Turn off the stove. Turn off the TV. Take a blanket. Go outdoors. Walk to the place you can see the sky with the least amount of city light. Lie on the ground. Look up into the darkest part of the sky. Tonight you will see as many as 60 meteors an hour flash through the night sky.
The old people in my family, say this is the Sky Smithy hammering on the iron anvil. She is shaping raw silver buckles for the saddle straps of the Night Horses. They are the ones that pull the sun up from under the dark earth every night.
Usually invisible to humans, tonight you will see the sparks flying from her forge. The silver buckles must be made ready before first light… The mother of all, the Smithy of Heaven, will hammer and shape the silver. Her muscled arms will strike and strike with her great hammer, and the sparks from her labor will fly all through the night.
These meteor showers are called The Perseids, named after the mythic hero Perseus. And, the lost story that hardly anyone remembers is this one:
In the late Greek stories, Perseus was sent to retrieve the Golden Fleece which was being secreted by the writhing snake-headed Medusa, she who could turn a human to stone with her insane stare alone. The Gorgon monster Medusa was filled with the black poison of war and warring. She had no rational nor peaceable mind left. All humans feared her and would not go near her.
Except for Perseus, who confronted her with a large mirror, that reflected her evil face back to herself. SO startled was Medusa to see her own vicious and blood lusting face in the mirror, she was momentarily weakened. Then, Perseus unsheathed his sharp sword and slayed the mythic monster.
We have, so many of us, for years now, wandered from war to war. I count seven domestic wars in my lifetime, and two more I met in Central America. What can come, we ask ourselves, what can come for us who seem to be under the will of a force that inhales our money and our young, and exhales war.
Whether we are at war inside, outside, here, over there, whether war is brought on without our will or by our assent, or brought on by our own naiveté, lack of experience, slowness to record the underlying motives, quickness to be hungry for heroism… what can come in these times, especially as a ‘good enough for now’ nourishment for the soul?
Perhaps you’ve wondered who or what are those Night Horses that the Sky Smithy fires the metal to make the tack for the saddle… the saddle that rests on the spine just right, the bridal and bit that are not made cruel, for the horsemen, the horsewomen have faith… that the Night Horses know the way…
To slay the Gorgon; there’s an interior and psychological meaning to much of myth-making; often recording in the stories the weakness and strengths and strategies we might take to mend ourselves, or to restore vision. The instruction, if one could say, the ancients were writing to us who live here in the future, the instruction they may have given us in Perseus’ myth, might be this: To not fight evil by exhausting ourselves with railing only, but to also hold a mirror to it, so that it can dread itself with complete alarm for a moment…
and then to strike, whether with a votive or a vote, with an inclusion or an exclusion… regardless, to sever the evil thought system from the evil system of actions… to make certain the monstrous cannot act ever again.
Perseus was exhausted by his labor. But his mythic story, did not end there. The Medusa whose blood, even a drop, was said to poison any man who touched but a speck of it…. Thus, as she was slain and fell, from her blood, sprang an amazement. Instead of a cloned monster like herself rising from her blood, the great white horse, Pegasus; the winged being sprang fully formed from her blood.
Pegasus, one of the many winged horses who lives to be consanguineous with humans, to help them remember themselves. Out of evil, in the moment of its dying, springs the quintessential Night Horse who knows how to tow the sun back up from under the dark earth again. And again. And again.
It is not too much to say that such a being as Pegasus, such a force, such an attitude resides in the psyche, in us, and for us. In a world that ridicules soul daily, and scorns the reach of the soul that resides in each person, each in his or her own way… tonight, in the dark sky, you will see the Sky Smithy fashioning the silver buckles for the saddles of the Night Horses… the mares and stallions who all these eons, despite all else, now matter the difficulty, no matter how exhausted, no matter how bewildered, the great winged Night Horses still ride strong. They know the way.
Thee, too.
CODA
From AP
…the best way to watch a meteor shower is with the naked eye.
The Perseids are perhaps the most beloved of all meteor showers because of their predictability. The August shower gets its name from the constellation Perseus because the meteors appear to originate there.
The annual Perseid shower occurs when the Earth’s orbit crosses the path of debris thrown off by Comet Swift-Tuttle. As the cosmic junk – many the size of a grain of sand – enters the atmosphere, it burns up in a flash, appearing as “shooting stars” across the sky.
In the past, the Perseid showers have produced such spectacular displays that people swamped radio stations with reports of a mysterious light in the sky