PLANET ZOOTOPIA
TERRARIA
MAYBE, MAYBE NOT
Cold steel bit deep into Geaudeux’s palms as the brash young dodo tightened his grip on the wheel. He conjured a word, aimed it at the open road ahead of him, then growled one of the most sagacious rejoinders ever heard, a perspicacious response to the grandest of all circumspections -- Maybe.
Alert yet simmering with a faintly fervent ardor, Cordelia Bungee thought to herself, maybe? maybe not -- half-echoed by Don Juan Lagarto as he leaned over the door of his ‘37 StutZootrope and hissed back at the dodo, “Maybe not, bird-boy!”
In a collapsing ellipse of thought Geaudeux suddenly realized the meaning of life is not a riddle to be solved: Life simply is. He could invest his life with meaning and allow the ambiguity of it to ride along as a blessing in disguise.
If he were absolutely certain about all things -- like winning the race AND Cordelia -- Geaudeux knew he would have spent his entire life in restless agony, fearful of losing his way at every turn. But since anything is possible, the seemingly miraculous lies within reach and wonders shall never cease.
The ever-expectant little dodo believed that true freedom may be stated in one word, which served him best as a big brick propping open the door of existence: Maybe.
THE GRINDER
They say a man is the word made flesh. So you’d think he’d at least have some say in it, wouldn‘t you? Take the dog boy. He says he’s just a grinder -- not fast, merely steady, and we believe him. But if he’s just a grinder, what on earth is he grinding? An axe, perhaps? They also say revenge is a dish best served cold, but I think a little foie gras and truffles would do quite nicely, thank you. Speaking of comestibles, maybe he’s just grinding his teeth. Nah, that’s more akin to gnashing. Comes with lots of weeping. Perhaps his nose then? Nope, he’d need a grinder to do that.
Aha! To the dog boy, a grinder may simply be one who puts his nose to the grindstone and keeps it there. Still, I think of it literally as a kind of millstone. Which, as we all know, must bear the weight of a heavy burden, much like the proverbial albatross worn round the neck.
Life can be a grind, a slow, unrelenting slog that wears us down daily, but only if we let it. Time to lose the necktie, dog boy.
-- Don Juan Alphonso Louis Lagarto
THE STRIFE OF WANDERLUST IN A DREAM
When dreams tread lightly through our waking hours we are mindful of many wondrous things; sadly, like so much heavenly flotsam, they escape those whose fly-by-night visions often find them adrift, drowning in their own sleep.
As for me, your lovable little fluffball interlocutor, I’ve circumnavigated this mortal Coyle, my piddling life this leaky old boat, filled with what dreams may come, carried on the wings of such stuff as they are made on, yet I fear not the future, nor shall I shed one tear for the past, and because of this I am certain that if everything left in our wake were tied to all that looms before us, it would languish in comparison to that which lies still within us. - from the journal of Marco Dodo
THE WHEEL OF TEMPUS Q. FUGIT
Your goal may be to stay alive as long as you possibly can, whatever the cost, using the snake oil of faith in a vain attempt to keep death from your door, or you may desire to waylay death in pursuit of all things supernatural, believing that the sweet hereafter is the point at which any meaningful life begins, but as a mature individual, steadfastly sovereign yet profoundly bound to this planet.
Come now, Master Toadrick. No sense crying amid the ruins of Life, claiming it with such woeful breath, though yours could have had no such dignity as the sweet call of Death. You have clung to Life as a child to its mother, now leave your dockets for the play; you have cheated Death with snake-oil, paid your sinner’s tithe with haste. Belay all exculpation and prepare to meet thine end, then remember this to your epitaph: far better that I should have lived as if every day were my last.
PHOENIX RISING
As I within my dreamboat lay,
Impatient with the light of day,
A tailwind blew, though all to brief,
And sent me through a cloudy reef.
I peddled with heroic strain,
And swore an oath to ease my pain,
Then sailed above both wave and dune,
Just east of the sun and west of the moon,
In search of a dream to exhume.
__________________________________________
My spirit like the Phoenix soars,
And beckons to the dream that roars;
Self-kindled every vision glows
And makes the future which it owes.
Unzip the day, embrace the night,
Wherein the stuff of dreams alight.
For such a bird was never found,
Who flew so high above the ground,
In search of a life, unbound.
(text within the Wheel of Time)
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
(text on the banners)
No bird soars too high
if he soars with his own wings.
