myth for plantago major

There was a time when the world prayed for night. We don’t know why the living things prayed so diligently and for so long for night to come, but they did. Maybe the sun had thought too much of herself. Maybe it was not the sun at all, but the living things of the earth who were siphoning down the sun to make the earth burn.

I don’t know.

But the night came finally, after all this prayer, like a soothing, cooling embrace so all of life collectively took a breath and fell in exhaustion from their endless day. But night, however comforting it is, is slow and doesn’t move quickly when it doesn’t want to, and it didn’t want to. It felt loved, it wanted to heal the world with its sweet darkness. Night was so heavy that it oozed down from the tops of the mountains like syrup. It mixed into the waters. All the while people slumbered and dreamed, and slumbered again. The whole earth grew colder.

After a certain amount of time, there was a group of people who began to dream of a small heat, and a dim light in the sky. So, half awake in the darkness, they rose and began to walk. They walked all over the world in different directions, but in the end found nothing. The skin on their feet was blistered and torn and they fell to the earth in pain and exhaustion. The night would never end and they would only ever dream of flickers of light that would never be strong enough to warm the world.

As it turns out, the people had walked the world over in search of dawn to find each other. When they fell to the ground they found each other’s hands. From their hands they felt that heat they were dreaming of. Together the heat made them rise through night’s thick air, into the sky all together where they became a beacon for the sun to return.

Together these people are the morning star and make sure the night nor the day will ever stay too long. And each of their footprints, from the time they walked, is now a plantain plant, healing and cool, because it remembers that night and is vivified by the desire the people had to keep going.