There was once an old soldier trying to get home after the war. He walked from village to village, begging alms along the way, for he had no money and nothing to eat. Every place had barely enough to give him the strength to get to the next and he began to wonder if he could make it, even though he was now close to home.
Finally, faint with hunger, he came upon an impoverished hamlet. His legs barely carried him in on blistered feet. Sunken cheeks and eyes in dark shadow foretold his starvation. He went slowly from house to house begging pitifully for just a scrap of bread or a rotting turnip. Everyone turned him away.
The old soldier sat in the village square looking about him, much as a condemned man might before the gallows. His end had come. Suddenly, despite himself and as though seized by something, he jumped up, grabbing a large stone from nearby. He tucked the stone into his knapsack and went back to the first cottage he’d tried where a kind old lady had explained politely that she simply had nothing to give him.
She was surprised to see him again so soon and more surprised still when, his eyes all agleam, he produced the stone from his knapsack as though it were a great treasure.
‘Since you have nothing to give me, allow me to make you some hearty stone soup, a recipe given to me by my auntie from the old country.’
‘Oooh’, said the old lady, ‘what do you need?’
‘Just a pan and some water,’ said he and gently began to bring the stone to the boil, tasting it every now and then, whilst the old lady looked on expectantly.
‘ How is it?’ she asked.
‘Just dandy,’ replied the soldier, ‘though it could use a little salt …and perhaps a few onions.’ The old lady promptly produced the salt and two onions which the soldier added ceremoniously.
Pretty soon some of the old lady’s neighbors came to the fence, drawn by the delicious smell. They were rather impressed by the idea of stone soup and wondered if they could have some as well.
‘Sure’, said the soldier, ‘there will be plenty to go around. Its a shame there is no thyme though. Stone soup benefits from just a sprig of thyme…
‘I have some,’ volunteered someone and off they went.
..and maybe a few sausages…,’ added the soldier, tentatively.
off went another..
‘and some vegetables, too, but only if you have them.’
The villagers duly returned and soon the stone soup was ready. Everyone ate to their hearts content, amazed at the miracle that such a tasty soup could be made from a stone.
At the end of the meal the grateful villagers clubbed together and offered the soldier twenty florins for the stone which he graciously accepted and set back off on his way, replete, enriched and freed forever from the fear of hunger.
Many of Grimm’s stories begin with an Old Soldier as the protagonist, someone who has been in conflict. Perhaps the old soldiers are our own time worn responses which no longer adequately reflect life and are in need of transformation.
In many of these stories the protagonist must resolve his situation by service to some sprite or demon, in other words by virtue of some initiatory process. He must wear a Bearskin for seven years, or stoke the Devil’s furnaces or scale the Glass Mountain.
This story is different. Having tended more heroic crossings earlier in life he must now face this new threshold of consciousness [closer to home] with a very different attitude. He can use neither his heroic soldiering energy nor his skills in begging from others. Both valor and dependency, as ways of going-on-being, are frustrated. He is thrown back onto his own primal resources, instincts even deeper than those of self interest which then have the marvelous effect of creating collective abundance.
There is an old Yiddish proverb, ‘If you are hungry, throw a party.’ Redemption depends on everyone getting fed. At just the point where you might expect the soldier’s personal survival at the expense of others to be strongest. In fact you find the opposite, a taking care of the whole. This is the bodhisattva ideal of enlightenment being a collective event, the realization that your fate is tied to others.
This Principle of Relatedness gives rise to a kind of miracle, ex nihilo, something comes from nothing, born of the shift in perception from I, me and mine to ‘the between’ which is the philosopher’s stone. The soldier’s spontaneous and playful gesture is zen-like enlightened action. It is rooted in sharing and so it magically attracts both people and ingredients.
The mercurial inspiration of stone soup is its selflessness. Without it there is no soup but the stone itself does nothing. Yet something is done, insofar as the stone assumes a symbolic character, a third actor in the drama, something to stand for the life affirming quality of the shared experience, of being in relation to one another, of looking beyond personal interest to interdependence.
The stone, as a symbol of Self, has a unifying effect, which leaves everyone feeling the richer for it. The soldier’s identity has shifted, has had to shift, from beggar to leader. He morphs from ‘how can I survive?’ to ‘How can we survive?’ This opens up space for the intuitive, non-rational gesture. It almost seems inspired from without, as though some god had whispered in his ear the moment he renounced surviving at the expense of others.
The well-known ‘Parable of the Spoons’ has similar implications. A man asks God for a sneak preview of both Heaven and Hell to see what the real differences might be. He finds that all the folk in Hell are sat down a long table armed with even longer spoons which they can’t get to their mouths. Their efforts to feed themselves are torturous. They are surrounded by delicious morsels but no-one gets to eat. In Heaven the situation is exactly the same, the long table, the longer spoons.. but everyone is feeding each other.
Our current situation with Coronavirus requires a similar shift in values. Containing Covid-19 can only be done by means of radical co-operation. You can see daily how the attitude of ‘First and Only’ is rapidly translating into casualty figures. Whether we co-operate with one another really has become a matter of life and death.
The question remains, once Coronavirus has retreated to its lair, what then? Will you, ‘get back to normal’? Isn’t the old normal precisely the culture in which Covid-19 arose? There will be change. We can chose it or have it imposed on us by any one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Take your pick. Their name derives from the Greek, ‘Apo-kaluptein’, to uncover or reveal. Covid-19 is uncovering a great deal, our vulnerability, our dependence on one-another, the indolent corruption and deadly narcissism of First and Only.
Surviving is not enough. What are you learning from lock down? In what way has it quickened you? Can you remember how to make stone soup? If so, you will have crossed an inner threshold in yourself and been transformed by the ordeal. If not, Plague, or one of his mates, will return and give us all, once more, the opportunity to grow, just a little further down the orange brick road.
