The Lonely Burro

The little grey burro lived alone atop a beautiful hill. He was fenced in on all sides. There was plenty to eat and he had several places where he could rest. His name was Gordo, or fatso in English, even though he was not fat. It was just the name his owner gave to him. He hated the idea that he had an owner at all and many times while grazing in the fields he would ponder the idea of ownership. He knew that he was not very smart because oftentimes when he started thinking about things his mind would wonder from one topic to the next. So he never really figured out exactly what it meant to be owned. He just knew that this man would come by from time to time and call him Gordo and give him nice things to eat.
Gordo usually could be seen grazing in the fields from sun-up until sun-down. He didn't really have a lot of other things to do. He was a good kicker and could make loud noises when he wanted, but he only had rare occasions to do so. Mostly he just grazed and thought as deep thoughts as he could think. He was also a good listener, or so he thought, and a good observer. Because he grazed so much, his head was usually looking down at the grass he was eating. Every now and then, he would just sit down and gaze. Gazing is like grazing, only it doesn't have an R, even Gordo knew this. Looking down at the ground might have caused others to think that Gordo was depressed or at least sad since his head was bent downwards. Of course, Gordo had no reason to be sad. All of his needs, being so small, were easily met by the plush fields where he lived.
The fences that kept him inside also provided Gordo protection from animals outside of the fence and so even though he felt safe because of it, he also felt a bit constrained by it. He would spend many, many days near the gate where the nice man would come and go. He felt comfortable near there and always breathed a little easier because even though it was a gate, it stayed closed and no one other than the nice man would ever open it. He saw other animals outside the gate and wondered what kind of lives they lived. The dog seemed happy and well fed. The cows were always grazing and seemed very content. The birds were the luckiest so it seemed because they could go where ever they pleased. Gordo noticed they were almost always singing. He thought that if he could change into a bird he might be willing to trade his life with a bird but not just any bird. It would have to be a beautiful bird that could both sing and soar. Gordo liked seeing the birds soaring up so high in the air.
At night, Gordo would nestle down in some warm brown hay that his owner had laid out for him. He had a stable where he could go when the weather was bad but for the most part Gordo loved being outdoors at night. He could look up into the heavens and try to see how far he could see. He would focus on one star and then see if he could see a farther one. Sometimes he would think about the end, not like end as in coming to an end but more like if it had an end, of the cosmos. He wondered if there were such a thing...and end of the cosmos. Was the cosmos like being inside a gigantic basketball? But then if we were all inside a humongous basketball like structure, then what would be outside the basketball (think cosmos)? Where would that end? Would there just be another ball that was outside of the basketball? and where would that one end? and what would the material be made of? Then Gordo would just turn inward and wonder what he was made of? Cells? What were cells made of? Molecules? What were molecules made of really? It seemed to him that none of this thinking was very worthwhile. None of it made sense anyway. What difference did it all make? And usually by this time he would be so sleepy that he would just close his eyes and fall off into sleep.
Sleeping was a strange thing for Gordo. His eyes would close and his mind would stop working from what he could tell but his heart and his other organs, for the most part, would keep working...even though he was not making them work. Not that he was making them work while he was awake. He didn't have to make decisions or do anything while he was sleeping. Then when he awoke, he felt rested, revitalized. Sometimes he had dreams. Some of them were very life like. Sometimes he thought that what he was feeling and seeing in his dreams really happened even though at some level he knew it hadn't happened in the real sense of the word. The most oddball thing of all was that even though he knew it was a dream and not real, in the real sense of real, he was able to learn from some of the events in the dreams. That was exciting for Gordo.
Gordo woke up to another ordinary day, if any day could really be called ordinary. I guess we should say that Gordo woke up, and to him, it felt like "another" ordinary day. Which is to say, nothing seemed very different from the day before. In truth, nothing was really different, other than Gordo who was just a bit older. Any how, Gordo began moving around in his wonderful gated community, munching on the delicious green grass. As he neared the gate, he noticed that for some odd reason, the gate was open. Seems, in fact, that this day was different. The gate was open. Gordo, being Gordo, realized all at once the enormous ramifications of the gate being open. He understood immediately that his domain was, at once, no longer separated from the world outside.His small protected world was now connected, linked, available to the outside world. He was no longer imprisoned by the gate that usually prohibited him from going out into the much larger universe. At the same time, Gordo knew that he was no longer protected from the outside world either. Had anyone or anything come into his safe gated community? How could he be sure? Should he close it? How? He knew he didn't open it and truthfully, he didn't know how to close it. Besides, if something or someone had already breached the gate, closing it would only guarantee that it could not go back out? Cognitive dissonance. What to do? Brain freeze. Panic. Fear. Excitement. Gordo felt all these emotions rushing into his little donkey brain. What was he supposed to do?
Gordo stood motionless for a long time till at last he could stand still no longer and he moved a hoof towards the outside world. He put one foot out of the gate and onto new territory. It felt very much like the ground within the gated community. So he was a bit relieved to find that not everything would be different outside the gate. He took several more steps. He was growing more confident with each step. He tasted some of the grass from the outside world and could sense no difference. He wondered if he would be sick from eating this strange new grass that was so much like the grass he knew.
And so his journey outside the gate began. Gordo moved with ease; moving about the open fields surrounding his old habitat. It didn't take long before Gordo ran into one of the cows that for years he had seen grazing outside his fence. Stop the press! Gordo didn't know how to interact with other animals, much less an animal that from all outward appearances was nothing like himself! What was he going to say? How would he say it? How would the cow react? Would the cow even understand what Gordo was attempting to say?
It just happened to be Gordo's lucky day. The cow he approached seemed very friendly and there appeared to be no barrier whatsoever to their exchange. The cow, Nick, very much understood where Gordo was coming from, or so he said. He too had lived for years inside a fenced area and had only recently been moved into this new large open field.