“Three, two, one, blast off” — and up he rose out of the center of the circles of Hierocles, riding the thrusting fire of focus straight through the center of his own mind and into the space occupied by his wife, then quickly through there, now rocketing through the circles of his daughters, faster and faster, away from his friends and his coworkers, streaming upward through the outlying spaces of his associates, powering past his community, his nation, receding now as a tiny speck behind him, flying from his hemisphere, lifting high now above the spinning earth, he shot into hyper-rational space.
It is rarified atmosphere — the neo-Platonic, proto-mathmatic, meta-esoteric,
supra-emotive, ultra-cognitive, visionary-imaginative, superlative-creative realm of the mind.
There exists, seemingly outside of the immediate influence of our essential relationships, the moment of essential ideation, thought, theory, formula, process, proof, syllogism, solution, application, wisdom. There the vast armamentarium of math, rhetoric, history, biology, theology, linguistics, psychology, physics, geology, zoology and all the other disciplines of the academic world come in to play.
Seemingly alone one thinks, ponders, tests, ruminates, muses, clarifies, reinvents, reimagines and proves.
Then he exited from there, in an instant, from brooding for a moment, luxuriating in time, floating in space, thinking thoughts of thoughts that were beyond all previous thoughts, to rubbing his chin, and then suddenly as if snatched out of his very shoes, to sitting at home again.
In a flash not less, his wife’s voice snagged his rocketing capsule by the nose of the craft and spun him back, falling, dropping, tumbling again into his own living room.
“Are you going to put your daughter to bed, or not? She is asking for you to read her that story.”
And then there, at the center of the circles, he sat with his daughter, her head still wet from the bath, her flannel nightgown soft and fresh and warm from the drier, the book with it’s bright colored pages spread before them, and he said, “I love you honey,” kissed her head, and read her a story about a bat.
And so she grew up like that, at the center of the circles, grew up just right like that to become a respected eco-feminist researcher, writer and educator, collaborated with many valuable colleagues, raised a beautiful family and founded a non-profit to empower young female entrepreneurs.
She found a cure for a rare bat disease, and she also wrote a famous children’s story about an unusually joyful pickle and its friends.
Modern Fables and Antifables 