The Serpent That Opens the Doe and the Rain That Never Touches

On the high rock where the wild goats climb, a hind went down into her labor and could not deliver. Her hips were narrow, her limbs drawn tight around the fawn, and every push sealed the passage it should have opened. She strained until her legs trembled. Nothing came. No herdsman climbed to her, no herd gathered. She lay alone on the stone with the life caught inside her.

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The Serpent Sent to Bite Her Open

Out of the cracks in the rock came a serpent. It did not coil to kill. It struck once, a single measured bite, and where the fangs went in the tight limbs slackened all at once. The passage loosened. The fawn slid free onto the warm stone, wet and steaming and breathing. The bite that should have carried death had opened her like a fist unclenching. But the wound still burned, and torn and leaking blood she staggered up the slope, nosing through the scrub until she found the one herb that answered it. She cropped it, swallowed, and the tear knit shut and closed over clean. God had set the poison and the cure on the same mountain, an hour apart, and timed her agony to the minute.

The Frenzy That Guards Her at the Water

She came down thirsty to the stream, weak in the legs, and a wild beast waited in the reeds along the far bank. Then something took hold of her. A frenzy dropped into her chest and she beat the ground with her feet and slashed the air with her horns, stamping and wheeling like a creature gone mad. The beast in the reeds heard the drumming, could not read it, and broke and ran. She lowered her head and drank.

That same frenzy visits a man. He is asleep on his bed and a serpent has risen silent at the foot of it, poised, a hand's breadth from his ankle. He feels nothing. But a spirit flings into his sleep and throws him thrashing, hands lashing out, feet kicking, and he comes up tangled and gasping with his garment pulled on inside out. The serpent hears the storm of him and pours itself back down into the dark. He never sees it. He lies back down cursing the bad dream, guarded by the very thing he cursed.

Rain That Would Not Mingle

Rabbi Yochanan stood under the eaves in a downpour and cupped his hands to catch it, and the water that ran between his fingers taught him something he could not stop turning over. Scoop as fast as you like, he said, and you cannot gather a handful deep enough to walk down into, because the drops will not join. Each one falls sealed inside itself. Let the rain come five hundred years without stopping and still no two drops touch. Above the sea the clouds haul up the brine, bitter and undrinkable, and sweeten it in their bellies until what falls is fit to drink. And every drop is counted before it is dropped, weighed out and diminished to its exact measure, so that the same rain feeds one field and drowns none, judges one nation and nourishes another, each drop a separate verdict falling in its millions and never once colliding.

The Sea That Has No Hands

None of it speaks. The sea has no hands, yet it heaves and holds its line before God as though it were laboring. The earth has no ears, yet when the prophet stood over it and cried "O earth, earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord," it heard. It has no mouth, yet at a word it split under the rebels and swallowed them whole. The heavens have no heart, yet they stretch from end to end and pour out glory without a sound. Every mute and broken thing in creation stands complete before the One who made it and praises without a voice.

A man who tried to say that praise aloud would run out of world before he ran out of God. Pile up every name and every splendor and the sky would crack before the account was full. And so the truest praise came to be silence, the way a king rules a hundred provinces and each one tells of his gold and his armies, but only the province where he actually dwells knows what he is, and lowers its voice.