myth for ti plant

Despite the world we live in now, the one that says there is no life where there are not eyes or thumbs, or numbers, or two legs, or a certain status.

There is life in all things, yes there is.

Some life is too sacred to analyze through and through but they hold secrets if you ask and wait long enough, listen to the dripping or the breathing of something unseen, or the way grasses sway against it.

——— Much of life is too deep for you to see the bottom of. But you will find levels you never knew were there if you descend.

Some things are too ephemeral to understand and yet we have never not seen them.

They weave through each day like our life is made of fibers.

One of the most difficult questions, the children ask while the sun sets: “why islands?”

There was a thread of water that began to sew the soil at the bottom of the sea. It collected sand and dust and skeletons and all sorts of shells onto it and slowly it rose up and became the islands. It is still sewing you can see the long white thread on the shoreline - though much much slower now.

But time went on and the sun and wind and rain took down all of the beautiful work that the thread was doing. So the thread started to weave rocks into the soil, But the rocks weighed the islands down. The thread went to the bottom of the ocean and brought up the algae and wove it together with coral and this became the ti plant. It grew thick white feet in the soil and it reached its hands up.

To the thread’s surprise, it brought the light and the fire of the sun into its hands, like it was harvesting summer. The fire lit up the ground. Trying to contain it, the thread made a large black box at the center of the earth where it would periodically erupt and grow, soon making sturdy volcanoes that anchored the islands.

The thread realized as it watched the work the ti plant was doing, that it did not need to work so hard as it had been, that it could lie on the beach and enjoy the sun in its old age. So the thread is there now laced on the shore, telling the story of the islands’ creations, while the ti plants care for the land.

We tell this to the children. Maybe some of the children and maybe some of them have fallen to sleep by now. But they can hear it in their dreams, they are listening to it in the sounds of the water.