A young boy gathered clays and oils and flowers and ground them into pastes. He mixed various ingredients to make different colours and sold them in his mother’s market stall. The people of his town came to love the interesting colours he was able to make and took joy in accenting their homes, artworks, and tools with affectations of the boy’s paints.

As he grew older, the boy began to daub the paint himself on tapestries. No one was able to paint the intricate depths of colour in a crashing river, nor the violent waves of a setting sun. No one could capture the elegant movement of soaring deer through the glens. And all the people revelled in the beauty.

As he was just becoming a man, he had earned for himself enough to buy a small storefront for his mother. There, they were able to sell plenty to feed their family and extra to take care of those around them. They were truly blessed, and the people shared in their joy.

But then a time came where war marched through their town. None could say which side was which or who was right. Few even knew of the nascent countries forming this squabble. Yet the town became trampled and ravaged by this war. Each side tried to claim the village as their own. The townspeople took up their tools and barricaded their homes. They armed themselves with what they could and hid their children in the forest. They aimed to take back their home as best they could.

But the young boy, now a young man, began to gather his paints, and daub the colours across the barricades, and on the tools, even some on the people. He shared the colours of the river and the seas. He shared with his people the sunset and the sunrise. The elegant deer and the powerful hunters.

Then the people began to cry, “Boy! Why haven’t you taken up your tools to defend our home? You make beauty but beauty cannot save us.”

And the boy smiled as he replied, “Why I believe it is only beauty that can save us. It is my paints that drew my family from poverty. It was my art that pulled our town out of poverty. It was in the beauty that we were able to rejoice year after year even when crops grew poorly. Even your tools for war are painted in beauty. And now even those that fight us, will first have to see our humanity. They will see that we are every bit the people they are. And only those who can ignore that truly deserve the end of the blade.”

(448 words)