A Man and His Stones

Once there was a man with three stones. One was the stone of rage. The other was the stone of pity. The other was the stone of delight. The man carried these stones in his pockets and every so often would draw one out to look at it.
When he would draw out the stone of rage, he saw that the stone would turn red and glow a kind of menacing light, and he would quickly return it to his pocket. When he drew out the stone of pity, he would hold it for a very long time, remembering his boyhood and those moments when he felt so free and unencumbered by the worries he knew today. After a while, he would slip the rock reluctantly back into his pocket, reassured that he would be able to find this stone again.

Rarely, but on occasion, he pulled from his pocket the stone of delight. When he held this stone in the palm of his hand, he could barely stand the lightness of how it felt, could barely understand how this very lightness had found him, and could barely hold it very long before he tucked it quickly away, believing that if he held it too long, someone might come and snatch it away.

Well, our man lived quite a long life, and toward the end of it, he knew that when he was buried, these stones would be lost among the clutter of his things, and so he decided to take matters into his own hands.

The stone of rage he buried near the headstone of his father, a father whose unexamined rage followed him to the grave. As the man patted down the dirt, a yellow flower mysteriously and instantly grew in that place, and the man gasped, unsure of its meaning.

The stone of pity he buried near the headstone of his mother, for he knew instinctively that her full level of compassion was untapped in her lifetime, and that pity was only a sense of love for something missing. As he buried the stone of pity, a red apple appeared on the headstone, and when he took a bite of it, he saw the forms of his mother and father in their wholeness, and he thanked them half-heartedly for doing the best they could, with what tools they had been given. As soon as he thanked them, half-hearted as it was, his heart stirred, and he stood there in the grass, finally understanding what it was that he must do next.

He took the stone of delight and buried it between them, knowing that it was the stone that represented his life. As he fiddled with the dirt, he had the realization that only in knowing rage (his father) and pity (his mother) could he recognize the vibration of delight (himself). And so it seemed that his whole life was intended for this sorting out, this carving away, this path to understanding.

As he finished covering the stone of delight, an image of his babyhood appeared in which he was held in the arms of those who loved him. And in those arms he saw all of the arms of all of the mothers and fathers, parents by blood and parents by choosing, and saw their perfection in loving only partially. For this human, flawed love left a longing so perfect that it propelled him and all of humanity forward to understand their true nature.

And so the man left the stones, pockets empty, and heart strangely peaceful.