myth for onion

The gods play games. They play enormous games in the sky. They love to run. It’s what keeps us all moving - the planets and the seasons, the sky and the wind. It comes from the games of the gods. One late winter day the god of rivers threw the ball in the air. It was particularly cold that winter. The god of winds had spent the summer building up cold in the arctic and had come back - out of his hibernation with a kind of terrible fury and a great excitement to travel the universe.

So the game of the year started off well. But the winds were so cold that the god of rivers reached their hands up to catch the ball in the perfectly starred sky and her fingers froze. The ball fell and fell. It fell through all the universe until it found its way here to us. It came flying through through the air and settled deep into the earth.

The ball was so heavy on earth that none of the gods could pick it up. Not even the god of determination, who easily transformed into the god of rage - as you can imagine - strong willed as he was.

But none of the gods thought that the god of the gentlest hands, the god who embraces the living when they pass to death, would know how to lift this, this ball made infinitely heavy by gravity. But these hands, despite being thinner than air - absolutely softer than clouds - they understood the subtle work of what it meant to unwrap a thing from itself.

And so, by the light of a cold moon, the hands found this freezing ball and surrounded it, unwrapping each part of it, then waiting, so that the ball could find its center.

And once the ball found it, it disappeared.

“There is nothing there, in the middle.” Said the hands in unison and curled themselves up and returned to their homes in the dirt as onions in the ground.

The gods had to travel very far to find something else to play with. And maybe, one day, when we’re all thinking about something else, that emptiness will make itself into a ball again and bounce once more, through space.