This is not a land for gods.
It is a land for mountains, for great rivers, for the plains and the ancient forests and the unending, unalterable sky.
This is not a land for gods.
It is a land for life, in all life's varied magnificence. The life which does not belong, it rejects. The life which exists, it absorbs into itself.
This is not a land for gods.
It is beautiful, and uncaring, and above all vast. It holds the world, this land, and it is unconquered.
Not a land for gods…
We have tried. Of course we have tried. Wherever humans go, we bring our gods with us like luggage, like we bring our dreams and our truth and our lies and our insufferable arrogance.
Not a land for gods…
We make our gods. We long for them, we mold them out of thought and need and memory. We create them in our own image, and we love them. Sometimes we fear them too.
Not a land for gods…
So we come, with all the trash and treasure of our minds, and try to root our gods in whatever soil we are given. In our search for the sacred, we uproot the deities of home, the beliefs, the superstitions, and carry them onward into the sunset.
Gods…
They come in all their glory and terror and humanity. They come in thousands, like the immigrants themselves, and each one bears a name…
Gods…
Krishna, Odin, Elegba, Jehovah, Mithras and the Dagda and Anansi the spider. The faerie and the spirits and the ghosts of the dead, the rituals of a hundred countries and the breadth of human imagination when it is fed by fear and hope.
Gods…
We bring our gods. We bring ourselves. We are the conquerors, the victors, the exiles. And one by one, in our turn, we too are conquered.
This is not a land for gods…
We too are conquered, for this land is too overwhelming ever to pay homage to humanity, too great to ever bow to the deities we foist on it. We who are human, mortal and immortal, we come and go and try to leave a mark and ever this land remains, owned by none, cowed by none.
We have tried. We have raised our churches and lived by our morals or not lived by them; we have burned and built and sometimes even remembered, but we are waging a war against something to big for any one of us to hold, and we have not won yet. Not yet.
This is not a land for gods…
Always, the land remains. We can exist within it, the gods, the spirits, the people themselves, but we cannot call it ours. It is the land. It exists, and it promises us nothing more than our dreams, and nothing less.
Better, perhaps, to have never come. To return to the places we have triumphed over, to pray again before our altars and be answered. Here, there is no altar but the grass, no graven images but the mountains, no soaring temple but the sky.
This is not a land for gods…
It holds the world, this land. It was built on the back of a turtle and carved from the bones of a giant and dreamed by a creator, and it shall endure. We can place our mark on it, or try; we can bring our gods here, our gods and our beliefs which make us human. But it holds the world, this land, and it is unconquered. It is unconquered.