Wisdom

"But", said the Wekakristabruder, "what about the order? the beauty?" The Allson stared into the Wekakristabruder with his hard, steely grey eyes. "Have you ever stood at an empty forest, as the day comes to a close, heard the noises, seen how the light seems to scurry away, frightened by the oncoming night?" Unknown to the Allson, the Wekakristabruder remembered the long-gone days of his childhood, and a shiver cold as the winter chill ran down his spine.  "If you have," continued the Allson, "then you know what it's like. You would know it's beautiful. Where do you think its beauty stems from?" The Wekakristabruder tried to respond to the heathen Allson with an enlightning response; with what he thought the circuitors at the monastery would answer: "It's their conformity to the Will of the One". The Wekakristabruder would have expected an angry rebuke, perhaps even a physical attack from the wild, dirty Allson in front of him; anything but what he got: Laughter. A rolling, belly laugh that carried shamelessly through the acres of flatland in the fields surrounding the monastery. "Ha, ho, ho, ho, hah, hah!" said the Allson, "You clearly haven't been in one!" said the Allson, tears in his eyes, as he slapped the Wekakristabruder's back in what he probably intended as a friendly slap, but which had the foreseeable effect of toppling the frail, wispy monk to the ground. The Allson's face became serious, even solemn, as he extended his arm and, with an air of grave formality, helped the Wekakristabruder to his feet. The Allson bowed his head in an unspoken apology and brushed the Wekakristabruder's robes to clean the dust. "If you have been there", he continued in much more muted tones, again staring with those deep grey eyes, "you know it's beautiful. You also know it's deadly, full of things that spend their lives tearing each others to ribbons, the tinyest and frailest of which could kill you. There's no order in it; no conformity to a higher law. But it is beautiful. It is beautiful because it is alive." The two realized that they had suddenly reached the end of the road and were facing the monastery gates. It was, precisely, evenfall. The Wekakristabruder shouted out a command to the sentinels, who opened the massive oaken gates, and the Allson stepped out into the forest, without a word, advancing into the treeline with a ponderous, stomping gait. Suppressing a shudder, the Wekakristabruder turned back and sighed as he looked into the neat, empty yards, the well-ordered furrows of the plowed fields, the solid, square monastery buildings... and noticed, for the first time in his life, that nowhere there could he see the beauty he had found in the forest, all those years ago. For all of its order, his world was barren, sterile, dead...