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From All About Eve to
Dearest Friends,
“All we know of heaven we know from Eve, who gave us the earth…Without Eve there would be no utopias, no imaginable reason to find and to create transcendence to ascend toward the light. Eve’s legacy to us is the imperative to desire. Babies and poems are born in travail of this desire, her great gift to the loveable world.”
Like the apple that came to represent Eve’s audacity, the sweet flesh of desire is encased in the taut, bittersweet skin of loss. For there can be no desire without loss; just as loss couldn’t exist without the ache for what it once had. The baby’s first knowledge of life is loss, the warmth of her mother’s womb. But the baby will abandon the breast after the first taste of ice cream. The poet knows that to put desire on the page is to lose intimacy with the Great Creator, but she’ll stand up a private date with Divinity any day for a public reading of her work.
What desires do you crave this month? What dreams beg to be carried to full fruition? What dream were you entrusted with to bring into the world? What dream did you abandon because it seemed as if another woman got there first? October is a wonderful month to reconsider dreams gone awry through frustration and fatigue, jealousy and fears of competition. Nothing kills a dream faster than imitation. Nothing buries our authenticity deeper than
comparisons.
Outside of Newton’s Chapel there’s a very old apple tree and I sit underneath it as often as I can, leaning against the trunk. Each time that I do I’m struck by the happenstance that led me here, linking my ordinary daily round with one of the world’s most cosmic coincidences; the apple falling from the tree while Sir Isaac Newton sat under it, disappointed and exhausted because every experiment he was doing so painstakingly right was going so terribly wrong. In late summer and fall, when the fruit is heavy on the branch, I sit carefully because apples tumble down regularly, and after my head injury, I’ve got a thing about fast moving orbs.
In case you’re wondering an apple falls down very directly. No veering to the left. No sashaying to the right. Plop. Plummet. Straight down. Newton had seem many apples drop before, but on that particular day during the summer of 1666, the apple’s fall became a catalyst for one of science’s most significant moments. Too tired to be anything but receptive, Newton understood this ordinary occurrence in a new light.
One Newton biographer, L.T. More, wrote in 1934, “It was a trifling incident which has been idly noticed thousands of times; but now, like the click of some small switch which starts a great machine in operation, it proved to be the jog which awoke his time to action.” Today scholars discount this story as apocryphal, doubting its authority because it’s too simplistic.
But it’s fascinating that the word “apocryphal”, which comes to us from the Greek, originally meant “hidden” and “secret”. And indeed, Newton kept the story of the apple to himself for twenty years. The workings of the Universe may well be encoded in enigmas, but the conundrums are very common ones. And the revelations that help us understand our place in the Universe are always as simple as they are stunning.
So getting back to Eve and desires--yours, as well as mine—each day in October, I want you to eat a celebratory apple. Enjoy picking them out (and try as many different varieties as you can find, and you’ll be amazed at how many there are). Polish your apple and find a special place on your desk or counter for it. Make a wish as your admire the source of your desire. Next, make your ceremoniously devouring it a private ritual of thanksgiving between you and the Great Creator. Be grateful for that apple and all the dreams that it inspires or rekindles. Write them down in your Gratitude Journal so you can make them real. Be open to receiving miracles with your name on them during a month that opens in Mystery and closes in Magic.
Eve’s leaving Eden was always part of the Divine Plan, necessary so you and I might know Heaven on earth.
Sending you love and a prayer for Deep Joy!
Sarah B.B.
PS. And if the Life Change you’re thinking about is becoming a Simple Abundance Certified Workshop Leader, congratulations! I’m so excited as I’m plotting and planning your pleasure. It will be a memorable week-end as Simple Abundance expands in such an exciting way. I look forward to working with you personally to make your dreams come true. We are holding a few places for members in our Los Angeles inaugural workshop November 10-11, 2007 remaining. Take a look, Certified Leader Program
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This is a bumper year for apples because of the wet spring and summer we’ve had and apples always make me think of Eve. “When Eve bit into the apple, she gave us the world as we know the world—beautiful, flawed, dangerous, full of being. She gave us smallpox and Somalia, polio vaccine and wheat and Windsor roses,” Barbara Grizzuti Harrison muses in her meditation on Eve included in the provocative collection of essays Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible.
