A story

This is not my story, but it's about me - metaphorically speaking. It's from a book by Terry Pratchett.

It has been said that everything everywhere affects everything else. This may be true. Or perhaps the world is just full of patterns.

For example, in a tree nine thousand miles away, high on a cloudy mountainside, was a plant that looked like one large flower. It grew wedged in a fork of trees, its roots dangling in the air to trap what nourishment they could from the mists. Technically, it was an epiphytic bromeliad, although not knowing this made very little difference to the plant.

Water condensed into a tiny pool in the center of the bloom.

And there were frogs living in it.

Very, very small frogs.

They had such a tiny life cycle, it still had training wheels on it.

They hunted insects among the petals. They laid their eggs in the central pool. Tadpoles grew up and became more frogs. And they made more tadpoles. And each eventually died, and sank down and joined the compost at the base of the leaves, which, in fact, helped nourish the plant.

And this had been the way things were for as far back as the frogs could remember.*

(* About three seconds. Frogs don't have good memories.)

Except that on this day, while it hunted for flies, one frog lost its way and crawled around the side of one of the outermost petals, or possibly leaves, and saw something it had never seen before.

It saw the universe.

More precisely, it saw the branch stretching away into the mists.

And several yards away, glistening with droplets of moisture in a solitary shaft of sunlight, was another flower.

The frog sat and stared.


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The frog had brought some other young frogs to its spot among the leaves at the edge of the world of the flower.

They stared at the branch. There wasn't just one flower out there, there were dozens, although the frogs weren't able to think like this because frogs can't count beyond one.

They saw lots of ones.

They stared at them. Staring is one of the few things frogs are good at.

Thinking isn't. It would be nice to say that the tiny frogs thought long and hard about the new flower, about life in the old flower, about the need to explore, about the possibility that the world was bigger than a pool with petals around the edge.

In fact, what they thought was . . . mipmip . . . mipmip . . . mipmip.

But what they felt was too big for one flower to contain.

Carefully, slowly, not at all certain why, they plopped down onto the branch.
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One of the frogs fell off the branch, and disappeared quietly into the leafy canopy far below. Since very small light animals can fall a long way without being hurt, it's quite likely that it survived in the forest world under the tree and had the second most interesting experience any tree frog has ever had.

The rest of them crawled onward. They were going to have the most interesting experience any frog ever had anywhere, one which would go down in frog history and be remembered for ... maybe even for minutes.

The tree frogs were far out on the branch now. What had looked like a smooth expanse of gray-green wood was, close up, a maze of rough bark, roots, and clumps of moss. It was unbearably frightening for frogs who had spent their lives in a world with petals around it.

But they crawled onward. They didn't know the meaning of the word "retreat." If it came to that, they didn't know the meaning of the word "bromeliad." Or "frog." Or any other word.

There were other dangers besides falling off the branch. One of the frogs was eaten by a lizard. Several others turned back as soon as they were out of the shade of their bromeliad because, as they pointed out . . . mipmip . . . mipmip. . . .

The frog in the lead looked back at his dwindling group. There was one . . . and one . . .and one . . . and one . . . and one, which added up to—it wrinkled its forehead in the effort of calculation—yes, one.

Some of the one were getting frightened. The leading frog realized that if they were ever going to get to the new flower and survive there, there'd need to be a lot more than one frog. They need at least one, or possibly even one. He gave them a croak of encouragement.

Mipmip, he said.
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The leading tree frog was trying to wrestle with a new idea. It was very dimly aware that it needed a new type of thought.

There had been the world, with the pool in the middle and the petals around the edge. One.

But farther along the branch was another world. From here it looked tantalizingly like the flower they had left. One.
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The leading frog sat in a clump of moss and swiveled each eye so that it could see both worlds at the same time. One there. And one there.

One. And one.

The frog's forehead bulged as it tried to get its mind around a new idea. One and one were one. But if you had one here and one there . . .

The other frogs watched in bewilderment as their leader's eyes whizzed around and around.

One here and one there couldn't be one. They were too far apart. You needed a word that meant both ones. You needed to say . . . you needed to say . . .

The frog's mouth widened. It grinned so broadly that both ends almost met behind its head.

It had worked it out.

. . . mipmip . . . ! it said.

It meant: One. And One More One!
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Although the frogs can spot the difference between day and night, they're a bit hazy on the wh*** idea of time. They know that some things happen after other things. Really intelligent frogs might wonder if there is something that prevents everything happening all at once, but that's about as close as they can get to it.

The remaining tree frogs crouched among the moss to escape the heat of the afternoon sun. Low in the eastern sky was a sliver of white. It would be nice to think that the tree frogs had legends about it. It would be nice to think that they thought the sun and moon were distant flowers—a yellow one by day, a white one by night. It would be nice to think they had legends about them, and said that when a good frog died its soul would go to the big flowers in the sky.

The trouble is that it's frogs we're talking about here. Their name for the sun was . . . mip-mip. . . . Their name for the moon was . . .mipmip. . . . Their name was everything was. . . mipmip . . . and when you're stuck with a vocabulary of one word it's pretty hard to have legends about anything at all.
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Find a blue planet . . . Focus.

This is a planet. Most of it is covered with water, but it's still called Earth.

Find a country. . . . Focus. . . . Blues and greens and browns under the sun, and long wisps of rain cloud being torn by the mountains. . . .
Focus ... on a mountain, green and dripping, and there's a ... focus . . . tree, hung with moss and covered with flowers, and . . . focus ... on
a flower with a little pool in it, is an epiphytic bromeliad.

Its leaves, although they might be petals, hardly quiver at all as three very small and very golden frogs pull themselves up and gaze in astonishment at the fresh, clear water. Two of them look at their leader, waiting for it to say something suitable for this historic occasion.

It's going to say . . . mipmip. . . .

And then they slide down the leaf and into the water.