A salt doll journeyed for thousands of miles over land, until it finally came to the sea.
It was fascinated by this strange moving mass, quite unlike anything it had seen before. "Who are you?" said the salt doll to the sea. The sea smilingly replied, "Come in and see." So the doll waded in. The farther it walked into the sea, the more it dissolved, until there was only a very little of it left. Before the last bit dissolved, the doll exclaimed in wonder, "Now I know what I am!" -a Sufi story Anthony de Mello The Song of the Bird New York: Doubleday, 1984, p. 98 Comment- The salt doll is a popular image in Sufism to suggest that the ocean is an image of the Infinite Divine (God), and when the ocean takes form it becomes a salt doll. The story is a parable of the spiritual journey. We walk many miles asking, "Who am I?" Eventually, our journey takes us to the edge of the ocean, but even there we cannot fathom its infiniteness nor our true nature. God is always inviting us, "Come in and see!" As we enter increasingly into God, our distinct separateness dissolves more and more, and in the moment of enlightened Realization, we "get it"-- "Who am I? Ahhhh, I AM THAT!" No further comment is needed. certainly, not to make a move toward literalism with this wonderful symbolism, but isn't it interesting that "human blood contains roughly the same percentage of salt as the ocean where the first life forms evolved." (-Al Gore) Salt helps maintain a stable balance of water and sodium in our body that allows cells to regulate fluids and transmit electrical impulses through the nervous system and muscles. We come from the sea, we belong to the sea, it flows through the rivers of our bodies, and our survival depends on the health of the seas. We each are a salt doll. -jag
