A Little Renaissance

By Veronica Glover

In a world where a bloodline of extraterrestrial goddesses are bound to maintain Earth's place in the universe through the magical and mysterious process of star- bonding, a young goddess comes of age. On the cusp of her 23rd birthday, Renai, abandons the familiarity of her life in Berkeley, California and her familial duty serving Earth to pursue her individual path as a goddess.

 

Renai seeks refuge in the companionship of a plant whisperer named Parker, and the two travel the world in pursuit of their bliss until the gods of the universe summon Renai and command her to use her powers to save the planet from the impending destruction of climate change. Now she is tasked with using her command of the stars to salvage Earth before the vernal equinox arrives and Earth's climate woes reach the point of no return.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Veronica Glover
• Release date: Dec 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201094621

Veronica Glover

Veronica Glover is a writer, editor, and entertainer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She loves exploring nature, connecting with her spirituality, and a good cup of tea.

Book preview

A Little Renaissance

By Veronica Glover

Renai

The moon is my third eye. That’s why my perceptions are always changing. With each lunar phase, I see things through a different lens and my understanding of everything around me becomes more nuanced. I know the truth is most clear when the moon’s face is full, and leading up to that point, I respect the revelations of her waxing. As she wanes, I start to reflect more. I weigh her revelations against the truths of darker times and dimmer nights. At first, I thought that her changing face was a bad thing. How can anyone trust an inconsistent perception? But then I thought, what if that is the reality of perception? What if perception is all dependent on the lens that we are looking through and the endless shifts of reality?

When the moon is dark, I do not fear the night, because she hides her face so that I may know her neighbors, loved ones, and well-wishers: the stars. The constellations shine bright in her absence. The moon is the benevolent ruler of the night sky and she shares her realm with other celestial bodies. I love her, this third eye of mine. She is the wise, multifaceted companion of Earth. She reminds all of us that it is okay to change our faces and our presentation. It’s natural to have shifts in our presence. She rests. She strengthens. She glows powerful and bright. Then she withdraws, bit by bit, until all that’s left to our eyes is a little slip of a crescent. She’s the only heavenly body with that kind of strength. It takes power to show your many sides. It takes courage to unabashedly own that you are not just one way, one thing, one face, one identity.

I was surprised when I first realized that the moon is my third eye. In fact, I was struck by how obvious it was and I wondered why it took so long for me to recognize that. After all, the moon was ruling the heavens when I was born. Eleven months out of twelve, the sun rules the sky and just moves between zodiacal constellations, but as June gives way to July, the sun enters the moon’s realm and Cancerian season begins. During the day and the night, the sun worships the moon and lets her example lead the rest of us. The sun basks in the wisdom of its natural opposite heavenly body and follows the moon’s lead. I’m probably biased, but I think Cancer season’s watery cardinal energy is invigorating, so it’s only natural that the moon and I share a rapport. She’s with me as no one else ever has been or could be.

Like all my female ancestors, I was born on July seventh. People may puzzle at that fact. No, it’s not a miscalculation or a lie. There was no delayed implantation, prolonged gestation, or tactful family planning maintained over the eons of my bloodline’s existence; I was simply born of my parent’s love upon the day of the world’s most ancient holiday, the Star Festival. The Star Festival celebrates the day that my first ancestor chose to come to Earth so many eons ago and it is the sole day when all star-bonding goddesses are born.

Every nation celebrates and observes the Star Festival. The legend of my ancestor’s arrival on Earth is known worldwide and therefore, July seventh is an international day of peace and merriment across the world. Nowadays, the holiday’s celebrations have diverted from their original roots. Instead of constructing altars and offering prayers to the stars and the night sky as was customary in the olden days, people stay out all day long and await the arrival of night for parties, bonfires, games, singing, and endless dancing. Unlike the rest of the world, my mother and I still decorate an altar and make offerings on our birthday. Someone has to keep these traditions alive, and we are the ones who are most connected to it, so we’re the ones who continue to honor the old ways.

Humankind has mostly forgotten the Star Festival’s origins. It’s hard for modern people to believe that deities and extraterrestrials came to Earth long before cameras could record irrefutable proof of our existence. And people have doubted video footage and photographs for as long as cameras have existed, so even with real proof, I doubt people would believe the truth if they saw it. Despite technology’s ability to advance documentation, perception is still a highly personal matter that is ultimately up to each individual.

Humans mostly like to dismiss what they can’t prove, so they all assume that the inexplicable occurrences of the past were natural disasters, religious ceremonies, metaphors, or eclipses that made primitive humans lose their minds. They’ve done the same thing to the details of my family’s history.

There are a bunch of legends circulating in various cultures about my family’s origins, and the most common version tells of a celestial goddess who wove a divine tapestry that became the sky. In her weaving, she illustrated the glow of each dawn and a cluster of immaculately placed stars in the cosmos for each night. Day after day, she’d weave and spread the luscious fabric across the heavens. The goddess always used her weavings to bare her heart upon the cosmos for the universe to behold. On most nights, anybody from any place on earth could gaze at the sparkling arrangement of constellations, but there were many nights among all the eons of her existence when the fabric would appear murky. During those times it was filled with gray smoke, and it only reflected light pollution from the world below or sometimes, it was just an emptying, blank blackness. On those nights, all could feel the desolation weighing on the heart of the goddess as she sat in her section of the sky longing hopelessly for a different circumstance for herself. When the weight of her burdensome lot in life became too much to bear, she snuck away from her heavenly post with a mortal man and brought her blessings to Earth.

Of course, the versions of this legend that mortals tell are a bit inaccurate, but it’s not like they have any proof or real knowledge to support their idea of what my family has done for eons. Nowadays, I believe that most people think of the legend as a myth and nothing more. And as far as I know, nobody has attempted to correct this conjecture. How could my ancestors or I explain to any typical human that the goddess from the legend was a real person, and that she never wove a tapestry that became the sky? I can’t even imagine explaining that the legendary goddess was not a sky-weaver, but a star-bonder. She bonded all the constellations of heaven with Earth and passed the skill down to her daughter.

I was told by my mother, who has served as that goddess throughout the majority of her life, that at some point, the presiding goddess dies and moves on to the afterlife while her daughter takes her place and begets another baby goddess as part of the eternal, dutiful dance of bonding heaven and Earth. Every baby born into my family is a daughter who’ll eventually take over the task of celestial star-bonding. Each woman in my lineage is born to a goddess and each woman births a goddess. We are all trained in our divine purpose by our mothers and then we train our own daughters. Of course, a father must come into play at some point in the process. The goddesses of my bloodline typically follow in the footsteps of our first ancestor and find a human man to help sire the next generation’s incarnation, but beyond that, fathers haven’t meant much to our kind. The mother is almost always the one to raise the next generation’s goddess, so men have mostly played a part in the process that’s crucial, but painfully and comically minuscule. While fathers have rarely shaped the goddess they beget, their presence is important, nonetheless.

A person, my mother once explained, Is made of parts of those who came before her. She carries the weight of her heritage and the curses and blessings of her ancestors through life, and she passes them onward to her own daughters. Goddesses must pass along their own lineage and choose a partner who can bestow an equally beautiful and powerful heritage upon their child. A poisoned father will spread poisoned seed. An unwell mother may choose a toxic father, and the self-destruction will creep through the bloodline and into the descendants. Goddesses must carefully choose from the divine masculine to create their daughters, although admittedly, sometimes we fail. My mother told me these truths often. Thusly, I came to know the origins of my family’s illustrious purpose.

My mother told me the story of our family’s history at every opportunity and each time, the ending was the same. She’d say, Someday Renai, you’re going to be responsible for maintaining the bonds between heaven and Earth. And then you will pass the honor onward to your own daughter when the time comes. Then she’d caress my little brown face and leave me to my wonderings. Usually, I’d reflect on this legacy without fully understanding how it was meant to be. Nobody else on Earth was tasked with this sort of destiny.

READ THE STARS, LEARN their placements, and you’ll always be able to find your way back to Earth, mother would say. You must always know how to find the entity you serve in relation to everything around it. I’d always scoff in response and suggest that perhaps I didn’t want to find my way to Earth in any regard. Why serve a planet or anyone else?

Because the universe has willed it. Therefore, it must be. Às̩e̩. Mother always had the same answer and she relied on that ancient Yoruba word to explain herself because she channeled her will through it. Às̩e̩ was an innate force we carried within ourselves to manifest and declare our determinations. But whenever she spoke Às̩e̩ to me, she used it in its other sense: meaning so it is. Às̩e̩ was meant to declare the recognition of infinite possibilities and the ability to realize them, but once uttered from my mother’s mouth it also meant that a subject was closed. She never explained further, and her lack of explanation was maddening. It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized her own mother had explained things to her in exactly the same way.

OUR OTHER-WORLDLY LEGACY wasn’t the only thing I’d inherited from my mother and previous ancestors. Like every goddess before me, I was named Renaissance. I also had skin as brown as rich soil and a garden of flowering dark coils sprouting from my scalp. Once or twice my mother had indulged me in a coveted silk press, but our hair was never meant to be subdued by intense heat or fall straight. It is not destined to succumb to the force of gravity or worldly limits. Renai, my mother would say, Be careful not to press the holiness out of your tresses. Your hair is one of many gifts our ancestors have bestowed on us. Our bodies and our divine purposes are sacred, so we must take care when we make alterations.

Even before mother had conceived me, I knew who I was and who the gods of the universe had ordained me to be. It’s always been written into the legacy of the universe. Just as the gods of nature wrote into divine order that a caterpillar will become a butterfly, my life path was written too.

I was just one link in a long line of goddesses bound to Earth. When I was barely old enough to stand, my mother began training me to replace her. I’d spent my infancy and babyhood wrapped in a sling and held fast to her body while she did our family’s work. I watched her perform various acts of goddess as easily as she cornrowed her hair. Her work may have seemed complex at first glance, but because of her decades-long experience, her fingers moved