There is a significant portal at the present moment that enables transformative change. There are planets aligning that have not done so for a very long time and we are shifting into our true experience of the Aquarian age. The old Piscean energy that supported power over and a power structure of dominance is disintegrating. The possibility of a new form of shared and collective agreement is open to us now. However we need to step up and take responsibility for the decisions we are making. Being apathetic and not making a choice or decision is, in fact, a decision all the same.
In the story the stream is at a point of choice. To remain acting as it always had or to change because the circumstances it found itself in, had changed.
It was a time to make a decision; to change or to live with the consequences of not changing.
I offer this lovely story as something to contemplate as we, too, are being asked to change.
The Tale of the Sands
From Idries Shah’s “Tales of the Dervishes.” This version of the tale is from Awad Afifi the Tunisian who died in 1870.
A stream, from its source in far-off mountains, passing through every kind and description of countryside, at last reached the sands of the desert. Just as it had crossed every other barrier, the stream tried to cross this one, but it found that as fast as it ran into the sand, its waters disappeared.
It was convinced, however that its destiny was to cross this desert, and yet there was no way. Now a hidden voice, coming from the desert itself, whispered: ‘The Wind crosses the desert, and so can the stream.’
The stream objected that it was dashing itself against the sand and only getting absorbed: that the wind could fly, and this was why it could cross a desert.
‘By hurtling in your own accustomed way you cannot get across. You will either disappear or become a marsh. You must allow the wind to carry you over, to your destination.’
But how could this happen? ‘By allowing yourself to be absorbed in the wind.’
This idea was not acceptable to the stream. After all, it had never been absorbed before. It did not want to lose its individuality. And, once having lost it, how was one to know that it could ever be regained?
‘The wind’, said the sand, ‘performs this function. It takes up water, carries it over the desert, and then lets it fall again. Falling as rain, the water again becomes a river.’
‘How can I know that this is true?’
‘It is so, and if you do not believe it, you cannot become more than a quagmire, and even that could take many, many years; and it certainly is not the same as a stream.’
‘But can I not remain the same stream that I am today?’
‘You cannot in either case remain so,’ the whisper said. ‘Your essential part is carried away and forms a stream again. You are called what you are even today because you do not know which part of you is the essential one.’
When he heard this, certain echoes began to arise in the thoughts of the stream. Dimly, he remembered a state in which he -or some part of him, was it?- had been held in the arms of a wind. He also remembered -or did he?- that this was the real thing, not necessarily the obvious thing, to do.
And the stream raised his vapour into the welcoming arms of the wind, which gently and easily bore it upwards and along, letting it fall softly as soon as they reached the roof of a mountain, many, many miles away. And because he had his doubts, the stream was able to remember and record more strongly in his mind the details of the experience. He reflected, ‘Yes, now I have learned my true identity.’
The stream was learning. But the sands whispered, ‘We know, because we see it happen day after day: and because we, the sands, extend from the riverside all the way to the mountain.’
And that is why it is said that the way in which the Stream of Life is to continue on its journey is written in the Sands
