How a little girls story about a stone on the beach became a metaphor for our society

As a child of ten, I wrote a simple fable in our writing class. A small stone on a beach .It travels through the hands of different people during centuries and end up on the beach again in the end of the story. The beginning of the fable being the exact same as the ending. A child’s story.

However, my teacher was so thrilled by the story that he read it at a PTA meeting and made a pompous grown-up analysis of the story, calling it a metaphor for human society and the changes we think we have on nature.

The question is, what had I meant when I wrote my fable? Being a ten year old I had no tools and experiences to be able to reflect over the universe in the manner he did. I only had my child imagination and a narrow and close look at the universe that I knew right there and then.

With other words, I wish we can work with objects and occurrences that we encounter on our Metafari just like this. Without trying to reflect, we will do small – early morning - writing exercises.

Before our grown-up brains start to sort out all the impressions, we will open our minds and let our imagination float freely, writing stories or fables on stones, sticks, animals or whatever our mind is on at that moment, baring in mind that a fable works very much the same as a metaphor.

Maybe if we just write about the object, without trying so hard to make it a metaphor, our colleagues at the metafari will see something in the fable we didn’t really knew we meant to say. Just as my teacher read so much into my poetic child story. And maybe this will teach us all to not make life more complicated than it is and to truly enjoy what we see around us.

Ingrid Rudefors