goddess
Deep inside the Earth’s womb, she sleeps an unconscious sleep. Our lives are her dreams. Her being is the ground we stand on, her breath is all the life on Earth. Every once in a while, she tosses and turns. Volcanoes cough and new fault lines crack open the face of the Earth. When she settles, the world falls back in order.
The Goddess sleeps with a balance in her hand. An ornate one with a golden goblet on either side. All the Earth’s kindness, good deeds, sympathy and love seep through the core and the mantle and fill her cup. Hatred, violence and the blood of the innocents fill the other goblet with a poisonous bile.
As long as the ambrosia outweighs the poison, she sleeps a deep, unconscious sleep.
Be kind, the elders said. Spread love, the wise said. Do good, else you might wake her. But people were entranced by hatred. They only heard its commanding voice. They maimed and killed at will. Venom gushed into her goblet. Ambrosia was just a slow trickle. The balance tilted.
The sun did not rise the day she woke up. The air was ferrous with the smell of blood. the sky crimson from the heat of her anger. She tore open Earth’s belly with a blood-curdling roar. Her wild hair was loose. Covered in nothing but vines and roots, she rose. She was the Earth and Sky.
When she stomped her feet like a petulant child, the matchstick world trembled. Her cosmical body moved to a terrifying drumbeat only she could hear, all the time ululating in grief over the horrors she was unleashing on her own children.
Violent storms tore through cities. Earthquakes demolished entire states, avalanches erased towns off maps. She kept dancing her demonic dance around the bodies of the dead until the entire world blew up in smoke.
Her anger spent, she returned to her hearth. She gave the world a clean slate. Earth healed. A speck of green emerged from the ashes. A new era was born from the crackling embers of destruction. The few who survived had nothing to give but kindness and love. Ambrosia flowed like an unbound river.The Goddess slept again, a deep unconscious sleep.
Deep within the Earth’s womb, she still sleeps. But only until hatred outweighs love.
