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Dear Haijin, visitors and travelers,
Another day has started ... it's a wonderful sunny day here in The Netherlands and it's almost 25 degrees Celcius ... so it looks like summer is here ... a bit early, but well ... all nature started earlier this year, because of the soft winter.
Today we will go on with our journey along worldwide legends, myths, saga and folktales and today we are starting with stories from Down Under, in other words, we are starting with stories from the Aboriginals in Australia.
Our first myth is, as you can understand from our prompt, Creation, the creation-story of the Aboriginals. I hope you all will like this story and I hope it will inspire you to write haiku.
How the World was Created - An Aboriginal Dreamtime-story.
There is no single creation story among Aboriginal peoples, who have a diverse mythology. Some traditions hold that the Earth was created by one of the gods of the Dreamtime, others that particular creatures were created by particular gods or spirit ancestors.
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| Credits: Aboriginal Dreamtime |
In the beginning the earth was a bare plain. All was dark. There was no life,
no death. The sun, the moon, and the stars slept beneath the earth. All the
eternal ancestors slept there, too, until at last they woke themselves out of
their own eternity and broke through to the surface.
When the eternal ancestors arose, in the Dreamtime, they wandered the earth, sometimes in animal form - as kangaroos, or emus, or lizards -- sometimes in human shape, sometimes part animal and human, sometimes as part human and plant.
Two such beings, self-created out of nothing, were the Ungambikula. Wandering the world, they found half-made human beings. They were made of animals and plants, but were shapeless bundles, lying higgledy-piggledy, near where water holes and salt lakes could be created. The people were all doubled over into balls, vague and unfinished, without limbs or features.
With their great stone knives, the Ungambikula carved heads, bodies, legs, and arms out of the bundles. They made the faces, and the hands and feet. At last the human beings were finished. Thus every man and woman was transformed from nature and owes allegiance to the totem of the animal or the plant that made the bundle they were created from -- such as the plum tree, the grass seed, the large and small lizards, the parakeet, or the rat.
This work done, the ancestors went back to sleep. Some of them returned to underground homes, others became rocks and trees. The trails the ancestors walked in the Dreamtime are holy trails. Everywhere the ancestors went, they left sacred traces of their presence -- a rock, a waterhole, a tree.
For the Dreamtime does not merely lie in the distant past, the Dreamtime is the eternal Now. Between heartbeat and heartbeat, the Dreamtime can come again. (Source: Aboriginal Creation-story)
When the eternal ancestors arose, in the Dreamtime, they wandered the earth, sometimes in animal form - as kangaroos, or emus, or lizards -- sometimes in human shape, sometimes part animal and human, sometimes as part human and plant.
Two such beings, self-created out of nothing, were the Ungambikula. Wandering the world, they found half-made human beings. They were made of animals and plants, but were shapeless bundles, lying higgledy-piggledy, near where water holes and salt lakes could be created. The people were all doubled over into balls, vague and unfinished, without limbs or features.
With their great stone knives, the Ungambikula carved heads, bodies, legs, and arms out of the bundles. They made the faces, and the hands and feet. At last the human beings were finished. Thus every man and woman was transformed from nature and owes allegiance to the totem of the animal or the plant that made the bundle they were created from -- such as the plum tree, the grass seed, the large and small lizards, the parakeet, or the rat.
This work done, the ancestors went back to sleep. Some of them returned to underground homes, others became rocks and trees. The trails the ancestors walked in the Dreamtime are holy trails. Everywhere the ancestors went, they left sacred traces of their presence -- a rock, a waterhole, a tree.
For the Dreamtime does not merely lie in the distant past, the Dreamtime is the eternal Now. Between heartbeat and heartbeat, the Dreamtime can come again. (Source: Aboriginal Creation-story)
There are many Aboriginal-Creation stories and here is another told in a wonderful video by: Rachel.
What an awesome story ... and maybe it has happened that way ... all people, religions, cultures and so on are equal ...
rainbow serpent
watches humanity always
bringing equality
© Chèvrefeuille
A senryu this time ... not really my ''cup of tea'', but it rolled from my pencil ...
This episode is open for your submissions tonight at 7.00 PM (CET) and will remain open until May 23rd at noon. I will try to post our new episode later on today. That will be our 4th CD-Special by Jack Kerouac, our featured haiku-poet of this month. For now ... just have fun!
