What an “Interesting Journey”, but at last — here I am on a Sand Bar. I have learned one thing: we all are prone to complain about wacky relatives, but here’s why we need to listen to them:
If you wake up from a shipwreck and find yourself marooned on a sand bar, it is useful know that you have a survival technique. Has anyone you’ve known ever preceded you on that journey to that particular Sand Bar? Did they leave any messages — such as fire circles, coconuts with messages scratched on with shark teeth, an unfinished raft, or maybe a wrecked one waiting to be fixed? It might be helpful then, to look for messages in bottles.
The seas circle the earth and carry messages, some for creatures and some for humans; but you can’t always make out the language they are written in or who they were intended for, or why they were important. How do we find out?
Long ago, in the deep and ancient past, it was determined that two persons together were safer than one person alone. It followed that two people together might accidentally produce a third person, or two, or three. They might even hear noises in the forest and discover other sets of persons unknown to them. Two outcomes were possible here: kill the others before they find your food, or recognize that four or five families together might be safer than just one or two families together. New words were learned and language became more descriptive. Young persons had to learn how to be like older persons. Unknown circumstances were explained by already learned behaviors and vocabulary. You had to start with understanding somehow, and learning “things” made you safer. At this point, stories were invented. And anyone who has dealt with a serial soap opera of any kind knows that “Red Herrings” rule the day and control the narrative.
Now we are back at our central question: What do you do when marooned on a sand bar, or an ocean, or in isolation? You can tell a story. That story will explain to you why you are stuck on a sand bank, or how you might be able to escape the situation. But then, there is the proverbial fly in the ointment (or on someone’s head at the wrong (or right) time. Since you never learned to swap stories with this fly, you can’t benefit from any information that fly might add to your present situation: “stuck on a sand bar”. So . . . How do you learn the fly’s language? By swapping stories. At first, it’s a lot of hand flapping and wing flapping, false starts and unfortunate ends (such as that time you invented a fly-swatter).
To be continued: