Echoes of Truth 

Echoes of Truth

By: John Kazerooni

In a distant village, cradled by rolling green hills and the quiet murmur of a cold mountain river, there lived a shepherd with a gift unlike any other. From his flute flowed a language the world seldom heard—a language not of words, but of care, of truth, of life itself. When he played, his sheep gathered close, their fears dissolving, their hearts quieted, their rest deep and peaceful. In the melody of his flute, the hills seemed to breathe, the river whispered, and the sky leaned down in stillness.

Yet the sound of his flute was not for everyone. To the villagers, accustomed to the rhythm of their own lives, the shepherd’s music sounded strange, jarring, even wrong. It was not the sound society wanted to hear—too unfamiliar, too free, too honest. Where the sheep found solace, the villagers felt disturbance. Where life found harmony, human expectation felt disrupted.

They asked him to change, to bend his song to their ways. But the shepherd could not twist the truth from his flute; the melody came from the heart and flowed as it would. And when he refused, they silenced him. The shepherd was sent away, and the flute fell silent, leaving the meadows empty, the hills still, the river flowing alone.

At first, relief filled the village. The familiar quiet returned. But life, unlike human preference, does not bend to comfort. The sheep, deprived of the sound that sustained them, stopped grazing, stopped resting, and grew weak. One by one, they fell. The meadow, once alive with breath and song, became a place of silence, of absence, of regret.

Only after centuries did the villagers begin to realize—though dimly—that something immeasurably precious had been lost. What they had silenced was not merely a shepherd’s flute but the truth and harmony that held the world together. The melody they rejected had been the breath of balance between divine and devil, life and love, man and nature, truth and false. And when they finally understood, it was far too late. The sound they could not bear had been the one their souls most needed to hear.

And yet, the story does not end there. The echo of the shepherd’s truth remained, carried by the wind through the valleys, whispering across generations. In every age, there are voices that disturb, visions that unsettle, songs that do not conform. Too often, society silences them, exiles them, rejects them. And yet, those voices, however faint, endure. They remind us that truth cannot be destroyed. It waits, patient, persistent, invisible yet unyielding.

We wonder then: 

Why is society so resistant to what lies beyond its norm? 

Why do we destroy what we do not understand, and devalue those whose voices are different from our own? 

Why do we think in terms of us against them, rather than all of us within one harmony? 

Why do we remain bound to traditions even when they poison our spirit? 

Why do we silence the voices that remind us of our forgotten humanity? 

Why do we fear the sound that does not please us—when it might be the very note that completes our song? 

Why don’t we dare to reveal the truth when so many around us remain in ignorance? 

Why do we kill the shepherd simply because we do not like his melody? 

And how many more melodies must be lost before we learn to listen?

The shepherd’s flute may have fallen silent in the world of men, yet its echoes endure. For those who have ears to hear, it carries both a warning and a promise: that truth, however quiet or unwelcome, will always return, patient as the river, steadfast as the hills, waiting to be heard.

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