At the beginning, Life is bored.
She is pure Substance, infinite, immutable and perfect. And she is decidedly bored.

As a distraction, she invents Movement.
Movement has wind, and tides and the rotation of planets.
He is hypnotic, and Life, in a dreamy daze, is entertained for a while.

But her Substance gets tired and worn out.
Movement is slowly but surely sapping her pretty structure.

Life values Substance,
wants her to stay composed.
She devises Order to keep her plain.
Substance can now mend and maintain.

Now all is and remains in place,
The hypnosis in full effect sprinkles fairy dust, to Life's delight.
Erosion no more is a silly distraction.

Fatefully, the moment comes when Life finds Movement predictable,
down to the last of its most subtle tricks of flow.
The hypnosis dissipates, just like that.

Boredom returns with a vengeance.
What's the point of Movement if nothing budges?

So Life dreams up Nurture.
She wants more from her Substance, that it be expansive and multiply.
Nurture comes through,
and Substance grows larger and richer.

Soon, much too soon, the space is invaded.
Substance's laments turn fierce and eventually feisty.
Both Order and Movement are overextended, And distinctly annoyed at their growing burden.

Life is listening, she responds promptly.
She formulates the Cycle to remediate.
From then on, Nurture feeds of an old form to nourish a new one,
Rather than grow, she transforms, refines, and refreshes.

Substance is ecstatic;
All she wants is to cycle and recycle.

But Order is offended, he finds that Cycle insulting.
He feels forgotten, he complains and squeaks, He feels unpleasantly out of himself And begs Life for mercy.

For an instant, Life resists.
But she once loved Order and opts to give him attention.

She wants Order and Cycle to marry,
To match what is and what becomes.
She ponders and contemplates dreamily, But finally, in an attempt to reinvent perfection, She conceives Beauty.

She bestows on her a poetic vulnerability, a mystery and infatuation.
Beauty accepts the gifts and withdraws;
Transformation doesn't suit her too well.
Order is pleased, and Cycle is amused.

Beauty plays her part.
She detects shapes, angles and instants, gives them a character that surprises
- and often irritates -,
Order as much as Cycle and Movement.
Essentially, she won't let anyone agree.

But their validation doesn't matter to her.
As long as Life's response is intense, Beauty is what she needs to be,
She won't stop at being cold or arrogant.
And there it is; Life is spellbound.

Comforted in her success, Beauty becomes prescriptive.
Magnifying the encounters of Movement, Cycle, and Order, no longer satisfies her.
She experiments with orchestrating, raising standards.

Eventually, she full on directs all of Life's subjects.
As she refines her powerful recipe, Beauty sadly, subtly, gradually, but inexorably, loses her surprise.
And Life finds herself back on the shores of boredom.

Life now craves reinvention.
She demands it from Beauty, She demands it from Movement. She demands it from Order. And from Cycle.
No more duplication, repetition, reproduction.
Life is all about variation.

Beauty, Movement, Order and Cycle enthusiastically seek reinvention.
They try. They fail.
They try harder. They fail dismally.
They find that they are who they are,
They cannot transform without denying themselves.

Life, in a mad flash of genius, contrives Chaos.
Disruptive in essence, he infuses Life's subjects at the very heart of their nature;
The core of Substance, the linearity of Movement, the conformity of Order, the regularity of Cycle, and the definition of Beauty.

Life is thoroughly entertained by all the accidents, incongruities, and surprises that Chaos downs on her.

She gets so well entertained indeed, that she neglects her subjects.
It is soon too late, and Order and Beauty are tarnished by Irony.
After enduring powerlessness for so long in the face of the almighty Chaos,
they have lost their purpose and won't attempt to resist anymore.

Life encourages and supports them,
she even tries to restrict Chaos.

But true to himself, Chaos escapes in an unpredictable spin.

Justified by impotence,
Life lets herself be amused at the view, In spite of the disastrous turns.

Inescapably, all is overwhelmed and undermined, the fun wears off.
Irony exults.

Life enduringly watches her own sinkage.
She conjures Sadness to cheer up.

As a friend, Sadness is short-lived.
In the long run, in all ingratitude, she boosts the sinking.

Life feels betrayed and rebels.
She institutes Time to trap the Sadness.

For an instant, Chaos seems caught first.
Suddenly, he's got a before and an after.
That's a hard knock on his unpredictability.

But Time mostly just delineates Chaos, reflects its might.
And as long as Sadness gives Beauty a glow, Chaos's glory days aren't past.

As she faces the fact, Life withdraws.
Her subjects swallow their impatience;
They know nothing can be resolved without a pinch of perspective.

Life then realises she was quick to cave in.
Out of sloth, out of pride,
Out of shyness and short-sight.

Looking at it closely, Chaos is a loner.
His fancies isolate him.
The others wonder and wander, But one way or another, They pitch in.

In a calculated stroke of imagination,
Life finds lucid determination.
She assembles her subjects,
calls for unity, invites them to muster their energies into a single goal,
her new and collegial device, Control.

Control is the remedy, the prevention, the method, in one word, the solution.

Order and Cycle are naturally inclined to appreciate the merits of this instruction and muster at once.

Nurture and Movement, much less so, and they debate dreamily.

As for Beauty, she's not quite ready to submit.
She could consider being a muse to Control, if asked nicely.

As the rally slowly takes effect,
Life regains confidence.
Soon Chaos's hazards will be history, a memory fond to her only.

Chaos won't have it.
In a facetious and daring rebellion,
he collides with the united forces of Life, aiming at full-blown randomness,
with a predictable absence of expectations.

So it goes,
Chaos hits Life with a bang, a big one, and for an instant, all is still and quiet.
For an instant, everything is in everything.
For an instant only, everything makes sense.

Out of the collision, Fertility is born.
She is shy at first, but one by one, each of the colliders recognise their spark in her very existence.
Fertility's got it all.

Life is changed forever. She knows that after this, she can only partake in the world, she can't own it anymore.
She can't go back, and she can't get bored.
She knows none of this will ever put an end to Chaos,
but if her subjects get the space to exist again, she, Life, should feel spectacular.

Right away, Fertility gets attached to Beauty, who turns her head.
Under Fertility's sway,
Beauty meets with Time and creates Evolution. With Cycle, Beauty creates Selection. With Movement, she creates Art, with Substance, Purity, with Order, Excellence, and finally,
with Nurture, she creates Love.

Life is contrite and sheepishly flustered.
She feels Love was hers to spark. This merry-go-round of encounters leaves her in a whirl.
For a moment, Life considers stopping Beauty. Who does Beauty believe she is? Life herself?
Maybe she created a monster...

But the die is cast.
Life is committed to Fertility thriving, for her own sake.

It is Nurture that gets Fertility's attention next.
After all, the two of them have a lot in common. They naturally understand each other.
In contact with the Cycle, Nurture generates Hope. In contact with Time, she generates Wisdom. In contact with Order, she generates Truth. And Life, finally, is satisfied with her achievement.
Only good things can come now.

Fertility enjoys this game and now turns to Movement.
This one has a je ne sais quoi so elusive, that Fertility, just as Life, expects a lot from his encounters.
And with a touch of wonder, Life and Fertility witness that, From the encounter of Movement with Time emanates Infinity, With Order emanates Will, With Substance emanates Light, And with Nurture, Magic.

The Waltz of Life's springs begins.
From one encounter to the next, are birthed Freedom, Strength, Good, Hospitality, Joy, Pleasure, Plenitude, Nature, Curiosity, Innocence, Conquest, Grace, Reason, Honour, Talent, Desire, Attention, Generosity, Choice, Intuition...

Life contemplates her deed; The game of vital forces that multiply.
She dances and laughs at the show.
Chaos has transmuted into that pinch of salt that will only flavour creatively any force it comes across.

Her favourites change with each new opus, as inevitably, the world appears to her in a different light.
Life widens and rejoices of all these energies, Her intensity heightens.
She becomes richer.

Little does she know that Chaos was only the humble joke of her endeavours.
Rapturous as she is from all the success, she succumbs to the ecstasy of the twirl.
Life savours the delectable dizziness, and only after countless waltzes does she finally pay attention to what stands still around her.

She needs to gather all of her Logic, Generosity, and Attention to realise that what is still does not twirl, what is still is not delighted.
She calls on her Curiosity and Intelligence, she tries to understand.
She is tempted to believe that this is the work of Chaos, but there is no such thing as chaotic stillness.

She invites the still to dance, but only meets resistance.
She then slows down, Life.
She takes the time to observe stillness.
She does not find any enthusiasm in this observation, but her Joy is affected by the still, and she is compelled to take pause.

She summons Movement to understand.
The latter explains that he can only exist in relation to something else.
Without the still, Movement might as well call himself Chaos.
Life understands but doesn't find any enthusiasm in this understanding.

She summons Wisdom and Order to help tame her ideas.
The two look at each other puzzled and grave, Invite each other to respond first, and finally start and complete each other's sentences.
Wisdom is nothing without Madness, Order nothing without the Mess.

Life is stunned.
Her beloved creations only offset bleak alter egos.
She did indeed, create a monster.

In a gathering ritual, Life seeks clarity over her reality.
She listens to her subjects, each and every one of them, one by one, in a parade reminiscent of Bulgakov's hell.

Life becomes conscious of the misery she created along with the good; Light's shadows, Beauty's dismissals, Curiosity's obscurantism, Honour's villainy.

Pillared by stoic guilt, Life faces vice, spite, and fear, idiocy, trickery, cupidity, inanity, vanity, melancholy, mediocrity, frustration, obsession, rejection, inhibition, prejudice, cowardice, wrath, weakness, submissiveness, loneliness, excess, Absence, indifference, ignorance, avoidance, and too many more...
All the way to her ultimate and favourite outrage, arrogance.

In a bitter whirl, she holds her tears and dissolves in a short and intense meditation.

She wakens to a mood as sad but now shocked too, as one last epiphany strikes her, the missing piece.
After this void, Time stops.

Everything starts flashing in her mind, Everything makes sense now.
In a split second, her entire story rewinds;
The conscience, the twirl, the multiplying, the creation, the conception, And at the source of it all,
inept perfection.

Life smiles now.
She reminds herself of the Cycle, Fertility, Order, and of Chaos,
And she knows that this all is but the farce she fabricated to offset boredom.

She is done.
She will leave it to her quiet and still counterpart, Her patient and dark shadow,
The mantle to name herself.

The End.