The Alligator Oracle
You find yourself paddling deep within a subtropical wetland, your kayak pulling through unexpectedly clear blue-and-green water as cypresses rise from its surface, their branches reaching out above you in a canopy of dappled light and hanging Spanish moss. The breeze blows against your face and insects chitter to each other in unseen spaces. The afternoon is so vibrant, the air itself has a glow.
Up ahead, you see a large patch of thick duckweed or some other algae. There’s a shimmer in the trees behind it and at first you attribute it to a trick of the light, but no. This is unlike any shimmer you’ve seen before. You can’t explain it but you know you need to paddle closer. Something there is important to you right here, right now.
You pull up close to the algae’s edge and, looking down into its green expanse, you lock your gaze on a yellow reptilian eyeball, squinting at you in the sunlight. An ancient alligator spirit rests in the algae bed and your heart jumps to your throat as you go to paddle backward. But the gator is still. It blinks at you once, uninterested. In the greenery behind it, you see what look like glowing numbers, zeroes and ones flowing in lines from somewhere high above.
You have found The Alligator oracle, and it has a story to share with you today.
The Alligator Oracle says:
Sometimes reality isn’t what it seems. Lots of people want to jump at anything that moves near them, thinking it’s an important thing, the thing they’ve been wanting, the thing that will sustain them, simply because it came along their path. They’re uncomfortable resting, they get impatient allowing things to come to them. They’re always biting at shadows, always using up their energy acting on things that would have revealed themselves as illusions with just a bit more time.
Because you are here, though, you move differently than that. You know what the alligator knows - you have the gift that the alligator has: you can discern between what is worth your energy and what is just detritus flowing by. A big splash can be the tail of a tasty fish or a rotted tree limb falling. A small ripple can be a leaf spinning in the water or a delicious meal rising to the surface. The biggest catch is not always the one with the largest appearance - at first.
The same is true for numbers, since numbers seem to matter so much to so many people. How many dollars on that check. How many checks in a year. How many leads. How many offers. How many likes on the post. How many replies. How many followers. But they didn’t nickname the algorithm the “alligator” for nothing. The lying in wait until an unknown moment to pop off, the bite it can make you feel like it took out of your progress, the mysterious logic it hides beneath its surface of shiny ones and zeroes.
And it’s allllll algorithm, not just on the socials or the internet of things. The world is made up of those ones and zeroes. 100, 1000, 10,000. 100,000. Coins. Views. Followers. Customers. More, they tell us, is better. But the zeroes and the ones show a certain surface version of reality that tells a certain story - a story that isn’t necessarily the whole truth. Much lurks beneath the surface that gets missed by the crowd that needs more ones and zeroes all at once. An alligator can look like algae until you peek beneath the water.
And not all zeroes are the highest quality zeroes. You can swim along at a frenzied pace down the river and bite at a lot of little minnows. You’ll get a belly full of water and a little bit of protein. Heck, you can buy a lot of mentions …er… minnows and end up with you feeding them instead of the other way around.
Or you can wait in your cozy algae bed while you do your thing, until one big thing that’s REALLY enticing comes into your vicinity. Something worth the energy. Something that actually satisfies. Something that swims right up to you in your spot in your frequency in your flow and timing. Because you’ve known the whole time that it would. That there was no need to splash and whip your tail and make a lot of movement and tucker yourself out. That, in fact, all of that thrashing around would scare the big fish off.
You have the patience for the big catch because you know that it’s down there, swimming around, under the surface, where the ones and the zeroes can’t calculate it. When it gets to your sunny spot in the stream, you’re already on its level. The current will bring it straight to you.
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About the Artist
Bailey Lewis is an experiential storytelling artist (MFA, University of South Carolina) who combines words, images, and reimagined materials to create intuitive story experiences. Her art has been exhibited and published internationally, and she is the author of award-winning stories which have been featured in The Wigleaf Top 50 and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Visit the Bailey Sends Word Story Studio site to see more of Bailey’s work.