A Story of Natural Law: The Wisdom We Forgot to Hear

    In the high fold of the mountains, where paths turned into deer trails and maps forgot their purpose, lay a village with no name. The villagers called it home and needed no other word for it. A river wound through their lives — not loud or boastful, but constant, whispering its song over stones smoothed by generations

    At the river’s bend lived an old man named Tapan. His home was little more than a hut of woven branches and stone, with moss like green velvet on the roof and wind chimes made of shells that had never known the sea.

    Tapan had once traveled the world — or so the stories claimed. Some said he was a scholar turned hermit; others, a madman who had spoken with trees. No one could say for sure. He rarely left the river’s edge, and each morning, he could be seen sitting cross-legged on a rock, facing the water like a man attending a sermon.

    But the children liked him.

    One of them, a girl named Avni, became especially curious. She was ten and full of the questions that adults had forgotten how to ask. Why does the river never stop? Why do birds know where to fly? How does a bumblebee carry itself through the sky?

    So one morning, when the dew still kissed the grass and the sky yawned open in pale gold, she and the children followed Tapan to the riverbank.

    “You never speak to the river,” she said boldly.

    Tapan smiled without turning. “I don’t need to. It already speaks.”

    Avni frowned, puzzled. “I only hear water.”

    “Then you are already halfway there,” he said.

    She sat beside him, mimicking his stillness — though hers was full of fidgets.

   Time passed, and then she noticed something — a bumblebee, floundering in the water. Before she could leap up, Tapan gently cupped his hand and lifted it free, setting it on a warm stone. They watched together as the creature shook its tiny body, warming in the sun.

    “It’s too heavy to fly,” Avni said. “My teacher told us they shouldn’t be able to.”

    “Yet it does,” Tapan replied. “Because it doesn’t know it shouldn’t. Because it obeys a deeper law.”

    “Like magic?”

    “Like truth.”

    Avni tilted her head. “But if there are rules like that… why don’t we know them?”

    Tapan turned to her, and for the first time, his voice was serious.

    “Because we ask too much, and listen too little. The river flows not because it decides to, but because it follows the shape of the land. The bee flies not because it understands physics, but because it understands need. Nature does not argue with its path — it follows it.”

    “But we’re not bees,” Avni protested.

    “No,” he said softly. “We are the only ones who forget we, too, are part of the same story.”

__________

    That night, Avni dreamed of a world stitched together by unseen threads. She saw roots moving underground, greeting each other like old friends. She saw wolves howling not to the moon, but to each other, weaving distance into closeness. She saw a thousand bumblebees dancing through meadows, drawing invisible lines between blooms, connecting one life to another.

    In the center of it all stood Tapan, silent, holding out a hand with a seed in it...............