The Taming Power of the Small – Will Blythe

A beautiful scary disturbing story. I go from one story that I can hardly get through – to one with sentences that that pulls me through to the end…keeping my heart in my throat and once again questioning how our society is held together – knowing that characters such as those created by Blythe exist in our world.

Again, I am reminded that if I had read this story four years ago – even two years ago, it would have hit me differently. Now that I am a father, I see the abduction of a young boy as something so real and so startling – something that frightens the life out of me.

It doesn’t help either that I work in the media where I have a daily dose of the ilk of humanity washing up onto my consciousness.

I believe that there are cases during the week, where my mind will purposely stray away from reading the news in order to prevent it from overloading my circuits.

Good.

So I checked out two books on the I Ching from the University library and I thought that I’d look into what they held since the book played such a role in the story.

I spent time reading both – which were similar – as expected, and I returned them in the book drop this evening. I thought earlier this week, when I checked them out that I’d mess around with them, throw some coins and see what sort of hexagrams appeared.

Then, my brain did what it was supposed to do, and my B.S. detector lit up and I realized that not only do I not have time for this, but there is no way that asking a question, throwing some coins and drawing some lines would really give me some insight to my future.

Yes I realize that the book is meant for uncovering our unconscious and allows us to look at life situations from alternative points of view by giving us different perspectives…but I think I can do that well enough on my own.

So – yes, this was a great story. It made me hug my son a little tighter, reminded me (or should I say reinforced the knowledge) that there are some really disturbed people in this world, and provided me with another example of how to write a great short story.