Before the secret is exposed, the world is not even aware of its absence. We live in ignorance. The bearer of the secret seems like an ordinary person to us, with ordinary, inconsequential preoccupations. With the articulation of the secret, he suddenly stands out in his landscape, strange and separate, like the stone monument that the people of Hailibu’s village are said to have carved in honor of him when they returned home after surviving the cataclysm. Gods create the world with words and breath that they unleash in their yearning for company in the void. The secret, once it has been spoken, unleashes another kind of world: it illuminates what was once in shadow and forces those of us who hear it out of our previous ignorance. It gives us information about the beginning of the world or the end of it, about the vulnerability of a king or a village chief, or even about the obsessive desires of a goddess. With such knowledge in our consciousness, we must grow up a little bit more. We must acknowledge that the mighty ones are more like us than we thought, or we are more like them. In so doing, we become more fully human.

@ Parabola (via Hermitary)