Abundance

My trolley floweth over and I am wading through a cornucopia of the good stuff, said the Blue Knight as he.

The gang of Hoi Poloi had entered the fabled store cupboard at the end of the corridor, pushing shopping trolleys pilfered from a nearby super. One such had a defective wheel, which was undetectable until the trolley was part full, and began to make a rhythmic thump every turn of the. Another developed a squeak which really grated the nerves and made one feel embarrassed, as if it was your fault.

Still, there was work to be and the resources would not dive into the trolleys of their own volition. The gang extended the robotic arm and pulled the rough asteroids, which nestled behind the poster paints, out into the light and loaded them one by one into the waiting trolleys. As each became full, they set off towards the passing moon, which would receive and manufacture to the highest standards in economically low gravity, before the finished lucky cats, golden and gleaming, swaddled in hubble wrap, were transported down to earth to feed and house the five thousand, luckily.

I am not sure I have everything that I feel is mine by right, I am, after all, entitled, spoke up one Hoi Poloi, from the depths of the store cupboard. Where do I find the electric cars and the holiday brochures? My children’s trainers are out of date, and my laptop is getting really slow. Surely a gaming station and various virtual gadgetry is essential to the wellbeing, I could fit them in next to the home gym machinery that you will give me.

No, said the Blue that is not it. We must make changes to the bottom line, not provide free trainers for all. Clean water at the point of a tube, precious manufacturing bits falling out of the mountains, and asteroids floating into our factories, adequate clean air blowing across our faces. I shall send away for a year and a day to the land where the clean air blows, as these balloons do not have sufficient.

Clean air is a precious, even unto essential as it passes. I saw it once as I lay in the snows and in the desert it was also. It has been said that the air is invisible to the uninitiated. But have you ever wondered if that is so, she Sphinx has seen it in atomic detail and I have witnessed the sandstorms that plot its course and the clouds that run, never against the current. The bending of the grasses before the horses have arrived, the tops of the waves cut and sprayed about, have you seen the leaves, have you seen the hair of the woman who faces the wind. Have you seen the very movement of it as it wanders and thunders from place to place.

And as you may know we must catch it as it passes, take great gulps at the end of the race and breath it softly in your ear. To blow a candle or whistle a merry, it is.

In the not so distant yesterdays, when the wind carried the air with only a whisper of contamination, both spiritual and secular, the great arrangements of prayer flags, strung between the jagged black peaks, might filter the passing until it emerged both morally glad and pure as the white snows. But now the flag filters are beyond their limits, the clogging of oily residues and sticky lies have ruined their fragile materials, and they broken. Try as they might, the filter attendants cannot weave new ones fast enough and they have not been paid in one hundred and fifty years. It’s not about the money, but it would help, their children also need shoes.

The World Filter Organization should form a pop band and conjure some funds for the mass weaving of prayer flag materials. These flags are traditionally woven from plant material grown upon the plains that are supplied by waters of the seven rivers. Unfortunately, two of the seven have run dry, having been dammed out of existence, and one is more plastic waste than water. We shall have to start at the base line as all these issues seem related.

To release the water from the damns we need to champion fusion power which we are told will be arriving on a bus in the next ten years, so we will have to make an interim plan.

Perhaps if everyone in the world donates one clean bed sheet, we may be able to cut them up to replace the clogged flags and begin the process of air cleaning once more. This should allow time for the rivers to be unclogged, watering the plain where the flag materials grow. We must pay the weavers and give them a bonus for being so patient. By the time the bed sheets get used up, we will be ready with brand new prayer flags that might sort out the quality of our winds.

It would help if the volume and density of the Sticky Lies and Oily Smiles was reduced, but that is not the remit of the Prayer Flag Filters.