13 Jun 2025 3 min read worldbuilding

Sols

The poems that follow are the conceptual framework for a world I’ve been working on shaped by memory, reverence, and the slow accumulation of meaning. At the center of this world stands a sacred practice: the recognition of Sols—mortal beings whose lives, through circumstance, sacrifice, or triumph, transcended the ordinary and became part of something greater. Their stories aren’t told in volumes, but in paired statues and short poems. Just two lines each. Written by committee. Always recited in full. Shorthand is a serious transgression.

Each Sol poem is a carefully structured moment of transformation. They do not rhyme. They are always composed of two lines, each with nine syllables. Every poem contains a Symbol, a metaphor that speaks to something universal, and a Name: a specific person, place, or reference that grounds the poem in shared cultural memory. Importantly, the Name must not belong to the Sol being memorialized. Their own name fades, eclipsed by the turning point they came to embody.

The poems are carved into stone—once where the Sol’s great act occurred, and once again, faceless, in the Garden of Sol. These poems function almost like sacred currency: they hold power when shared. Their meaning arises not from divinity but from communal insistence. Like economies, like stories, like memory itself, the Sols are real because people insist they are. Their poems are recited, their statues visited, and their meanings fretted over. This is a mosaic of those who became lodestars through the persistent act of being remembered.

Here is a growing collection of Sols, each with a brief description of the accompanying statuary.

The First Thirteen

“The Bell was broken, bird stirred song
ash into rain cloud – I am a great wind”
A woman with wind-whipped robes, cracked bell on her wrist, silver birds rising into a storm.

“Father's sins melt heavily I fire
Heavy Furnaces with many hands”
A blacksmith pouring molten metal from his palms into tools and chains, furnace roaring behind.

“Weeping Pavla is the sun wisely
rising again? I, red, rise again”
A sick child wrapped in cloth turning to sunbeams, with a mourning figure behind.

“Light scatters, each living thing: crystal
Ardipan water spring eternal”
A radiant woman amid rivers and carved animals, holding a floating quartz sphere.

“The Axes grew dull against hard wood
then broke – grindstone – I do not neglect”
An elderly woman grinding a broken axe, surrounded by forest tools.

“I, an urgent prayer, flow as water
We'ehTerehwah light the five fires”
A torchbearer sprinting across a waterfall, lighting distant mountain peaks.

“I hide you bone-safe Gentle Princess,
warm hearth and warm home of sturdy stone”
A smiling man sheltering a child in his apron, surrounded by tiny carved homes.

“Nutmeg in White Winter's good water,
mist and I sit patiently waiting”
A man on a harbor edge with steaming mug, older self ghosted in his coat’s shadow.

“I wash my hands, stubborn Brother Crow
learned and taught and then he learned again”
A stern woman with water dripping from her hand, crow on her arm, shiny objects in a fountain.

“Raggedly I am your threadbare rest
dark night, Cool Breeze, lower the curtain”
An exhausted elder seated with a shepherd’s crook, surrounded by graves and sleeping forms.

“Mother bear sound, smile of Seeding Sprout
I am righteous anger ripening”
A fierce woman in a bear cloak, spear raised, cradling a tiny sprout in her arm.

“Fir snap memory of Tarragon
the blood-taste peacefully I swallow”
A solemn man walking with a low axe, beside fir trees and a carved standing stone.

“Stone hardness — lines in sand Althea
I am just right rock river proceeds”
A towering stone stele etched with rivers and a woman’s profile, alone in a gravel courtyard.