Sunday Morning Ponderables

The Tree Of Wisdom
(A Yoruba tale from Nigeria)


Tortoise stood beneath a Tree and thought about wisdom. He knew that gold held great value in the eyes of many. "But wisdom," he thought, "is worth more than anything else in the world."

Taking up a hollow calabash, a large bottle gourd, he tied it around his neck and went in search of wisdom. When passersby dropped morsels of wisdom during their conversations along the road, he picked them up and put them into his gourd. When the wisdom contained in the seeds of grain or in the nuts of trees fell to the ground or when a fluffy seed blew in on the breeze, Tortoise was there to snatch it up. If a bird's wisdom fluttered down from the sky in one of its feathers, Tortoise grabbed it with his beak and put it into the gourd. After many days of gathering and gleaning wisdom, the gourd was full.

As he gazed into his gourd, Tortoise thought, "Surely I am now the wisest of all. No one has ever gathered so much wisdom. This must be all there is in the world."

But now Tortoise was worried that someone might find his wisdom and steal it.

"I will put it up into this ancient baobab tree," he thought, looking at its wide spread of branches. "No one will ever find it there."

Tortoise hung the gourd full of wisdom around his neck and tried to climb the tree, but the gourd hung down by his belly and got in the way. He tried hanging it from one front leg and then the other front leg, but each time the weight of the gourd pulled him down and he fell off the tree. He tried tying it to his puny tail, but the rope kept slipping off. Then he tried holding it in his mouth, but he was so used to saying his thoughts out loud that he found he couldn't think clearly when his mouth was full.

Finally, he heard a small voice coming from the bush. "Hello, Tortoise."

"Where are you?" asked Tortoise, looking around.

"I'm down here."

"Oh, it's you, Snail," said Tortoise.

"That's no way to carry a gourd up a tree," said Snail.

"Well, then . . . how would you do it?" asked Tortoise curtly.

"Granted, I do not possess the wealth of wisdom that you do," admitted Snail, "but you might want to try tying the gourd onto the middle of your back, so the weight will be even and your limbs free to climb up the bark."

Tortoise stared at Snail and said nothing for a very long time. "Well," he snipped, "thank you for the words of wisdom."

Snail helped Tortoise to tie the gourd onto his back and watched as Tortoise made his way slowly up the tree and out onto one of its upper branches.

When Tortoise had caught his breath, he felt satisfied at holding all the wisdom in the world inside his gourd, which was now safely hidden in the tree. But then another thought began to eat at him.

"If I hold all the wisdom in the world inside this gourd," he thought, "then why is it that I needed advice from Snail to get the gourd up into this tree?"

At that moment, Tortoise realized that no matter how much wisdom he gathered, there would always be more to learn. So he untied the gourd from his back, dropped it from up in the tree, and watched as it smashed on the ground, planting some of its wisdom in the soil and scattering the rest to the winds.

Artwork by Evan