You remember this.
Lying in bed at night, drifting toward sleep.
Then—a sound.
A creak on the floor.
A soft thump against the wall.
Something brushing past your door.
Your heart quickens.
Is someone in my room?
In the closet?
Under the bed?
The dark is full of possibilities,
and every one of them could be dangerous.
And then—you call out.
You turn toward the one you trust.
What was that?
And the parent answers.
Sometimes they tell you the truth: It’s just the wind.
Sometimes they give you a story: It’s the cat knocking something over.
Or—That sound means the house is settling in for the night, keeping us safe.
Whatever the words, they give you what you really need—
a frame, a story, something to hold the fear in place so you can rest.
The child’s question in the night
is the same question our earliest ancestors asked under the open sky.
Why does the wind rise without warning?
What made the earth shake?
Who took the life from the one we loved?
These questions did not come from the gods.
They came from life itself.
And from fear—fear that made us turn to each other,
to the elders, the storytellers, the ones we trusted to know.
Around the fire, in the cave, under the stars,
they gave us explanations.
Some were accurate.
Some were imagined.
Some were both at once.
It was the best sense they could make—
observation, memory, imagination,
shaped into a story everyone could share.
And in time, those stories grew taller.
The wind had a will.
The sun had a face.
The river could be persuaded to rise.
The gods came into being as answers—
the children of our fear and our stories.
We gave them names and voices.
We dressed them in the colors of the dawn and the fury of the storm.
Not because they were waiting to be found,
but because we needed them—to explain the world, to teach us how to live,
and to hold us together when the world made no sense.
If the gods emerged from the stories,
then the real power has always been with us—
with the community,
with the meaning we choose,
with the life we decide is worth living.
The fears came first.
The questions came with them.
The answers continue to shape our world.