Goddess: Part Four – Eve.
[It’s the end of an era and the start of something new. I’ve been primarily working with goddess archetypes as part of my practice since I was fourteen. Now it seems its time for me to move on. But, in honour of the feminine archetypes that have guided me thus far, this is the goddess series.]
Eve: Silence can be a weapon, you know. Not just a defence, but an active, formidable weapon. I’ve held my silence well, you could learn a lot from it.
I’ve watched you, as I’ve watched all of history pass before me. You wear your silence, then shrug it off when it gets too heavy. All your conflicts, all your problems stem from your inability to hold your tongue, even when everything in you is screaming, incessantly, to tell whoever it is that’s hurt you, exactly what you think. That’s real power, that’s real strength. The strength of your mother and her mother, the strength that you lack, the strength that you see as weakness, to keep your silence. (She sits still like a plant, stationery and rooted. She’s tiny, one of those classically petite women, a mousey ballerina with a small nose, thin lips and huge wet eyes. Her light brown hair looks dirty, greasy and unwashed, but the rest of her is spotless.)
Me: Sometimes I think that I shouldn’t have to be silent, it isn’t fair. Why do I have to take everything but give nothing back? Why do we have to keep our silence?
Eve: Because what we have to say would be truth, and no one wants to hear the truth if they can hear a lie instead.
To others I seem lifeless and boring, this isn’t an observation I’ve made, this is what I’ve been told, to my face. I live in my head and that’s seen as a pointless existence by most, I get that. In this world I am lifeless, all my passion, all my living goes into worlds of my own creation, into the study of the universe and everything that resides within it.
A guy I used to know once said to me that he wanted to see everything. I said to him: “I don’t want to see everything, I want to know everything.” He told me that was impossible, he didn’t understand. I know that life is finite, so it isn’t really about knowing everything. It’s about filling myself up with as much of everything as I possibly can before I die. That brings up other things though, like the point. What’s the point of gathering, hoarding knowledge, if I’m going to die and it will all be lost?
I sometimes imagine the future, this world as we know it has ended, a new species has evolved to replace us. They look at all our creations as ancient relics and study them to gain insight into who we were. Perhaps one of the things they’ll find is my laptop and they’ll find a way to give it life. They’ll translate these words into whatever language they’ll speak, and they’ll know a little fragment of this world, of my world.
