The Chain

Sometimes it seems the words hide there, waiting for us to come out to find them. The world waits too, behind the words, ready for us to use those words to describe it. It waits there for us to make up stories about it, fitting the words together around the world, making a chain of words to link us to the ground we walk upon.

We call those chains stories and some of them are true and some of them are not, but we have a tendency to believe stories as if they are true, as if despite what we see they do describe a world around us.

The closer we look at the world the more we should see that those ancient stories do not describe the world we live in. That does not matter, though, as long as we know those stories are just stories and no longer are about the world we live in.

The danger of stories is that we grow to believe in them, despite the fact that they no longer tell us about the world they are meant to describe. Their chain linking us to the world has been broken, some links shown to be poorly-made have rusted and snapped as they’ve grown older, breaking that link between us and the world. That does not matter, for we have found stronger chains that really do bind us to the world we live in. Therefore, we have no need any longer for those old rusted and broken chains, except to keep as story chains and admire the craftsmanship that created them.