The Awareness

Once upon a time, long long ago before the story of Adam and Eve as written in the Bible- solidified in the manner I came to know while growing up - it seems there were other ways of viewing the world. How I reached my early thirties without knowing this escapes me now, as it did then. Just how I thought all things came to being, I don't know. I only know that I did not ponder it. Perhaps I was busy; perhaps I was afraid to know; perhaps I knew that if I knew then I would have to change the comfortable way I viewed my existence.

By whatever means I had survived in that place of restless acceptance, (for I had known on some other level that things were not as they seemed) the day came when I listened to a classmate do her oral presentation. Words that would forever instill in me the reality of what it could mean to be woman.

The report. A presentation about a contemporary author who wrote about the time before Christianity. Before Adam and Eve? Before Genesis? Before the one and only male god who ruled the heavens and the earth? How was it I'd always known this yet my conscious mind hadn't registered it, examined it, brought it to my waking attention?

Before that there had been many cultures, many who worshipped a goddess; a female deity? So she was the one whom had comforted me all my life. The one who'd come in her white flowing robes, spoken to me time and time with that whisper voice. The whisper that rescued me from certain madness when I was nine.

Saved me from believing that I was evil at the core. Innately sinful; twice cursed because as if being born human with original sin wasn't enough; I was a girl. Girls were more innately sinful even than boys. Because of Eve and the apple. And the serpent. And because she alone had fallen prey to the evil temptation of Satan and with her sinful ways taken Adam down with her.

At nine years of age, frightened by the prospect of evil as I was; already guilty of inciting man with my wanton ways, although I didn't know how I'd done it. I only knew I had. That it was my fault they got erections, and erections hurt them. They had to have help with it and sense I'd somehow caused it to erect, it was my responsibility to fix it.

But, the demons had come to me because of it. I fought each and every day to resist them. I laid across my bed and read from the Holy Bible. I read and I prayed. I begged God to help me avoid the evil. Yet, I was mired in it, like it had hold of my feet beneath the sludge - pulling - pulling - a steady tug pulling me closer and closer to the fire pits where Satan lived and wished me to live as well.

My tears fell on the pages of the Holy Sacred Book of God. They defaced the page, large wet splotches that made the words blur together in a puddle that reflected back to me the horror of the evil I had become. It was hopeless. Satan had won.

No more resigned to this solid fact then she had come. I felt her before I heard her or perhaps it was the same thing. Perhaps the whisper of her voice had been the same currents that carried her to me in the first place. Perhaps her voice was the very air she traveled upon.

I believed her. From some place outside reason or need for proof I believed her and wept. I wept in her invisible arms against her non-existent pulsing breast. I slept within the hazy warmth of fresh clean breathable air and when I woke she was gone, yet; not really gone.

So, some twenty years later I heard a report and I knew deep at my core that it was true. I took the grocery money to the bookstore in search of more information about her. I found books about her. All sorts of books with scattered bits of history and pictures of old relic statues dug from deep in the earth. Books I'd never noticed before, books I'd seen and heard reference to, yet had never registered in my conscious thoughts as more than god with a 'dress' attached to it.

-Betsy-

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