CREATION MYTH

Many people have come up with explanations for how the world came into existence so there's no reason why I shouldn't. It began long ago with a guy walking along the riverbank on a clear night where the moon lay silver on the sand, and as he picked his way along he noticed insects and crabs and plants and he caught them and plucked them from the dirt and took them to a crevice at the foot of a cliff and he sat in the dark and put them in his mouth, one by one, and he figured out what he liked and what he did not. Later on there were houses and burrows and more people. The more people there were the more they could accomplish. They rappelled down into the canyon and walked along the path that the river had worn into the rock until they came to a boulder that sat in a hollow. They worked together to lever it out. When they had done so a fountain of disasters erupted from it. All the terrible things you can imagine. Dragons. Disease of every kind. But not the evil intentions of humans. Those had existed since the very start. There had been murders and thefts and tortures since the first man on the riverbank. But if you think the additional adversities that came rushing out of the hole made things worse, you're right. They got a lot worse. And the guy from the start - the riverbank guy - he was old at this point, and he was tired and jaded, and he found it all to be symptomatic of the other terrible stuff that had been on his mind. Whether he was right or not is up to our interpretation. And he took himself back off to that first crevice and lay down and thought about the sum of the problems. How busy they had become since he first picked insects out of the soil. And how tired. The river, of course, filled the hollow and then kept flowing. It met the sea, and swept out the driftwood, and a basket with flowers in it, and a little boy who had set out on a raft in search of a real tragedy and died before he could share it.