Create From Chaos

While the Genesis episodes rest for a moment, Mara has a bedtime story and a new song to share. Meet Mila, a little mouse who lives under a boy’s bed and has convinced herself she’s fine on her own. The accompanying song “Is There Anyone There?” is inspired by Goodnight Moon, and now available wherever you listen. Best enjoyed with a child, or the child in you.

Part Bible scholarship, part personal essay, part folk album. Create from Chaos is what happened when one mother followed her curiosity into the first pages of Genesis and couldn't find her way back out.

Most of us inherited the story of Adam and Eve in translation — which means most of us missed a wordplay planted at the heart of it. In this episode, Mara turns her attention to two Hebrew words: adam and adamah. Human and ground. A relationship so deeply woven into the language of the story that when it gets lost in translation, something important goes with it. Not a lesson, but a perspective.

Learn more about Mara's work at marameasor.com. Join the mailing list, or follow her journey @marameasor on Instagram. You can also get in touch through [email protected].

Every culture across the ancient world told stories about where humans come from, why we work, and why our days on earth are numbered. The Israelites were no exception. In this episode, Mara turns to the creation stories that surrounded Israel's neighbors: the sacred garden of Dilmun, the blood and clay of Atrahasis, and more from the shared imagination of a world that long preceded the Hebrew Bible. All to wonder: what is truly distinct about the voice and vision of the ancient Israelites?

Visit Mara's website at marameasor.com or message her via her Instagram @marameasor.

No introduction. Just the story of Genesis 2 read aloud — for whenever you want to return to it.

After exploring the context and brief history of interpretations — it's finally time to sit and simply listen to the story in the garden. In this episode, Mara reads her version of the narrative of Genesis 2, with her two children beside her. Mia notices the poetry. Philip giggles as he munches on his pancakes, and a simple song emerges.

From the moment this story spread, its audience have had questions. And across traditions — even within the traditions —thoughtful readers have come up with different answers. In this episode, Mara traces a brief history of how the story of Adam and Eve has been interpreted across centuries, and wonders whether some of those layers have settled so thick over the text that we've forgotten what lies beneath.

Professional kitchens run on mise en place — the discipline of preparing your ingredients before you start cooking. What might that look like for reading Scripture? In this episode, Mara pauses on the threshold of Genesis 2 to ask: who wrote this story, when, and from where? The answers are slippery, but perhaps the questions are still important ones to ask.

In Season 2, Mara lifted the curtain on her inner world as a restless creator — the self-doubt that followed finishing Season 1, the loneliness of asking unsettling questions, and the growing reliance on companionship over certainty. From rabbinic wisdom to Carlo Rovelli's physics to a fictional story set on a misty morning — this recap traces the winding path of a season that refused to go in a straight line.

As Season 3 begins, a look back at where it all started. In Season 1, Mara turned to the seven-day creation story in Genesis with fresh eyes — and found a text far stranger and richer than she remembered. A God who hovers over chaos rather than destroying it. Humans made not just in God's image but as his image. A seventh day that is less about recovering from exhaustion and more about moving into a good home. This recap traces the discoveries that started it all, laced with songs that grew out of them.