Honeycomb Moon

#2 Still the Beginning: The Cup July 31, 2019

And so we find ourselves yet at the beginning still, though, to be clear, it is not the same beginning. Life has moved on, as it does, in a flow of cycles and seasons, and this beginning finds the child sitting quietly occupied in play while her mother carries on with her chores. Her father is not present at this moment, out working at the business of financial livelihood and, as best he knows how, the care and security of his family. (We will see later that this seemingly beneficent belief in his role as family guardian has some unintended consequences, which may cause more than one of us to question the usefulness of such “truth” in our own lives, which, to digress even further, is the purpose of story – to engender introspection and questioning.)

The girl, as promised by the giver of the wand, has indeed grown both strong and kind, and always seems to know her mind and the desires of her heart, though she is not prone to insisting on having her way. If this seems inconsistent with the usual manner of such a young one, so fresh in this world, so be it. We will continue in this vein nonetheless. And so …

Once upon another particular point in that same recent long-ago time …

Just after the girl’s second sun cycle threshold was reached, a beautiful woman, with hair the color of silvery moonbeams, a dress iridescent with the light of a thousand stars, and gossamer wings that were at once as blue as the clearest afternoon sky and as seemingly inconsequential as morning mist, appeared at the family’s abode. She found the door open, as it nearly always was, and the little girl sitting on the floor, the Wand of Desire at her side, while her mother hummed sweetly over some mending. When the winged woman stepped inside, the child and her mother looked up at the same time and smiled identical smiles.

“Hello, little one.” The woman’s voice shimmered and sparkled in the air around them, like sunbeams playing in their own light, and the child laughed with delight. “I have been looking for you,” the woman said to her, and the child nodded in apparent agreement.

The young mother rose from her seat to brew some tea and offered their guest some sweet cakes she had baked earlier. The woman accepted graciously and sat down to wait while the child crawled onto her mother’s lap to suckle. The women sat in companionable silence, nibbling on cakes and sipping tea, until finally the child was satisfied and slid from her mother’s arms.

Then, without hesitation, the little girl approached the shining woman, who lifted her onto her own star-shimmer lap and stroked her baby-silk hair with the same motion the child’s mother used to soothe her when sometimes at night she had frightening dreams, always the same: a great fire and an immense expanse of space where the darkness was impenetrable. (We will see later, of course, how these dreams relate to and even presage the future. For now, we remain in the moment of all-is-well.) The woman spoke to the child’s mother over the silken head lying easily against her breast. “She is growing tall and strong. You have nourished her well.”

The mother nodded, pleased, recognizing the truth as it was spoken. “Yes. Thank you.”

“Soon it will be time for the little one to be weaned. She will know,” the winged woman said, inclining her head toward the Wand of Desire lying on the floor where the child had been playing, “when she is ready.” The woman paused and stared as if considering some long-distant place. Her eyes dimmed to the palest of blue, as clear as water, and she herself turned momentarily translucent, as if she might disappear, before gathering herself and returning firmly to the present. “I have a gift from my sisters in the Land of the Fae,” she said finally, and brought forth from the light of her wings an exquisite little cup. The cup was the color of the moon at its fullness and was encrusted with colorful gems that gleamed as if lit from within.

“Oh!” the young mother exclaimed. “It’s so beautiful!”

“Yes,” the woman of the Fae said, “and there is no other like it. It was created by an ancient alchemist in gratitude for a favor done for her by my many-many-times-great-grandmother. The alchemist used materials she found in my land and imbued them with her own very special magick.”

The winged woman handed the cup to the little girl, who took it and squealed with delight.

“What is it for?” asked the child’s mother, certainty and uncertainty fighting for precedence within her. Another special gift? she thought, glancing at the wand lying on the floor near where her daughter sat in the faerie woman`s lap. The little girl was gazing at the cup, seemingly entranced by its shimmering light. What kind of child receives such favor, and, more troubling, what might be expected from such a child? What be the cost?

The woman of the Fae read the young mother’s struggle in the way she watched her child and so spoke to her gently and with understanding. “It is the Cup of Creativity,” she said. “When she is weaned she must drink from it often. This cup is hers and hers alone. As the current guardian of the cup, it is my choice to pass it on, or to hold it for another. The word, the praenomen, by which your daughter is known to the stars, was whispered to me in a dream, and so I set out on my long journey to find her.” The woman smiled, wishing to further reassure. “If she will accept the cup, I will be her faerie mother,’ she said. “Not in the ways you are her womb-mother, but in ways you cannot be. I will be here to watch over her and to guard the cup.”

Rather than being reassured, however, a dark cloud of concern crossed the young mother’s face, and the faerie knew that the woman understood far beyond what she might have expected. The Fae woman would not lie to her in the presumption of protection.

“Yes,” the faerie said, “unfortunately there may be those who would wish to destroy the cup or to harm the one who bears it … No, no, you mustn’t worry.” She spoke lightly, reassuringly when she saw the distress deepening and taking over the young mother’s face, so that it was collapsing into a mask of fear. “We do not know that this is so. It may be that these are but the stories told by the ancient ones to frighten us into awareness. Rest assured I will allow no harm to come to this child. She will be protected. I promise you. Do you believe me?”

The young mother looked deeply into the faerie woman’s eyes, which were now the sapphiric color of a crystal blue sky on a warm May morning, and saw there only truth. She nodded and, finally, smiled, her fear dissipating into the void. “Yes,” she said. “I believe you.” She knew in a way she couldn’t explain that the faerie woman was incapable of speaking anything but the truth.

While the women were talking, the child had climbed down from her faerie mother’s lap and taken the cup with her. She picked up the Wand of Desire and chewed on it for a few moments, as was her habit. She was only a babe, really, barely two sun cycles out of the womb after all, but she understood, in a way that needed no words, that tonight she would nourish herself at her mother’s breast one last time, and that tomorrow she would begin drinking from the beautiful cup the nice lady with wings had given her.

When the little girl’s father came home, she ran to him as she usually did, and threw her tiny arms about his neck. “Look!” she whispered in his ear, pointing at the cup sitting on the table.

“How beautiful, my love,” her father said, setting her down and giving his wife a quizzical look.

She tried to explain everything to him in detail, wanting him to understand how important this was; what it meant for their little girl. First the Wand of Desire and now the Cup of Creativity! “The faerie woman said this cup is so special there are those who would destroy it,” she told him, wanting only to convey the cup’s special value, not to frighten him.

“What?” Her husband looked suddenly worried, stern. “Then we cannot keep it. I will not allow it!”

The man’s wife was taken aback at her husband’s vehemence, forgetting her own initial fears; then she remembered the faerie woman’s promise. “My dear,” she said, taking his worried face into her two hands and drawing his gaze so that he peered deeply into her eyes. “It is not for us to allow or not allow,” she said gently, but with conviction. “It is as it is. The woman of the Fae has declared herself our daughter’s faerie mother and has promised that no harm will come to her. Our little one is protected by our love and by faerie magick.” She smiled. “It will be all right.”

The man looked deeply into his wife’s eyes, and there he saw the moon and the stars, and a bright, polished gem the color of a crystal blue sky on a warm May morning that could only be the truth. He nodded, softening. “Yes, well … “ and he turned his brightest smile on his precious child, who stood by, watching her parents, the wand in one hand, the cup in the other.

And it is here we come to the end of another scene, another pause in the pacing of the telling, though of course, life for our happy-so-far family continues on, as it does, even if the story seems to rest. By the time we are ready to rejoin the flow, bypassing the ongoing seasons of mundanity that would become simply boring in the telling, the feelings of anxiety produced by the gifting of the cup would seem to have dissipated. But like many seeds that fall on fertile ground, when the right elements come together to nourish it, the seed may indeed germinate and grow. But that is still some time in the future. For now, we must focus on completing the beginning. To the unstoried, it would appear that not much has yet happened, but this would not be so. Much of life and story occurs below the surface of our awareness, and if we are wise, we will recognize this blindness of reality and take it into consideration when we note that, in this moment, though there be ripples in our little family’s glassy pool of calm and truth-as-we-know-it, all is yet well.

Copyright 2019 Linda Maree/Linda M Gabriel