myth for marigold

There was a child whose grandfather died. The child was so young they could understand the languages of creatures and trees and were shown the veils between this world and the others. The child missed his grandfather. He thought of him every day. He would forget and then remember him again in a flood of emotion. He dreamt of him. Hist grandfather would appear as snakes in sleep. He would appear smiling. And then there were some dreams where he was lost all over again.

The child played one day in a field in the valley and ran after a bumble bee and ran directly through a veil. It is hard to see anything there in the beyond places, so the bee left a slight pollen path that the child could smell. Soon it became clear that the pollen were stars. That’s all the child could see, but it doesn’t mean that is all that was there. He followed the stars and realized soon that he was approaching one. It was a being with hundreds of tentacles. As he got closer to the glow the star creature was so very bright and warm it made the child glimmer. Standing before it then the boy began to feel sweaty and anxious. As if it felt his straining heart, the tentacles of the creature wrapped their arms around him in an embrace. It was his grandfather.

A hand emerged from the top of the being and gave him a ball of light that had a message in it and showed the child the way home in between many abysses. When the child lifted the veil again he realized he had grown up and there in the field were many dozens of the balls of the light his grandfather gave him. A skeleton of a deer lay in the valley, birds sang, ants crawled over the bones. The man named the plant marigold. And the message spoke for itself. When you see a marigold it will tell you what you need to know about loss and celebration, of multiplicity, rot, and sunlight.