Vacation on Earth

Vacation on Earth

I awoke the morning after my vacation to find myself again hauling sludge in my home factory.

I am a sludge hauler.  That is pretty much all I do.  It is my place.  I haul sludge until I am too tired

to do more than swallow my rations and sleep as best I can in the cold.

Every so often we are rewarded with a vacation on Earth.  We are given a life and

go about it as we choose, intermingling with vacationers from other worlds and ways, 

all here suited as humans, pretending for our recreation to create our own destinies.

Yet, even here we are still but humanoid renderings of who we essentially are.  Thus I found

that during my time on Earth I was mostly not happy, feeling that I could not fit in anywhere.

There were times that I was very happy indeed, painting my pictures from my own ideas

and imagination.  Yes, there was food and warmth, but these did not really enter my

consciousness as being anything other than routine.  I was dismayed to find that I was

really rather surly, unlikeable.  No wonder I did not have a life of good fellowship and

love.

Back from vacation, I find that sludge haulers are a rather surly bunch.  No one has much

to say.  There's not much to say about hauling sludge.  Our Earth vacations are so strange

to contemplate back here.  We keep what little we remember to ourselves.  It is not a 

social world here.  True, we haul sludge in groups, but not in teams.  We eat and

sleep alone, in small cubicles.  It all seems rather pointless.  It seems to me that somehow,

there must be more.  I think about the times I was happy on my vacation on Earth.  There must

be some way to learn from that experience.

I enjoyed creating beauty from my own ideas and imagination.  It occurs to me

that I need not actually create a painting.  No one would look at it anyway, even

if materials existed.  The beauty is from me, inside my mind.  I can look for it.

I can see the beautiful images, watch them move and change into more beauty.

I can do this while hauling sludge.  No one would be the wiser, except for wise,

happy me.  If the beauty is in my mind, if I create it for myself, it doesn't matter

whether I fit in with those around me.  I am around me.  I am always exactly where

I am, giving myself the pleasure of my own beautiful creations.  I can be anywhere,

my body engaged in servitude, yet gracefully dancing in the glorious meadow of my

own imagining.