First, you have to get to Mother Night’s country. It’s both through and beyond: through any doorway, but also beyond the place you’re stepping into, so you can’t just step through and end up there. You have to, in a sense, take two steps. Both through the doorway and beyond the reality you’re currently in.

I wrote about Mother Night’s country in a short story called “The Other Thea,” which you can find in The Collected Enchantments. In that story, Thea goes back to the combination middle and high school she graduated from, Miss Lavender’s School of Witchcraft, in Hartford, Massachusetts. She’s been having some personal problems lately — trouble focusing, lack of motivation, a general sense of existential unease. She consults her old teachers, including the mysterious Miss Emily Gray (who appears in several other of my stories). They tell her that the solution to her problems lies in Mother Night’s country.

I won’t tell you more about that story — you can read it for yourself. What I want to talk about is Mother Night’s country and what Thea sees there. Of course, Mother Night is a character in the story, but also the primordial darkness from which all things originally arose. She is the mother of all things, including light and time. And, simultaneously, a wise old woman who can look any which way, as well as any age. In fact, every time you see her she might appear different, but you will always be able to tell she is Mother Night.

In her own country, she lives in a castle that looks sort of like a sea shell and sort of like a dinosaur skeleton and sort of like a bunch of other things, with towers and various architectural features, many of which don’t seem to go together. Think of an Escher print. In that castle, in the highest tower, her tapestry is continually being woven.

Let’s go into the castle — Mother Night has beckoned us in. We follow her to the tower, which is so tall that we can’t see the top of it — it’s taller on the inside. Down from the top of the tower, wherever that may be, come the warp threads. And weaving through them is the weft — the threads that make up the picture the tapestry is showing. Who does the weaving? Golden spiders. No, I’m not making this up, or rather of course I’m making this up, but if you go to Mother Night’s castle, you can see them. They are quite beautiful.

What are the threads? They are you and I and all of us. Each of us is a thread in Mother Night’s tapestry. Some of the threads are shorter, some longer. They are all different colors — deepest burgundy, lapis lazuli blue, malachite green, the yellow at the center of daisies and the yellow at the center of the sun, orange like autumn leaves, the red of poppies, indigo like twilight. All the colors possible. What picture are those spiders weaving? That’s the most important thing I’m going to tell you: we don’t know. Only Mother Night knows.

We are all part of a great tapestry, and we don’t know what is on the front, or which part of the picture we make. Are we a unicorn’s nose? A flower petal? An ocean wave? We have no idea. Only Mother Night knows what is being woven. All we can see is the back of the tapestry, which is a bunch of threads.

What do we know? That every thread is important. That every thread is equally important, because if you pull out one thread, you alter the tapestry. And that we don’t know the picture it’s making, but we know we’re part of it. The not knowing is what makes us human–if we knew, we would be something else, something supernatural I suppose.

Yes, this is a sort of allegory, at least a loose one. It’s also an argument. I’m trying to make a point about human life, which is that we are part of a greater whole, and we are all part of that whole, and we are all important in some way we don’t understand. We may never understand it, at least not while we’re alive. We don’t get to see the front of the tapestry. We are living in a time of hierarchies of value, when some human lives are treated as more important than others, but that’s the height of arrogance, isn’t it? Because we don’t know what the front of the tapestry looks like. It doesn’t make sense to say that a CEO is more important than the Uber driver who gets him to work. Both of them are threads in the tapestry.

It really seems to me as though our society is looking at a lot of things the wrong way round. Perhaps if we could get to Mother Night’s country, we would come back wiser, or at least a little less certain of ourselves, a little more humble in our approach to the magnificent world that emerged from that primordial darkness, and which we, however rich we become, however much we accumulate, however powerful we are, only inhabit for a little while.

(The image is Queen of the Night by Mila von Luttich.)