myth for jasmine

In the time of gods, before there was a moon, there was a people who had spent a few generations trying to get to the bottom of the ocean. Preachers and storytellers told about how there were beauties beyond reason in the deepest parts of the sea. All the while the people didn’t see the beauty of the world around them. 

So they made all sorts of maps and conducted experiments and philosophized about what was inside the ocean, much farther than anyone had gone before. 

One of the scientists found herself in the middle of the desert and she looked at the sky and saw that within the sun there was a being made of nothing but water droplets. She could feel the being before she made contact her whole body cool and her skin soften at merely the scent of them. A soft sheet of cloud covered the sun and shaded her in those moments. And even thought she was very very far from the ocean she realized the way to the bottom. Where the being had been was a shrub and it told her through its flowers how to find shade in the desert, the bottom of the ocean at the highest mountain peek, and sun in the deepest night. As the plant told her the secrets something was happening at the other side of the world.

Waves rolled in white and gray and green concentric circles of froth and from that point the moon rose like a pearl from a giant oyster. When it made its way to the horizon the people saw their world, but through a light they had never witnessed it before. When they closed their dreams were covered in a white silken sheen they understood that they were not, in fact, separate from the bottom of the ocean. But this truth was easy to forget and dissipated when people opened their eyes.

But the moon left bits of itself behind in the form of the jasmine so people never entirely forget that they were directly connected to the bottom of the ocean, and even though all they saw was from two feet above the ground. There was a part of them that knew the depths as well as the moon that now graces our sky.