Have I told you the Parable of the Dust Bunnies? No? Then here it is.
Dust bunnies are alive. (You, of course, being a reasonable person, already knew this. But it doesn't go without saying, so I said it.) To you and me, their lives seem rather... well, boring. But they enjoy it -- it's the only life they know.
But I bet you want to know how they live, and how they enjoy things or get bored. How well do you remember the science lessons I've been teaching you? Like what causes you to be able to scuff your feet on the carpet and zap your brother -- that's right, electricity. Well, in our brains, there are a whole lot of really small electrical currents, zipping around the neural pathways. These pathways store information and, by a miracle of God, we somehow interact with that stored information to have thoughts and memory. Now Dust Bunnies have a lot of carpet fibers in them, right? And the carpet is where you get the static to zap people. Carpet can thus obviously hold electricity and move it around. It turns out that the Dust Bunnies use their carpet-electricity a lot like we use our brain-electricity. That's how they live and think and stuff.
The Dust Bunnies' primary problem, being balls of carpet, lint and dust, is that they've got nothing like legs to make them go. Left to what we can see, there's no way they could move. Sure, they could wait for Mom to come by with her Broom (or the Evil Vacuum -- but this is a parable, not a horror story) and sweep them around. But if they relied just upon the Broom to get around... well. Mom doesn't clean _that_ often, so they're really just be as good as dead. (And that's why it's okay to clean them up, when Mom does clean; the ones she gets are the dead ones. And we don't want all those dead bodies lying around out there. That's just icky.)
But Dust Bunnies do have a couple of ways to get around without the broom. One is to move by telekenesis: they think really, _really_ hard, and are able to push themselves around by their thought. And this does get them where they want to go. Unfortunately, they didn't get to enjoy the trip, look at the scenery, or anything like that: they were too busy trying to push themselves around to have fun while going. Plus, they're really tired afterwords -- it's a lot of work to think that hard -- so they don't much enjoy where they went, either. And a lot of those die of exhaustion, and get swept away by the Broom. It's sad, really.
Then there are the ones who've been told the better way: Wind Power. There is always Air moving through the house, blowing here, blowing there. When one of these Dust Bunnies feels a Wind, he just lets himself get carried away. Sure, he doesn't always get to go where he thought he wanted to -- but there's always something interesting to experience when he arrives. And, sure, it's scary to be totally controlled by the Wind; it can whip the Bunnies around, and do weird loops -- but with the right attitude, it can be as fun as a roller coaster is for us. And the view: they can just lie back on the wind and watch everything around them. And it's not a lot of work, so they're not always tired at the end of their trip. One more thing: remember the eddies I've shown you in rivers? Air does that, too -- especially behind the refrigerator and under your bed and other hidden places. So, sometimes, the Wind takes the Bunnies into the eddies, and keeps them safe from the Broom. And in that place of safety, they are free to rest a true rest.
And speaking of rest.... Store this away to think about later, but it's time for you to go to sleep.
Good night.