Repent!

The pot had just begun to boil. An aroma of savory sauce still waded softly though the air as Julia turned off the stove. Making this particular ramen was a two-part process that she cherished. First is the broth, roiling in the warm water, was a dash of soy sauce, green onions, a cutting of yellow, aromatic ginger, and fresh shitake mushrooms. The noodles, boiling in a separate pot, were just about perfect. Experience has taught her to time the boil so the noodles were soft with an ever so slight bite to them. The steaming noodles filled her bowl as the thick ladle filled the gaps and edges with the warm liquid that was chemically constructed to feel exactly like home. She had nothing to do today, but put on her favorite fuzzy socks, sit by the bay window of her second story apartment and watch the beauty of fall make its elegant entrance across the narrow street below.

Her short hair brushed gently across her cheek as she leaned toward the bowl. With one leg on the dining room chair that she sat, she leveled a soft blow on her spoon, and found a smile creeping across her lips. This was exactly where she wanted to be.

“Repent!” came a voice from the street below. First muffled by the distance, but it grew louder with every cry.

“Repent!”

“REPENT!”

Julia’s smile dissipated as her brows furrowed. The right corner of her lip drew upward in distain as she looked through the nearby window for its source.

“Repent!” Cried the man, now just below her window.

“Oh nature, this is getting ridiculous.” Julia groaned aloud.

Thoughts flooded her mind as the decades old resentments she has cultivated found their way to the surface of her consciousness.

She was ardently agnostic. She spent 12 long years in an Ecocentrist Academy and knew full well the teachings and principals of Mother Nature. For her 12 years was enough and she has done her time. Flashbacks of weekly nature walks to commune with the sacred Mother of the Earth had left her with nothing more than a strong abhorrence for mosquitos and muddy shoes. Things have been getting more dogmatic it seems since her secondary educational days. Zealots and prophets claiming to speak for Mother Earth have grown louder and more acceptable throughout the community.

The man was now walking away from her apartment. He was slight and skinny with a noticeable limp. He wore the garbs of one of the more radical sects of the religion – a brown piece of organically grown cotton fashioned into a long tunic. This particular side of the religious spectrum abstained from any and all commodification of nature. As they believed placing a price on any item, shifted our belief in Her grace and was heretical to the idea of Her abundance. Price meant scarcity, and in the Holy Balance scarcity was an aberration.

This was all fine and so long as the evangelisms didn’t try to force it down other people’s throats, or market beliefs based solely on fear. She had no ability to know, with any certainty, of the nature of the Goddess and simply chose to live her life as best she could.

It was a good day, despite the morning interruption. She looked through her bookshelf to make headway on her large collection of books in her “intend to read someday” pile. While going through the shelfs she noticed the rarely opened copy of the Bible her mother gave her when she graduated. Her parents were fairly conservative, pious people and she kept the book for a memory of her mother more than any interest in reading through its stories of the birth of the world and its long parables about the Holy Balance of humanity in nature. She selected the next edition of the science fiction saga that has been her guilty pleasure in the past months and sat back to read about the dystopian world in which rampant consumerism and corporate interests pilfered the earth for economic gain and causing wide-spread impacts to the environment in the process. She shuttered at the thought.

It was the end of the day, and Julia laid on her comfortable queen-sized bed, nestled under the thick covers, rubbing her feet together to remove one sock from her foot. She found a habit in sleeping with a single sock. There was a nice balance to the different temperatures it caused. Settled in she quickly fell asleep.

Julia found herself in a meadow. The fragments of consciousness of her surroundings signaled that she was in a dream, but there were details she was unaccustomed to. The grass was cool and prickly against her bare foot. The wind blew her hair with a slight caress that caused a ripple of sensation across her neck down to her forearms. She knew instinctively it was a dream but felt a deep feeling of calm and happiness that was certainly real. A large crash surprised her, and she felt the adrenaline pulsing through her veins. In the distance, over the cresting hills emerged a metal monster climbing up toward its sloping peak. Breathing a thick cloud of dark smoke from its side, the two-legged beast ambled forward with a mechanical elegance and precision. Suddenly the beast jerked violently, and its long-jointed leg was pulled from beneath it causing the machine to fall hard against the ground. It pointed the object it had in its hand toward the leg and fired a shot of blinding light toward, what looked like, a thick vine around the leg dragging the whole of the creature beyond the hill. The vine recoiled and retreated. The machine kept still for a moment while Julia walked closer to the scene. She stopped in her tracks as its body opened with a hiss.

A man emerged from within the machine, struggling to climb out of its chest he appeared battered and worn, but was still young in appearance. He jumped from the laying body of metal and ambled his way toward Julia. He didn’t see her watching him. She was a spectator, watching the man wondering through the meadow, so out of place, with a fear emanating from within him that was at odds with the peace she still felt inside her. A fierce wind came suddenly, pushing the man backwards. His feet were spread apart with his back foot now bracing himself against the onslaught. It subsided leaving the man winded from the exertion. Still walking toward Julia he made it to the foot of the small hill that she stood upon as a new sound – a loud and sustained crashing of waves roared toward them. The torrent of water surged and crested at the sight of the man. He brought his arms up in a cross in a feeble attempt to shield himself from the force of the water and it consumed him. Julia’s mouth was open and her eyes poked and prodded the view in front of her trying to pierce through the waves for any sight of the man.

A hand landed on moist earth and to Julia’s surprise. She watched the man climb from the calming waters. Free from the river that appeared below her, the man fell to his back, exhausted. With a groan, now audible to Julia’s ears, he struggled to come to his feet and began his journey up the small hill, inching closer and closer to Julia. Just as he was within feet of her, the man slipped slightly. Catching himself with one hand. Julia heard him gasp, and with a quick motion, his eyes met hers. There was a look of sheer terror in him as the skin of his cheeks turned a supreme pale against the red lines around his eyes. The man struggled to breath, gasping for air, and Julia watched in horror as a rough blackness emerged from his neck. The ridged dark covering spread through his chin, now converging at all sides. It found its way into his mouth, to the cavities of his nostrils, down his forehead, where all Julia could see was the piercing and pleading gaze of his eyes. When they were coated with it, the man was frozen like a rock on the crest of her hill. This was too much. “What kind of dream was this?” She thought. She was not waking up so she did what felt instinctive and ran.

She ran down the opposite side of the hill, toward a forest of thick trees beyond the meadow. Entering the forest, she felt the crunching of fallen leaves beneath her feet and kept pace to the steady rhythm of her gait across the forest floor. She was tired, scared and felt trapped by this dream. Unable to run any longer she fell to the ground, her knees and hands feeling the dirt and leaves beneath her. She panted and wanted to cry out but couldn’t. She looked behind her to see if anything was following. There was only her footprints. If she was stuck here, Julia thought, she had to at least try and make a plan. She looked around frantically for any sign or direction when she saw a figure in the distance. It was a person. It’s back was against her, but she knew it was a person by the long braid that covered its back.

“Hello!” she shouted at the being.

“Hello!” Julia repeated as she got back to her feet and walked quickly towards it.

The person didn’t appear to hear her calls, and as Julia got closer, the figure of a woman became apparent. The woman, moved slowly and even with the loud footsteps of Julia’s approach, gave her no attention. The woman gracefully walked away from Julia, and at this Julia’s pace quickened. She was catching up to the woman, just as the figure stopped. The woman turned slowly and looked into her eyes and with a soft smile sat on a fallen log.

“Hello Julia” the woman said, still bearing the warm but melancholy smile on her face.

She was beautiful Julia could see now. Her thick brown hair was unfussed and rolled elegantly across her forehead and tied loosely together toward the long braid that reached to her thighs. In her hair, was a white and yellow flower that caught Julia’s eye.

“Who… Who are you?” Julia asked, taken aback by the familiarity in which the lady greeted her.

“Oh, that’s right. We need a proper introduction don’t we now.” The lady laughed as a big smile came across her face.

“I’m Akuva. But I’m sure you are more familiar with the name… what is it? Ah… ‘Mother Nature’.” She continued to laugh, almost embarrassed by the sound of name Julia knew so well.

“No freaking way…” Julia said in an audible whisper.

“You must feel a little out of sorts, am I right?” Akuva said with a smile still stretch on the edge of one side of her lips. She attempted to stand but struggled and fell back to her seat on the log.

“Are you ok?” Julia asked reaching toward her, hesitating with a mind racing as to the appropriate protocols for addressing the Mother of all things.

“I have been better.” Akuva replied. Her right arm held her bent knee. Her eyes looked to the floor as she caught her breath.

“What is this place?” Julia asked.

With a chuckle, Akuva looked up at Julia and said “This is your mind of course! You are quite asleep. I hope you don’t mind my intrusion, however. It’s rather hard to phone ahead for these kinds of things.”

“Wait, what?” Julia’s eyebrows raised. “This is a dream, but you are…”

“Yes. I am quite here.” Akuva finished her sentence, which did not do much to clarify things in Julia’s mind.

“Sometimes…” Akuva continued “I need to reach out. To speak to you. To connect. Selfish maybe, but the connection to the world helps with the struggle.”

“What struggles do you have?” Julia asked seeing the age showing in Akuva’s face.

“Things seem to have gotten tangled in the generational game of telephone it seems.” Akuva smiled. “I’m grateful for these moments to connect and try and correct the message. I really should do this more often, but I am afraid transitioning between our realities is not very easy… especially these days.”

“But you are all powerful.” Julia exclaimed. “I learned this. You are Mother Nature, the goddess of all living things. The keeper of the Holy Balance, the purveyor of the natural truth. You spite those who go against your teachings and keep the world in harmony. You have the power…” Julia trailed off realizing the person in front of her did not resemble the image she has been taught. She seemed so… human.

“Ah yes, let’s start there.” Akuva responded shifting on her seat to settle in. “The world is a far more complicated place I’m sorry to say. The balance is not like water settling to an even level after the ripples have subsided. The balance is obtained through a conflict as old as time. I am relatively new to this war actually, but for millennia now, since your great, great ancestors came to this earth, I have been by there side and fought for you all since then.”

Julia couldn’t comprehend this. This was all information she never thought to herself. This couldn’t be a dream. She sat on the floor beside Akuva and listened.

“Each great force of the earth spawned a champion of sorts – a trustee of their existence – to fight for the survival. The balance is only an uneven peace. Since the dawn of humanity, and my birth, I have fought alongside you, against the wild tangle of life that all seeks to obtain dominance on this planet. The plants, the animals, the bacteria of the earth, the wind, the seas all of them are locked in a battle for supremacy. The trees, and vines seek to claim the land and all things. The animals populate and clamor to be supreme among all things. The wind and the sea wish to be free to span the world unimpeded. We all fight for survival and our fight is just for each of us.”

The scene Julia was shown began to make sense now. The man, and his vestiges of humanity, fighting for survival.

“Each thing on this planet has their champion. From the wind, the glaciers, the mighty beasts that roam the earth, to the imperceptible viruses. We all have names – Bastig, Melchor, Sirena – and some have lost the battle and have been erased from the earth. You see this battle every day. The floods that sweep over the prairies, the hunger of sharks, the blades of weeds peaking through the concrete. All things struggling for life on this planet adapting to the actions of another in a dance that has persisted since the beginning.”

“So, you’re not the Mother of all things, I guess…” Julia said.

“Correct. I am, for use of the familiar phrase, the Mother of Humanity on this earth. I fight for your survival, guiding you toward survival. When the droughts came, or the plagues of locust descended, I mustered alongside your people to seek out new land. To adapt and to thrive.”

Leaning back on her log, with a face of satisfaction on her lips, she continued “And… I have done a pretty good job, I’d say. Maybe too good.”

Akuva’s eye’s softened and she looked intently at Julia with sorrow. “Things are getting harder. You have done so much. Together we have claimed dominance in this world, and in your strength, I have lost my ability to guide you. The lives you live are beautiful, filled with so much meaning and purpose. You are worth every fight, but hubris is a hard force to tame. The forces of this world adapt quickly. They seek to use every action against us. With every forest that is destroyed, it leaves room for the forces of disease to take hold. With every factory, the world becomes warmer providing the strength to the winds and the rain to fight back with more ferocity. The great balance the books about me speak of is not altruistic, you see, its strategic. That concept has been lost over the centuries and without it I am losing my ability to see you survive.”

“Why come to me?” Julia asked after a moment of deep thought.

“Well…” Akuva answered. “It sometimes feels good to see what the fight is for. I have lost much of my ability to guide you toward survival in this harsh world, and you all are as imperfect as the world around you, but you are beautiful. You have the power to create, to love, to express love, and to care for the creatures and forces that seek to overcome you. It’s really something to admire. I just need to connect, be heard, be seen and to see the purpose of all of this and I see it in you. So thank you.”

“That can’t be it?!” Julia exclaimed. “Look at you! There has to be something I can do.”

“I have been fighting since the dawn of your kind. That brings a certain perspective. Things that matter, the victories worth winning, all take time. I believe in you all and I believe that you will find the path back to survival. It may take time, but I believe in you.”

Julia woke in an instant. She looked around the room and struggled to catch her breath. “What the hell was that?” she thought. She sat quietly in her room. Thought of her life, of the decisions she has made. She looked to the table beside her and there sat a delicate white and yellow flower and she realized how could she not believe in a being that believed so much in her.