Mythologies, New and Old
A
few years passed, and it sort of gradually became clear that I might stay in the United States.
Perhaps sensing that, my mother started telling me, during our long
international phone calls, about the virtues of water drunk from the wells of
my childhood.
“It’s
the only water that has the right energetic balance for you,” she said.
She
was talking about energy a lot, positive and healing versus negative and
destructive. It seemed that energy, unlike most other things, was never neutral,
unknowable, or an amalgam of good and bad stuff. As my mother described it, the
positive and healing type was somehow connected with my homeland and its
waters.
I
never knew what to answer. It felt like she was warning me of some unknown
danger lurking in the future. Wasn’t it enough that I went home, back to
Romania, once a year, then once every two years or so, to drink its energy-laden
water? Or were the aquifers of another continent doing some irreparable damage
to my energy? I had to admit that living in the States did feel exhausting at
times.
My
mother’s watery mythologies made me think of other ones—Antaeus, for example,
the giant from ancient Greek legends, son of Gaia, our mother earth. Antaeus was
invincible while touching the earth, as Gaia protected him. While fighting him,
Hercules discovered that Antaeus, whenever fallen to the ground, almost defeated,
would rise back up, healed and more energized than before. In the end, Hercules
defeated Antaeus because he held the giant up in the air, while Antaeus was
losing his power, becoming like any mortal, so Hercules could kill him in the
end. Had I, like Antaeus, lost contact with the source of my life and was now going
to lose my power? Was I going to be defeated in everything, just because I
wasn’t touching the land I was born on anymore?
The
truth was, I didn’t feel comfortable in the New World. I had thought that it
would be nothing else than some sort of a Western Europe just a bit farther
away—how one can be wrong! Everything was different, unexpected, and vaguely
threatening. Ladybugs, I noticed, were orange, while in Europe they have a
deeper reddish hue. In the fall, trees turned intense red, orange, and purple,
while back home they stayed within tamer ranges of yellow and rust. Sweet
potatoes, peanut butter, maple syrup, corn bread, tortillas—all these foods
hinted at a different life system, here for thousands of years, different from
everything I had encountered so far.
From
the outside—and I was a complete outsider at that point—the locals themselves,
as far as I could tell, exhibited an ongoing discomfort at being here, one that
they didn’t seem to notice. They never treaded the earth, but drove huge
terrain vehicles, as if ready to conquer any land that had not been asphalted
yet; they lived in houses whose windows never opened; chemical smells replaced
the fresh air from outside; and plasticky foodstuffs in bright packages filled
the aisles of supermarkets. It looked like they were spending a considerable
amount of time to avoid the reality of the place piercing through some
comfortable fantasy that they were other people doing something else in a
different place that was nicer and cleaner. It felt as if nature was out to get
them, and in order to prevent that hostile overtake they surrounded themselves
with chemical lawns, landscaped bushes and trees never more than ten years old,
miles and miles of asphalt, and ingeniously padded objects.
No comments:
Post a Comment