The Creation of the Moon
By: Emily Armstrong
Some say that the moon is a gift from the gods, but it’s not. The moon is a gift from the wolves, the dog of the gods.
Long ago, before the wolves were “gracefully released” from the heavens, they resided in the laps of the gods, where it glittered gold in the palaces, and it was spectacularly huge with tons of space to run about and play. They were the favorite animal of the gods and goddesses in all of Olympus, but the gods had to let them go. The people of earth heard that the immortals were keeping a spectacular animal up in the heavens, far away from earth.
When they were dropped down on earth, the wolves were placed away from each other and they went every which way across the globe.
The wolves were very lonely, unhappy, and heartbroken. They felt betrayed by the gods. Weren’t they supposed to be “god’s best friend”? The wolves began to howl. They howled for the loneliness of being away from their pack, they howled to once again be in the laps of the gods, and they howled for life to be back as it was done before.
And the wolves soon found out...
that if they all howled at the same time, they created a “flash of light” in the sky. That “flash” was a reminder of their wolf brothers and the despair that all of the wolves on earth felt.
Sadly, you could only see it if you really looked, and it only appeared at night. The wolves were unhappy and wanted something bigger than a spark, so one night, all of the wolves wailed at the sky together until the spark of light began to expand and expand and expand until it appeared to be the size of the sun. They found out that the louder they howled, the brighter the newly-created “moon” shone. So every night, the wolves howled their loudest and basked in the light reflected off of the giant, glowing sphere in the sky.
The gods were furious that they had let the wolves leave the heavens.
If they had only known what the wolf pack was capable of, they would have kept them all to themselves up in Olympus. “We should have kept them all up here!” ranted Zeus. The immortals were livid, and regretted that they had even put the wolves on earth. Unfortunately, there was no way to reverse what they had done and the gods had pangs of conscience about the eternal sadness that they had casted upon the wolves.
The moral of the story is: if you love it, keep it all to yourselves.
The gods cracked under the peer pressure of the mere mortals of earth. If they hadn’t, they would still have their “best friends” up in Olympus with them, and maybe, just maybe, the gods would have been happy living with their beloved canines forever.