Mother Eve and the Garden in My Body, Part 2

I was with a friend a couple of hours ago sitting on a dock stretching into Boggs Marsh.  We were in a garden of tules with redwing blackbirds, ducks, a goose, and frogs disquieted by our voices.  Muck of the marsh below.  The remnants of yesterday’s storm floated above our heads, blocking the sun, and a wind chilled us until we sat on the boards that soaked up the sunlight slipping through the clouds.

She said, “You were eating your maleness yesterday.”  I laughed because I didn’t know she had read my last entry, but also it hadn’t occurred to interpret my dream that way. 

We both admitted we have never felt feminine, that a sense of beauty, physical or spiritual, was somehow not embodied in us.  Not that I’ve felt  . . .  I’m giggling as I write this . . . manly.  Just to celebrate womb and breasts, natural grace, the clay that has made me, doesn’t come naturally.

I’ve always trusted my head more than my heart, sometimes with drastic consequences. But the head has felt safer, in general.  Perhaps movement brings emotion and so often with them chaos, the tension I wrote of yesterday.  That wonderful freedom I woke with, the woman who lives deep in my gut, the grace of simply being, is gone today. 

But the gift of the dream, experiencing the lifting of anxiety, of the silencing of the small voice of dread that has been my companion all of my life, has helped to reinforce what I know on the surface of my consciousness, on the surface of my skin, but don’t in the depth of  my body’s knowledge.  This shell that surrounding me is not my true self.  That spirit of yesterday morning, open and strong, really resides inside of me. 

 Eve, blamed for so much, lived in a garden.  And then she was banished, and the shell descended.  I would love to believe that the garden is beginning to grow again and that she’ll return home.