Not a god
Cyparissus
A youth who loved a stag, killed it by accident, and became the cypress. Grief is the subject. Apollo is secondary.
Cyparissus, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, is a youth of Cea loved by Apollo. The boy’s own great love is a tame stag. He kills the stag with a misthrown spear and grieves so completely that he is transformed into the cypress, the tree Romans associated with mourning. He is not a god. He is barely, in the poem, a lover of Apollo in any sense that survives the stag.
What the story is good for
It is good for people who have hurt something they meant to protect, and who need a rite that is about repair and not about self-destruction. It is a bad mascot for romantic fixation. The stag is the moral center if there is one: care for a living creature outranks being someone’s beloved.
A repair practice
- 1Name, on paper, a harm you did that was not glamorous. Keep the paper private.
- 2Name one repair that is still possible. If none is, name one way you will not repeat it.
- 3If you can, put your hand on a tree or a houseplant. Say: “Sorrow can make a shape without ending the person who feels it.”
- 4Do the repair, or the safeguard, within a week. The myth is not the repair.