lentils

A myth:
Psyche was a princess and so beautiful that the people began to worship her instead of Venus, which pissed off Venus. She sent her mischievous son, Eros, to make Psyche fall in love with something hideous as punishment. But Eros, surprised by her beauty while piercing her with his arrow, accidentally pierced himself too. He married her and took her to his palace on a mountain with the condition she never look at him. Psyche's unfriendly sisters convinced her he must be a monster and in the night as he slept she bent over him with a lamp and found he was a beautiful winged boy. But a drop of hot oil fell and woke him. Injured and furious with her betrayal he abandoned her. Psyche grieved and appealed to Venus, who gave her a series of chores to accomplish before leading her back to Eros, the first of which was to separate a mountain of lentils into piles in one night.

My latest therapy game is to pick up handfulls of dry pinto beans from one bowl and move them to another. At first I could only hold a couple which more or less just got stuck to the sweat of my skin from the effort. Now I'm able to grasp a pretty good pile. Next I'll graduate to split peas, then to rice.

A whole lot of fairy tales evolved out of Eros and Psyche and retain the lentils, like East of the Sun West of the Moon and Cinderella. Psyche finishes her impossible task with the help of an army of ants, Cinderella gets birds from her mothers tree. I'm not seeing any ants or birds lately, but the monotany of lentil picking has been majorly relieved by the full set of Lost dvds Eliza B loaned me. Thank god for you, Eliza B.