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The
Legend of the Sun, Moon, and Stars
( Why the Sky is High ) |
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| Long
ago, our elders say, the sky was so close to the earth
that one could touch it. But there were only two people
who could avail of that fact. They were the first man
and woman.
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| It has been said that
the first woman was so vain. She wore so much jewelry
and despised work. Whenever the first man would ask
her to do something, she would pout. She pouted when
he asked her to clean the house. She pouted whenever
he asked her to cook. She pouted whenever he asked her
to grind the rice grains everyday for their food.
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| "But if you don’t
grind the rice, we don’t get to eat," the
first man reasoned, and even the vain first woman could
not dispute that. |
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| But
it was so much work grinding the rice with a little
pestles and mortars. So she poured all their rice for
the day into a very large mortar and took up a very
large pestle to grind it with. The pestle was so tall
that when it hit the mortar, it touched the sky. The
first woman was oblivious to this. She only knew she
had to grind all the rice before her husband came home
for supper.
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| She still wore all
her jewelry. She noticed that her jewelry kept falling
off or hampered her in any other way whenever she worked.
So she hung her larger pieces of jewelry upon the sky,
which were her silver comb, her gold ring, and her long
pearl necklace. And then she went to work with the huge
pestle, unknowing that as one end of the pestle pounded
onto the rice grains, the other end was pounding onto
the sky. The first woman only knew that having the sky
so low only made her task more difficult. So she pounded
harder and harder on the rice. Higher and higher the
sky went, until with one enormous stroke, the first
woman sent the sky flying up, never to come so close
to the earth again. |
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| She sensed a draft
behind her neck and looked up. She was astonished to
see that the sky had risen so high – and taken
her most precious things with it! She could see her
silver comb shining where the moon is now, and the beads
of her lovely necklace twinkling all around it. Her
golden ring was nowhere in sight. The first woman grumbled,
"I would have worn those things again if I’d
known they would go to waste." |
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