A contemporary Aboriginal Myth from Kombumerri country.
The Boy Who Had The Magic Word And The Whispering Moth
A boy was wandering along the beach one day when he came across a flat piece of rock about half a foot square with a carved fish on it . He took it back to his parents and everyone , and they all said he was lucky and that he should keep it for awhile and see
what happens .
That night with the carved fish beside him , he dreamt that a tree got split by lightning and that some people from long ago made a canoe out of it and had carved fish on it .
The next day he told everyone the rock with the carved fish on it was first a tree from a long time ago that had been made into a canoe – the effect what we now know as petrified wood. Everyone thought that was very imaginative and left it at that.
The next night he dreamt he had been told a magic word . A word that if he spoke it or even thought about it, it would mean the end of the world.
He woke up the next morning earlier than everybody else and heard the rock whispering to him. The carving of the fish had disappeared. The rock kept whispering to him.
The boy put his ear closer and closer until a big moth that had been resting on the rock upped and flew away crazy and quick. Its camouflage design was the same as the rock , or the long ago tree, depending how you look at it. After it flew off the fish was back of course. But for the boy , he had half got what the moth whispered to him. That day he could hear the thoughts of others and feel their feelings too . He could hear and feel all things not just people. This was too much for him and he fell into a
kind of deep sleep. His family and everyone worried. They looked after him in every way before finally someone noticed the fish carving had disappeared. And finally too someone decided the rock had to go back into the ocean waters . Not knowing the big moth had landed back on the rock over the carving of the fish
again , they carefully took it to the beach and canoed out quite a way . With good will they let it go noticing the fish had come back on it again as it disappeared into the deeper water . The big moth had flown off.
The next day found the boy out of the deep sleep and quite okay . He remembered the tree-rock-fish and the whispering moth but not that magic word . As for learning something about all this , he realized people and animals and all things were braver than they let on . Everyone were like great nets catching good thoughts , not so good thoughts and all the crazy in between . And every now and again some of this gets thrown back for the well being of others . |
