Self-sacrifice enables us to dance.

I think, here is oblique
praise for the storm
ready to eat.
with heart of earth; with thoughts of love affair?
and why.

last night i know, in the same name every time
i've got you under the tent of night between the planets
and the mother brood some deed of sacrifice?
her floating robe, in royal amplitude,
falls in deep water,
it belongs to me.

look! The cupboard has closed.
wee, small hands, quick finger tipped,
slipped the key to time and space folding up
i saw the thing descending, circling, here.
and marking you i shall find again
dancing on the hollow of the fence.

--MegaHAL

Oh, my children, you do not know how weary your Mother becomes, giving birth to you, nourishing you, bringing you back to myself again. Being your Mother, holding the lives of all my children, is a burden in ways you can never understand. How could you? For all your boasts and all your glories, you are still so very young.

This is how you know your Father loves me: air and water, in the guise of storm, he comes to me in the night. This royal robe I wear--this identity--time and space!--comes off beneath his hands, my willing sacrifice. I renounce myself; he claims me. Time and space, falling away, forgotten in his inconceivable storm. Our older children--the littler ones--carefully gather up that royal robe and all of you in it, fold it up and put it away. For a while, I am not your Mother Earth. For a while, because of Father Sky, I forget myself, and I dance at the edge of the worlds.