Stories · How Things Came to Be

The Watchman with a Hundred Eyes

13 min · Field and river · Calm · Letting go

In a twilight meadow, a herdsman who never sleeps because he has a hundred eyes meets a wandering piper whose music and winding tale close those eyes one by one, and in the closing he learns, without sorrow, that watching many things is not the same as being awake to one, and that resting is a gift rather than a failure.

Retold from The Book of Nature Myths, by Florence Holbrook.

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Story 11 of How Things Came to Be, starting at 2:17:00.