Stories · Nightfall

The Sealed Jar and the Patient Fisherman

12 min · The ancient world · Wisdom · Letting go

At dawn on a quiet pebbled shore, an old fisherman draws a sealed clay jar from the sea and, meaning only kindness, lifts its lead cap, releasing a great grey being whose anger finds nothing in the fisherman to push against. In the soft light that follows, he learns that goodness is not wrong, but that it travels best beside attention.

Retold from The Thousand and One Nights, translated by Edward William Lane.

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Story 3 of Nightfall, starting at 25:37.