The Jigsaw

The little baby looked around in awe and wonder.

Everything looked amazing. All connected. All vibrant. All love.

Then one day, his parents started teaching him words.

Very slowly at first . . .

Cat, dog, bed, flower, sky, mummy, daddy.

The new words kept coming. Thousands of them!

The more time he spent at school, the more words he learnt.

Time flowed on. The baby became a toddler, became a child, became a teenager, became an adult.

By 18 years old, he had been taught 20,000 different words for things.

20,000 separate words for 20,000 separate things.

He couldn’t remember how the world all looked like one amazing thing when he was a baby. That seemed like a lifetime ago.

Then one day, in the middle of his life, something inside him woke up and he started to remember what he experienced when he was a baby.

It was like a jigsaw before the cutters came down, all connected, all one thing. Every word had been like another cut in the jigsaw, creating separation from the whole.

For many years the jigsaw had been completely jumbled up. Thousands of separate parts, all in a seemingly random order . . .

Supertanker, buddhist, royalist, murderer, saint, baboon, policeman, blackbird, tree, watch, cardboard, deodorant, orange juice, beach, hybrid car, lawyer, washing machine, angels, Europe, referendum and so on…

Now the parts of the jigsaw started coming together again and there was an order to them, a logic, a pattern.

Then the lines between the jigsaw pieces started fading away. There was no separation anymore. The picture was all complete again.

In truth it had always been complete.

All connected.

All vibrant.

All love.