Creating Myths

Farstep Station is going well. Ada Nish Pura is somewhat on hold, and this for the sake of the publisher, who is going to change the deadline on it. They were picked up by an important distributor who wanted their first two novels -- so the people at Aio have been working very hard to get book #2 done. I'm book #3. I don't mind the little bit of a rest. This is a busy time for me with Vision due, and classes to write, and the stuff for FM for March to set up.

Nevertheless, story ideas still pound me in the head far too often. Sometime in the near future I'm going to start the fantasy novel I mentioned in this entry:

http://zettesnano04.blogspot.com/2005/02/writing-this-writing-that.html

Odd pieces of it have been coming to me. Over the last couple days I wrote what will be one of the creation myths. I intend these myths to hide 'truths' and to seem brighter than the world in which they exist. Oddly, this one is not about the creation of the world, which I have in mind, but part of the Gifts Cycle.

At the moment there are a lot of generic terms -- Mother Earth, Sister Storm, Father Sun, the great tree, the well of time. I might change these and I might not. But I'm


The Two Gifts of the Hummingbirds

The hummingbirds, being so small, feared that any contribution they could make would be negligible. They went to Mother Earth and confessed that they could not bring any gift worthy to stand with those of the others.

"You are beauty made animate," she said smiling upon them, "and anything that you bring as a gift will be made of joy and splendor. The new race will need such things, to stand with the gifts of wisdom and strength that the others brought."

So the little hummingbirds gathered again in conference, a joy to see in itself at the fluttering wings of blues, reds and greens and every combination of colors and hues. And looking to their beauty they found their gift. They gathered their fallen feathers, the petals of flowers, sunlight made whole and raindrops made strong, and from these divergent pieces they fashioned jewels and gems of every color imaginable, and strew them like tiny treasures throughout the world.

But when they looked into the well of time they found that their gifts brought both beauty and pain to the new race of man, for not only did the humans use the gifts for art, but they also fought and killed for them.

"It is the way of man," Mother Earth consoled them, but their little hearts lost the joy, and they slipped away and hid, saddened that they had not gifted as well as they had hoped.

And for a time no one saw the pretty jewels of the skies and the world seemed a darker place for it. Even Father Sun seemed dimmed by the loss, and the flowers bowed their heads, no longer looking to the sky, watching for their small friends.

Finally Sister Storm found them, their wings stilled, sitting on a shadowed branch of the great tree. Nothing she said could lure them out until she began to play a game of tag with them, tickling their little heads with raindrops, until they finally danced up into the air, laughing and trying to catch them. From the great tree rose streams of reds and greens and blues lifting up in an arc into the sky. Mother Earth laughed, and Father Sun shown brightly, catching them in their game -- and then the hummingbirds gave the world a second and unexpected gift born of laughing sunlight and playful rain. They created the rainbow.