Quest

It is a place of hard sand, a place where billions of grains have hardened and formed a solid ground of bleached yellow and dirty white. There are mountains topped with green pines and big square bricks. The Cannanites were spawned in these lands. Their robes moved in the dry desert wind. It was in the desert heat where a sect would emerge, a small group beneath the deities and gods who destroyed their idols and talked to the being without shape. Without sex, without a female, the sky god ruled alone. This was their glue, the common belief that would separate them from the other herders and farmers and carpenters of the land. Ripe with olives and dates, red with the blood of pomegranates and sacrifice, the land gave birth to the singular. Three thick branches would sprout from the tree rooted in myth and time, three branches linked by story, blood and place.
The world came to and end, as all stories do, as each life is a world unto itself. Coming from the great city to the east, Nebuchadnezzar conquered the mountain, capturing the learned minds of the sky god people. Writers and poets and singers of tradition were taken in chains and brought to Babylon. It was here, in the city, where the stories were written, where with careful pen upon parchment the myths were transcribed. The act of the hand would be the revolution, the action that would carry myth through five thousand years. The tales that would inspire war and sacrifice. The plot that would be taught as total truth clothed in the everlasting wrath of the all-seeing sky god.
Some eventually returned to the mountain and the stories were brought and studied and passed to the children that awoke in the gold-cast land. There would be kings. There would be teachers. There would be small inner chambers that remained forever dark. Animals were sacrificed and fires burned with the heat of prayer. And the branch sprouted.
The Romans followed through with a request from the sky-god elders, forever silencing the dissidents… only, the limb was not severed, it grew in the hard-bleached ground and wound like ivy up the continent and through many seas and over oceans. It would be the same people that would return with a thirst for vengeance, many generations later. Not recognizing their own kind, throats were slashed and children became food for the hungry. The mountain would be conquered again and the men of chariots would hunt the priests of the sky god, the swords would enter and the rituals would die with the men. There would be one, the one escapee, the teacher that would teach after the walls had fallen. The exiles vanished with the cool wind, carrying with them their tragic memories of the end of the world.
The mountain lived on in their dreams and the two branches grew yet another branch of similar design, a singular entity at its center with a different prophet that orbited it like a moon. The mountain grew with cities and people, with kings and priests of all three branches. But they would come from the outside, they, clad in chain mail and red crosses would come with horses and weapons, starving and seeking the mountain. The quest continued. Generations later, the fruits of each branch would bleed and kill for the peaks of gold, for the place that was theirs, for the place where things were good, where the sky god could find them.
In Sunday school, little girls are taught from books with cartoon camels and they are told of little animals that warmed a blessed baby. On Saturday, little boys are scrubbed clean and put into black clothes and walk with their fathers and wig-wearing mothers. This is the place of bombs and pomegranates, the place of exploding buses and red streets, the place of lost knowledge and fixed rules.
Were the secrets ever there? Were they found and then lost again? Or does the quest continue, an endless search for the hidden meaning of absence?

Kava Speaks

What they gave me to love? A man doll, a rag of dirt, a thing in the image of, but not alike to, the lords, the Elohim, the crowd from heaven that sometimes come down to earth. A puppet, a joke, an experiment. A companion. Adam. My Adam. They would scorn me because I loved an angel, loved an angel more than a man, an Adam. Because I have climbed the tree, climbed it and descended it in company they might never hope to have, they would make a scandal of me. Let them scorn. Let them despise me and shut their windows against me and blame all of their woe on me and call my best works a sin. I gave their "good" Adam two sons, I gave them their shepherd. To my angel I gave Cain. To the power and the life of the heavens I gave the earth, the cup, a grail to hold the ecstatic wine of the unknowable. To him, the half brother of your shepherd, the son of an Angel, the grandson of an angel, to him the kingdom belongs.
Upon him I look with admiration, yes, with pride, which is noble though those who are not so would make nobility a curse. Who was jealous of whom? Those whose lives are so tightly knitted to the earth that they are drawn to it like metallic dust to a lodestone, scarcely able to look up from it to blink drowsily at the stars, they have ever feared that which was not so earthbound as they, that which rises far above them, reaching higher and deeper, touching lights and shadows that they would never dare to brave, enslaved as they are to instinct. They would make evil those who are masters, masters of themselves, masters of the word, masters of the illusion that shrouds us like an absurd raiment. Their curse is a blessing. To be shunned by them is the greatest possible honor considering the baseness and vulgarity of that which they prize. They may run the noble born to the ends of the earth with false claims of supremacy, with their shouts that they are the chosen of the one true God. But for those who know better, their stomping and shouting will be laughable. Or at least it would roll like water off of a swan’s back if it weren’t also so wretched with resentment and jealousy, that it burns through the protective oils like acid, and finally sinks that graceful bird that once knew both the depths of the waters and the heights of the sky.
I have known Gods. And I am aquatinted with this God of theirs, who is one, but not the only one. To a jealous God, a jealous and desperate people. This is… they are what the Gods have given me to love, rag children made of dirt, sons and daughters of Adam, of Abel and Seth. Can they help what they are made of? Is it their fault that they have been made only half as good as their brother? Is it their fault that they haven’t enough strength to pull free of the lodestone and fly madly into the abyss as angels fly? I cannot hold them in contempt for their weakness, but nor should I deny the greatness and worth of true strength. I will not hang my head for scaling to the heights and the depths with angels. I defy the people of dirt, I challenge them. Chase my better children to the ends of the world as you are want to do. That is as far as you will be able to pursue them, but they can go farther still and will leave you far behind. Even now, they are dancing madly where you cannot see them, and they will rise and fall beyond the limits of your pale perceptions. To them the kingdom belongs. You are the ivy which eats at the tree. When the tree has fallen under your advance, what will you inherit? More and more dirt. To the noble born goes the kingdom. And to Jehovah go the unwashed.