Let us wait, let us listen.
We tell this story often, and in the telling it is different every time, but that, you see, is the nature of stories. There is always a tree, always a tiger, always a small bird that knows the secrets of the forest and helps humankind. The rest is smoke that never curls the same way twice.
We tell this story around a hearth. Come, gather by the fire.
What will it be tonight?
A tale of moral caution, say the elders. Of reaching too far, too high.
But the children plead for something lighter, where giants turn into mountains and their baskets into boulders.
No, say the lovers, tell us about the man who played the flute amidst the branches, so sweet, so clear, and won the heart of the queen.
Tonight, we tell the tale of creation. The one in which a tree is a golden ladder linking earth to sky.
Why? ask the children. Why?
So that the first tribes of our celestial people could wander freely, working their fields below until the evening, climbing up to rest in the house of God at night.
Listen, now, to how the tree, the tallest-in-the-world tree, was felled; how seven tribes were rendered earthbound; how its branches smacked the lands of the south, laying them flat and rich with the mulch of foliage, how the trunk crashed and carved our hills. Look how they bear the mark through all the ages still.
Listen, listen, for a story told once may not be told again.