Partial Portraits of the Actors
Crossing the World’s Stage
If the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players, Shakespeare’s Jacques did illustrations of seven of them. Not wishing to compete with the Bard, I’ve picked out just five to image. The first is childhood.
I
The youthful sapling that dreamed of growing up to metamorphose into a horse and gallop away with the wind. This dream of epic mobility to come in the future (as opposed to a rooted life yearning for freedom like that) inhabited its deep night dreams and waking fantasies, year after year, and gave the young tree something to live for.
II
Beware of what you wish for. The little tree did metamorphose, but not into the great, heroic horse it imagined. Instead, it got a human-style experience of adolescence. It felt all the stresses of that metamorphosis—that it’s body had grown huge, clumsy, even grotesque; that it was becoming something it couldn’t control or understand; and that, now raw, over-sensitive and self-conscious, it was sure everyone around it was looking at it.
III
The tree is now a hyper-focused adult full of confidence and on the make, now at the height of its energies and incredibly well connected.
IV
The tree, past its peak, has now been forced to become a rock. “Been there and done that” has transformed into having been and having done and having not found any real success or satisfaction. So many wrong paths were taken. No reasonable likelihood exists of going anywhere different now. A splitting headache accompanies its increasing responsibilities. Its burden of stresses gets worse and worse. Big dental problems emerge from too many years of gritting its teeth.
V
The tree is now overwhelmed by the wave of meekness that comes with old age, when one at last is surprised by seeing The Great Light. With sigh of wonder, the tree realizes that it didn’t have to become a great horse or anything else at all—that this was true all along, and that it missed something important by not having seen this until now.