Eve

Eve

For decades and millennia,

she had been a woman uprooted, 

but now was one whose potent shoots

were again sinking deep into the fertile soil.

And so the woman scorned, 
turned to He 

in whose name she had been shamed,

and said “No, enough, I am done.

You will not do harm unto my sovereignty any longer.

I have done no wrong here and there is no part of me 

that deserves your punishment. 

My body is a temple, it is sacred.”

And the God within Eve,

which knew itself through her holy embodiment,

said unto the God who spoke in punitive tones from on high,

“You cannot cast me out, 

because I cannot leave the sanctuary of my own beingness,

it is the gate through which I walk. 

I claim my own authority as a direct interface 

with the threshold of divinity.

I cannot be exiled because I am a part of everything, 

I cannot be made separate 
because I am whole unto myself and all of love. 

You cannot banish me from the garden

because I am a living expression of that garden.

She blooms more verdantly within me 

with each passing of the moon. 

I reclaim the snake, 

for she is my great ally.

She is the ladder that links the polarities of divinity, 

the conduit of union between the earth and cosmos, 

she taught me that life is sweet and juicy 

and ripe for the plucking, 

that there is a path to awakening that is found 

by entering into the body, 

taking the fruit of life inside, 

through inclusion, nourishment, 
harvest, bounty, 

the sacrament of endarkenment, 

to balance the mystery of our enlightenment. 

You will no longer set me apart from man, 

he is my equal and my friend, 

I carry his qualities within me 

as he carries mine within him, 

and we stand side by side in this life.

I renounce the grief that has wracked me for millennia,

the illusion of our separateness.

I give you back the lie that he would have dominion over me, 

for in doing so he does harm unto all of life.

The energy dwells within me as my purity of purpose,

and walks beside me as my friend and ally, 

together from here we are facing forwards,
and there is no longer room for all the harm done,
each to each in the woundedness of our exile,
we renounce the pain and seek only love in the spaces between.

No longer will he be my misguided direction, 

nor my heroic salvation,

for I am already home and whole.

No longer will I make of him the grand distraction 

from the immutable knowing of my own righteous wilderness.”

And to Lilith, her ancient rival in uprootedness, she said,

“Come back, my sister, come in,

come dwell here with us, 

there is room for the many faces of woman. 

Your power does not threaten me, 

the world is made more bright by our difference. 

Let us tend the diversity of this garden together, 

we cannot be turned out, 

for it is our birthright 

and it flowers in our hearts. 

We will raise the food to nourish the whole, 

we will plant the seeds that will create the magnificence 

of our own reflections, 

our resonant vibrations a testament to the unshakable offering 

of our own communion with the interface of creation, 

each of us a face of the Source of life, 

no one less than another, 

each sovereign and powerful in their capacity 

to know themselves as the unshakable presence of Love.

So deeply embedded in my own becoming, 

I understand that no sister was ever my rival, 

only my teacher, 

and another woman's power is never a threat, 

but rather serves to embolden the clarity of my inner-sense 

to know myself as whole. 

Here we shall dwell together with all our daughters 

and tend the garden side by side.”

And to those daughters she said, 

“Don't believe the lies that anyone can take anything away from you. 

You are so fiercely protected by the interface 

of your own embodiment in the heart of love.

Enter into the wilderness of your own chaos 

and come to know yourself.

Feel the starry crown descend upon your brow 

as you sink your mud encrusted feet 

into the cells of your own earthly becoming, 

deep roots into the power of your love 

that no one can rob from you.”

And to any who would know woman 
as a lesser thing , she said, 

“The pain of my womb as it brings forth life unto itself,

is my greatest blessing, 

through it I am birthed anew, 

through the eye of the needle 

into the kingdom of heaven 

which dwells within me, 

and between the union that seeded the life that blooms, 

and between the babe who suckles unashamed at my breast. 

Your curse has become the most transmutable of gifts.

It has become the portal through which I enter 

into exquisite intimacy with the dark edge that gives me power, 

the shadowed veils of this embodied life 

which have gifted me temerity and endurance.

Through my pain the future is born quivering from my thighs,

and this power to face and know myself through the darkest of hours

has brought me home again to the garden of my birth rite,

has become the primal gateway through which I enter again 

the powerful perfection of my imperfect embodiment.

Your punitive imperative no longer holds sway here,

in the wake of my immaculate conception, 

gestation and birthing of sovereignty.

Spirit speaks to me through the fecund folds of my flesh,

the succulent creation of new tissue,

the fertile flow of my blood,

the bitter tears of my shedding,

the glistening filaments of my dreaming soul,

connected imperceptibly to the tomes of cosmic lore.

For I am the earth from which the garden blooms

and She, my mother, carries me on Her back in every living moment.

She will not have me forget who it is that I am,

how deeply I belong in the matrix of Her love.

I have come home to the garden,

and it is in need of my tending,

for the eons have swelled in the wake of my forgetting, 

upon the false tides of the myth that I am separate.

And now the story of my excile 

has become so old that it is dying.

And in its place a new one is being born, 

woven from the threads 

of our immutable belonging.”

Image and Text © Lucy Pierce 2017