The Secret of Maya

Star: Maia (Pleiades Open Cluster)

Mood: Celebrating

Song: The Blower's Daughter * Damien Rice

Maya is the person I cherish most in the Universe. If I didn't meet her, I'd have invented her, as cliché as it may sound. And it's her birthday time.

Everyone knows the wonderful civilization of the Maya. But to tackle that, I'd need ages. Just so that you would know, Maya has just as much of a civilization.

She's everything one could want, and everything one could not want.

She is moody. She sometimes gets angry. She fights with whoever is serving her or bringing the bill in restaurants. She is always right (that's a problem)...

Though Maya is the sweetest. She is too sweet I get afraid to overlap her sweetness. She is generous in her emotions. She is of an extreme intelligence, and highly cultivated (kicking everyone's ass at cultural questions). She is the perfect Cook. The perfect Painter. The PERFECT FRIEND.

We always fight, sometimes I break chairs (hehe) and sometimes she breaks into a demon you don't want to see.

But that's temporary. For I cannot have a normal week if I didn't get to call her or share with her whatever random stupidity I was having.

That makes her a first-magnitude star in my own catalogue classification. And she has a long path to go yet while spreading her light over her numerous fans.

In astronomy, Maia is one of the 6 apparent Blue-ish stars in the Pleiades Open Cluster (or the 7 sisters) in the Taurus Constellation. This clearly visible to the naked eye cluster, is the nearest to the Earth. It holds several hundred stars.

Mythologically, Maia is believed to be one of the 7 sisters that form the Pleiades cluster (Maia, Electra, Celaeno, Taygeta, Merope, Alcyone, and Sterope).

They are the daughters of the Titan Atlas and the nymph Pleione. In the sky, the 7 stars are visible (with Alcyone being the brightest). They are represented with their parents, Atlas and Pleine who are on the farthest left.

To get back to Maia, since she is the topic of interest, she is the eldest of the seven Pleiades. According to the Olympian pedigree, she used to be one of Zeus' lovers, and from this relationship, she gave birth to the god of travelers, Hermes.

(In the picture, Maia is the most brilliant from the 4 upper stars)