I recently reread this beautiful story from the Philippines of how the sky, the moon and the stars came to be. Like all myths, the story is very simple and follows a logic that is impossible to fault. It takes us to a time when magic was found in the routine of daily living and; solving the mysteries of the universe was a global preoccupation.
Now on to the story...
A long long time ago, the sky was very very close to the ground. It hung over earth like a blanket over a sleeping man. It looked somewhat like a large coral rock, shimmering and porous and soft.
One day a spinster sat under this large coral rock. She sat there busily with her hands flying fast and furious as she pound a mortar full of rice. The mortar was as large as the earth we all live on and the pestle had the strength to smash a thousand sharks or a million crabs into the tiniest grain of sand.
Before she set to work, the old woman took off a string of shiny silver beads from around her neck and the comb from her hair and hung them up in the sky. She did not want the beads from her necklace, nor the stray strands of grey from the comb to get into the rice. And the sky hanging above her head seemed the perfect place to hang her things on to.
As she began working, she soon lost track of time. She worked hard and with every pound her pestle rose higher and higher until it struck the sky. She worked harder and harder until the pestle struck the sky so hard that the sky flew up very far. It went up so high that the old woman lost her beads and her comb forever.
Her comb became the moon and the beads turned into stars that light up the sky even today.
