off on a royal visit to Greenland or some other place where the climate and terrain keep your queen from joining you. And that good face will come off.

“Ten thousand will march on the palace and demand she be gone. She is not one to desert you, as you well know. Her fate will be sealed. They’ll come through the palace doors with axes clean and sharpened.

“On your return, only her empty throne will you find. Scattered at the foot of it, you will not recognize her among the wood chips."

Your crown gave a shiver and let fall a tear; a dark spot appeared on your robe. That is how your dream died. You did not hear what was said after that. You knew what you had to do.

You will set your crown free and abscond with your lemon tree. You shall live in exile in France. In an old villa on the outskirts of Paris. No attendant, no cook, no maids, no good ministers. If they try and stop you, you will disguise as a gardener and escape with her in a wheelbarrow by way of night.

Probably it was how ingenious and infallible your plan that told you it could never work. Once you’ve got it all figured out, you’re done for.

You find yourself an eight-year-old former king of Spain alone in a foreign land where the signs are all in French. And all you can think as you look on your lemon tree asleep in her wheelbarrow is how are you going to support her?

It is not all fun being king. There are things one must do because that is the Thing That Must Be Done. And you can’t wait too long, or the Thing That Must Be Done is far gone before you know it. You can then only follow from a distance as it makes its way down to the ocean and swims out into the vast blue to become one more wave in a sea of endless waves.

And as you stand on the windy shore peering out to the edge of the wide Spanish Sea, you can no longer tell which wave is the one that once was the Thing That Must Be Done.

And so you make your way to The Gardens of the Skies for the talk you must have with a lemon tree.

Something there is about being in those gardens that has you seeing things from three inches taller than you are. Once the novelty wears off, it hurts your eyes. You can’t go on seeing things the old way. All the trees and flowers are laughing at you. Those looking to visit a polite little garden are soon gone.

You won’t find ordinary rocks there. They’re solid as a brick but full of little sky pockets like a sponge. Drop one in the duck pond, instead of sinking, they float like a rubber duck. It’s the sky running all through them that keeps them afloat. They bob along and find it all quite enjoyable.

The gardens are known to wait years to grow a certain flower that looks not for the sun to shine and the rain to fall. Instead, it brings its own sun and timely rain to grow the world. Who can believe it exists? And until a visitor shows up willing to see it, a flower in waiting it remains.

These gardens grow not like a doodle out of a bit of daydreaming that thinks it’s a masterpiece. Nor like a little robot on a mission to grow the picture on a seed packet. If only that robot could see how funny they look! These gardens hardly appear to be doing much of anything.

They grow their garden like a big yawn.

Because Yawns Big the noted Norwegian designer of The Gardens was constantly misplacing the plans for how it was all to be filled in, he made up a few things as he went along. This may explain why the various trees and such grow not from the ground up, but from the sky down.

Each greenery when it’s time descends from above the clouds on a billowing parachute full grown. The view from up there sees like the sky. Nothing in particular has the sky to look at, nothing in particular is it longing to see, and each particular thing it sees exactly for what it is.

It’s the view like the sky that knows the spot to land. There’s no seeking a soft place to fall at the end of all the long travels. Those parachuting in from the skies bid farewell to the familiar comforts of the starry homeland to put down roots in the palace grounds of yelling and crying.

And so you met up that day with your lemon tree in The Gardens of the Skies and stood a while in easy talk. A soft breeze fluttered her sunny leaves. To look on one so trusting and know what you are about to do to them made you begin to wish if only you were king of France.

The sun slipped behind a cloud, unable to watch. Yet another star-crossed love about to meet its fate. Once those images get in your head, who knows when those pictures will begin to play back over and over in there? You then need to get a pair of scissors and cut them out.

As king, of course, for you, there can be no slipping behind clouds, no cutting of scenes too dismal. A sun that vanishes in the face of things too hard to watch is not the shining example you look to. For you, there is only the Thing That Must Be Done, and that’s what you do.

“We have always been honest with each other," you said. "I think you know, you are a lemon tree…. with a certain nature…. “

"I suppose it was only a matter of time," she said, "till someone found out.”

“Yes, in time all things are known, they say…. or else, they aren't.”

(Long pause.)

“So, I must now say, my love, what must be said…. you and I…. it cannot be. The queen a lemon tree can’t be. I’d say anything else instead. But I must say what must be said.”

Her leaves became still, and still went the air, but none of her innocence left her. You spoke not of axes in wait of a queen such as she. The people of Spain are good people, really, most of the time.

You once read a mother tigress starving to death will eat her cubs. Maybe her cubs at the time think she’s not the best mother. Do we blame the starving tigress for doing as any starving tigress would? Is she not a good mother tigress, most of the time?

You meant to leave your lemon tree with nothing good to think of you, with only you to blame, but as you went off a small tremor shook the ground underfoot and you looked back.

She stood gripping the earth with her roots, clutching fast to a crumbling dream.

"It will all turn out right for us," she said. "You’ll see. We will not be separated forever."

Incurably romantic, she clung to the belief the story ends well when you believe enough the story ends well.

Probably it is no easy thing to be a lemon tree in Spain and not wish things different. If only people could be a touch more receptive to having as their queen a lemon tree of a certain nature.

From a branch somewhere a leaf let go, down it floated, first this way, then that, till it came to settle quietly at your feet.

"Please, know I’ll never abandon you,” you said. "I will wave to you every morning from my balcony. And if ever there’s not rain enough, and your leaves go dry, I will bring you the waters of my heart…. “

It was all you could think to say.

From that day on, you gave no thought to another queen.

Some days when you waved to your lemon tree you envied how free her life. How little freedom has a king of Spain to do the most simple thing! You are dressed and undressed, shoes shined, tea poured. That’s the job. Should you fall lax, shine a shoe, pour tea, idle servants turn into demons, yelling, crying, slamming doors in every corner of the palace.

And you never know when the one bringing breakfast will show up grumpy. You have only to ask, "What’s got into you this morning?” They act like it’s you with the problem.

Then, you’re behind a tree. A palace gardener ambles down the garden path whistling with a rake over their shoulder. You’re about to jump out and shout Boo! Just then your good minister the Boo! expert shows up with a thought to share:

“Sir, may I ask, does one need always to be shouting Boo? Is it the best example for children? Are people not apt to hear better the message you wish to impart if you don’t shout at them?

“Perhaps if we announced ten or so days beforehand when your jumping out was to take place…. we might put together a seminar…. your majesty could possibly give a series of talks on Boo! - shine light on the inner meaning.

“Does it not help others to learn first the rules, so at the time of the jumping out, their surprise is performed properly?”

If only Boo! knew what their own rules were. The only rule they know is: “Nobody can ever know what the rules of Boo! are.”

Palace life for Boo! is long days of suspicious looks coming at them when they stand too long in one place and say nothing. There are days Boo! sleeps the whole day curled up behind your throne. You worry they’re losing the will to jump out.

One morning, you wake up and Boo! says to you, “I was just noticing, sir, it appears to be a perfect day for escaping from palaces.”

You have no escape plan. Maybe change out of your pajamas. Best put your crown in your pocket so no one knows it’s you. Then, go mingle downstairs.

Eventually, someone notices the king is gone. A search party sets out to find him and you join them. It’s agreed to look for you in the mountains. There’s quite the view from up there.

The search begins with the usual grand picnic feast up at the lookout point. Many compliments to the head cook and pastry chef and wine steward. Some well-fed hours later, time to find the king. But first, a large tree needs finding, a big shady thing for their afternoon nap to lie under.

Once the napping part of the search is underway, time to go off on your own and find where you disappeared to.

And so you come to find yourself at Sky Castle, your private cave hidden high in the clouds, whom you consult on all important cave matters.

The minute you step inside, it’s like you fell into an inkwell. Forward and backwards no longer can tell are they going backward or forwards?

Slowly, your eyes adjust, dim shapes appear, life as a cave begins to reveal itself.

As a cave you get to listen to drips fall and land on rocks and in puddles formed in the hollows of the rocks. A cave devoted to Drip Watching attends to each droplet as it arises, falls, and plops, on rock or in puddle.

The endless cold, the endless damp, the flitting of bats squeaking on their return home from a night on the town, the sleepy snake digesting a warm mouse in their rock crevice, these are your long time companions.

Over centuries, as your walls are worn away by drips of beauty and sadness, you come to know the 84,000 drips and their individual voices falling free in the darkness.

Listen closely and you can make out the echoes of old still repeating things they once heard somewhere.

From the mouth of a cave come echoes repeating the things everyone says - all the songs of love and hate the band plays at the dance of hope and fear.

And from a bottomless place, echoes of things nobody said - songs singing without a singer, who must’ve gone off some place, nobody’s sure where.

You sometimes go to the bottomless place and take along your jar to try and catch one of those echoes flying around there. You’ve never caught one. Your jar has no lid.

Your jar had a lid for years, but took it off the day it retired. To put a lid on a jar of raspberry jam is only natural. But to try and put a lid on those echoes of things nobody said - many have tried, nobody’s ever done it.

Once you arrive at the bottomless place, you remind your jar how it’s meant to wait for the echoes to show up:

“Be not hungry, or not hungry, to hear them sing. Let them come and go as they will with their careless song.”

Who knows from one visit to the next how it will go? Will your jar remember what it’s there for? Or will it fill the hours with endless reminiscing on the days of raspberry jam?

If the stars are good, and your jar waits as it should, a bottomless echo flies over and hovers at the mouth like a hummingbird suspended in time.

Into your jar, such sweet silent songs of loneliness they sing.

Because the bottomless place is never where it was before, you are always having to feel your way down the winding passageways. When it forks in two, you can only send away your thinking thing and trust right or left to your knowing feet.

Anyone going there, know a good map is essential, as long as you follow not what it tells you. Go according to the Truth, take the straight path, and you will never get there. You will forever arrive at a place that knows only to repeat things everyone says.

Your palace friends find your cave somewhat enigmatic - possibly, romantic - but really, who wants to be a cave?

How remote from all the interesting people and where the jazz and the orchestras play!

Curiously, your cave seems not to know they live apart from anything at all.

“Do you ever miss the music?” you once asked your cave.

"How can one miss what is such a part of you?” said your cave. “Am I not the space that plays between the notes?”

You only wish you too could be a cave. But you are king of Spain and have taken vows to return to your kingdom and can be gone only so long.

As you are saying your goodbyes to Sky Castle, there’s a clink in your jar. Then, another clink. At the bottom of your jar lie two brand new echoes of things nobody said, a gift from the bottomless place, to remember your time together.

And then you are standing at the threshold of your cave, facing your return to a world of palaces and kingdoms to be run. Already you miss your cave. You miss your squeaking bats and sleepy snake and drips falling plop, on rock and in puddle. And it occurs to you there’ll come a day you are done running palaces and kingdoms, and you will set your vows free, and you will.,,

“Let’s go," says a voice. “You’ve still got years of king things to do.”

You look round for who said it, and feel the jar in your hand growing impatient.

“Did you think we weren’t coming?” says a little cave from inside your jar, and a tiny bat flies out its mouth. “Did no one tell you? Wherever you go, your little cave goes with you?”

And then you are back in the palace and people are going about doing palace things, walking right past you. You go over and sit on your throne. No one pays you any mind. You look round to see are there any other ghosts in the great hall besides you.

You remember your crown in your pocket. You put it on.

Eventually, you hear, “The king is back!”

And now they are all beaming to see you, pouring you tea, shining your shoes, dressing you and undressing you. And you know once again things will be fine. For a while.

Maybe that says a little why you envied your lemon tree her lonely life with not a person on earth to treat her special. Once they treat you special, you never know from one minute to the next what sort of special treatment you’re in for.

Some evenings, you’d watch from your balcony as one of the household staff stopped by your lemon tree to breathe her blossoms. And she’d enjoy the attention and forget her sadness a little. And it was good to see her not so alone.

And there were times you’d imagine her up there with you on the balcony, the two of you in the quiet of the evening, looking out on the lengthening shadows of the Gardens.

You’d surrender all your kingly privileges, if only that could be.

Chapter Two

As king of Spain, you naturally get to do some things not everybody gets to do. Probably the privilege you’d miss most if it were gone is how you get to remove an arm or foot, so they can go off and do things on their own.

Maybe the Queen of England drops in for tea. One arm is all you really need for tea, which leaves an arm free to attend to other matters. You’re thinking now of last spring and the incident up at Fearsome Mountain, and how your arm was called on to play a key role in the negotiations.

The case involved a very rich man who lived at the foot of Fearsome Mountain. In winter, it blocked the sun from his house.

“What if the top wasn’t there?” he thought. “How hard can it be to cut off?”

One small problem: on the security fence at the foot of the mountain, a small wooden sign with a picture of a menacing cloud with a crazed look in their eyes had this to say:

“Warning! Wrathful Clouds!”

The mountain was said to be the playground of sky children. Wrathful cloud protectors patrolled the steep rock face to the top.

That didn’t stop him.

Even had the sign said: “Please, reconsider. You are going up against forces you know little of. One needs to show humility in these matters, or there will be consequences.”

That is hardly going to stop a very rich man.

He went and hired five hundred great thinkers and philosophers to do the job. None of them believed in cloud protectors or sky children. All they believed was, when the cow jumps over the moon, the trajectory is a parabola.

“What a silly sign!" said the rich man. "Whoever put it up likes to scare little children!"

But now they all felt it too risky to incur the wrath of cloud protectors. They had families to think of, wives and children.

The rich man offered them nine times more.

That sounded about right. It’s about what they were thinking.

To begin mountain top removal, you measure down from the top, draw a line for the part to be cut off, then measure again to check it’s even all the way round. Just be sure you have the right mountain. Too many every year lose their tops because the top removal people got the mountain wrong.

When you are a philosopher or great thinker, few things are as tedious as measuring mountains. Your penchant runs to measuring Things You Know That Others Don’t. When it is something you enjoy doing, you do it again and again. You never tire of measuring the Things You Know That Others Don’t.

So they measured down from the top, drew the line for where to make the cut, checked all the way round. No sign of threat from cloud protectors. No ledge broke off and sent anyone flying.

Somewhat disappointing.

How do you prove it wasn’t invisible beings who made the ledge collapse, there’s good science to explain it, when no ledge collapses?

Clearly, a cloud protector isn’t one to fly off the handle the minute you step on their toes. They conduct their wrath methodically. Step by step, slowly and surely, like the walk of an elephant on their way to a leisurely mud bath, that is their methodology.

First, they called in your arm to enter into negotiations with the workers high up the mountain. Should your arm be called back to the palace on an emergency, your foot was to stand by. It just meant negotiations take longer.

Your foot shimmies up like a mountain goat the first ninety feet, takes a look down, looks up, remembers there’s somewhere they’ve got to be, climbs down and they’re gone.

You don’t see them again for days, weeks sometimes.

To begin the talks, the cloud protectors had your arm climb to the very top of the mountain and push over a boulder the size of a bus. This set in motion a landslide. Falling rocks made a tremendous roar like a big army of guns booming.

All five hundred great thinkers and philosophers on the mountain looked up. The rich man, home at the time having his dinner, looked up. And the next instant they all got crushed to death.

That is how cloud protectors negotiate.

You don't get to present your side. Try telling them one needs to hear from all sides in a negotiation, they look at you like what is a side?

A cloud protector decides Obvious Things. A Thing with Sides they cannot think.

They think Dumb things.

Not dumb like two bedbugs arguing over who gets which side of the bed. Dumb like so huge and free and gigantic that all the little sides on the way to the debate hall are always getting lost in the sheer giganticness of it all.

There's all kinds of room for a cloud protector to walk round inside their Dumb and question things. And the question here was, “Does a mountain need a top to climb up to?”

Naturally, they first considered the topography of the mountain, and determined topography to be a big word for top.

Next, they considered the climbing part and found there to be two kinds of climbing:

Climbing Up starts from the bottom. Climbing Down, from the top.

Once the considering was done, no discussion, no debate. They all decided all at once the same thing. Try telling them one needs to take a vote, they look at you like what is a vote?

A cloud protector decides Obvious Things:

To climb to the top of a mountain, a mountain must have a top.

Your arm served the mountain bravely that day. Your foot needs some work. Sooner or later, if they too wish to serve bravely, there’s that little fear of heights to face up to.

You once got into quite the debate with Lady Sophie over that foot. Sophie is four, you are eight, you are king of Spain, how could you lose?

It was close.

It’s not like you’re debating a grownup. You tell them you’re writing a poem to a lemon tree.

What do you know of lemon trees? Where’s your PH.d in botany and plant pathology?

The thing most important, you tell them, is you must never forget to wave good morning to your lemon tree.

Most important is you must know lots of everything and do lots of everything and go see lots of everywhere!

Grownups are easy to understand. You can count on them to say grownup things.

Sophie, not so easy.

Each sentence she says you can understand. But when you go to put all the sentences together and try and understand it, you can’t understand it.

All you can do to try and understand it is not try and understand it.

You were having tea in the sitting room, Sophie was in the big armchair, little legs dangling, you on the couch. She plopped a sugar cube into her teacup, took a bite of a chocolate wafer, decided the armchair wasn’t right for today, climbed down and sat on the floor across from you.

Those familiar with palace rules may ask, before Sophie removed from the armchair to the floor, did she not first ask the king’s permission to move about in your presence?

Not exactly. Sophie likes to pretend she forgot. Then you pretend you forgot, too. It’s how you play Did Somebody Forget? And the rules have somebody to play with.

When you are the rules, you don’t get to play much. You’ve got people all the time looking to use you and break you and make you be like them. It’s a long time looking for somebody to play with you.

As king, you need to keep an eye out so people don’t see too much how the game’s played. You don’t want them thinking anyone can do it. Next thing you know, you’ve got the whole palace slouched on your couch and a gaggle of sprawling feet has taken over the coffee table.

Sophie stretched her legs out underneath the coffee table and reached for another chocolate wafer, and as she did so, a little stockinged foot poked you. She acted like she didn’t do anything.

You sipped tea, gazed out the window, poked her back. One need not be a four year old to play footsie, but if you intend to compete with one, it helps to think like one.

Sophie looked into her teacup, poked you again.

“Somebody thinks she’s poking my foot," you said to the window. “What do you think happens when she finds out it’s not my foot?”

Sophie hasn’t time for guessing games. Tell her or don’t tell her, it’s all the same to her.

In other words, just the person you can’t wait to play a guessing game with.

You sipped tea, looked out the window, said nothing. Your mantle clock said nothing, went on ticking. That’s how you and your mantle clock worked in tandem to draw Sophie in. You just need to give it time.

Two minutes passed.

“It’s attached to your leg, isn’t it?” And so it began. “How can it not be your foot?”

"One foot’s mine, you’re quite right, the one attached to my other leg. The one you poked, I’m afraid, that one’s not mine. Happens a lot. People are always confusing that one.”

"You admit you have two legs,” said Sophie the lawyer. “Is it fair to say, legs that have suffered no amputation all have attached to the end the same thing? Think carefully, Mr. King. Have you at any time suffered the amputation of a leg?"

"Not that I’m aware. Attached to the ends of both my legs I believe there is still my torso, which appears intact."

“Not that end of your leg! You went the wrong way!”

”Right, I need to turn around. Do you happen to know how far back it is? Can I walk? Or do I take my horse?”

So went the debate. The little foot confusion was easily explained, if only one could say it. Here in Spain, of course, there’s Debate Rule Number 5.

“One never states what it’s really about. There’s no end to the debate once the truth gets out.”

Let’s say you tell the truth:

“Look, the king’s foot at the moment is off somewhere doing things on their own. The king’s foot double at the moment is filling in.”

Ever since your foot learned a certain Lord Shingen in 16th century Japan had a personal double to fill in for him, your foot had to have one. Now they’ve got their own foot double, and the resemblance is eerie.

Your arm hasn’t a double and doesn’t want one. Better the empty space left there when they go off. They get to come back to a place that misses them, not an arm double in no hurry to leave. Then they feel bad they’ve got to kick them out, and the arm double goes off all resentful back into the armoire. The point is, if you toss out the rules and say your foot just happened to go off somewhere, the foot double is filling in, what you hear back is:

“So, to be clear, when you tell us this alleged foot went off somewhere, how do you come by this information? Were you there? You were somewhere else? And you’d have us believe this alleged foot was somewhere else? So you are telling us, somewhere else can be in two places at the same time?”

Whoever thought up Debate Rule Number 5, the king of Spain thanks you.

It’s always a rare treat when Sophie visits. She’s not the easiest person to get hold of. Always she’s off traveling over in Asia or Australia or South America giving talks on the meaning of everything.

One day you will travel to Australia or South America or Asia and hear Sophie’s talk. When her voice comes through the microphone, you will hear the Sophie you know.

She never says much about the talks she gives. You wonder are they at all like your teatime chats? There’s the time in The Gardens you’re having tea and scones. Sophie’s got a buttered scone in her hand and is looking up at a puffy white cloud.

“Cumulus,” she said. “Cumulus the Cloud. Nothing to do with Columbus the discovery person. The land he discovered, obviously, disputed his claim. “But was I not here before that fellow showed up?” said the land.

“So then somebody in a history book has to come out and explain to them, being there doesn’t count. You need a discovery person to sail over from somewhere faraway and discover you. Or you’re simply not there at all!

“Cumulus the Cloud does floating,” she said. “According to my science book, Cumulus weighs as much as one hundred elephants. I know. Hard to imagine. You don’t expect that many elephants all standing one on top the other to be so light they float up that high.

“So far we’ve heard no reports of a Cumulus falling on anyone’s head like an acorn. That’s because there’s a long string tied to the acorn only acorn people can see. Then when it’s time, Lord Gravity tugs on the string and down goes acorn. And how do you attach a string to a cloud?

“On nights when it’s a good thinking night, Cumulus thinks up riddles and folds them into a paper airplane and sends them off on their travels to wherever riddles go.

“You know the riddles the hero must solve in those mythical stories or else they get eaten by the magical creature? Not those. These riddles only get solved when there’s nobody to solve them.

“One riddle flew off one night and never came back. It’s believed they crashed somewhere in the sands of the Sahara, sadly, never to be seen again. All we know is, before the riddle took off, they reportedly said this to a cloud:

“Before they named you Cumulus, who is a cloud, really?”

“The more you go into it the more you find there’s not much to a cloud. You’re just going along somewhere in all the cloudy. Once you go too far into a cloud, say, like an airplane, you find you’ve come right out the other side.

”Clouds in a bad mood don’t like sunny things, so they hide the sun behind them. You know the sun’s behind them, so probably not the best hiding place. Those clouds don’t care. So what are you going to do about it?

“To make the sun come out, you do the ritual. The ritual to make the sun come out, in case you forgot, is you wait for the sun to come out.

”To make the sun be out all the time, you do the secret ritual. Nobody tells you the secret. That’s why they call it a secret.

“All you know is somebody went and turned the whole sky upside down on you. Clouds all down below. The sun’s all over the place. Remember how you dreamt of a life above the clouds? Nothing like that. It hurts your eyes to see so much. No shadowy places to hide things you don’t want anyone to see.

“That tells you why people choose to be under clouds, rather than on top. You get to go on dreaming of a life above the clouds.”

Sophie was now looking at what was left of the scone in her hand. Most all of it was gone.

“Somebody came and ate my scone when I wasn’t looking,” she said. “I can’t remember the last time the scone eater got it.”

“Tea?” you said. And poured Sophie more tea.

Chapter Three

It began soon after your dream died of a life with your lemon tree as your queen. The sky turned on the earth and the droughts and floods and wildfires came upon the land.

It is five years now. A cruel famine has come to make its home here. The monster of the Great Hunger goes door to door stealing the last crumbs from the mouths of the children.

In broken times, people look to their king to put things right. Their king can fix anything. An airplane limps in, you straighten a wing, it flies off. When the sky turns on the earth, you sit them down for talks in Geneva. Crops return to the fields, lemons, to lemon trees.

In the eyes of the faithful, all you need do is be king of Spain and you are all-knowing.

Maybe in your past life. In this life, you are born not quite remembering the all-knowing part. You’ve got tutors to teach you that. And tutors, let us say, can vary in competence.

One day, you say to tutor, “Tutor, tell me, how do I remove my arm and my foot?”

Tutor says, “First, sir, you submit your removal plans to the official officials in charge of official things. Upon approval, begins removal. Upon completion, comes inspection. That is all there is to it, sir. You are now all-knowing.”

So you are on your own with it.

You ask yourself, “I wonder who can tell me how do I remove my arm and foot?”

And your question turns round and says, “Have you thought to ask your arm and foot, sir?”

So you say to arm and foot:

“If you please, arm and foot, tell me how do I remove you? Beyond these palace walls, a big kingdom has need of you.”

“No, thank you, sir,” says arm, who speaks for them both. “We’re good here. What use to try and help people? All they do is tell you what they hate that people do and make you listen to all they need to be happy. However much you do for them, they think you only care about yourself. Best to forget the removal, sir. Waste of time it is.”

“Is it a problem, wasting time? Is it not what children do? You build your sand castle with care on the beach; the big waters come in and return your castle into sand. A perfect waste of time it is! Now, if you please, arm and foot, tell us how do we remove you?”

“If we may say so, sir, tell grownups to waste time like children do and all they do is begin to make plans to waste time in Hawaii or Machu Picchu. Their whole life is about not making a wrong move. When it doesn’t pan out, they mope and blame. When it’s a big win, they say work is play! It’s how grownups talk. Playtime for children is serious talk. No time off do they get from being children. Best forget the removal, sir. Waste of time it is.”

Arm and foot make a good point. You make a good point. You could talk all night, it’s going nowhere. Waste of time it is…. not that there’s anything wrong with that! Just then you remembered you are king of Skandha. Does the king not have final say by Royal Command?

Here in Skandha, of course, you have the Royal Command Rule:

“Any and all royal commands must be done upside down. One looks never down on those one commands.”

To accomplish this, the king makes use of the royal trampoline in the great hall.

High above the grand chandeliers you bounce and turn upside down. It is always a gamble what comes next. Who can ever know what a royal command upside down will say? What you hear is this:

“Listen, you stubborn arm and foot, glued to your own petty comfort. We hereby declare our right to remove you is no more! Now and henceforth we surrender it, relinquish it, renounce it out the door! Good news, you two, you get to go on as before! No need to think too deep. Do you like to sleep? Talk things that mean not much? Some good palace gossip, intrigue and such? You’re in luck, carry on, be happy as a clam. So say us by royal command!”

“Fine!” muttered arm. “The way we are is how we shall be!”

“Fine!” muttered foot. “Clams we shall be!”

And that was the end of it. The great hall fell silent.

Just the occasional boing! of a bouncing king on a trampoline…. and the tinkling crystals of a grand chandelier as they caught the breeze of a king floating by.

Some months later, the end of summer, you’re in The Gardens of the Skies, listening to the evening’s garden sounds. The rush of water jets in the fountain shooting up to the top tier, sheets of water spilling over into the pool below. A sharp crack of acorn striking cobblestone courtyard. The distant hoot of an owl somewhere.

Then, a tap on your shoulder.

“Would you like a peach, sir?” says an arm.

“May I go down to the duck pond and visit the swans?” a foot calls to you from over by the fountain.

Your arm brings you a perfect peach.

And that is how it comes about that your arm and foot remove you, when you are king of Spain.

You hear Sophie is in Germany giving talks and visiting old castles. You miss your teatimes. There’s the monster of the Great Hunger you must go up against, and it weighs on you.

You do not look to Sophie for answers. You miss how she forgets the rules, and how you get to pour her tea, and how the king who must be served things gets to take the afternoon off.

Hundreds and hundreds of talks Sophie gives and never the same one twice. You once asked her, “How do you always come up with new things to say?”

“I do nothing,” she said. “My talks know what to do with themselves. They make perfect sense on the planet they come from. You just turn three times round and think inside out.

“First, you do things, then you plan what to do. You find out the plan after you do it.

“You have only to see things and they tell you what they are. You find out the secret after you know it.

“No old wisdom somebody once said, now that’s the tradition and they’re dead. Only acorns of young wisdom that drop on your head.

“If you lived where my talks do, you could talk that way, too.”

How many four-year-olds do you know who travel the world giving talks on the meaning of everything? Many dream of the life, of course, faraway places, the stage, the audience. Then it occurs to them: “So, after the talk, when it’s time for bed, who tucks you in? Who reads to you your bedtime story?”

You think of Sophie in a foreign land, end of a long day, yet another bedroom, yet another bed, nobody to tuck her in. An old bedtime story on the nightstand, nobody coming to read to her.

And Sophie yawns in bed and says, “You do know, Mr. King, you cannot count on all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to be there for you when you need them. All the troops will be gone when you face the monster of the Great Hunger.”

“I will remember that,” you say. “Would you like me to read to you a bedtime story?”

Sophie is fast asleep.

And then you find out, so are you.

There’s a hero myth you once read where the hero must go off into the under world and steal a treasure from a monster. They must then bring it back to the upper world and bestow it on others. What happens if the others aren’t particularly interested in having that treasure bestowed on them just then? Maybe they’ve got more important things on their mind?

Probably, wait a few centuries, try bestowing it when people are maybe more amenable.

One treasure was a little bottle of magical elixir you use to turn dead things into living things. If they give you a choice, that’s the one you’d steal. Sprinkle it in a lake or on a rock, and dead fields and orchards all spring back to life complete with bountiful harvest.

In your Spain, of course, the hero story goes a little bit different. In this one, monsters and heroes need each other to exist. For a hero to be a hero, a monster there must be. Thus, it is said:

“If you would rid your kingdom of monsters, all your heroes must leave you, as well.”

What’s essential is your monster and your hero both must lose. No victory to celebrate. No parade.

No medal for zealous and devoted service to the realm.

Obviously, to accomplish this defeat for both of you, the hero must first go forth and face the monster. And the monster in this story is not so easily met with.

To help out a little, there are the 84,000 instructions on monster-facing kindly left behind by those who faced monsters before you. That may sound like a lot of instructions to face one simple monster, and you’ve given some thought to it.

People, it seems, are constantly facing things they confuse with the monster. Every morning they wake up and prepare to do battle with one or another of the 84,000 things they confuse it with.

Hence, 84,000 instructions, to tell you: “That’s not the monster. And that’s not it, either.”

It’s what makes the monster such a confusing thing to track down in the first place. If ever you’re to catch a glimpse, you must train to think like a Confusing Thing.

Then, where and when it strikes next, you are there to seize it and bind it with rope and hold fast, as the confusing thing keeps changing shape, as confusing things are wont to do.

It’s a hippopotamus with a hypothesis….. it’s a dubious duck billed platypus….. it’s…..

…..where’d it go?

It just turned into a Thing Not There!

And the more you look into it and see it’s not there, the more a Thing Not There is there!

And that’s how a Thing Not There lives on to confuse another day.

If you pursue a Confusing Thing, it slows down for you. When you see you are gaining on it, you fall further behind. It grows bigger and bigger on how far you’ve come!

If you refuse to pursue it, it’s work is done. Once you’re too smart to fall for it, you already did a long time ago. It grows only bigger on how clever of you to outsmart it!

It finds brilliant your every strategy to defeat it! When the plans fall through and you refuse to get out of bed, it makes you a nice cup of tea and shares a map of its favorite hiding places.

It thinks it's on the side it's against. 

How not to admire thinking like that? If only you had a clue how to do it. All you knew was if you didn’t do it soon, your Spain was no more.

Then one morning you awoke thinking like a Confusing Thing. And how you learned to think that way wasn’t even a question - you’d always thought that way, only no one told you, so how were you to know?

As it was nothing new, you didn’t think anything of it.

All you knew was you awoke from a dream you didn’t remember. Dream recall isn’t your forte. It's just your dream was looking rather anxious for you to remember it, the way it was hovering at the foot of your bed. You said you’d try.

You’d think your dream could’ve just told you what it was, but you know how dreams are, always they are wanting you to remember them before they remember you.

Meanwhile, you went to rub the sleep from your eyes and found an arm missing. Not the first time. Always you were misplacing that arm. Did you leave it on the coffee table last night? Did it fall underneath the couch?

One time you looked for it everywhere for an entire morning. Your arm made you promise not to tell where you eventually found it, so you can only say, when you lifted the lid, how it got in there and fell asleep and didn’t drown, you have no idea.

So, you couldn’t remember your dream, nor where your arm was. And then both those things you couldn’t remember began dropping hints that if you truly cared for them, they were the one you’d want to remember first. If they came to mind second, how much could they mean to you? Why bother remembering them at all? 

Clearly, no accident the numbers one and two were invented. How else to keep alive all the rampaging over who comes first and means the world to you, and who always comes second and you treat them like a scrap of nothing!

You sat up in bed and listened to the early morning birds chirping the sleepy ones awake. A very faint humming sound was coming from somewhere. You listened closely.

It was coming from you.

Chapter Four

Somehow you ended up later that morning at the duck pond in The Gardens of the Skies, no closer to knowing where your arm was. You’d looked for it all the usual places. Perhaps a clue to its whereabouts was in your dream, if ever it came back to you.

One of a pair of Royal Mute swans glided over to you on the bank. When they saw you had no bread crumbs - which they really shouldn’t be eating too much of, anyway - they made a regal turn about and went gliding off.

The other swan was tipped over in the pond, head and neck under water, tail up in the air, keeping to a healthy diet of underwater vegetation.

The slow lapping waters of the sparkling pond washed up sunny memories of a once cheerful people, before the monster of the Great Hunger swallowed up their laughter and turned their world into a shuffling gray thing.

"What did we ever do to deserve this?" people said.

They all knew, of course.

It is no secret the sky and earth here are bound to look after each other. And what joins them is the bond of trust and love that exists between the people and their king.

And a small matter of a lemon tree the people found unfit to be queen had torn something in that sacred bond too deep to reach with words of sorrow or forgiveness.

Of course, what does it matter that you know you may have played a small part in the fate you are meeting?You see your goats go all spindly till you can’t squeeze out a drop of milk to make your goat cheese. You see the sticks that once were trees, the walking bones, once your children. And as evening falls at the close of the day, the wailing begins - the distant voices here and there crying out in anger and in anguish at an unfeeling sky:

“What kind of sky shuts their heart to the cries of a million starving children! All you care about is a miserable lemon tree who can’t get over not being queen!”

Even if you are their king, what can you say to them? How will any words you try and say ever reach them? There is the Spain they live in, and the Spain you live in. And the Spain you live in is nowhere to be seen from the Spain they live in.

One can look under all the mountains, under all the oceans, search the heavens till the sky goes home. However far and wide one looks for it, no other Spain shall appear.

It is a Spain far too close for all the looking to find it.

Still, you are king of Spain, and your job is to ensure the seasons happen in the proper order. You can’t just say it’s all because those people won’t let your lemon tree be their queen, that’s the whole problem, and run off and hide in your room and pull the covers over your head.

If Sophie were here, by now she’d be raising a hand to tell you, "Mr. King, please, if you will just tell us one thing: everyone wants to know what happened to your missing arm? We are all waiting to hear that part of the story!”

It’s hard to tell at times who Sophie talks for. You once asked her, “When you go and talk all over the world on the meaning of everything, is it for others who need to hear that? Or is it just for you, because you need to say those things for yourself?

"What do you think?” she said.

“I don’t know.”

"Take a guess.”

“Both?”

“To your surprise,” she said, “my talks don’t talk for anyone. It’s like how the moon talks."

When you are the moon, she said, first you grow big and round, then you grow thin and disappear, then you come back from where you went and do it some more. You’re not the same moon, of course, when you come back.

Each time back you’re a different moon.

Best keep that to yourself, she said. People need you to be the moon they have always known and to remain within known moon parameters. 

You may disappear and come back, people find that acceptable. But to come back a moon they have never met - how can they depend on you to know how you are supposed to be for them?

Anyone who cares to look up on a moonlit night may listen to your talk, she said. You are only really talking to one person, but since you are the moon, your voice obviously travels, so you know others are going to hear it. 

But you are not talking for anybody at all.

Your talk only happens to be there, she said, because you stay awake all night and never tire of performing the moon for the pleasure of the night sky.

Sophie is never shy to speak up to the king on matters of importance, and how grateful you are to have her there. She is just not the easiest person to tell a story to.

Sophie will have no surprises. She insists on full disclosure of any and all surprises before the story commences.

You did try and tell her, a story lacking the surprise element soon drifts off and ends up falling into a death-like sleep.

You are then left waiting seven weeks for it to travel through the after-story state and come back to the telling.

Once it returns, a story has little or no memory of where it came from, and must start over pretty much from scratch.

Sophie yawned. She’d have none of it.

"When things surprise you,” she said, “it’s because you missed seeing the whole story when it first ran by you. All you saw was a blurry thing. Was it a horse? A train? What was it running from? Where to?

“Know well the blurry thing before you commence,” she said. “You will then know what to look at as your story unfolds, for those things matter. You won’t be dazzled by things of no consequence on the night of your solo flight over the Spanish Sea. You don’t need your little airplane seeing things in the dark that aren’t there, growing ever more confused as you are fast running out of fuel.

“Above all, Mr. King, please, remember this: trust not your story to the whims of surprise. Do know the other side of the sky before you set off solo into the night. Then you’ll not end up in the cold Spanish Sea. And your story will thank you."

Just then something splashed in the duck pond and all at once like a fish leaping out of water you remembered your dream and where your arm was the same instant! What a relief for it all to come back!

Not everyone shared your enthusiasm.

”How could you not remember me first?” said dream.

”How could you not remember me first? said arm.

“But no one came second,” you said. “Did you not both come first?”

“If there’s no number two,” said arm, “there’s no number one,” said dream.

Whoever invented one and two, how brilliant the mind that thought it up! You just wonder, was any thought ever given to what if those numbers fell into the wrong hands?

So, you remembered last night.

It was past midnight. You’d been out on your balcony in your lemon pajamas. The Gardens of the Skies in the darkness below were floating up their sweet fragrance and a memory floated up of Dede Gardener your devoted gardener.

It was the day you watched her graft a branch from a lime tree onto a lemon tree in tears. The lime tree, her close friend, was dying. The graft was so they’d be together when her friend was gone.

It was Dede who showed how you might put the seasons right. The answer was obvious. What took so long for you to do it? Probably everyone knows how these things work - when it’s the obvious thing to do, it’s always the last thing one thinks of doing!

You were looking up at the night sky, trying to find the moon. A warm mist of sleepy was in the air, so it’s hard to say were your eyes open or shut when from behind a night cloud a big moon emerged.

It must have been movie night because a documentary on The Gardens of the Skies was showing on the face of the moon. Dede Gardener your devoted gardener was the host.

"Now, over here, we have the beautiful and sad lemon tree once engaged to our handsome king.” Dede sighed. "Not for her a destiny to be his queen."

From there, she moved on to introduce the lemon tree with the lime branch grafted on in memory of her friend. She was about to tell their story when a thought struck her. She turned to the camera and spoke directly to you:

"Sir, do you think it might help to do for your lemon tree what I did for this one? So radiant she grew with the limb of her friend.

“Perhaps if we grafted on to yours a new limb, might it bring a new radiance? Might she come to smile again? Might the seasons then smile again and return to their natural order?”

When the fate of all of Spain is teetering, it is good to know a gardener like Dede Gardener. 

That very hour you sent your arm off to ask your lemon tree to please accept your offering of a new limb to be joined with her for now and for always.

Once your arm was grafted on to her, a limb of your own would be hers. You’d grow together through the seasons, lie dormant in winter and blossom in spring, for all the rest of your days.

You went and lay in your big high bed and closed your eyes. Two strands of stars you saw weaving together a diamond sky necklace, two fates being joined in a night sky.

And that is how you fell asleep.

In your dream, you roamed a jungle and felt quite at home there, surrounded by terrifying animals and half-dead bodies crawling all over the place. Somewhere a small ensemble was playing achingly beautiful Japanese music, long howling notes that sounded like a cave with a few old bones left in it who hadn’t seen a visitor for a thousand years. You followed the music till you came to a clearing and there saw lemon tree with your arm growing out of her, holding a baton and conducting an ensemble of wolves.

And then your remembering was over and you were back where you stood on the bank of the duck pond. And the pair of Royal Mute swans were looking up at you.

You showed your open hands with a shrug to say, “Sorry, guys, no bread crumbs today.”

The more slender, slightly smaller swan, the lady swan, then spoke in a quiet hoarse voice, because a Mute swan cannot talk very loud.

“I’m sorry for how I was earlier, sir,” she said. “I woke up grumpy and didn’t even say good morning. Some days I wake up and all I want is bread crumbs.”

“Don't be silly," you said. "When one wakes up in the morning, who doesn't want bread crumbs?”

When you wake every day for five years to hunger and crying in every corner of the kingdom, to wake one morning to something graceful and green in the air, you wonder, have you really woken up yet?

It is almost too hard to think, seasons back in order, crops in the fields, lemons on lemon trees. And when from your balcony you wave good morning to your lemon tree, she waves back.

And the next instant a mountain of sadness descended on you. 

"Why am I like this?" you thought. "Is it because I lost my good and faithful arm and only now know how much they meant to me?”

And yet, if it made her smile, you’d send her your good and faithful foot, as well. Then, anytime she felt like singing a spontaneous song of what it is to be real and bright and yellow, she’d have foot to tap along.

To forget all about droughts and wild fires and floods! To hear laughter once more in the kingdom! Who can not feel good about that? 

And yet, you knew right then, that is what made you cry.

You were remembering a young child skipping and twirling in the halls of an early morning palace.

And you saw a lemon tree gripping the unsteady earth with her roots, clutching fast to a crumbling dream. 

Did you need to forget all that, too, just fling yourself into the good times and forgetting all round you?

How many were about to thank lemon tree for joining with your arm to put right the seasons?

How many were about to now raise their voice in the streets and call for her to become their queen?

You could already hear the talk:

”Wasn’t it that lemon tree who brought the famine in the first place?

“Was she not the one who took the seasons hostage, who demanded our king’s arm in exchange for their release?”

Still, the same old Spain. Still, the same good people, most of the time.

One can bring back fruit to the trees and crops to the fields and feed the mouths of the hungry. But what can one do to relieve the famine without body?

What rescue is there for the famine beyond reach of any food the tongue can taste?

Chapter Five

When all your life you’ve dreamt of making a certain lemon tree your queen, it is hard to think how little you know her. How to ever be prepared for the day you learn she was not always a lemon tree?

As your former arm became part of her, they tapped into memories of a past life. And you felt the memories, too, like messages sent back from a phantom arm when an arm is lost. There’s still the itch on the elbow, only when you go to scratch it, where is the elbow to scratch? 

You caught tiny flashes of memories like fireflies on a summer night of a young woman whose perfect beauty stilled the play of sky children when she walked by.

And you learned how she came to be a lemon tree, no longer to walk free and graceful upon the earth.

A certain drunken god on holiday in Spain was struck by her beauty and set on having her. He was from the realm of the drunken gods, where every day there is a holiday. Mostly drunken gods spend their days doing whatever they want. However bad a thing they do, never is it a bad thing. Bad things are good things - all things are good things - in the realm of the drunken gods.

The drunken god on holiday in Spain had been after the young woman for some time. He once chased her up a tall mountain beyond the clouds, only to meet at the very top a young mountain goat chewing a clump of grass, wearing her scarf.

"Are you her in disguise?" he said.

What a funny fellow, thought the goat. "Are you drunk?"

“Are you a flying goat?” said the drunken god, and twirled a finger in the air.

And a great wind rose up, and it shook the mountain and threw the mountain goat over the side.

If not for a narrow ledge a long ways down, the goat was destined for another life.

Another time, he tracked her for weeks as she fled through a haunted woods, till she finally threw herself into a wild rushing river to escape him.

A moment later she heard the splash as he dove in after her.

He’d surely have caught her had it not been for the intervention of a school of little silvery fish. When her arms grew too tired to swim on, all the silvery fish slipped over her and hid her in their midst and darted off with her in a glittery flash.

Like a bad dream that pursues you night after night till you no longer can sleep and no longer can you stay awake, she made her way to the gates of a Tibetan abbey in the south of Spain, home to five hundred nuns.

It was a place no man could enter.

A deep rumbling underground shook all the stone buildings of the abbey and sent the nuns and their newly arrived guest out into the main courtyard.

There, the five hundred nuns formed round her a human shield. And waited.

After a time, one of the nuns went to check the front Gates were bolted tight. On her way back she stopped to hitch up her robes. When she looked up, it was the drunken god staring out with bloodshot eyes, gnashing his teeth.

He said nothing, just tossed a handful of dirt in the air.

The stone walls of the library wobbled. And then the large stones all began rolling away, heading back to the hills and valleys from which they’d originally been gathered.

“Let’s have her,” said the drunken god, waving for her to come out. “Hand her over before all the rest of the stones in this place decide to follow your library.”

The head abbess stepped forward, holding out across her palms a three-sided dagger made of meteoric iron. She chanted softly to the dagger a Tibetan incantation to destroy demons and sent them off on their deadly mission.

But then, somewhere in mid-flight, the dagger had a small doubt regarding their assignment. Till now they’d served as a ritual object in ceremonies. They knew the demon destroying chants and had some understanding of the meaning, of course. But the killing of an actual demon, that was a different story.

Too late to turn back, the dagger veered off and took to chasing after one of the big stones from the library now rolling back to some hill or valley from which they’d originally been gathered.

“Hey! Hey!" shouted the drunken god, clapping his hands loudly at the abbess.

And where she’d been standing were now just her robes and fingernails on the ground.

Her fellow nuns gathered up the little that remained of her and retreated to the inner sanctums.

And the young woman stood alone to face the One Who Would Not Be Denied. 

He laughed when she picked up a sharp rock, as if she had any chance to fend him off with that! It was not her intention. She’d use it to cut off her nose, she said. Her own beauty she’d ruin, if that’s what it took to end his desire for her.

"By all means!” said the drunken god. "Toss us your pretty nose!”

But then she couldn’t bring herself to do it. And the drunken god had her.

Never again did she see him, but from that day, a child was born, and to look on her was to see born new and shining the perfect beauty of her mother.

One morning, she was at her dressing table trying on an earring, her infant daughter cradled in her arms, when in the mirror the child’s perfect features appeared to shift ever so slightly, much as a white puff of cloud in a blue sky will quietly rearrange itself to assume a new shape.

She glanced down at a face so pure she had to smile. Then, before her eyes, the child’s features began to drift. And the face they took on made her turn white.

The eyes did not look out from any human place. The mouth demanded to be fed living insects and small birds with hearts still beating. An open gash bled where the pretty nose had been.

It was the face of All Things That Cannot Be Looked At.

To look on it was to live again all the viciousness that gave birth to it - every savagery, every ugliness done to her - over and over again, again and again.

The sight of her own child was too much to bear, and she pleaded with all the drunken gods to turn her into anything but who she was.

Whether out of pity, or just tired of all her begging, they turned her into a lemon tree.

From that day on, a lemon tree she has been.

Some days she thought, if only she’d taken that rock to her face. She’d be left alone to roam mountains free, to make secluded caves her home.

But other days, she knew how much her beauty meant to her. If she’d destroyed her face that day, what if all she accomplished was to share the fate of her child, sentenced for life to wear the face of All Things That Cannot Be Looked At?

After you came to know her story, your usual easy talk left you for a while. How could you look upon your lemon tree and not see the young woman locked away inside?

As you went about your days, your every fifth thought was, “If only you could free her.”

You’d heard of course the rumors of how those versed in certain magical practices on the island of Borneo and in the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico and a number of other places, can free those held captive inside rocks and trees and lakes.

Not in Spain.

Here, should you one day find yourself locked away inside a rock or tree or lake, you are on your own. No one is coming to free you. It is quite hopeless on Spanish soil to imagine too much.

And so for the young woman imprisoned inside the walls of the lemon tree, the magical element of being freed by another did not exist. And her days passed all much the same.

Mornings of what to wake up to? Days of how small can a life be? Nights of did night and day even exist when all meaning is lost?

Then, at some point, when she woke to begin her day, her cell walls began to wish her good morning. And she began to wish good morning to her walls.

And her walls began to share some things, how they came to be the walls there, and some of their hopes and dreams. And slowly, she began to share some things, too.

And it made for cell walls a little less there, and not so close upon her.

So very slowly did small changes in the walls happen she barely noticed when one day she came to be living in a home quite spacious of architectural design, Wall length windows looked out on old Japanese gardens floating in and out of a timeless mist.

It was her custom after breakfast to take a walk down the winding pebbled path and cross the wooden moon bridge over the clear running brook, and spend time with her sitting bench. And the two of them were a long while there with no need to talk, two rocks listening to the day grow old.

But how did such a very big inside manage to fit within the lemon tree’s not so very big outside?

You tried to see could you still put your arms round her trunk.

You could, quite easily. 

You climbed your ladder to measure her with your elastic rubber ruler. Your ruler stretches as far as you want it to, so you never need worry you’ll run out of ruler.

And always before you measure a thing you know what it measures. If you measure the circumference of a pea, then measure how far to the moon, it’s exactly the same.

Each measures precisely from one end of your elastic rubber ruler to the other.

You wrote down in your log book the measurements for your lemon tree with home and gardens inside her, compared it to measurements you’d kept of her over the years ever since you were four.

Identical. You found this reassuring.

A lemon tree you could count on to be always the same on the outside, and to keep whatever was going on inside on the inside.

For the most part.

Until the day your former arm told you the young woman inside the lemon tree had the previous night somehow ended up outside and spent the better part of the night in the The Gardens of the Skies!

To which, you’d just nodded. Being startled does not come easily to you. It can be days for a startle to dawn on you.

The escape - if you can call it that, as she hadn’t meant to escape - took place some three days before the dark of the moon. The walls had other things on their mind that particular night and fell asleep on the job. They’d been off dreaming about if only they were the walls of The Louvre.

What a life those walls must live! If not for them, how many millions of masterpieces would be left to lie there in The Louvre on those hard wooden floors?

That night before retiring, the young woman in her nightgown had gone into the dark kitchen for a glass of water. She’d opened a cabinet and got out a water glass. Then, the water glass in her hand had dissolved, like water being poured into water.

Then, the cabinet was gone; then no kitchen round her.

And she found herself outside in the wide open night Gardens of the Skies.

A distant roar and cries in the dark reminded her how enormous and untamed this world she once knew!

And the roar came closer and a wind of salt air came with it.

And then the Great Ocean of What? rose up before her, and she could barely bring herself to look at it.

Everywhere were things too big to think. Everywhere, things too small to think.

“You should ask a question,” said Great Ocean of What? “Make it a good one.”

(Long pause.)

”I can’t think of anything,” she said.

”Try,” said Great Ocean. “I’m sure you can ask a good question.”

(Long pause.)

“Well, just begin swimming,” said Great Ocean, “and see what comes up.”

So she walked out into the Great Ocean until the hem of her nightgown was wet and the cold waters wrapped themselves round her bare legs, and there she stood and could go no further.

”Forgive me, Mr. Great Ocean, but my logical informs me I never learned to swim.”

Just then a dashing Little Idea in a blue velvet fedora came walking up the beach and began talking to her without any of the usual formalities one goes through when you meet someone new.

“May I suggest you take your logical and put it all away in your little wooden triangle box - the one you keep that old key to open a destiny you never unlocked, and your blue eyelashes with sparkles for special occasions. Then, let’s meet back here tomorrow night. We’ll go for a swim.”

And with a tip of the fedora, Little Idea bid adieu.

Her first thought was, “I wonder where I can get a fedora like that?” Then she wondered, “Is my little triangle box big enough to fit all my logical inside?”

She went back inside her lemon tree and got out her little triangle box and had to wind up her logical very very tight to get it all in. Mostly it fit, just the skinny tail like that of an elephant hung out, which prevented the lid from closing all the way.

The next night, she knew what to do. The way to pass from a world inside a lemon tree to the one outside was no mystery. She went into the dark kitchen for a glass of water, opened a cabinet door, got out a water glass…..

And then once again she was outside in the wide open night Gardens of the Skies. And a distant roar in the dark was coming closer, and a wind of salt air came with it. And then before her there rose up the immense and untamed Great Ocean of What?

She looked down the beach for Little Idea. She looked out across the Great Ocean to the horizon. Maybe she was early. Did Little Idea say a time?

And she listened to the night till it lightened into dawn.

It was a long night and she was tired and a little giddy, and it was time to go home.

“Could you hold my fedora for me?” said Little Idea.

Where’d Little Idea come from? And before she could think it, she knew, “Oh, yes, of course. Things come from where they come from!”

And she stroked the blue velvet fedora, and soon the fedora forgot they were a fedora and thought they were her pet cat and began softly to purr.

“If I may say a word before I go,” said Little Idea.

She was already sad to see Little Idea go before they even got there.

“Whatever splashing about you do,” said Little Idea, “regard not that as the swimming. When the true swimming happens, no such question exists.”

And the next instant Little Idea was far out in the Great Ocean and gone.

”May I hold your fedora for you?” said a tall hatstand tree that just happened to be there. “Until after your swim?”

So she handed her fedora to the hatstand tree and they put it on to wear till she came back.

But now what did they mean by “after your swim?” she thought. She hadn’t any plans to do any swimming, and besides, she didn’t even know how to.

And next thing she knew, Great Ocean was all round her. And she was swimming true through the Immense and the Untamed and it was cold and it was good. And what did it matter she didn’t know how to?

When she returned home that morning, she went and got out her little triangle box, and how happy her logical to see her! And the skinny tale of her logical reached out and wrapped round her little finger and held tight the way the little hand of an infant grips your finger and does so quite firmly.

And she put on her blue eyelashes with the sparkles for special occasions. And they looked quite smart with her blue velvet fedora. Or, rather, Little Idea’s fedora.

And she gazed out on the old Japanese gardens floating in and out of the timeless mist, and raised a glass of wine to the morning.

And she moved slowly and quietly, so as not to wake the walls.

Epilogue

For those of you concerned about how life went on for the woman in lemon tree, I’m afraid I’m a bit sketchy. Nevertheless, I will say what little I know after I left Skandha and came to live here on the east coast of Canada.

I loved the people of our kingdom dearly, but there is only a certain time you can be king. Once seasons have been returned to order, eyes that looked to you to join sky and earth must begin to turn inward to join them on their own.

One morning I went to wind my watch, and it was ticking along fine, but why was it running eight hours and thirty minutes behind?

So, I said to watch, “Mr. Watch, did you know you are running eight hours and thirty minutes behind? Is it because you have so many things to do today, perhaps, that you are running late?”

”If I may say so, sir, I believe I am running precisely on time,” said watch. “You need only be standing on the east coast of Canada, and I think you will find me quite accurate.”

So that’s where I went. And watch proved correct.

I first arrived with education minister who’d refused to let me go off alone to fend for myself in some untamed land of barbarians. He arranged for me this rather small-looking house from the outside, till you go inside and get lost and you’re walking in circles and end up back at the front door.

For all the many long and winding hallways of former palace, when was I ever lost? Those hallways all knew where I was going. I’d go off in the opposite direction to where I meant to end up, and before I knew it, I’d arrived.

The house here sits on a wooded hill near to a wide inlet that goes out to the ocean. In winter with trees bare and sun on the waves, you can sit at the window and spend an afternoon gazing out on the waters all shiny and glittering.

Education minister never spoke of all he’d left behind to be my attendant and cook. His good wife of forty years, the grandchildren, his respected office and colleagues whose friendship meant so much - gone in an instant. He felt in five years time or so we’d need a younger person than himself to serve me. I think he was brave to last the winter.

When the food is not your food, the people, not your people, the days absent all you called a life, how for thoughts not to go to the empty place where familiar comforts used to be, like a tongue to the gap when a tooth is lost.

My good friend promised to visit next fall, or else the following spring. We both know he will not be coming back. One makes promises to a friend at times to feel better about oneself. And as a friend, you look forward to seeing them.

One evening last week was warm enough to go down to the small dock that looks out on the wide waters of the inlet. And I stood listening to the waves of openness going out to the ocean.

It’s easy to be alone there at the supper hour. If anyone were to come, you’d hear them a long ways off, the crunch of footsteps on the steep gravel path all the way down to the dock.

Then, a tap on my shoulder.

No need to turn round to know who it was. That they’d come up on me without a sound, no surprise. How not to recognize the familiar touch of one so long a part of you before you sent them off to be part of lemon tree? And that is how I came to be once again with former arm.

For a part of you forever gone to show up and be part of you again, you begin to think impossible things quite ordinary. Now, when there’s an itch on an elbow, there is an actual elbow to scratch.

That evening former arm and I said little. The many questions of how we once again came to be together all just floated off in the fading light far out to the night sea.

Only days later did I learn from former arm a bit more of what happened to woman in lemon tree. Now free to come and go as she pleased, life went on much the same. Occasionally, as days drew near to the dark of the moon, she’d put on her blue eyelashes with sparkles and dress for a night out.

And she’d wear her blue velvet fedora. She was keeping it for Little Idea of course to return it. Then she’d laugh at herself for not wanting to. She’d imagine she went to hand it back and Little Idea said, “But it suits you! You must keep it!”

Then she heard laughing and it was not her own.

It was coming from Fedora.

"It's okay to laugh at me," she said. "I think it's funny, too. I don’t want to give you back!”

“Me, too!” said Fedora. “I’m laughing at me! I so love being your pet cat and getting to sit on your head!”

And yet for all the worry over it, if on a dark of the moon night she ran into Little Idea, she’d give away her fedora quite easily and bid a cheerful farewell.

I’ve heard people in other places give away things to be generous, but the story of generosity maybe goes a bit different.

To practice generosity, you first need to gather fedoras enough so you’ve got a good number of them to give away. You then give away a very generous amount of fedoras to people in Africa. Just not your favorite fedora.

In the kingdom of Skandha, of course, there’s the Fedora Rule:

“Regard not how many fedoras one gives away as the generosity. To give away easily and cheerfully to just anyone the fedora one loves most, that is the generosity.”









It was on one of their evening outings Fedora said to the young woman, “Do you ever think about going out one night and not coming back?”

She’d been struggling for some time with where she was meant to be.

To remain a lemon tree and keep to herself?

Or to return to the world and be there in some way for others?

She’d come to know what it is to have no walls to contain her. Her worlds Inside and Outside passed back and forth without much ado. And she knew well the waters of the Great Ocean and what it was to swim free in them. And there was much she wished to tell of those things, and those things were real and they were good.

But these days, who cares for any of that? Even if you speak with a true heart to be helpful, people think you are trying to fool them. When the words are all known, and the meaning left them long ago, what have you left to say?

It is sad to see one has no place in the world, but it was true. How could she not be faithful to how things are? And she chose to remain lemon tree for the rest of her days.

Probably, when after much thought you decide to remain a lemon tree, and you go to bed a lemon tree, you do not expect to wake up one morning outside in the The Gardens and see a swan gliding by. How clear and sharp in the morning light the ripples spreading out in a big V across the pond from the rear of that gliding swan!

And that is how quite out of the blue the woman found herself one morning waking up on the grassy bank of the duck pond, and on her cheek she felt the morning dew. No need to ask how she came to be there. Too late to think such questions. She was there because she was there.

Till now, she’d seen herself as a hero in a myth meant to bring back a treasure to others who’d never understand it. Now, that was gone. And in the morning light, all she saw, she saw with her heart. And she chose to return to the world with only that.

And she walked back up from the duck pond to say goodbye to lemon tree and the Inner world she’d come to love.

And she found no world to say goodbye to. Lemon tree was gone.

"I think we are both on our own, now,” said a voice.

She looked round and saw former arm on a bench by the fountain.

And a mist of cold fountain spray rode a breeze all the way across the courtyard to say good morning to her and to kiss her cheeks and welcome her return to the world.







It was some months after she’d gone off that former arm learned where she was now living. A Norwegian traveler come from a little rest house in a remote place in a forest spoke of a young woman newly hired as a housekeeper. She changed bed linens, swept floors and cleaned bathrooms. And when on Saturday mornings she went to the farmers’ market, she wore a blue velvet fedora.

“Wherever she went,” he said, “a quiet scent of lemon blossom was there, and as she passed by, she eased the mind of weary travelers.”

The other night was three nights before the dark of the moon, and I went out on the porch and gazed up to the heavens and became the night sky.

From the day I set foot in Canada, I’d wondered what sort of work I was meant to do, now that my king days were over. Often I’d find myself just keeping the night sky company.

I’d forget about my destiny and think what a wonderful thing it must be to be the night sky. You get to hold the earth and the moon and all of outer space in the palm of your hand!

Back then, of course, I wasn’t yet ready to become the night sky. Everything was too new to me.

Once you take leave of your kingdom to begin a life so unlike anything you have ever known, you find yourself thinking still about the king of Spain who is no longer you.

And it is only when your old story is no more, and your new story no more, as well, that you may begin to meet up with something too big to think.

And then, for the last three days before the dark of the moon, you may become the Night Sky.

And that is how you came to meet the waning Moon.

And she too has a story to tell, much like your own.

She speaks of her days now spent in a remote forest where she’s a housekeeper in a little rest house for travelers. And how she was a lemon tree, once. And before that…..

……does it matter?

Her story came to an end. She no longer has need to keep up with the telling. The newness wore out along with the old story.

She came to see things too simple to think.

And now for the last three days before the dark of the moon, she becomes the Moon.

“You do know,” she said, “when I disappear and come back, I am not the same Moon when I come back. Please, do not expect me to be the Moon you have always known.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Sophie told me.”

And for a few nights she performs for you a Moon she’s never been, a Moon younger than she ever was. Till you must part and for a while be gone once comes the dawn.

And you want to be up all night with her. And you know the nights are few. And you know you’ll be always waiting for a Moon you will never know.

Just a few thoughts that go through your mind, like tiny dots in outer space, when you see the days begin to close in on the last three days before the dark of the Moon.