The sages say may things. Sometimes people wonder if the sages make things up to see if we’ll believe them or if we’ll push back. They never say. But they say that Jeremiah Joseph was a strong man, not tall, and really, they say, if you saw him, you’d probably not ever know it. While his feats are recorded as legend, they say he himself look unremarkable. A sort of social camouflage. He is a man of humbleness of personality, despite the stories of his birth.
He once was said to have climbed so high that he touched the sky and when he did it burned him. That one one the sages use as a test, to see if you’re paying attention. They reworked the story of Icarus a bit. In truth, he once climbed a tall peak, barefoot, in the snow. He got frost bite, the doctors (which honestly, were really just shaman) said they’d have to take his feet. He said “Take my feet? The hell are you going to do with my feet?” The shaman said to him “they’ll fall off if you don’t do anything. They’re black! Can’t you see that?”. Jeremiah Joseph couldn’t accept that. He stared at his feet. He thought about what he had done. He knew he couldn’t let himself be an invalid. He left the shaman’s hut.
He walked, yes, they say he walked, to the local temple, and he asked the head monk “Sir, oh wise one, the shaman says I will lose my feet to the snow. What should I do?”. And the monk looked at his feet. He asked him to sit with him, and they sat on small orange red pillows. The monk asked Jeremiah to give him his feet. So he did. He just took them off and handed them to the monk. The monk’s eyes nearly popped out of his head at this. He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t expecting this at all. But he took them and examined them. He turned them over, seeing the freezer burns and frost bite. He felt them, their coldness. He turned them over again, and then he gave them back to Jeremiah Joseph, shaking his head again, in disbelief. And to this once again surprise, Jeremiah just popped them back on! The monk said to him that he had never seen anything like it before.
He told Jeremiah to go to the forest, and find the tallest sycamore tree. It will be by a stream. You must climb this tree, and sit among it’s branches. Feel it’s sway and meditate. You must meditate on your feet. If you have the will and the strength inside you, if you are determined enough, through meditation, you can regrow your frost bitten feet. And so Jeremiah Joseph did this. He went to the forest, by the stream. He stripped off all of his clothes, and climbed the tree, naked as the day he was born. He sat in the branches and meditated. A few people saw him, but they said nothing. Three days later he came down. His hair has grown six inches in three days. His feet looked brand new. He went back to the monk. He sat down, and told the monk everything that had happened. The monk waited until he finished and asked him “do you realized you’re still naked and your hair is now six inches longer?”. Jeremiah looked down, and was surprised to see he was in fact still naked! What he saw when he looked down was his penis laying heavily between his feet, his new feet! “No. I didn’t actually”, said Jeremiah. The monk got up and gave him an orange robe which Jeremiah put on and thanked the monk. He asked the monk what happened with his hair, why had it grown so much. The monk didn’t know, but speculated that maybe the act of healing his feet also made his hair grow. Jeremiah Joseph thanked the monk.
Jeremiah Joseph got up, walking on his new feet, and unused to the monks robe’s tripped on them, rolled, and tore them apart, and as he stood up, he found he was once again naked outside the monastery. He went back to the monk and said to him “Oh wise one, I guess my new feet need to be calibrated.” And so he was given another new robs, this one shorter than the previous one. And with that Jeremiah Joseph walked home on his new feet.