your bridge home
Festivals
They churned the ocean for a thousand years to get one pot. What came out first was the man carrying it.
The gods and the asuras had agreed on one thing, which almost never happened. They would churn the ocean together and split what came out of it.
So they took a mountain for a churning-staff and a serpent for a rope. They pulled, one side, then the other, for longer than anybody had the patience for.
What the sea gave up, it gave up slowly, and not in the order anyone wanted.
Poison came first. Then a cow, a tree, a horse, an elephant, a jewel. Then Lakshmi herself, standing on a lotus, which is the part most people remember.
And near the end, a man walked out of the water.
He was dark-skinned and strongly built, and he was carrying a pot. His name was Dhanvantari, and the Bhagavata calls him a part of Vishnu himself. In the pot was amrita, the nectar that ends death.
Everything that followed was a fight over the pot. That is the famous part, and it is not the part this day is about.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.