(it's the running of my thoughts this morning...interesting it is also passover...just after seder...after the memory of wandering in the desert for 40 years...is that simply a metaphor for every life lived in the effort to puzzle out God's purpose for our being?)
Eden is the place we leave. That’s the title of an episode from the third season of Ironside. It struck me kinda like the theatrical “see your life flash before your eyes” sort of way just before death. Epiphany. Clarity. Suddenly. All the interpretation seared through from biblical to personal. Upon gaining knowledge the First Two left the garden. Theology says they disobeyed God and lost their privilege. Other interpretation says they broke trust with God and in order to protect them from their own stupidity and the inevitability of eating from the tree of life, they were evicted.
Now I see the parallel is that we simply grow out of the state of unknowing and as we realize what we didn’t know we already knew we learn that the transition itself is a kind of eviction from all that was and of course all that was is remembered as paradisaical compared to the challenges and disappointments of what is. We long for the gardens of unknowing, or preknowing; the before. We can’t go back. The real travesty is that in breaking trust, we are condemned to linear time, to cause and effect, to the unreachable before to the dismal now.
Dismal only by comparison and the comparison made only because some of us lack imagination for some reason. It’s easy for me to blame school and the dog because these two things distract and drain me. I’m in some kind of weird cycle and instead of conjuring the effort to get out I am simply waiting for it to come to its natural end. It may not be the right strategy.
What if right now is some sort of Eden to the next phase which will bring other inconsolations or losses that I now know nothing about? All that I know to do to be healthy evades me in perpetual exhaustion and I just drop in a kind of collapse. Effort. Will. Ambition. Purpose. I have these drives at school but not at home. I love my house and my stories. I love Bubbi but I am not good for him and I can’t continue to live like this for long but I also can’t bear the permanence of linear reality that when he’s gone it’s forever.
They say, whoever they are, the faceless, nameless muses, say the only solution to this ennui is to be in the now. It’s a struggle and an effort to think of it. So thinking it isn’t the answer, being it is. Dropping the thinking that prevents being is really hard until it just happens. There’s the woman who speaks about collaborating with your mind ... she is right and it was helpful to hear; but ironically one must do something in order to be.
Turns out, knowing isn’t all that. Information age has rapidly deteriorated into the age of deception. Snake is ruling paradise. So much sounds true but reason for many of us keeps us...keeps us what, sane? Reeling? Hopeful? Terrified? Trapped? Even the most basic empirical evidence to the contrary doesn’t prevent the lies from destroying our world as we know it—presenting another source for the inevitable necessity to leave Eden....
I so appreciate the Dalai Lama’s attitude. Being banished from Eden means the world learns about a tranquil alternative life style and joyful attitude foreign to the insidious soul-destructive way of greed which so much “capitalism” has turned out to be. Jesus, too, had this sense of weightless detachment from place, from Eden. Yet grieved openly for Jerusalem.
So as Eden is the place we leave...where are we headed? When will we arrive, where will we arrive, how will we know?
