Allegory the first

Well-watered with rage, the creator and destroyer strides in her garden. She looks at the ancient roots of his chestnut tree, the knotted and gnarled mess ripping up his soil, the gnarled mess so adept at soaking up the snowfalls of a hundred winters, adept at giving shade to copulating squirrels, coolness to the field-labourers in the plantation, bark to bored children, and inspiration to the poet staring out the window of the glorious white plantation-house.

She walks through all this unseen, her robes flailing metaphysically around her, laying a finger here and there, nodding benevolently or shaking her head distractedly. Today Shiva--creator and destroyer, who would drown the phenomenal plane in the hot fires of her fury while weeping over her own sins--is in a rotten mood. Millennia of creation have not amounted to more than this, no more than a tree striving for height and the little squirrel scuttling greedily up its branches searching for nuts that have not ripened, that struggle to hide from tearing little claws. The mighty chestnut is no more than a passing curiosity to the men working the fields, and to the children it does not stand out as particularly considerable. The sun bathes the scene with mottled patches of light, but for what? For whom? This same sun is scourging the labourer's back and is an unwelcome intrusion on the alcoholic slee pof our poet.

Her own sleep has been fitful in recent days, as she has fought with the question that most trees, squirrels and dare not ask for fear of jeopardizing their neat process of existence. If only they could know the philosopher-gods have the same problems! The question ran around her mind like that critter ran around the tree trunk when the child wanted to throw rocks at it, except this question managed to climb its way into infinity and, finding no answer, languish and disturb her mood: "why is there anything at all?".

Consider: "when we have nothing definite to say, we try to trap the archangel of the soul between two visual images, even if we're not religious. It sometimes works for me, but I fear the opinion of the not-me."