One evening, Anna, Alana, Rembrandt, and Lila took a walk around the island. They walked on lush paths that went through grasses waving in the breeze, past a field of corn and through a forest dense with ancient Redwoods. When they came out of the forest they arrived at a sandy beach. The sun was low in the sky and the blue was turning pinks, oranges, reds, lavenders, and purples. They sat in the warm sand and watched the sun set into to ocean. The colors in the sky slowly disappeared and the indigo night was bright with stars.
Rembrandt built a fire and they camped on the beach. Alana and Lila made a dinner of fish and berries and they sat around the crackling fire while Rembrandt told stories about the constellations.
He would lie on his back and point to a series of stars low on the horizon and say in his deep voice, “That is whale. He is breaching out of the ocean rising into the sky collecting all if the stories of mother earth. He can see as well above the water as he can below the surface. He knows the truth. He watches and he listens, and when he collects all of the story he dives back into the ocean and begins his song. As he dives, another whale rises up into the sky to collect the next part of the story and so on and so on. The story has no end. It will go on for eternity and goes back to the beginning of time.”
And then there was silence.
After a while Lila took up the story telling. She pointed in another direction picking out another series of stars and in her soft voice as gentle as a breeze she said, “That is hummingbird. She moves in all directions, her wings fluttering so fast that when she is next to you it sounds like the buzz of a bee. She is happiness itself. Her iridescent colors exude joy. She flies as if she is dancing and when you listen carefully you can hear her happy chirp. She reminds us to go through life with joy and gusto and to change direction as needed.”
This time in the silence, Anna lays her head in her mother’s lap and falls into a peaceful sleep.
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