A good number of years ago, I came across a fable that made an unusual point. I always seemed to find my own moral to the story. That is not what happened in this case. The fable has proven as hard to find on the Internet as the point it makes is to find in present day thought. Therefore, I intend to write my own version of the fable for your reading amusement.

As a stand up philosopher, I am interested in more than thinking. I am interested in the way that people think. Logic and reasoning are keys to what I do in this space. Fables are good ways of making difficult points. The way that you take my rewrite of this fable will prove interesting to me.

There once was a sorcerer who lived on a planet all his own. On this planet, he had several dragons that he intended to use for making soup. This part of the fable never made much sense to me. Maybe I think too much. It could also be that I am just too dense.

Well, three dragons arrived on the sorcerer’s planet and he wanted them to stay so that he could use them for soup as well. He gave these visiting dragons the best of the dragon food that he had in his storehouse. That night, they bedded down in the best hay in the best parts of his barn. The three dragons wanted for nothing on the day that they spent with the sorcerer.

When the sorcerer got up the next morning, he was surprised to see the new dragons preparing to leave. He rushed out to meet them, asking them why they were leaving. “Have you not had the best of the food and shelter in the barn?”

“You have given us that much and more,” was the reply.

“Why, then, are you leaving?”

The dragon paused only long enough to reply one last time. “You have given us the best of the food. We slept in the best of the hay. To us you gave the places of honor in your barn. But, look at how you treated the dragons who did elect to stay with you.”

I’m not sure why any dragon would want to stay with a sorcerer and be made into soup. Dragon soup is not in any recipe book that I have ever come across. Yet, there is a point in the fable that is rarely spoken of in this time. How do you treat the people in your life who have shown you the greatest loyalty? Do we pay too much attention to the wrong people?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.