The Pickle Oracle
You come across a pantry door with ornate wings carved into its sturdy wooden front. You can’t explain it, but somehow you know you must open the door. What is inside is important to you right here, right now.
You twist the brass doorknob and as your eyes adjust to the dim light inside, an ancient pickle spirit steps out to greet you.
You have found the Pickle Oracle, and it has a story to share with you today.
The Pickle Oracle says:
We are all born fresh, crunchy cucumbers. It’s only over time that we’re introduced to the brine. The sweet and sour brine of heartache. The mouth-puckering brine of disappointment. The eye-watering brine of regret.
Your brine is unique to you, as every person’s is unique to them. You sit in your own brine soaking in its various pickling juices. Until, one day, you realize that you are no longer even a cucumber anymore at all. Grief comes with that realization, that you’re no longer what you once were. And that’s okay — you’re allowed to grieve losing a previous identity and sense of self.
But then! Suddenly. Finally. One day and as quick as a jar being uncapped, you understand what you have become. Because you are an entirely new thing altogether, part what you were and now also formed by what you’ve been through. Irrevocably changed, but more beautiful for the process. And you realize: The brine was an essential part of what you were becoming all along.
Yes, it took time (so much time) and dark spaces and airtight containers where you could barely breathe. Still you didn’t spoil. Still you didn’t rot away. Still you didn’t let the brine make you nasty. You made it part of you and became all the more complex, all the more interesting, all the more certain of yourself — as you are today — because of it.
No, not everyone likes a pickle. But pickles don’t care. They don’t change their taste to try to please the pickle haters. They don’t try to be sweeter or milder or less bold or bracing. The pickle pickles the way it pickles. That’s the flavor: Take it or leave it.
That’s part of your becoming, too.
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About the Oracles
Bailey Lewis - the voice behind and creator of Found Oracles - is an award-winning writer, multimedia storyteller, and owner of Bailey Sends Word Story Studio.
Visit the Bailey Sends Word Story Studio site for more stories steeped in modern mythos - work exploring intuition, mystical encounters in the everyday, and how the stories we tell ourselves create our reality.