i didn’t expect one of the things that would shape the direction of this work most would be re-reading the book of genesis.

the more i sat with the strange disconnect that seems to happen between people and their own inner knowing once life starts asking them to change, the more i kept finding myself returning to eve eating the forbidden fruit.

for most of my life, i understood the story the same way a lot of people do. eve eats the fruit, humanity falls, everything breaks. the story becomes the moment we are separated from god, separated from paradise, separated from innocence.

and from there, so much of spirituality gets framed around the idea of return. returning to god. returning to wholeness. returning to connection. returning, somehow, to how things were before leaving eden.

but lately i keep wondering if returning was ever the point.

picked the most perfect apple from my parent’s apple tree

when i went back to the story, i found myself paying less attention to the disobedience itself and more attention to what happened afterward. eve eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and then genesis says, “their eyes were opened.”

that line has stayed with me.

because before that moment, adam and eve exist inside a reality that has already been entirely defined for them. the structure already exists. the rules already exist. the meaning already exists. there isn’t yet this tension between innocence and experience, inner knowing and external authority, choice and consequence. they simply exist inside what has already been created.

and then their eyes open.

suddenly they are aware of themselves. aware of vulnerability. aware of consequence. aware of choice. aware that being alive is more complicated than simply existing.

i used to read that only as loss, but now i’m not sure i can.

because maybe what disappeared in eden wasn’t simply closeness to god. maybe innocence became impossible once consciousness arrived.

and consciousness is complicated because once you know something, you can’t really unknow it. once you become aware of suffering, you can no longer move through life as though suffering doesn’t exist. once you become aware of yourself as an individual, relationships become more complicated because now there is a you and a me, each with your own needs, fears, history, desires, wounds, boundaries, and choices.

i’m realizing where i have previously succumb to the idea that complexity was dangerous.

if love became complicated, i wanted to return to the version before complication. if a truth hurt, some part of me wanted to unknow it. if life felt harder after becoming more aware of myself, i wondered if ignorance really had been bliss.

and this was my real life lightbulb moment:

the other day, i had this random conversation with a friend about periods (stay with me).

we were talking about how difficult being in a female body can be sometimes, and she jokingly brought up eve. she said something like, “why am i being punished because eve wanted the forbidden fruit? why do i have to deal with this because of what she did?”

and i swear something in me just stopped.

because she didn’t mean anything by it. it was a joke. but hearing it said that plainly made me realize how deeply that interpretation still lives in us.

the idea that eve wanted knowledge, and now we suffer for it.

curiosity created punishment. awareness created pain. a woman reached for something she was told not to touch, and generations of women somehow inherited the consequence.

but the more i thought about it, the less complete that felt. because knowledge doesn’t only make us aware of suffering. it also gives us the ability to respond to it.

knowing that childbirth can be painful doesn’t just burden us with fear. it gives us the ability to prepare. we learn about the body. we study pregnancy. we create medicine. we build systems of care. we learn how to intervene when something goes wrong. we pass knowledge between generations.

the same is true of menstruation. menopause. illness. grief. aging. heartbreak. all of it. we become conscious that something hurts, and then consciousness allows us to ask, okay, what can i do with what i know?

we prepare. we adapt. we create. we heal. we protect ourselves. we make different choices. we make meaning.

and suddenly the fruit starts to look more complicated than a simple curse because the same awareness that exposes us to suffering also gives us agency inside of it.

i think that realization changed something in the way i understand love, too.

there have been so many moments in my own life where i’ve thought, man, i wish this could just be easy. i wish two people could love each other and that could simply be enough. no timing issues. no wounds. no fear. no projection. no growing pains. no having to confront yourself through another person.

and maybe part of me was longing for my own version of eden.

especially because one of the most significant relationships in my life began when we were kids. there is something about knowing someone before adulthood that carries this strange remembrance of innocence. like, i knew you before all of this. before we became these people. before life complicated us. and i think part of me wanted to return to that.

but we can’t.

we are different people now. and not just in the obvious ways. we have entire inner worlds that didn’t exist back then. we have experiences that changed the way we love, the way we protect ourselves, the way we interpret things, the way we relate to ourselves.

and then we met each other again as adults and changed again.

that relationship revealed things to me about myself that i didn’t know before it. i’m sure the same is true in reverse. and whatever happens from here, we will keep changing.

i think i’m finally understanding that maybe the point of relationship was never to find someone who allows you to return to some untouched version of yourself.

maybe the point is learning how to continue becoming while you love.

how to remain whole while being deeply connected to someone else. how to have an us without losing the me. how to let somebody matter to you without handing them your entire center. how to allow relationship to change you without disappearing inside it.

and maybe that is what conscious love asks of us. not, can we get back to who we were before life happened?

but, can i know you as you are now? can i let you know me as i am now? can we keep meeting each other as we become different people?

there is something so beautiful to me about the difference between “i remember you” and “i am willing to know you again and again.”

i used to confused innocence with wholeness.

i thought wholeness meant nothing had touched you yet. nothing had complicated you. nothing had divided you internally. you hadn’t yet had to confront the parts of yourself that wanted contradictory things.

but now i think wholeness might actually be something we learn after all of that. not being untouched, but being able to remain with yourself after being changed.

being able to know what you know without abandoning yourself.

being able to feel pain without deciding that pain means life has betrayed you.

being able to love without needing love to rescue you from being human.

and i think this has changed the way i understand what i used to call the separation wound too.

i still believe there is something deeply damaging about being taught that our own awareness is dangerous. that trusting ourselves is dangerous. that questioning is dangerous. that inner knowing has to be immediately checked against someone else’s authority before we are allowed to believe it.

we see it all the time. we feel something, know something, sense something, and then immediately look outside of ourselves to determine whether we’re allowed to trust it.

but i think there’s another layer now.

maybe the wound isn’t simply that consciousness separated us from god. maybe the wound is believing that consciousness means we have been abandoned.

believing that difficulty means the divine has left. believing complexity means love has failed. believing suffering means we made some irreversible mistake and now the whole human experience is just one long consequence.

i don’t know if i believe that anymore.

because what if the divine was never only inside eden?

what if the divine is also in everything we have learned to create after it?

in medicine. in discernment. in repair. in love that becomes more honest. in wisdom passed between generations. in the body learning itself. in the moment someone recognizes a pattern and decides not to repeat it. in two people learning how to love each other without losing themselves.

what if consciousness didn’t move us away from the divine as much as it gave us a new way to participate with it?

i think that’s where i am now.

there were moments in my own life where i confused emotional suppression with maturity. moments where i thought disconnecting from myself made me more loyal, more grounded, more spiritually evolved.

but my body still knew when something felt off. my emotions still knew when i was trying to preserve potential more than reality. some deeper part of me still knew when i was abandoning myself to maintain attachment.

the answer was never becoming less aware.

it was learning what to do with the awareness.

how to listen without immediately reacting. how to discern without becoming hardened. how to love without abandoning myself. how to accept what is true without needing reality to become something else before i allow myself to keep living.

and i think that is the part i was missing before.

consciousness becoming wisdom.

so, i don’t think i want to return to eden anymore.

i don’t want to unknow what i know. i don’t want a version of love that only works if i become innocent again. i don’t want spirituality that requires me to distrust my humanity. i don’t want wholeness that can only exist before life complicates me.

i want to know what it means to remain whole after my eyes have opened.

to know suffering exists and still choose life.

to know love can hurt and still remain capable of loving.

to understand that people change and still allow what happened between us to be meaningful.

to recognize my own patterns without hating the version of me who hadn’t learned them yet.

to accept that awareness comes with responsibility, and maybe responsibility is also what gives us choice.

maybe we’ve spent too much time asking how humanity gets back into the garden. i feel like the more interesting question is what we’re supposed to do now that our eyes are open.

maybe innocence was never the final destination. maybe it was one part of the story. and maybe, consciousness was the beginning of another.

one where we have to learn how to choose. how to discern. how to create. how to heal. how to stay connected to ourselves while being connected to other people. how to meet pain without deciding existence itself was a mistake.

maybe eve didn’t simply introduce humanity to disobedience, maybe she introduced us to the terrifying, beautiful responsibility of knowing.

and maybe that’s why, in some strange way, we owe eve an apology.

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