Papa is the mother, and mama is Papa ?

Where was Lu?

I tried to reach him by phone, but to no avail. He did leave an email account. I waited after sending a message written in Chinese to him. No, half day had passed but still no reply. He couldn’t access to his email in some rural landscape newly shaped by earthquake, I guessed.

The last resort was a postal address. Are there any people who still write a letter nowadays? As the final resort I wrote one.

Writing still worked. After a week or so I got a call from someone who claimed to be Lu’s family. She told me Lu once called home, but left no correspondence hint as to where to find me again. She said she would tell Lu what I said in my letter if he called home again.

From then on I rang up Lu’s family once in a while to find out what was going on with him. Sometimes it was answered, sometimes not. The same answer was that Lu was still searching. Yes, I could assume Lu heard of my advice. If he went on, it was his business. Gradually I forgot the man.

It was special about Maori god Ruaumoko among natural myths of volcano and earthquake. He is not an animal, but rather, a personified entity. I figured him to be one of the underworld population, a wanderer suffering from chronic, if not forever, nostalgia which was described as a loss of feeding from Papa, mother earth. His rage rebuked the terrestrial ever on.

What an interesting invert. The mother is called ‘papa’ which in many cultures means the father? And Maori gods are nearly all male. Papa is the mother and mama is papa. Where have all the other goddesses gone?

Presumably in other subterranean locales. Just thought of them as another tribe, another world. Underworld.