Listen to this on the Wild Creation Stories Podcast here:
Once there was a woman who saw the world in pain and was moved.
She felt its waves of anguish, despair and self loathing deep within her soul.
“I have to do something,” she said.
So the woman set out to ease the suffering of the world by taking it into herself.
It racked her body with pain and hurt so much that she could barely breathe.
As it moved through her, she worked magic on the pain, and it began to transform into brilliant blue moths emerging from her mouth.
Exhausted, the woman collapsed onto the ground and fell unconscious.
A tall white figure dressed in robes came to her in a dream. It had pale skin and large dark eyes.
“Dear one,” it said to the woman, brushing the hair from her face with a tender caress. “The pain of the world does not belong to you. It is not yours to bear.”
The woman sighed. “But I must do something. What can I do to ease this suffering?”
“Be. That is all, and that is everything,” the figure replied.
“But how? How can I be? What can I be that will change this?” The woman wept at the memory of the pain still aching in her bones.
“With this.”
The figure in white touched the woman’s forehead with a finger. “You are the water of grace. The water of remembering.”
When the woman awoke from her dream, she was no longer a woman.
She was the rain.
The pain in her body was gone.
She didn’t know what to do, but she knew how to be whatever it was that she was when she stopped thinking about it.
She flowed into the world to the places where she was drawn by curiosity.
Her rivers met the people of the world and knew their pain, but she was no longer compelled to feel it as her own.
She saw them. She loved them.
“I am only water. I can’t change them, but I can rain,” she said.
She rained down upon their souls.
Sometimes her rain fell upon souls that were like granite. Most of the droplets rolled off, but some penetrated the crevices in the stone and it changed, almost imperceptibly.
Sometimes her rain fell upon souls of hard soil, and they began to soften.
Sometimes her rain fell upon the fertile ground, and the seeds that had been planted there began to grow.
The suffering of the world did not disappear, but the magic of her rain transformed the world without doing anything at all.
Adapted from a story by Anthony DeMello and retold by Michael Neill, with lots of liberties taken by me.
