My Mythical Creation, (Much of Which is True)
“The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
I remember nothing about my life until I was at least three years old. I have heard stories about my previous existence but can verify none of them. I have been told that I was very ill during that mysterious period and that the medicine prescribed (sulfa drugs), almost killed me, but as far as I’m concerned, all that business lies in darkness. I can’t honestly tell you that I remember heroically wrestling the Grim Reaper to a draw, or even that I was aware I was sick.
This void lasted until my third year when for no knowable reason, I became aware of a bright light pouring through the screen door at the back of my mother’s kitchen. Outside a bright, cheerful Spring day was going about its business. I don’t remember much about the rest of the kitchen. The curtains of darkness have only drawn far enough apart to reveal the door, though I somehow know that I was in a kitchen. I say “my mother’s kitchen” only to indicate that I knew it wasn’t mine at the time, and I wasn’t supposed to be there.
The shimmering colors on the other side of the screen drew me forward. It was beautiful, and I wanted to move closer to its brilliance. On the other side of the screen, I could see a well sitting under a shower of golden light. My father has said that a family of garter snakes lived in and around that well. “In the beginning, Eurynome, the Goddess of All Things, rose naked from Chaos, but found nothing substantial for her feet to rest upon…..She danced towards the south, and the wind set in motion behind her seemed something new and apart with which to begin a work of creation. Wheeling about, she caught hold of this north wind, rubbed it between her hands, and behold! The great serpent Ophion.”
I pushed through the door, and the whole world rolled out before me. Swirling clouds sailed across clear blue skies. Spring peepers were chirping off somewhere. I could smell damp earth mixed with cut grass. The well, however, sitting there in its silence fascinated me most of all. I was probably told to stay away from it, but that admonition must have made it even more interesting, I stumbled over to the edge and looked down into its darkness. I couldn’t see anything. Echoing up from the bottom, my breath sounded strange, but nothing indicated any danger, or why I wasn’t supposed to be there. I leaned farther forward to get a better look. I saw only more darkness and a little head smiling back up at me. A few pebbles slipped under my hand and fell into the well, destroying the tiny face in the dark water.
More pebbles began to fall. At that moment, a sudden breeze stroked my cheek, and I looked up. There in the distance, a half-excavated gravel bank glowed in the sunlight. I got back up on my feet and my heart skipped a beat. Something up by the gravel bank loved me, and my sense of this affection sparked the first awareness of myself. This moment inaugurated the beginning of my self creation. It was a second birth.
I followed a faint path through tall grass up to a level shelf that spread out from the side of the gravel bank. From there, I could see my house and the well outside it. When I turned away a bit, I could see a copse of pine trees. Beyond a tangled hedgerow, a large field of short green grass glistened with morning dew. The field’s grass was greener than anything around it, greener than the intervening hedgerow or even the tall grass I had climbed up through from the house.
The breeze stiffened. The clouds dancing in front of the sun established a rhythm of bright then light, then bright again. I thought I heard music from some hidden place drifting across the field that lay before me. I must have already been able to recognize the existence of music. Perhaps my parents had previously played some records near me before I came out of the darkness. Perhaps I always possessed this knowledge. Though I recognized it as music, what I heard from the gravel bank puzzled me at first. It rose and fell. Sometimes it disappeared in the wind only to return a little louder than before. It slowly became more and more understandable. Yes, it was happy music. I could hear people laughing. At that moment, I was offered a brief glimpse of the immortals. An old roofless jalopy floated up from behind a hill in the middle of the green pasture and passed smoothly down the other side. While no sound issued from its engine, I could, however, plainly hear the young people who filled the car singing to the music on the old wreck’s radio. While watching them appear and disappear I felt nothing except curiosity and a dose of admiration for their happiness.
I knew at that moment that I never wanted to return to the darkness from where I had been summoned. I knew what it meant to be alive. As the car disappeared behind the hedgerow, I smiled. I knew I was separate from all the things I saw around me, and this knowledge set me free.
I heard my name being called from somewhere down the hill. I looked around to see who knew my name. There, running up the path, was my mother, waving her arms like a big bird and shouting “Put those down. Drop them right now”! She looked really funny. I remember laughing. I misunderstood her intentions, as I would many times in the future. The immortals proved to be much easier to understand. She often told whoever would listen that when she found me, I was dancing about in circles, laughing like a fool while waving wriggling snakes in each hand. All I know is that I had officially entered the world of light and life, and this knowledge offered me a promise of freedom I hadn’t experienced before. I never forgot that day, and throughout my childhood I would often think back to it and wonder about what I had really seen and felt.
As an adolescent I began to seriously consider the meaning of that day and how it would affect my future life. It offered me a starting point from where I could determine how I fit into the world I saw around me and how I related to the immortals that could occasionally pop up in that world. I decided that they didn’t know I observed them that day, or even that I existed. They were too wrapped up in their joy to notice anything beyond themselves.
I eventually decided that I lived in a metaphorical translucent bulb that bounced around inside another globe. I controlled everything that occurred within my bubble. My thoughts, emotions, and identity all resided within this inner sphere. Though the wall of my orb was relatively transparent, its surface contained some flaws that might have distorted my view of the world outside it. I trusted most of my understandings of what I thought I saw, but soon realized that some of my observations were not 100% accurate. Still, I felt I understood the outside world well enough to navigate it by rolling my sphere through it to go where I wanted to go and satisfy my curiosity.
I could also respond to commands made by the outer world’s inhabitants, but I never left my bubble when following these instructions. I could see much that I judged to be beautiful or ugly in the world outside my orb, but I reacted with attitudes and emotions that resided only with me inside my personal soul bubble.
Unlike the world’s container, the largest globe that encompassed both my bubble and the outside world was not easy for me to directly assess or understand. A misty haze coated the inside of this bubble, and no one seemed to want to wipe it off and view what was on the other side. Something was happening there. I could see vague shapes moving about behind the mist, but I have never been able to come to any firm conclusions about what is taking place outside the shell. Perhaps the immortals inhabit that space and play games with the outer bubble, throwing it here and there, shaking up the order of the world inside it and causing the fear and chaos I often see erupting there. Perhaps, the immortals live amongst us rather than outside our personal or the world’s bubble. It might be only impersonal, mindless storms that hurtle and jerk the bubbles around us; the immortals being just as confused about why this is happening as I am. I don’t know what to believe, but will continue to roll through the world observing everything I can, both the understandable and the mysterious, both the world’s beauty adulterated by human foolishness,and the immortals’ foolish beauty, while keeping an eye on the outer globule, hoping to someday see a hand sweep away the blocking condensation to reveal a smiling face beaming down on everything below.
