Wow, what an exhausting, vulnerable, joyous piece of writing this was. The desire to write a fable was born of a confluence of reading The Sufis by Idries Shah that itself begins with a fable—The Islanders; an exploration I’d done into the epistemology of lineage martial traditions that are structured to teach on multiple levels, both overtly and subtly; and to try my hand at crafting narrative fiction instead of essays or poetry. I began—as befits my engineer bona fides—with a focus on how to structure the overlapping and interpenetrating narratives, to create something that would still impact a casual reader from a surface-level reading but would deepen for a curious reader that explored the story.
With the goal set, I got immediately to work. If only. No, I avoided getting started for months by finding other projects to occupy my time. I was constantly wondering whether the image of what I wanted this fable to accomplish had outpaced my skills as a writer. And if it wasn’t going to be amazing then why bother? To make it amazing, I thought, the story would end up being long. Did I have the patience to write a long piece of fiction? To do the world-building of a Brandon Sanderson or a Robert Jordan? I knew I didn’t. I felt trapped. Then I remembered the powerful short story—not even 3000 words—The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin. I read it for the first time back in middle school, and it has stuck with me ever since—clear evidence that writing could be both short and amazing. That still didn’t mean I was capable of it, but it was enough to get me started.
My first effort had a few passages that worked, but mostly it read as condescendingly mysterious. As I reread parts of it after putting it aside for a few weeks, even I was confused by what the characters were implying. Clearly too clever to be useful. In short, I had a structure, but no story to tell. It was months later, when a seminar with Carol Sanford focused on cosmology intermixed with my own life events that the seed for this story, The Sedra, took hold.
It began, unlike most of my writing, with simple scenes, only a few sentences long, written late at night. In fact, at first, I thought this could become a children’s book that would offer something of value both to the adults who read it and to the children who heard it (and later read it themselves). Maybe that version gets written someday, but I couldn’t tear myself away from the richness of vocabulary accessible to an adult reader. Despite my degree in mathematics and career as an engineer, I’ve always been a word nerd, too, thanks to hours spent playing Boggle with my mom and her cadre of teacher friends. From those few sentences that captured the essence of each scene, I layered and wove the threads that connected everything together. Maybe it’s still condescendingly mysterious. Maybe it’s all obvious to you. (Though I hid a few nuggets that are easy to miss unless you are an especially attentive reader.)
The only thing I kept from the first abortive attempt was the main character, Uyo. I hope you enjoy their story. But more than that, I hope some part of their story sparks and reignites your innate curiosity to look deeper than the surface, past the memes and the tweets, beyond outrage and empty rhetoric. Our cosmologies determine what is possible. The adage—I’ll believe it when I see it—had it backwards. Unquestionably it goes the other way around—We can only see it once we believe it.
Ash Morgan
Mountain View, CA
May 2022
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