"In the beginning there was the Skyworld.

She fell like a maple seed pirouetting in the autumn breeze. A column of light streamed from a hole in the Skyworld, marking her path where only darkness had been before. It took her a long time to fall. In fear, or maybe hope, she clutched a bundle tightly in her hand. Hurtling downward, she saw only dark water below."

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I first read the story of Skywoman in March of 2021, nine months into a major depressive episode. I hadn't been to class in five weeks and was instead spending all my time sleeping on an air mattress at my parents' house. I was hiding from my life, and I didn't feel bad about it, because truthfully it seemed like a reasonable reaction to the trauma the world was experiencing.

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I've thought many times about how I might describe this time in my life to children or grandchildren. How we went home from school one day and nothing was ever the same again. In just a few months, a virus killed millions and revealed the dark underbelly of systems that had long exploited the poor to benefit the privileged. We each unraveled, and as we looked around for hope, we only saw the fear in our neighbors' eyes as they they too tried to grasp at the frayed threads of our collective fabric. Nothing was holding and all we could do was watch.

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After so many months of this reckoning, the image of Skywoman falling struck me to the core. If I had read this story two years ago, my reaction would have been entirely different. Perhaps, I would have seen only the beauty and bravery in Skywoman's work, or maybe I would have been convicted by how lovingly she interacts with the natural world. But reading this at the desk in my childhood bedroom, my heart heavy with grief for a life and a version of myself I knew I would never recover, it was the vulnerability in her fall that I connected with most.

 

Here is a woman hurtling through the sky - down, down through the vast darkness - toward a new world she was tasked with building and mothering. How lonely she must have been, I thought, and afraid. It made me want to weep. I knew that loneliness well. It comes when you have a job to do that no one can help you with, jobs like world-building and remembering joy. It's a loneliness you can't explain or share, which is both a privilege and a curse, but most of all it's pain, pain, pain, until one day, it's not anymore. Skywoman may have been brave to create a new world, but all I could think about was that she surely didn't choose that job. New beginnings can be beautiful, but the necessary ones never seem to come easily. 

 

Both the stories of Skywoman, and the origin story I grew up on, of Eve in the Garden of Eden, depict the experience of world-building as full of agency and honor. But it's clear to me now, that they were also of pain, sacrifice, and abandonment. In that moment, I was feeling the pull and pain of many converging origin stories at once - old ways crashing to the ground and new ways sprouting up. A mental health crisis, a deadly pandemic, a social justice uprising, an unjust economic system failing, a planet rapidly dying. These experiences are the foundation for a new self, a new lifestyle, a new world. What kind? Who will write the next origin story? Have they already started? How can I help? 

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