At the Pierre au Diable - Eden Saga

Hi Xavier. The urgent need to tell you something leads me to write this text for you, entitled Promenade rue de la Pierre au Diable. Are you going to publish it? If so, as I know you, you’ll find the title too long. Put another one, as usual. Hugs, AA.

The street of the Pierre au Diable, I live there. This devil’s stone is a dolmen in my garden. XS

Window or Mirror?

He had long believed that the prophets looked to the future. He had imagined them with their eyes turned towards centuries still invisible, their words gathering in silence the events which were not born. Then he understood that they looked especially at men. A prophecy is sometimes a mirror that we take for a window, it does not always say what will come but often reveals what we fear to see coming. And this discovery, which could have saddened him, brought him on the contrary a strange peace.

The men of each era announced their own end with the words of their own fears. Each century invents its apocalypse in the image of its worries. Far from being saddened by it, he understood on the contrary that if the future was not written in the prophecies, then he remained free. And if tomorrow is free, today becomes precious.

We seek to know tomorrow when we no longer know how to live today. We ask in the future to reassure ourselves about what the present refuses us. Why know if we will be happy tomorrow, as if happiness were a house that someone else already had the plans for.

Act to Act, Not to Have

But the day does not ask tomorrow for permission to be born, the tree does not consult spring before growing, any more than the river knows the sea when it leaves the mountain. What lives does not need to know its destination to be alive.

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So he wondered why man wanted to possess the future so much. Maybe because he was afraid of losing the present?” We ask for guarantees to tomorrow so that we do not have to trust today, he said.

Path, Truth, Life

He understood that hope itself could become an escape when it prevented us from seeing what was there. And he said to himself: “The opposite of fear is perhaps not hope, it is presence. Being there, looking at the face in front of you, listening to the voice that speaks to you, loving the hand you can still hold. Life doesn’t promise us anything; it offers us something, and that something is now called.“

He then remembered an ancient word: I am the path, the truth and the life.

He had once believed that these were three things, then he understood that they might be one. The path, when one agrees to walk it, is the truth; the truth is life when one ceases to want to possess it, and life is the path when one ceases to demand to know where it ends.

He watched the sun come down. There was no message in its light, no prophecy, but only the light. We look for signs in the sky while the miracle is already before our eyes. A laugh, a face, an encounter, a pain that can be relieved, a door that can be opened, a forgiveness that can be offered.

The future is a land that no one possesses; the present is the only land where our steps can leave a trace. Ever since that day, when he heard a prophecy, he asked himself: “What fear is the reflection of it?”

Living in the Moment

And when the end of the world was announced to him, he looked around. If someone needed to beloved, they loved. If someone needed to be listened to, they were listening. If a child was running, he would watch the child run without worrying. For he had discovered that the future may not be something we can guess, but something that we generate, at every moment, by the way we live in the present.

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Then he continued on his way, without seeking to know where he would lead him. It was enough for him to know that he was advancing. He who walks in truth need not know the destination.

And, for the first time, the stranger no longer seemed empty to him; he seemed vast.” The future, he told himself, is perhaps the name we give to freedom when we are afraid not to control it.”

Then he smiled and walked again, for he had finally accepted that the only time in which life could be lived was this one. Here. Now. The rest belongs to God, to chance, or to mystery—no matter what we call it.

The Future

God

Chance

Mystery

Dear Alain! Irreplaceable poet of the Living!
What I like about you? Your first-time neighbor side.
What bothers me about you? The same thing.
Kisses,
Xavier