When Eve Ate the Apple: The Beginning of Our Story as Earth Daughters
Whether there truly was a time that we lived in a mythical Eden of Heaven on Earth
or whether that memory simply lives as a seed within each of us, destined to one day burst open and flourish into a wild paradise of remembrance, the longing to return home to “The Garden” is an ache that lives inside of us all.
It comes to us in our quiet moments of longing to feel that there’s somewhere in this world where we belong. In our sensitivity and despair as we witness the jungles burn, animals go extinct, waters be polluted, and places that we fell in love with through our world travels become congested, overdeveloped, and lose the magic that reminded us of who we truly are.
We feel it in our hunger and yearning to be met with a love that can touch us at our core, to truly harness and access our gifts and understand our life purpose, and to feel the harmony of life that sings to us when we step outside of the business of the structures that have oppressed our true nature for eons.
In a world where it is so easy to deny this longing and settle into the amnesia of the way that things have “always” been, choosing to face your own ache is a powerful revolution.
To answer the ache, to listen to the longing, is at once exhilarating and also terrifying. We may wish to go back to sleep once it has awoken us. Because to face this ache is to face ourselves. It is to strip away the false masks of who we have been told we are and to dive right into the very force of life that makes us who we are.
And so, for some, the deep longing to return to our true nature stays in the background. Like a dull hum that one can grow easily accustomed to and fall into a hazy slumber of complacency and endlessly forget. Meanwhile, the jungles burn, the waters go dark, the animals disappear, and we remain unfulfilled.
But eventually the time comes for every being on this evolutionary path, when the hum in the background, the quiet tug, becomes an alarm bell, a wake up call, a tornado that enters our lives with unavoidable force, clutching us so tightly we simply cannot escape, bringing us face to face with life and death, and demanding that we finally remember who we are and why we came here.
When did you first come into contact with this ache, this longing, this yearning to remember your true nature and come Home?
For me it came at the start of 2012, when I traveled to a small beach town surrounded by primary rainforest jungle in Costa Rica. Living for months in this simple way, in harmony with the rhythms of the Earth, disconnected from the outside world, brought me into a state of ecstasy that I had never before encountered. I saw the world with the eyes of a child and came home to the simple pleasures and bliss of being so totally in my own flesh.
Returning home after this wild awakening felt impossible. I tried to repackage myself into the old self I had once been and attempted to regain control of my life through my mind. But eventually… I let go. I let go of everything to answer a deeper calling and curiosity within me, my house, my car, my relationship, my career, and the safe conventional existence that was all I had ever known.
I spent six years living in this small jungle town, falling in love with her mysteries and letting her wisdom weave me into a new human I had never known before. I chronicled my story and my journey through my former blog, This American Girl, which reached millions of readers and inspired many many women to come to this small jungle town to also remember the wild within.
But that was not the end of my story as an Earth Daughter, it was actually just the beginning.
The ache met me again in 2018 when every cell in my being urged me to leave my paradise home in Costa Rica and the unconventional dream life I had created, to end what I had loved more than anything, to truly taste the unknown. It was the systematic dismantling of my entire world as I had known it, feeling myself cast out of the love of the wild.
I resisted it immensely, and I stayed. In my resistance I became increasingly physically ill, having daily anxiety attacks, unable to leave the house, and finally I was met with the Dark Goddess who came into my home one night as two attackers, bringing me into contact with my greatest fear, my greatest rage, and my greatest power. (I wrote the full story here.)
That’s when I left the jungle, my own personal Eden, and in doing so, I plunged into unavoidable contact with my greatest pain: the feeling that I was separate from the source of life itself.
Acutely aware of the magnitude of my own unmet suffering, I began to ask myself… why? Why did I feel separate from life no matter where in the world I went, cut off from the wild abundance of nature, and cast out by the only place I had ever called my home? Why couldn’t I just go back to the jungle and return to my old self, my old life?
Why couldn’t I go home?
In a world that has conditioned us to numb, avoid, distract, lightwash, and medicate away the ache inside of us, we have reached a time in Herstory where many of us are being guided deeper into the source of our suffering, to discover the very source of our existence.
Desiring a sense of resolution within my own pain, I handed myself over to the question… could this insatiable longing for home be the very thread guiding me to more than I could have ever imagined? Is this ache that I’m trying to resolve, actually something truly sacred?
This koan has become my greatest stirring, my fiercest teacher, and my most profound guru. It has required me to explore and excavate the depths of my own deepest longing, pain, and feelings of separation in an attempt to trace my way back to the roots of the wound and to finally discover the seed of its source.
In doing so, I have come to believe that there is a sacred, holy purpose for the longing that we all carry to discover our true nature, to merge with a soul mate, and to return to The Garden of Heaven on Earth. I believe in the depths of my bones, that the ache we feel is actually the innate stirring, the divine guidance, the holy desire, the magnetic pull, and the thread of gold directing us to the greatest potential that we came here to co-create as human beings at this time on Earth.
The ache is here to guide us home.
as we seek the true nature of our being, the ache will challenge us to dive into the deepest questions that we came here to live… what is my potential? Who am i? And why did i come here?
Stories from the dawn of creation, woven into the fabric of every culture on this Earth, stories that personify the movement of the stars and the cycles of nature, stories that have been passed down through generations, offer us clues, keys, and gateways into the vast majesty that is the mystery school of life.
Stories are prophesies, messengers, reminders, here to guide us through the dark tunnels between one reality and another that we may not yet fully understand or fully see.
At this time in humanity, as we collectively are awakening through our ache, we have an incredible invitation to revive the hidden prophesies that live in our stories and to reweave them into a collective context that will set us free. Just as our own deepest longing guides us deeper into the truth of our nature, the key to returning back to the literal and metaphorical Garden of Eden, is hidden in the very wounding that our perceived Fall From Grace has created.
Beginning with the story that has shaped us from our very inception… the story of original sin itself… the story of Adam and Eve.
For a moment, let’s all imagine ourselves in the mythical time of The Garden, in the paradise of our own creation, where all is right and all is love. Breathe in the rapturous essence of life that dances as a luminescence and sparkles like fresh dew on every flower, every tree, every leaf, everything.
Feel yourself in this long forgotten time when man and woman lived in ecstatic bliss with all of the elements of nature, in love with one another, naked and wildly open to the orgasmic pulse of life.
You know this place. We all do.
If we can imagine this state, and if some of us have even accessed it in wild nature across this Earth, while imbibing the medicine of plant teachers, or within deeply meditative trance journeys, then it must also live within us. It must be intricately woven into our genetic makeup as a core source of our deepest desires that we each came here to fulfill.
The paradox of our longing for Home, is that we feel separate from it, and at once… we are it. We are actually designed to fulfill it.
As the great drama begins, and the stage is set, Adam and Eve are “set up” to forget their true nature.
Within the context that many of us know the story today, this forgetting occurs as a result of “original sin” when Eve is tempted to eat an apple from the tree of knowledge by a talking snake. Despite it being forbidden, Eve eats the apple and invites Adam to follow suit.
Because they have eaten the forbidden fruit, the two are punished by God for disobeying his orders and are forever banished from returning to the The Garden. In essence… they fall from God’s image and are reduced to becoming human. Because they eat the apple, they become separate from God and are destined to suffer.
Over many many eons under patriarchal rule, our cultural interpretation of this story has delivered us several key messages: desire is unholy, awakening is dangerous, woman will tempt man away from God, and when we disobey this voice of the “Father God” (aka patriarchy) and listen to the voice of the wild, we will be punished on the deepest level.
But what if Eve eating the apple was actually the best thing that has ever happened? What if it was meant to happen? What if, as its placement in Genesis suggests, Eve eating the apple was just the beginning of our return home to the truth of our nature?
Have you ever found yourself in the midst of great transformation, waking up to deeper layers of your existence, feeling the wounds of our collective, and wondering if you’ve done something wrong and been punished by God?
This is exactly what I felt when I left my home in Costa Rica.
I had eaten the apple. I had tasted truth. I had followed the voice of my own intuition, and in that process… my world crumbled and I was catapulted out of my own Garden of Eden and into what felt like the depths of Hell. I lost my home, my community, my influence in the world, my sense of identity, and all of the external layers that I thought made me worthy of love.
But something strange was also happening in the midst of this. It was as if the entire construct that I had once considered home, love, and life was simultaneously dissolving and also anchoring. Like the whole world that I had once known to be mine disappeared from outside of me and begin to travel deeper into a tiny flame, or a seed, or a spark of light inside of my belly. Everything that disappeared around me was traveling back into a deeper space inside of me, returning to its very source.
Through leaving the wild, a seed inside of me was actually encapsulating the wild within my own womb, and a quiet voice within told me that I had to leave behind everything I thought I was so that I could rebirth this remembrance back out into the world.
As much as the process was deeply painful, I couldn’t help but recognize that this place I had been told was “Hell” was also filled with magic and treasure. The deeper I swam into the great abyss of my grief and total despair, a new world opened up for me.
Leaving behind the wild jungle of Costa Rica I discovered the inner wild through feminine embodiment, a path full of mystery and wonder. I began to remember and relearn the many faces of the Goddess, ancient priestess arts, womb consciousness, and realize the deeper hunger and longing that drove my desire to find yet another new paradise in the world. I began to find my way down to the source of the ache itself that lived inside of my own womb.
Beneath the sadness of no longer feeling connected with the land that had been my sanctuary for so many years, I unearthed and understood the deep universal ache to return to the true paradise of the human body that I had been so conditioned to abandon and didn’t know how to discover outside of the Eden I called Costa Rica.
By inquiring into the depths of the depths of my own at times unfathomable suffering, I began to see that our collective longing for home, is actually our longing to reside more fully within the body and the paradise of aliveness that it provides. Through my own constant awareness of feeling divorced on an internal level, I began to realize that the deepest ache we all carry is actually for the inner beloveds, the Body and the Soul, Mother Earth and Father Sky, to finally reunite in love.
Perhaps the most damaging message we have received within the context of our creation story, is that our humanity is what makes us separate from spirit.
As long as we believe this to be true, whether as spiritual practitioners striving for the unattainable perfection to be more like “God”, or unconsciously within the framework of a society that exists based on Good vs Evil, we will struggle to feel at home in our bodies, in our world, and in the sensual delights that are the gifts of being human.
We will feel ashamed of our sexual nature, simultaneously obsessed with and avoidant of pleasure, and confused about our primal desires. We will endlessly ache to live, while feeling at odds with what it truly means to be alive.
We will continue to desecrate the planet. We will continue to oppress those who we deem more “earthly” (indigenous cultures, brown skinned people, animals, plants, and on.) We will ache for the reunion of our spirit within our bodies and divinity within the bedrock of the Earth and unconsciously seek out resolution through destruction.
Until we realize that life is why we are here, not the ascension out of life into some “higher” realm, we will unconsciously carry a death wish, frozen, suspended in the purgatory of purposelessness, denying the very ache that wants to guide us home. Eden will continue to evade us.
The feminine spiritual path invites us to return to the truth that it is not in spite of our humanity that we awaken, it is because of it. It is not in the after life that we return Home, it is within our fierce devotion to totally live that we remember that we are home.
As many women (and men) are being called at this pivotal time in our evolution to revive the lost forgotten stories of women, of Goddess, and of the sacred ways of the Earth as portals into unraveling their way deeper into the truth of their existence, the story of Adam and Eve is rich with symbolism and ancient memory that can help us reweave the entire framework through which we understand our humanity. Beginning with the apple.
The apple has long been associated with the Goddess Venus, or Aphrodite, who represents the union of spirituality and sexuality, of Heaven and Earth, of Body and Soul. When Eve eats the apple, it is actually her sovereign choice to receive this forgotten feminine wisdom, enticed by the transformational energy of the feminine herself: the snake.
In shamanic spiritual understanding, snake roots us into the primordial energies of the Earth, into our sexual nature, where all transformation arises from. While the external voice of “God” commands she not feast on the fruit of truth, her inner voice, her primal shakti (the snake) tells her “yes.” She listens to the voice of her womb, the feminine, the source of life itself.
I’d like to imagine that Eve eating the apple was her choice to be less “godly” and more human. To dive deeper into the wild embrace of her own flesh. To rebel against the outer voice of truth and realize truth within the dance of her sacred holy life.
In our patriarchal interpretation of the story, Eve herself becomes demonized as the one who tempts Adam to also eat the forbidden fruit. But through the lens of Goddess consciousness, we know that this is actually the sexual dance of creation itself!
Eve tempting Adam to eat the apple is much like Shakti (also described as a serpent in Hindu mythology, the kundalini energy that lives at the base of the spine) appearing before Shiva to awaken him out of his deep meditative trance and to engage in his soul purpose in the play of life.
Eve tempting Adam to eat the apple is symbolic of the ancient sacred role of the feminine initiating the masculine onto the path of wild awakening through sensual divine union.
Rebirthing wild consciousness back on Earth and returning to the harmonic dance with our Mother Nature requires that we first reclaim the sacredness of our own perfectly human, sexual, spiritual design.
Through the lens of Goddess consciousness, we can recognize the play of the snake, temptation, and the tree of forbidden fruit not as evil, demonic, nor separate from spirit, but as the mysterious portals that guide us deeper into our human experience where we can discover our spirit through the play of our lives.
Within this retelling, we may begin to more fully acknowledge the divine orchestration of our seeming “fall out of innocence” (personally and collectively) as the transformational journey of incarnating spirit into matter, body into soul. We strip away the veils of demonization towards the feminine, and we open wide to the ever present love of life.
Once we reclaim the sacredness of our inner gardens, our wombs and sexual source, we mirror that reverence in how we treat our world. This gives us the opportunity to reclaim the sacredness of our humanity and become much healthier stewards for the well being of our entire planet Earth.
As we unravel our collective stories, untangling the harm caused by generations and generations of belief structures that have confused us away from the sacred harmonic dance of life, we have the opportunity to trust our inner truth and let it guide us home.
We each have the opportunity to look into our own “falls from grace,” “punishments by God,” unholy desires, trials and tribulations, and reclaim them as the raw material for our total, profound, divinely human redemption.
We each have the right to reclaim what we once thought made us unworthy as sacred gifts that can heal our wounds and our collective at large.
We each have the ability to face the depths of our own suffering, to becoming devoted caretakers for our own wounds, and to follow our ache home to its source to remember who we really are.
Each and every one of us is a seed with a sacred purpose in the wild garden of life, and once we come home to that core, essential remembrance, only then will we truly live in Heaven on Earth.
Virgin & Whore
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About the Author
Camille is the founder of Earth Daughters and a woman devoted to reviving the ancient wisdom of nature and the wild voice of the feminine.
She has traveled in dozens of countries across the world activating her soul truth through her relationship with land. She lived for seven years in primary rainforest in the Costa Rican jungle, communicating with trees, plants, creatures, and exploring many shamanic Earth wisdom traditions.
She is a DANCEmandala facilitator, rebirthing breathwork facilitator, yoga teacher, Earth Priestess, and student of many paths of love. She has been guiding transformational women’s retreats in activated locations across the world since 2015.
More on her website camillewillemain.com.