“One day, when the light was yellow, I turned to Bush and I said, ‘Something wonderful lives inside me.’
                She looked at me. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The early people knew this, that’s why they painted animals on the inside of caves.’
                Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see.”
                -Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

                Maybe all stories are creation stories.
                Once, eight years old, when I was sitting near the wall of my mom’s African dance class, I looked at the movement and the swing, and I thought, that looks amazing. And I thought, I couldn’t do it. That’s not only the influence, of course, but still, I’ve now been scared of dancing for decades.
                Talking to a friend, senior year of college, I asked, “Do you think your high school in India would hire a young college grad to teach?” Later I spent a year in Rishi Valley, climbing rocks with new friends, learning what I hadn’t known I didn’t know.
                Maybe all stories are creation stories.
                Solar Storms is a book about becoming: it’s about how the land comes to be, about how people come to be, about how we all come to be, interconnected and together. And it’s a story that insists creation is not finished: it’s ongoing. In these, the last lines of the book, Hogan’s main character asks us to see something. To believe something. “Something beautiful lives inside us.” We can grow following that. Hogan doesn’t want this to be a book you finish and put down. It’s a story you follow and pick up, and it unfolds in front of you: the world, now, is different than it was. If you’ve read. If you believe. “You will see.”
                This isn’t something simple, like “envisioning the world you want” or “sending it out into the universe.” This is deeper than that, I think. This is relational, communal. This is the work of becoming. What we create, bit by bit, what we join together, day by day, becomes something; what we join ourselves to can draw something from us, and we change with it; and any time we tell a story, anytime we see something truly, another stream runs through us. After that we’ll move forward, but we won’t move forward the same way.
                I told myself, a month ago, that I wanted to try my friend’s Blues Dancing class. It’s been frightening. It’s been wonderful. I’ve never thought I could find the beat, to be honest, but on Monday there was this new thread I could almost follow.
                Maybe all stories are creation stories.