Cycles of Preternatural Life[1]

Mother ocean, father Sol, wet-nurse Luna.

Soaring, gently swirling, wafting in warm winds and aerie tidal currents, joyously meeting siblings; floating, some serenely others irreverently twirling gathering others and growing stronger.  The good old days!

Tiny, a mere hint of a drop without perspective or perceptible substance, then a miniscule perch, just molecules wide but wide enough to cling to and to rest; transition from water to vapor, not as easy as some think.  Escaped from mother’s nest, I bask in father’s warmth until he drifts off; evening’s chill, then the warmth of Luna’s breast.

More siblings come or perchance I seek them out; finding each other we coalesce becoming something new and marvelous yet ancient and primordial, billowing and white, sailing along, exploring the dawn, tasting of aurora’s breath.  Still free yet linked through a single group soul, basking in the sky and playing at auto-sculpting: faces and figures and mythological creatures while from far away, dimly echoing gasps of delight.  Cruising in endless skies, navigating between shades from indigo to green, with cyan and everything in between; at dawn and twilight learning to play with skies in all the hues of father’s rainbows.  Those were the days!

Days turn into weeks and weeks into months.  Full of youthful energy we dance and spin and gather others to us until in the fetid tropical air we grow enormous and enormously dizzy; then, drunk on new found power, we move from jubilation through ecstasy to confused anger.  Shaking with unfocused fury we dive, anchored to wrathful winds, giddy with power until, exhausted at last, we drift.

A stuporous haze and destruction everywhere; hangover, most of us missing; abruptly mother no longer seems eternal, fading first to tans then greens then browns and finally to splotches in ugly shades of grey.  Dumfounded but curious we flit between valleys and dales and mountains and hills, and silver streams, long sundered cousins beckoning for us to join them in their beds of lakes and ponds.

Curiosity drives our cycle, becomes more and more intense, especially as winds grow chill.  Bickering we shout in thunderous voices but somehow echoes of mother’s calls break through, touching our hearts, calling us home again until, first one by one then in a clamorous horde, like our brothers before us we dive down to earth, colliding and mingling with ugly solid soil, which grasps and holds us in thick brown puddles.

We sink through the earth, no sign of father, no sign of mother, no sign of Luna though we sense her pull, an invisible green light draws us eventually forcing us to mate with growing green things we’ve hardly met.  Still, as we flow into new wives, the dark is replaced with melodies and echoes in amber and green, muffled sounds of father’s sonorous laughter; joy in the begetting of new forms of life, father having somehow melded us with minerals and strange vapors into more or less willing wives.

Others, more rebellious recoil and join together planning an escape, running in rivulets to older likeminded cousins, searching for home.  One by one, we come together, test our strength joining powerful currents; unpredictable, tasting of the malignant as well as the benign until finally, scenting brine, primordial memories lend us strength and we cascade into the arms of our patiently waiting mother: time for respite and recuperation, merging once again into the infinite wonder of the blue-green seas.

---

[1] © Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2010; all rights reserved