Oliver Nobody and the Winged Woods

                                                “ Oliver Nobody  and the  Winged Woods”  

As a peasant, whatever scraps given or found , either dirt or rubbish, you just have to set aside the most gullible sin among the Seven Deadly Sins known to mankind --- Pride…and keep the palms spread like doves’ wings, trapped in morbidity and the entrapments of men. It knows no blue sky but the dark grey of endless shower and coldness . My name is Oliver Nobody. I have no surname, no father to make me a man fit for  a structured society. We are all  born with structures, without it, there are no rigid and firm forms to uphold us when a tide of physical and emotional tests of life , are thrown into the boiling broth.
Open your eyes and see the make-up of a democratic nation , an open-minded society  and  social levels that give rise as well as power to our leaders, our so-called nucleus. The political system of our current world works like our bodies which are made up of various systems, from these systems, organs work together,and these organs are made up of tissues. Tissues are groups of similar looking and functioning cells. These cells are common working people, the basic unit of life. Yet, due to man’s own greed, every politician wants a part of us, the cells’ by-products,  and claim it as their own riches, just like a malignant cancer sucking away the life source of a healthy cell. I view our world of recessions  and political instability in a biological way. The malfunctioning  of our nucleus, the leaders, has lead to the fall of such systems. Now, peasants like us are borne without a structure, an instruction manual to lead a long happy life.

You might ask me why and how did I come to seem educated  from being a peasant but sometimes life is such a mystery  even if it is ironic most times. “ In the middle of difficulty, lies opportunity.” as quoted by Albert Einstein, I have found my glimmer of hope. All you need is curiosity and imagination that could feed you a lifetime no matter how deep your physical hunger may be. My story started  on a cold winter night, I was homeless, dirty, smelly and unwanted . Even a slight warmth emitting from the tender orange lights shining out of windows from rows of houses passing by, gave me a second of relief. I have forgotten when was the last time that I had eaten and silently pray to any god that may exist that I wouldn’t die of starvation. Regardless, I am still moving and breathing. My body didn’t fail me, though I am frail. Maybe there is a god who created my power-saving body. This body that stores any fats intake first and metabolize it last when all proteins and carbohydrates are gone, depleted by my starving poor body. Death awaits me if I don’t find food. Every living being fear death and the unknowns that lay ahead of it. Hence, I fear death but Mark Twain once wrote, “ Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear ,” and  these words continuously whispered in my mind as if  a permanent dial tone, droning behind the piece of meat in my head which kept me in my search to find the putative  meaning of life.  I did face my own death that winter day while walking away from that warmth and running away from a pack of guard dogs as I was trying to steal food from a rich man’s garden. I had lucked out by stumbling upon a deep,dark forest after a 15 minutes marathon fueled with fear of pain and gruesome death in the hands of hounds. My feet bleed from cuts sustained as I randomly ran, turned and stumbled on logs, broken twigs and whatever the wilderness  offers to trespassers like me. Lack of glucose, energy and dehydrated, I finally fainted into a place like hell if I was in fact dead and if hell was that dark. I drifted off like a phone shutting off due to low battery. My consciousness wanes. I am in deep slumber.

Sometimes reality is too harsh, and we want to believe in fantasy or maybe something  called an after-life. Out of that need, we believed that after-life was like seeing a white light at the end of the tunnel. I did see that light. What I didn’t understand was the sound  I heard behind this light, like a dove singing. Automatically I thought I was already in heaven or some sort of underworld vacation resort. That dream was broken by a cry of a chicken. The loudness of its voice opened my eyes to the bright sunlight and a large, upside down vulture-like looking shadow. I immediately shoot up and was ready to run from it out of fear  that it was Death in a black, long cloak, ready to rip my soul. If there were any spectators around, they would be laughing at a delusional young  man who tried to sprint away at the sight of a house that looks like the wings of a chicken.
The building was grey, dejected and lonely. The foundations of it was mere well-shaped blocks of wood that complimented one another like ‘lock and key’ hypothesis of enzymes and substrates. A strong kind of cement mixture acted like glue, and held the bricks together. It didn’t seem like anybody was living there and the intense smell of poop could be detected from the inside of it. Regardless of its state, at the angle at which I was standing at, it was emitting a motherly protective feeling. I couldn’t quite place the correct words to express these foreign emotions since I am a peasant and orphaned. In a way, it was like a cell wall of a plant. Strong, rigid from cellulose but porous and fully permeable, thereby allowing warmth, light and love from a mother hen to her chicks or letting all these flow into the wild. We can’t see it with the naked eye, but under a metaphorical microscope, the air once containing oxygen and other gases were replaced by these elements especially love. At that moment, I felt like I got a second chance in life and the old broken systems of the world were past me. If man wasn’t chasing papers of different colours like rainbows of the visible light spectrum, we wouldn’t be losing these trees I see around the cell wall structure. Enclosed by nature, I knew I was safe and far away from the destroyers  of  Mother Earth.

Time is just an illusion. Some physicist believed that theory while it was abhorred  by most left-brained population of zombies programmed by cancerous cells governing countries of our world.  As for me, time truly was an illusion here. I felt like a foreign substance trying to get into this interesting infrastructure in front of me. At a closer look, it was lined with little doors just around the height of my knees and each had a small window-like opening. It was  in fact , mini houses for chickens. In each house, it had a family of chickens. I curiously peeked into one of  these equally shaped small openings as if it were transport proteins.There were fluffy little chicks inside and an angry looking hen that tried to peck my eyes. Luckily, I fell back on my bottoms just in time to save my right eye. The hen was similar to the semi-permeable characteristic of the plasma membrane. It knew that I was an unwanted, probably armed and dangerous walking three-dimensional and breathing organism. I was amazed that even such simpler organisms could detect a certain danger approaching.

It was getting darker in these areas much earlier than those cities bombarded with lights twenty-four hours. I knew I had to find shelter to keep myself warm against the forest cold nights, so I walked behind the building in hopes of finding a bigger door that would lead me to a small cabin if there were farmers tending to the chickens and staying there. As I walked further down, I found a brown door with a green knob. I tried to open it but it wouldn’t bug. In despair and dire consequences, I gave my all and poured the remainders of my energy storage to break the door open but my insane actions was stopped by the sudden opening of the door by an elderly man. He was bespectacled, learned-looking and had an approachable countenance. He smiled at me and gestured for me to enter  without questioning my identity and my abrupt appearance in front of his doorsteps. With no other options left, I walked into a room made of interesting patterns of wood that made up the floors and walls of it. The room itself was like  combinations of  arts museums in some big cities. The patterns and decorations changes as I strolled into each smaller rooms. In one room, the wood walls were carved and fitted together in the shape of pentoses  and in another room the walls were like random stacks of  wood in shapes of hexoses. The eccentricity and randomness of these rooms intrigued me as I had never stepped into rooms of other people's houses except during the short time I had stayed in a foster home until I was legally eighteen. Even then, I was constantly bored from staring blankly at those grey or white painted walls with smudges of  dinners that was cooked years before my arrival there.
The last room I entered was the mini library. It’s walls were filled with shelves of books from the ground to the ceiling of the room. I could smell the daily brewing of coffee, knowledge and years of  younger days spent in here by the old man. As I glanced through his collection of books, he introduced himself and asked me if I had a place to stay. After years or even a lifetime of homelessness, shame was nothing but an itch on the small back of my skin. I told him my story and for the first time, I felt good that somebody was truly listening to me and not treating me like the brown mud beneath their feet. My fate had turned for the better and  if it was not for his words, I wouldn’t have spent  the changing seasons of each year with him as he taught me how to read, write, calculate, hunt in the wild and the importance of maintaining the balance of wildlife by unleashing the inner caveman in me and getting reacquainted with Mother Nature. He was like the father I never had and a tender mother figure with an authoritative side. I stayed by his side until the day he passed on. His last words to me was, “ Man had forgotten the foundation, the fundamentals  of being ‘human’. We lost compassion, empathy and the nerves that makes us sensitive to emotions. We have gone on an endless  killing spree on animals, cleaned out every inch of land from trees and let the poor starve on barren land. I have given you the gift of emotions and  trained you to differentiate between what is morally right and wrong. Mostly, I have given you knowledge. Knowledge is power.Most men use it to reap their own profits but I hope, you would take the road less taken by others and use your knowledge for the greater good. Reverse or revive as much as you can of the wildlife. It is the heaven on Earth that men never realized.”

Three years later, it was the same winter night but I am no longer a peasant but an advocate for the wildlife animals that needs protecting and a fighting chance against human greed. I’ve turned that winged-wood shaped building and the entire similar looking trees surrounding it into a national park in hopes to fulfill the old man’s last wishes to me and my love for the Mother Nature he had introduced to me. My name is Oliver Nobody who became a somebody in  the winged-woods and it is my meaning of life.