Havah: The Story of Eve

And I know that God made the heart the most fragile and resilient of all organs, that a lifetime of joy and pain might be encased in one mortal chamber.

How mighty, how great the One must be, I thought, to send the heavens careening, and yet hear the cry of a single heart.

The words, when they came to my heart, were so gentle, and familiar -- and so very sad: What is this you have done?

I was beloved. I had been hoped for. Somehow, I was necessary.

I wanted to be alone with the One. The One who scaled then careened from the heights of the Mount. The One who raised up the man from the mud. The One who fashioned me from a part of the man and knew me more intimately than even the adam.

You are necessary to that end, and to me...you are all I have of the garden. You are the image of me and of the One. And if you have wronged, then I have surely repaid your wrong twice over.

I have always contended that girls are the sturdier of the genders and wondered in secret if the One that Is might not best be identified with the creativity of the female heart.

In the beginning there was God...but for me there was Adam.

I slept in the grip of that love, comforted, thinking I should forget my longing within it, knowing that all was somehow well...In the morning when I stirred, I knew...I knew I lay here in my own flesh, but not alone.

Sometime before sleep it occurred to me that the true nature of being without might mean never knowing what one lacked.

I felt laid bare, a fruit split open to reveal a moldering inside.

I will protect you all the days of my life. You will be the mother of all who live and the giver of life to the seed spoken by the One -- the seed that will strike the offspring of the serpent. The One has said it, Isha...today I name you Havah, because you will live, and all who live will come from you, and you will give birth to hope.

A mist crept into the valley—how could this be, by the light of the climbing sun? It drifted over the form in the grass, nearly obscuring it, seeming to draw all sound into itself. I thought I might burst from the strain of that silence... until a single sound shattered it: The gasp of an indrawn breath.