Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

creation story

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/15549399.55.1.14

1554-9631

Maren Loveland,

Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

He makes the light and the primeval oceans and the rapturous Word, but I have the dirtthe ground the chthonic underbelly and sustenance of all. I have the jewel-toned beetles and cavern cathedrals and the slick blesmols. The translucent jellyfish and the elegant otherworldly bats. The velutinous darkness I see when I close my eyes and look out is what I create—that moment of descending into something unknownwith limitless possibility. Black calla lilies and thick root webs and lithe olms and the young coyotes with protruding ribcages.Before I sculpt the earthand the atmosphere tooI try to enjoy this night and remember my sliver of time before the labor of creation. The time of loving and crying and walking through snow floating down like tiny newborn stars. The time of waking up to the bright marmalade sunrise shining through the bathroom window and whispering to the daytime moon. I was a lover eating rabbit stewwondering how I could rupture so violentlyso completelyand still move forward through time.The old time of unknowing, of not knowing the unknown.On the first dayI made the starling and then let its feathers become the centerpiece of the highest worldglittering with iridescent specklesletting the undertones of violet and turquoise shine through.This(I thought)is the skythe world's favorite quilt: the starling as firmament.I rest tonight and think about my large-souled dayslike when my father taught me how to fishor when I picked bucketfuls of fresh strawberries in springor flew through gilded air on a bicycle in June.It is no coincidence thenthat the words soil and soul are nearly identical sonic twinsseeing as the layers of my soullike a stratigraphyread certain scales of timeexperienceand remember past lives fossilized in the sentient sensual sediment of the body. The strata run horizontal like long thin snakes with writhing bellies underneath my skinvarying in widthas some strands of time are denser with memory than others.This is where I will begin and endin remembering these moments of unknown beauty and quiet grit.Underneath the soul's many mineral depositsthe liquid core sends a pulse through the bodyspilling blood through an ecosystem of veins. Here, at the heart, I remember my shamewhich smells like cinnamon—sharp and harsh and cathartic. Memory may not be a realitybut it bends and melts into worlds both known and unknownpreserved in our salubrious soils.I recall that I am a world unto myselfslowly dissolving untilat last at last my burning center is exposedand burns hot and shimmers right before it erupts into a thousand shining pieces that float like meteors in an unknown reservoir.On the second dayI will make the dirta luscious loam with a dense liquid heart that beats and writhes and fuels the world forward. It is the origin from which everything else will flower and grow without my help, alone and unabated. I will make the ground strong and softfull of sculptures and sepulchres and pools of oil and iron. I will create sandstone red as summer cherries and rough as a man's stubble, like thistles.Worldmaking is an act of time grace and pain anger and patience love. It is a birthing. I trust my body and create the underworld the underneath the subterranean. The clay the silt the dirt the sand. Within the soil of the world is where the fleshy self iswhere secrets are whispered and sung. All things are taken into the soft world of the earth in a returninga homecoming that invites new life through transforming death. It is where things are made radical and rejuvenated and why mud spread over the eyes gives sight. A body placed into the ground is born anewmade supple through time and slithering annelids.