One of the books that my father checked out from the library using my name was Illusions by Richard Bach. I learned that one pretty fast and it wasn’t as challenging as Ulysses was but I felt like since it was so easy it must not have meant so much. That’s obviously not true.

I breezed through that book not because it was easy but because I was a kid and I didn’t think anything it talked about was impossible. I wasn’t tainted or jaded as we become when we’re older and for me the idea of vaporizing clouds was an easy one to accept. Flying too for that matter.

Decades have passed since then and I’ve read that book plenty and I recently reread it just again. I was struck by how much I took the book to heart and how it absolutely shaped me as a person and defined a great deal about what I think and have thought since I was a small child.

I’m not sure if you’ve ever read anything by Richard Bach and I’m sure his work isn’t monumental literature but I am also sure that his work is important. To me it is, at least, and that’s enough. The opening passage from Illusions is just great and I loved the grease-stained pages reproduced for the thing and it looked like a real journal to me. The story of the little creatures that cling to the rocks is still an important idea that I’ve never not held in very high esteem and I figure it’s nice to post it here for you and for later.

“Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great crystal river. The current of the river swept silently over them all–young and old, rich and poor, good and evil, the current going its own way, knowing only its own crystal self.

Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature said at last, “I am tired of clinging. Though I cannot see it with my eyes, I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.”

The other creatures laughed and said, “Fool! Let go, and that current you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks and you will die quicker than boredom!” But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks.

Yet in time, as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more. And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, “See a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come to save us all!”

And the one carried in the current said, “I am no more Messiah than you. The river delights to lift us free, if only we dare let go. Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.” But they cried the more, “Savior!” all the while clinging to the rocks, and when they looked again he was gone, and they were left alone making legends of a Savior.”

It’s simple, of course, and it’s nice and it’s important and I like it very much.

Originally published at [Posted over at smartwentcrazy.com/journal.]. You can comment here or there.