Reading Notes: Week 7, Part B (The Legend of the Rice)

The Legend of the Rice: Back when things were better than what they are now, people were stronger and prettier, and everything that was eaten was bigger and sweeter than what we eat now. Rice, which was the food of the people, was of much larger grain – one grain was all that a person could consume at a time. Back then, when the rice was ready, it would grown big enough and fall off the stalks and roll into the villages – there was no need for the people to toil over preparing it. One year, the rice was so plentiful that the town ran out of room to store it. When the granaries were taken down and construction on the new granaries began, the rice was ready to be harvested before they were completed. There was a widow working in the granaries, and she became very angry at the rice for not waiting for construction to be completed before it came rolling into town. The widow struck a piece of rice and it broke into a thousand pieces, saying from then on it would stay in the field until it was wanted. From then on, the grains of rice were small and had to be harvested out of the ground. 

This was the only story in this section that really interested me, and I oddly took so much meaning from it. It shows lessons in both being content in the waiting and not wanting to rush things before they are ready. While it is a legend about how small grains of rice came to be, I seemed to have taken it in a different, in a more characteristic and scriptural type of way that I could easily transform to a new story for the storytelling. It's crazy that a simple story can have so many intended and un-intended takeaways and be interpreted in so many different ways.

Picture of grains of white rice

(Taken by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash)

"The Legend of the Rice," Laos Folk-Lore by Katherine Neville Fleeson