There are moments in life when I feel less like a storyteller and more like a conduit, as if the pieces of a puzzle have been scattered across the years, waiting patiently for me to grow into the shape that could finally see them.
The dark before dawn is one of those hours.
The sky is dark, the world hushed, and dawn is still an hour away. Soon I must return to the cold arithmetic of daytime reason, but for now, something softer asks to be heard.
Little A has been reading Eldest, and yesterday he shared a passage so quietly profound it pulled a forgotten thread inside me. Twenty years ago, that same passage etched itself into my memory: Eragon sitting in the elven glade, trying to meditate, trying to listen, trying to grow still enough to feel the pulse of the world around him. He fails at first. Every beginner does. But then comes the instruction that hits with a quiet force:
“...open your mind and listen to the world around you, to the thoughts of every being in this glade, from the ants in the tree to the worms in the ground. Listen until you can hear them all and you understand their purpose and nature. Listen, and when you hear no more, come to tell me what you have learned… “
Eragon tries.
He slows his breath.
He waits.
“…as he immersed himself in the thoughts and feelings of the beings around him, he was able to attain a state of inner peace so profound that, during that time, he ceased to exist as an individual. He allowed himself to become a nonentity, a void, a receptacle for the voices of the world. nothing escaped his attention, for his attention was focused on nothing.“
My younger self read this passage fondly in Mysore for the power it had over me then. It’s an excerpt from the ‘Eldest’, the second book of Christopher Paolini’s ‘The Inheritance Cycle’ series. As memorable as it was, it stayed with me throughout my yoga journey in Mysore and all the years that followed. When Big A and Little A took to reading fantasy books, I knew that I had to share this series with them. Big A devoured it and loved it a while ago. Now, Little A, 10 years old, unschooled, and finishing the second book, instinctively recognises the meditative scaffolding behind the story. I hope one day, they will both see through the bones of any world they walk into, the quiet knowledge that the world is alive in ways most people walk past. Little A, finding this on his own catching what I caught as an adult feels like its own kind of inheritance. A lineage not of land or name, but of perception.
Oromis instructs Eragon through what can easily be recognised as surya namaskara, before bringing him into the inner field of awareness. He also teaches that sound releases stored energy, mirroring an ancient tradition held for thousands of years. That vibration is not metaphor but architecture. Every mantra is a pressure point on the unseen places of the Self. Touch the right syllable and the world rearranges itself around you.
Paolini’s Ancient language is fictional, but the idea behind it is as old as fire. And this is what made these passages linger in my bloodstream. Paolini, an incredibly young author then, somehow captured the textures of inner practice:
the widening,
the dissolving
the thinning of the Self
until awareness is no longer a spotlight but an infinite field.
Oromis reminds Eragon that awareness is not a clench but a softening. A letting go.
Was the world turning itself inside out? Softening into the living web and feeling the forest as one continuous breathing organism? Eragon stop resisting, and the world rushes in. When he speaks, the world listens because he has aligned himself with the nature of things.
A child could read that as magic. A yogi reads it as memory.
The elves’ refusal to eat flesh was not about purity. It was about responsibility.
“Why do you resist the order of things?” Oromis asks.
And the answer is simple but immense:
Why should we cause unnecessary suffering?
This is not the denial of desire but the refinement of it. A kind of stewardship.
To eat with intention, to live with restraint, to recognise that everything eats everything else, but that we have a choice in how we meet that law. It is not about the posture, or the pose, but the ethic. The elves do not claim to rise above the world. They choose to walk through it lightly.
“Would you deny all your desires?” Eragon asks.
Oromis does not tell Eragon to become an ascetic. He tells him to become accountable.
“Only those that are destructive.”
This is the hinge of the entire philosophy of Book Two.
Desire is not the enemy.
Unexamined desire is.
The destructive ones, the hunger that dulls the spirit, flattens the world or harms others, are the ones to set down.
And so, before dawn finally arrives and the day asks me to return to its practical rhythms, I sit with the same lesson Eragon discovered beneath the tress of Ellesmera. The world is endlessly articulate when we are quiet enough to listen.
Perhaps that is all any of us are trying to learn. To soften, to widen, to let the self loosen its grip just enough for the world to speak through us. To notice the small lives underfoot, the ethics in our choices, the pulse of a forest we cannot see but can always feel.
If the elves thread their kingdom lightly, it is because they understand something simple:
that nothing we touch is ever truly ours,
And everything we tend becomes part of us.
May we walk that way too with the gentleness of those who know they belong to a larger rhythm, and with the gratitude of travellers who recognise that even the smallest glade, the smallest moment of awareness, can become a teacher. And when all of it falls silent again, when the mind settles, and the world grows still, may we remember to listen.
Lighty.
As they do.
