The Hole Self

Alan Rayner
2 min readSep 3, 2020

--

The Hole in the Mole (Oil painting on canvas by Alan Rayner, 2001)

Once, within a place somewhere in the middle of everywhere, lived a Mole.

The Mole was lonely and longed to find some other Mole with whom he could belong.

But, for a long, long while, no other mole came into view through the Mole’s short sight.

So the Mole looked inside of himself, again and again, until one day he heard a voice.

This is what the voice said:

I AM the hole

That lives in a mole

That induces the mole

To dig the hole

That moves the mole

Through the earth

That forms a hill

That becomes a mountain

That reaches to sky

That pools in stars

And brings the rain

That the mountain collects

Into streams and rivers

That moisten the earth

That grows the grass

That freshens the air

That condenses to rain

That carries the water

That brings the mole

To Life

Hearing these words, the Mole was delighted. He understood that ‘everything lives somewhere inside somewhere else inside everywhere’. What a pity so few of us seem to understand that, he thought — we’d care so much more for ourselves and our companions if we did. He learned the words by heart, and whenever he started to feel lonely, he sang them gently to himself. And so he has never again felt lonely, from that day to this.

For further publications exploring the fundamental nature of self-identity as a dynamic, receptive-responsive inclusion of space somewhere within space everywhere, please view my personal website at http://www.spanglefish.com/exploringnaturalinclusion

--

--

Alan Rayner
Alan Rayner

Written by Alan Rayner

Alan Rayner is an evolutionary ecologist, writer and artist, who is pioneering the philosophy of natural inclusion

No responses yet