Jonah's Hoards

Jonah didn’t know what to do with his hoards of negative emotions. He was considering moving them into boxes and taking them to the local shredding center near his cave on the Upper West Side.

     He looked around the cave where he had spent most of his adult life. It looked like many other dragons’ caves, except that it was piled high with stacks of papers he could not seem to get rid of.  In his many writings, he had explored his negative emotions, especially his self-doubt.

      Jonah’s parents had been depressed dragons, content to lead unexamined lives that made it hard for them to change. Consumed by their own problems, they had not paid him enough attention, so he had not acquired the confidence he needed to meet the daily challenges of dragons.

His confidence had also been eroded by people’s distorted ideas about his species. Dragons were thought of as greedy, with enormous appetites. Pictures showed them as winged, horned, and always breathing fire. In numerous stories, they pillaged villages, even eating women and children.  The hero of these stories was usually a young male whose fight against a dragon highlighted his masculinity.

This negative view of dragons, along with Jonah’s parents’ neglect, had left Jonah with a poor self-image. This poor self-image prevailed even after Jonah learned that people’s wrong-headed idea of dragons stemmed from an innate fear of snakes.

It was somewhat comforting to realize that people only half-believed what they believed. Although dragons had evolved from crocodiles, humans had left dragons completely off the evolutionary tree!

Jonah reflected that he had always doubted himself.

When he was small, he had earned an A on every test without ever feeling confident that he would pass the next one.

 In college, he didn’t approach the females he wanted, only the ones he thought he could get.

At age sixty, he was still traveling solo.

Because he never married, he had no children. He would have liked to have been a father, although his own childhood had not been happy. He would have liked to marry, despite seeing little evidence that his parents’ marriage had been happy.

He had wanted to be a great writer. Why else would the stacks of papers in his cave almost reach the stalactites? But it was hard to get published. So many other dragons also liked to write.

So Jonah had become a teacher, although he wrote on the side.

When Jonah turned sixty, he realized that he needed to turn his oft-negative view of himself into a more positive one.

Jonah worked with affirmations, meditation, and prayer to see himself differently. Determined to change, he practiced being grateful for how his life had gone and who he was.

It was true that as a youth, he had doubted his intellect, which had made him study harder than most dragons. Now he saw, as though for the first time, that his studying had made him unusually enlightened. 

In college, he did not, like so many dragons, meet and marry a female he didn’t know well. How could he choose wisely when he hardly knew himself? Why, most of his college-age friends had gotten divorced after their children left the cave!

He had still found the time, while teaching, to spend countless hours writing, something that gave him a great deal of pleasure.

Teaching hadn't been such a bad choice. Not being a father, he had at least spent time with children.

While teaching, he had even managed to secure for himself a prestigious writing gig reviewing documentaries for a national movie magazine. The films were mostly personal dramas about dragons struggling to make their way through life or about societal issues that plagued dragons.

These issues included global warming (Dragons were having a terrible time with higher temperatures), constant war (Being tribal, dragons had great difficulty getting along with dragons different than themselves), and poverty (Half the dragons in the world were not able to slay enough beasts to put on the table).

There was also a particularly concerning epidemic, Covidic 19, that had killed millions of dragons and people.

In his newly positive frame of mind, Jonah could see that the future didn’t look bad. The Covidic era had, in fact, mostly passed. After all, a vaccine had been found. Dragon scientists were making headway in the battle to save the Earth from burning up. In schools, new curriculums were springing up, teaching dragon children how to get along better with all kinds of dragons. All over the planet, dragons were helping other dragons to find food more readily for their thunders (For those who don’t know much about dragons, this is what groups of dragons are called.).

Even human stories about dragons had evolved. Revisionist fantasies of dragons and dragon slayers now often involved young women or even transsexuals. Thank God for children’s literature, in which a friendly dragon often served as a powerful ally!

Jonah had plumbed his life in poems, stories, novels, and even one screenplay. Now he no longer believed his lifelong fears to be founded.

Jonah now believed that:

 1) All dragons deserved to be happy.

2) Life was a gift.

3) It was paramount to think positively.

When Jonah finished packing his boxes of negative emotions—a lifetime of writing that sometimes got published, more often not—he drove his Mazda to the local shredding center.

After the last carton had been lifted from the trunk (Jonah had had to take several trips because his Mazda was only a sedan)— when Jonah had dumped all his negative thinking into the shredder with great fanfare—he confronted the biggest question of his life:

Where to go from here?

Jonah ruminated about the misery that dragons had lived with, misery that stemmed from their poor self-concept. If Jonah was good instead of bad—if life, instead of being rife with strife—was, in fact, a gift—what next?

Jonah said goodbye to his cave. No longer would he live inside a dank hole in the ground where he had never believed in himself. No longer would he go through his days like a weary warrior, fighting his negative view of life.

He vowed never to see life from fear but from love.

He would see only the good, and by doing so, transform the world.

Jonah turned in his Mazda at the dealership where he had bought it. He didn’t even ask for a trade-in. After all, did he really need a car? It only polluted the environment. And God had endowed him with wings. How had he ever become convinced cars were a necessity?

Spreading his wings as if for the first time, he felt an enormous burden lifted. With great velocity, he flew to his favorite park, DragonCentral in New York City, where he took up residence— not inside a damp cave but in a special part of the part reserved for the enlightened—which humans had dubbed “Strawberry Fields.”

Where he is still living.