Fish-fish is such a happy little guy! He spends day after day swimming about. Sometimes he just rides the gentle push of the water which carries him along. Sometimes, he feels like getting some exercise, and turns into the push. It’s an effort, but he loves the feeling of the water flowing in and around and through him.
This is the happy little path he’s been swimming as long as he can remember (which, is really only a few months, because Fish-fish is still just a baby). ‘Who could ask for anything more,’ he often asks himself as the playful friendly water gently throws him in an easy somersault.
Ooh, there, another somersault! The little stream is especially fun-loving today, it seems! Fish-fish laughs as he’s pushed tail over fins, then fins over tail, then round and round and round like the rocks he’s seeing spinning and twirling along, beside, and beneath him. He’s having so much fun dancing with the stream, he hardly notices – he’s never been out this far! He can sense the stream is getting deeper, and he’s moving along much, much faster than ever before. It’s thrilling, for a bit, but as it gets faster and faster, Fish-fish starts to feel panicky. He tries to turn around and swim back.
He struggles and struggles flipping around and swishing his tail and fins, but the current is so strong, it flips him right back around. Forward, forward, forward, faster, faster faster he goes, no matter how hard he tries to go back! Soon, Fish-fish is so tired and frightened from trying to swim upstream without any success, he decides he needs to find something else to focus on — something, anything that he can do, instead of the trying that’s not working at all.
‘Well,’ Fish-fish says to himself, ‘I can swim straight so I don’t get bounced off the rocks.’ and he puts all of his good thoughts and efforts into missing the rocks, which, as it turns out, he’s very good at!
Fish-fish is very pleased with his new skill, swimming fast and missing rocks, until — his happiness is interrupted by a sound, like nothing he’d ever heard before. We might call it a roaring sound – something like the roar a big airplane makes jetting down a runway to take off, but, there aren’t any airplanes taking off where Fish-fish grew up, so, he only knows it’s the loudest, angriest, rumbly-tumbly sound-feeling he has ever felt and heard.
Faster faster faster he’s pushed forward, then…nothing-ness!? Nothing flowing in and out of his mouth, nothing happening when he wiggles his tail and fins, nothing familiar at all, and such brightness! In his tired and fish-out-of-water state of mind, he hears himself say, “Hmm, I wonder if I’m floating or falling or flying?” (some things he had heard of from some of the older fish.)
He was just in the middle of deciding whether to call this a floating, a falling, or a flyng, when, THUMP! His whole body BELLY-FLOPPED (ouch!) onto the water’s surface, then slipped and sluiced into the clearest, most beautiful, crystalline-light filled pool he could ever imagine!e
And oh, such wonderful creatures here! Some long, flowing tails brushed by him as he heard a whispered “How do you do?” next some brilliantly painted, fast moving, delicate shapes slipped around him as he heard “Welcome!” Fish-fish had a very fun imagination, but he could never have dreamed a place such as his new home, so perfectly lovely, it would have made him weep if fish had tears.
Joy, a perfect, peaceful joy — that’s what he is feeling. The joy all around him begins to move through him, until he feels only joy, hardly at all a fish called Fish-fish. Getting swept away and taking the leap in front of him had some scary moments, but what an exciting adventure this new world will be!