There was a thatched hut. No one knew who built it, or when. It had always been there. Sometimes it was stuffy and hot, other times cold, and it often felt as though all the dust in the world was gathered here. Aside from the garden and trees outside, there was nothing as far the eye could see. In the near total darkness of the thatched hut was a woman, alone. Piercing the darkness were small beams of light from cracks in the roof and walls. The light fell patchily upon her shoulders, her arms, her feet, and her legs. She was starlit.

The woman wore a magnificent blue and green dress, which floated around her curves and upon her skin of rich earthly colour. Her long white hair fell forward over her crossed arms and over her bent knees. Her face was hidden. She kept herself secret and secure within her own bosom. Her breath: a slow in, and a slow out, was the only sound in the hut. One could almost hear the dust fall.

Senses adjusted to this light would notice that the woman was clearly tired. Not only tired, she was worn. The dress was torn on her back, knees, and breast. Underneath the rips was dry blood, pus, and other venoms, witnesses of rough treatment.

In the absolute stillness of the primitive hut she sighed heavily. Her fragile shoulders rose and fell with her breath, and as she exhaled a breeze swished outside the hut, coursing through the inner air through the holes of the wall. At the end of her exhale a sob broke out against her will, and the world heard the rustling leaves the trees. Then came stillness again. It was peculiarly heavy and ominous.

Into the mud floor the woman sadly dug her toes, trying to ground herself. The hut was barren and empty. A woman of her age should surely by now have children about her, making the household one of plenty. Children she did have, many of them whom she all loved very dearly. Yet they were not here today. No one took care of the Mother.

All throughout their lives she had cared for them and loved them. With maternal care and patience she helped them grow, but it was difficult.

She would give them milk until she was dry, but they always would cry for more. She gave them gifts, which they would break, gave them food, which they would gobble without leaving any for her. They came to her only to take, to take, to take, and to take more. Then they went forth, ever hungrier. From her bosom they drank all the milk, from her belly they ate every last crumb, from the trees they ate all the fruit, stopping its replenishing seeds, and from the land they scavenged the edibles and valuables of every nook and cranny. Even from their mother’s only dress they tore vast strips, skirting indecency, for their own use. From her flowing snow-white crown they ripped tufts. They had even, in more ways than one, forced themselves upon her. Such, overtime, age and the unrelieved burdens of quiet and brutal despair had made this proud mother fall from a prideful stance to this pitiful curl.

As the children had grown the Mother tried vainly to guide them towards the nobility of divinity. She had been so proud of their ambition, their sheer ingenuity! But alas, she never knew how to how the direct the torrent of their passions. She taught slowly, yet they moved so fast! She would sit them down underneath the tree of wisdom, but as the weary mother soon found out, nothing could keep her children still for very long, not even the promise of fruit from the venerable tree should they simply listen. They took one bite, then left that garden forever. They were too much, and they were too many. She had failed to turn their ingenuity to another purpose than the ravaging and exploitation of each other and of their Mother.

One day the Mother, now well advanced in age, saw with a twinge of grief her children peering, then gazing longingly, out of the door of the hut. They knew that those small beams of light in the darkness meant something. They imagined many beautiful tales, but in the end what possessed them most was the idea that the lights might be beacons leading to other huts. Perhaps to huts where they might feast freely again, occupied by other plump and jovial women who might take them in. The children were ravenous, as though she had mistreated them and never given them anything at all.

No longer could the Mother provide the plentiful feasts that her ungrateful children always demanded. No longer could she stammer their greedy cries with her abundance. They took, and they took until she could give no more, and then they claimed even more. Now in her hour of direst need, where gratefulness should have been, the children mostly looked upon her with disgust. They trifled at the poor mud hut in which their simple Mother lived. They looked ahead, out the door, and turned their backs on this wreck of a woman.

A sob racked the broken body as she thought of that vileness, and she prepared. A shiver coursed up her back and a cool gust of wind shook the walls, bringing a fresh gale into the musty hut.

Her heart cracked at the thought that she could never satisfy her children, that they would never love her and be grateful. It cracked further as she thought of the other women whose home’s they would pillage, whose bodies they would rape.     Would they never love at all? Oh how she had hoped one day to see them off in joyous marriage! Now she would never see that day. Oh how she had hoped! But she could hope no longer. The thoughts convulsed through her body and broke her heart. It split pitifully, but at its center she found the molten iron core of resolution around which her whole being gravitated. Boiling strength lay there, and it was being released. The mother drenched herself in that strength in preparation of what no mother should ever have to do.

It needed to be done.

A rough exhale blew past the woman’s mouth as the walls shook anew. Her fingers clenched upon the folds of her dress. Rolling under her ebony skin her muscles tensed and flexed. In this effort the woman suddenly appeared much stronger and younger than her passive beaten self let show. As though preparing to pounce she dug her feet into the ground, and her knuckles grew white from grasping her dress so tightly. She breathed hard and the wind rattled the hut harder and harder.

Tears began streaking down her cheeks and rain began to pit-patter upon the thatched roof. She ground her teeth in her despair and the whole World began to tremble. The Earth of her skin was no longer stable.

Mountains appeared and disappeared as her clenching muscles rolled beneath her skin. Grasping onto her hair she tore out patches of it in the greatest violence mangling her white mane and tossing tuffs of it about her as the even the so-called eternal snows melted out of their fabled existence. The Mother’s dress was drenched with her warm tears and sweat, and the ocean’s rose relentlessly. Entire coasts disappeared under her tear ducts. The rain fell violently. She heaved like an animal, and the hut was battered with gusts, rains, and fear. It was a scene drawn from the most primeval of times.

She lifted her buttocks of the floor, but was still curled on herself. She rocked back and forth on her feet. At the woman’s core her heart boiled, ready to erupt. Blood pounded in her ears, giving a tribal rhythm to it all, and she heard within herself the cries of her children. The cries echoed dismally as she concentrated enough violence to rip away in an instant the love that had rooted over countless millennia by her care and permission. But the permission had been abused, and was now being revoked.

She coughed in fever and the hut became as a boiler while strong winds threatened to tear it all away. The thought that all of her children, even the innocent, would have to pay the price of the sins of their bipedal siblings was devastating to the motherly soul.

Thus was the cost of cleansing. Mothers do not always wish to sweep, but it must be done.

Like the lighting that tore the sky, she erupted to her feet rearing her head and opening her arms. From the deepest caves came her howl of despair; the World shook violently, and in her voice was the power of thunder. It was a howl never heard before, one that tore the vocal chords to produce, and that tore the heart and mind to hear. The skies got dark, being only ripped open by the violence of lightning and the thunder of her shrieks.

Her face, heretofore hidden, was twisted into the grimness of her act. It was horrifying. Beauty could have been presumed earlier, no longer. An iron mask was imposed upon her, a mask of death. It was all of the terrifying masks that had been imagined in the night of times and sculpted for tribal dances put into one. Its terror completely distorted the wearer’s face. Gone were the soft angles creased into permanence from almost endless love and smiling, almost endless love. Her eyes were all white. Her iris had disappeared, but the veins remained and they snaked red across the white purity. Her eyes looked like shattering eggs as they rolled back in demented fashion.

She stretched to stand at her full threatening height. In a boom all the elements of Nature were unleashed in their greatest furry and it was only by some divine miracle that this humble thatched hut withstood the chaos. Outside the leaves of the trees howled angrily as they were ripped off. Looking at the starry roof, arms by her side the woman opened her mouth in a quiet scream that was drowned out as all around the World her children cried.

All the fury of her heart poured out of her. Every volcano erupted spewing burning magma on the land and freezing ash in the skies. The Mother wailed so much that she tore her throat. Blood boiled out of her mouth and flowed down her front, staining her dress. Her ensuing coughs released pestilence that ravaged everything.

The children howled and cursed and prayed and repented and pleaded and apologized as all the cities of men burned and fell to ash. Yet nothing changed. They fought wars and killed themselves over the last scrapes of her dress, desperate to hide in infancy in the safety of her folds. These were their final blind acts: splintering rather than salvaging, breaking rather than banding, hating rather than loving. Their cattle died, their ships sunk, their monuments crumbled, their ideals evaporated, hunger struck, thirst choked, diseased possessed, violence flourished, and death reaped as their lives ended. They pleaded, but she did not heed. She had heard it all too often before.

In their final breath her children simply cursed her and all she had ever done. They did not, even now, understand her love for them. They understood not that she was saving them from endless eons of continuous frothing madness and violence. Misery lay in the loneliness of the stars for those whose hearts were not pure.

If the children did not learn their Mother’s lessons before leaving her hearth of Earth, they would spread like a plague rather than as the pollen of her love on the cosmic winds. No, they held only violent bestial contempt in their selfish misunderstanding of her. Their dying throes fell as blows upon her figure. They emptied the armouries as fast as the granaries; their bombs went off, their factories exploded, their guns emptied, their smoke filled her lungs, their toxins her skin and blood, but nothing would stop her and they only harmed themselves. They howled in hateful, defying rage at being torn from their lofty branches back to the mud of mortality. They had climbed on the trees and as they were extending their hands she tore them down; they had been so close to the immortality of the stars.

To the last they cursed and hated her, her love and the grace even of this act unfathomable to them.

The suffering was horrendously long and drawn out for them, but thankfully the Mother simply had to blink and it would be over. In a final spasm of effort she clenched all the energy in her body and silenced the last voice. The wind positively howled over the destroyed Earth of the hut, and the leaves of the distant trees were heard no longer. The sickening sound of snapping wood was drowned out for good by the gale. This supreme effort lifted the Mother onto her toes. She was there for a breath, convulsing at the height of violence and pain, and then she utterly collapsed to the floor.

Her body lay in a mangled heap of destruction on the floor as the elements raged on outside, sparing her and her home. Blood trickled from her mouth, tears from her eyes, and sobs slipped from her lips. Her dress was ravaged and her skin torn in many places. She simply lay there. The storms lasted for a hundred thousand years.

She became white with deathly pallor as cold seized her in its grip, choking out almost all sparks of life, almost. But at the end of the years the patient Father of the Mother came in gently as he always did. Sol’s warm rays kissed the Earth and her skin, and colour flushed back into her. The holy heat melted the ice and in the torrent she cleansed final putrid wounds.

Overtime the Mother healed and the greenery of her dress gained vividness and began to weave itself back together again. The dirt was washed out of the blue, and her hair grew back. Slowly she rose back to her feet.

There was a great sadness in her heart. It would heal, but it would leave a scar. As she healed, the molten metal core was hidden again. Love began to be harvested anew upon her heart.

She washed herself clean in the waters of her cosmic faith. She saw herself in their reflection: an old woman. Whatever vigour of youth she had had was now fossilized under the wrinkles of hardship, spent as it was in the pain of necessity. Nevertheless, strength remained. There came the day when she brushed the floors of her home clear of the detritus of past shattered dreams, and planted the seeds of hope once more in her garden.

As she watched the offshoots break the soil layered with the toils, hardships, and wisdoms of a thousand eras she smiled. The house of Gaia would prosper again. Under the Mother’s benevolent smile the fresh Earth basked in the maternal hope that one day she would raise children that she could see proudly off. She sighed contently. A gentle breeze rustled the small green leaves of the offshoots as she whispered to them her dreams. Worthy children would one day support her as she gave them away to the daughters of stars in joyful marriage. She would retire, and the leaves would fall, and blow away on the wind with the pollen. Finally then she would rest in her cosmic hut free of the demanding toils of motherhood.

(c) Julien Dupont, 2014