My name is Mother. My name is Proserpine, Ceres, Rhiannon, Frigga,
Epona, Isis. I am encompassing and brutal, an ocean that covers all the world.
I am the flame of life licking and dancing inside your fleshly heart, your
throbbing brain. I am the softness of your mother’s embrace and the warmth
behind her eyes. I am the singer of the song of the world—life, death, life,
death. Over and over and over I spin in this heady dance.
The cycle is everywhere, in everything, and it never ends. It never changes.
And so I fell in love with you, you who are as inconstant as the dawn despite
your own slavery to the cycle. You have loved me in return, returned my
protection tenfold with fervent devotion. You gave me my names, my faces, the
smell of blood and death curling up from your sacrifices.
In the newborn spring, I like to be Proserpine, the maiden of death who comes
back from the other world to bring life to the earth. I like to walk in the
form of a beautiful girl amongst the green trees, my feet bare over the tiny,
sprouting flowers. In this fashion, I met a man.
He was beautiful and
tall like a slender sapling, with black ringlets for hair and dark, pondering
eyes set deep in his skull. And when he saw me, oh, how those eyes widened till
he looked like a little fawn! How his brows raised till they were hidden by the
fringe of his soft hair. He ran to me, overcome with the tumultuous devotion
still lingering in the hearts of mortals. No matter how much the world changes,
or how much they change, that need or us, for me, is always there. He took me
in his arms like I was that harmless girl, and not the primal, ancient force
behind the turning of the seasons. I melted into him. There is nothing like the
pure warmth of human skin, their crushing, insistent love.
I don’t know how
long I kept him there. Perhaps an hour, or a century. Time means nothing to me.
And yet I am always acutely aware of the seasons. And yet in his arms, I could
not even feel the wind brushing past my face. I could feel nothing but the blood
pumping in his heart.
As all gods do, I
got bored. You might think me cruel for it, but that’s only because you can’t
fully grasp my nature. I am nature. I
can love, but in the end I am only the wind, the earth, the rain. I am not a
thing that can stay entranced by flesh and bone and warmth.
I sank into the
cool earth, the dark soil soothing and cool. I stretched, and I dozed,
listening to the lullabies of earthworms and ants.
Eventually, I
awoke. I rose, and walked about the earth again. It was winter now, and
everything was dead and silent. White glittered everywhere, blotting out all
the colors of life. And by chance, it caught my eye again.
The figure of a
man, kneeling, keeled over, shrouded in dark, tattered clothes. He looked so
bony underneath them. He didn’t move, his back didn’t even rise and fall with
his breathing. And as I approached him, I realized that the curly hair had
disappeared. Like everything else, there was only white now.
Only the white of
his skull. That is all that is left of my beautiful acolyte with the black
ringlets for hair.
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