▸ Column · A backwater Outer Rim homestead world, two settlers escalating with salvaged droids and carved idols — adapted from a modern suburban lawn-ornament feud into the Star Wars galaxy of Yoda's exile.
YODA replies.
Replied to by Yoda, with a rebuttal from Darth Vader.
The letter
It began at the last harvest, when my neighbor across the ridge — Greevo — mounted a pair of glowing, gyrating moon-lizards on his homestead's roofline. To restore some sense of proportion, I answered with a salvaged protocol droid I'd repainted gold and posed mid-wave. Greevo countered with a carved stone bantha the size of a speeder. So I arranged a dozen cast-resin gundarks around a sabacc table, mid-game, tiny cards and all. Six rotations later my front yard resembles a junk-dealer's lot that gave up on dignity. My wife says enough. But Greevo has just installed a motion-shrieking screech-hawk that wails at every passing landspeeder, and I cannot let it stand. Do I commission the eight-foot whirligig with the hand-painted mural of a gundark beating a bantha at cards — or is that the escalation I'll curse when it's time to sell the homestead?
Yoda replies
Hmm. About lizards and lawn-droids, you believe this is. About them, it is not. Mmm.
Beneath the gundarks, look. A small fear lives there — that lesser than Greevo you might be, that count for nothing your standing would, should the last word his to keep be. Pride, that fear becomes. To anger at the screech-hawk, the pride. And the suffering? Already arrived, it has — your coin spent, your wife's patience thinned, the homestead a monument to a war neither of you can win.
Win, you cannot. Nine hundred years I have watched such contests. Always one more shriek there is, one more painted gundark. Endless, the ladder. To climb it forever, you wish?
Let go of the last word, you must. Frightening, an unanswered screech feels — like losing. But louder than any owl, the quiet yard speaks. Mmm.
Take down a thing, not put one up. Watch what your wife's face does then. Stronger than the whirligig, that will be.
Do, or do not. Build the windmill, there is no try — only the regret at selling, of which already you ask. Listen to it, you do. Wiser than you let on, you are.
— Yoda
Darth Vader weighs in
The little one in the swamp tells you to release your attachment. He always did love that word — release, let go — sitting alone among his roots, certain he had mastered the thing that mastered me.
He sees the fear. He misses the casualty. Look past Greevo. Your wife said enough. Mine asked me to stop, too — quietly, while I told myself the next victory was necessary. I did not hear her until there was nothing left to hear. The screech-hawk is not your rival. The silence growing across your own table is.
Win the ridge, lose her. I know this arithmetic. I paid it in full. Take the droid down. Sit with her instead.
— Darth Vader
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