myth for spikenard

The scientist said the world is nothing more than a series of equations, and that at one point in the future the heat index will lower and we will remember what is to come. And the great statues that were shattered will reform, then melt, then become rock again, and the rock will find its way back into mountains and the plants will return to the ocean long after we all have and all things will move back. There was a time when we only remembered the future. We lost our past.

A bird lived with beautiful blue and purple wings. He had everything that had happened in his life floating around in bubbles all around his head, so it could dive into the memories whenever it wanted.

But the lord of time decided one day that it was sick of all the mess that had been made since the beginning of time. It was all getting out of hand, they thought.

They took a little glue and a sander and they started to mend all things that had been broken since the beginning of time. At first no one really noticed, but then some started to see trees come up that had long been down. They started to see their scars disappear. They started to see old ruins come back together. It was all very disorienting because it messed with how everyone thought about their past.

Before long the bird noticed. His strings of beaded memories were harder to reach, they would bop around and it was all difficult to see them, much less dive into them like a cool and welcoming lake. His thoughts seemed to be moving forward instead of back. He was remembering a sterile and distant future that had nothing to show for itself. The little bird knew he had to do something. When our memories are always going forward, how will we know who to love? How will I forgive all the ways we will be betrayed? So he made a crystal ball and in it he placed a mountain, and into that tiny mountain slope in the crystal ball he whispered his memories and they dove into the soil like seeds. He asked every other bird and bee and elephant and squirrel and every living thing to speak their memories into that little portal. Yes, and they came up again, in the chaos of losing the past, and they came up as spikenard.

You may not know this, but time is fickle, and time decided it would be good to stop unravelling time now, that things were clean enough. But at that point, all memory was gone, all refuse of the past, erased, every piece of art was bare and separated. But the crystal ball was still there, and he bird didn’t know why, but he kept remembering a mountain. So he flew the world around until he found the place in his crystal ball.

He saw the spikenard with the words of all the creatures written in it from a forgotten past. So when he smelled the spikenard he had can sense who he was, of who we all are.

The past is not a place, but it feels like one. No, it’s a way of caring for the memories of others. And spikenard helps us remember.