'Show,' the Keeper asked. It was imperative to ask the arrivals what they brought to the Sanctuary. He took this role seriously. A strong man and a tall one, he cast a formidable figure, despite missing an arm and being blind in the left eye, the orb pale like a winter sky. Sometimes they stared right at it. Most of the time they looked away, because polite society and it's rules persisted, despite everything that had happened since the Collapse.
The man before him wore a tattered suit and shuffled nervously toward him. He looked furtive, in the manner that all arrivals did - life did not mean what it used to. In the pocket of his suit jacket was a phone, it's screen cracked. It would not have worked for years, but the man clearly felt it was an important part of his armour. The Keeper felt the urge to laugh, but didn't. He himself did not remove his shoes for eighteen months after leaving the city, and only then after losing his arm, his eye and his wife to marauders, or perhaps it was rats. He couldn't remember. Time had lost all meaning for him. There was only the sky below, the earth above, and the garden which stretched into the land behind the gates. He knew there were guards on the walls, and people that tended the gardens, but they were not something he put his attention on. This man in the tattered suit did not even really matter, but what he brought might.
'Show', he said again. He had all the time in the world.
The tattered man extended his hand, and opened it, to show a bundle of car keys. On one fob, the Keeper noticed a brand that he himself once proudly owned. He had no need for a vehicle. All he needed was right here. Sky above, earth below, and all the new wonders in between, to which he had to lose half his sight before he could truly see them. The Keeper gestured him to one side. The man's shoulder's slumped.
'What do you want from us?' he whispered. 'This is my third offering. Please tell us what you want'.
The Keeper did not answer. If they did not know, they had not yet opened their wild heart, the one that belonged to The Mother. They did not listen to their dreams. They did not listen to the thrum of the earth, the whispering winds or notice the passage of the moon across the sky. They did not ask the Mother how to live. They still believed themselves separate from Her. This thinking was of the old ways, and would not do in this world.
The tattered man was replaced by others.
'Show' he said, more kindly now. He forgot sometimes they were like children. Next to toddle forward were two middle aged woman. Perhaps they were sisters. One still wore a gold wedding band, which she proffered victoriously, as if gold still had value. Her companion lifted her skirts, revealing a tangle of wirey grey hair and a belly tattoo of a crescent moon. Blood flowed freely down her thighs. You could have The Mother inked on your skin and flow from your body still not know her, he thought, incredulous. He expected them both to be mad. Madness was common. He himself vibrated with madness before he met The Mother. It did not mean that one day you could not be sane, just that it was just a different kind of sanity.
'Show,' he said, beckoning with his one set of fingers. The woman joined the tattered man, falling to the outskirts of the crowd. He would see them in a few weeks time, perhaps. Feeding the earth with their flesh, or else eyes shining with the light of the Mother, and a true gift in the palms of their hands. It was rare to have them return more than twice. So easily they gave up hope.
When he saw the Mother, he had been walking for many moons, his arm rotting, his eyes both nearly blinded from the desert sun. Everything was desert, he knew. Society had collapsed long ago, even though it believed it was still coherant. Man had talked of floods and fires and pestilence for centuries, yet did refused to look at it when it came, and believed it an anomaly. The order of the world that they knew disintegrated, like share markets and concrete buildings falling into fissures. Man was good at building castles, but was not good at watching them fall. Absolute and utter ruin happened in what seemed like minutes, although took nearly a decade. His children died of starvation and still the crows fed off them. His wife became one of them, her black wings silhouetted against the fierce sun as she fell. Her last words? He did not remember. He thinks she might have asked him if he had locked the front gate. He had not. Nor had he mourned her. His heart had turned to stone.
'Show' he heard a voice say in the darkness. 'Show'. He was prostrate on the earth. His lips were anointed with clay and one good hand had reached for his children in the darkness, only to realise upon waking that they were no more, that his life as he knew it was no more. He was to blame, he realised. He had sold chemicals to farmers in India in a past life. In another he had been a whaler. Two life times ago he had sold land in tiny parcels to the poor, and before that, he had cut down forests in the Amazon. He had mined ore from the earth. Displaced peoples for gold. Sold contracts for uranium ore and exploded ancient cave systems with paintings of ochred hands because there was no need for the past when the future was big business. He had poured chemicals into rivers. Killed the last of a species of frog in Borneo. Replaced the last of the forests with factories. Owned a fleet of container ships that clogged the oceans of the world. On vacations he spearfished and hunted the last of the rhinoceros.
His ribcage opened to the pain of the world.
The Mother spoke to him.
'Show' she said. He showed her everything that had ever been in his heart.
She offered him cool water that trickled from an underground spring onto the plains where the Sanctuary would one day become a new Eden. He gave up his shoes. He cut off his arm with a blade he had used to cut open the throat of a horse that his children fed off, and that fended off a group of men that wanted his wife. The amputation did not hurt any more than the pain in his ribcage. For many days he drank from the Spring and made his confessional. He watched ants devour the flesh of his arm to the bone. He slept for a long time and when he awoke he only had his sight in one eye.
Around the spring, tiny wrens took succour beside him. It was the first life he had seen since the crows. They looked at him curiously from the rock that would one day become an altar. Life persisted, he realised. After all man had done, life had persisted.
The Mother was all there was and all there had every been, he realised. How had he never seen her, even though she had been with them always? She was there in the hot sun that parched his skin in the desert, but she was in the iron rich water that bubbled up from the earth. She was the tiny insects circling up in the warm currents from the earth in the late afternoon light. She was the cold shadows that blanketed him after nightfall, and the dewy dawn. She was Venus, low slung in the purple dusk. He took off all his clothes and laid on the soil and breathed with her, feeling her form beneath and all around him.
It took him a whole year to come back to the spring, with pockets full of seeds. Another five years to build the wall and find people who knew the Mother too. The ones that would die for her. That would anoint themselves with water from the spring and feel the reverence that he did. That thought with their hearts, not their minds. They did not mourn the old world. He knew his children and the horse and his wife had all returned to the Mother. When he breathed they breathed too, and the stars, and the grasses that grew on the edge of the Sanctuary, and the ants, and all the living things.
And so, an old man now, he stood at the gates to the Sanctuary.
'Show', he said.
They came with all kinds of trinkets from the old world: rusted ploughs, sacks of fifty dollar notes, a painting hundreds of years old, a samurai sword. But he was not looking for the things of that world. He was looking for their wild hearts. Their earth hearts. Their Mother worshipping hearts.
A long time after the tattered man and the sisters came a young woman who looked at him straight into his eye and reached for his hand.
'Show' he said, and she sung, of the river she had seen winding through the mountains, of the lone eagle, of the last coyote, a song of the Mother. She was still humming when she entered the garden.
On dusk, as the light came low and soft, a small girl came with her brother and in their cupped hands lay a nest of dandelion seeds. It was hard to show the Keeper and not allow them to fly in the cooling wind, but he smiled at them and winked with his own good eye, and they laughed and their hands flew upwards like bird wings, scattering the seeds to the wind. They too entered the garden.
More would come, he knew. The Mother was awakening their wild hearts, for it was the only way they could survive.
All else became dust and bones and songs and dandelion seeds. It was the way of things.
This was written in response to the Abundance Tribe question of the week, about deep ecological awareness being spiritual awareness. Somehow it became a short piece of fiction. I hope you enjoyed it, and my point came through okay!
For @trucklife-family and @edouard, whose beautiful words this week went straight to my heart.
