Eva’s Story
I Am
I ask you to suspend disbelief and journey with me. I ask you to open your hearts and your imagination. I want you to picture the long journey that your ancestors have taken to get you here today. I want to start by taking us back to our common beginnings—our common mother—I call her ‘the Great Mother’, who lived through the almost complete extinction of the homo sapien species some 150,000 years ago. She lived deep in Africa near the equator—her sisters, cousins, and friends had all died trying to give birth to a baby whose brain had become too large to pass through the female pelvis. Since our ancestor apes came out of trees—pelvises had contracted, and brains had grown three times in size. In my stories I call this moment of near-extinction, when homo sapiens numbered less than 2000, the Big Death.
One morning, some 7,500 generations ago, a woman went into labor. Death surrounded her, and people had already gathered grieving the coming death of both woman and child. Yet the baby’s skull contracted, and the mother’s pelvis spread—she survived and so did her baby. The village rejoiced, danced in circle, and called her Eva.
In joy, they raised their voices:
“She lived! She lived! She lived and so lived her daughter and her daughter’s daughters.
“May she never go hungry. May she never thirst.
“Many she live to lead us forward on our journey of life!
Eva began my (our) ancestral heroin journey—she is an actual woman, the wise woman of Kenya, also the first instance of the Great Mother archetype.