I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
Here is the truth: I think some deep wisdom inside me (a) sensed the stress, (b) was terrified for me, and (c) gave me something new and hard to focus on in order to prevent me from lapsing into a despair coma — and also to keep me from having a jelly jar of wine in my hand.
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The aliens arrive, saucers white and gleaming like sails. Their instruments are excellent, and they all speak several of our tongues. Still, they confess to struggles with translation. They bring peace, but not the peace we have imagined. They have a story we must learn, a story that drives them through the galaxy. There was a child, a king, prophets, plagues, a horrifying death, and a word more precious than the world. They do not tell this story start to end, the word resists all of our tongues. Red wolf racing in the dim forest? someone asks. A vole in the meadow grass, meeting his beloved? No. They beg for patience. They are sure we can learn, we can know as they know. In the meantime, they bring other gifts. Centuries pass. They talk, and we listen, when we can. Millions die in plagues they insist were accidental and tragic. The gleaming towers they build for us stand empty, the wide spirals they insist must crown each tower screw themselves enigmatically into the sky. They cannot go back, their ships burnt dead by the deeps. More were to follow, but none arrive. They grow melancholic, distracted. They live for centuries but do not breed — something in the sun, they believe. We have the word, they die insisting, the only word, the child told us there was no other word. They speak the word, dying, reluctant, desperate. We listen. Nothing changes. We bury them according to their ways, faceup, lightly covered, not too deep. When the child returns in glory she will save us, they told us many times, if we are covered lightly and not buried too deep.
Jeff Gundy