myth for chickweed

Our world is small. Everything in it is small. The pinky of a king is smaller than a prairie coneflower. Humans like to think of massive things. We dream of universes and worlds. But we can never see an entire mountain all at once. All we can do is hold rocks in the palms of our hands. We can see birds fly in circles. We can feel the wind and know that the ocean is near even if we can’t see it. We are small. But that doesn’t mean there is no love for us in the great cosmos.

And that’s all thanks to a special chicken who was both beautiful and smart. Her plumes were golden with dappled patterns of brown that hit the light like copper. Her beauty caught the eye of the bird spirit in the sky and the spirit alighted on the ground where the chicken lived. The chicken showed the bird spirit things that were so small they could not have possibly seen from their great journeys through all of the worlds. The bird spirit saw that none of the small things were connected together though. They all lived on their own, and so this spirit decided they would give up the very thing that made them divine: their flight, so they could connect all the small things of the world.

So the god became chickweed and its eyes are the tiny flowers: the eyes of a god hidden in the soil, so that they can always see. It always reaches to connect us with the things of our world with its sprawling stems. It kept its feathers that the cold of winter months can’t touch, so it kept the beautiful chicken fed. And wherever we find it, even the smallest seed will grow there.

And after so many thousands of years since the great bird became chickweed, they will always follow the birds, and honor the chickens. The gods of the cosmos missed the great bird spirit. So they took the flowers from the chickweed and made the swan of the north in the sky, a bird that acts as a twin to the great bird spirit that is here on the earth.