There seems to be something in the human heart that longs for a garden. Perhaps a garden is an analogy for wholeness. Maybe it’s something more.
We are stardust
Joni Mitchell – Woodstock
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil’s bargain
And we’ve got to get ourselves
back to the garden
This devil’s bargain, at least as far as the biblical account presents it, has to do with a choice between the Tree of Life or the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. This suggests that the opposite of life might not be death. It might be knowledge.
One especially interesting point about the Genesis 2 account is that the Lord God planted a garden. Why is it a garden and not a meadow, a glen, a grove?
Gardens don’t occur in nature. They are entirely artificial, the earliest attempts at geo-engineering. Yet unlike other artificial structures such as pavement, walls, or roofs, gardens are made up of living things. Living structure is the essence of a garden.
Maybe that’s what this yearning to “get back to the garden” is all about. We yearn to be surrounded by living structure.
Also on Wild Rye
The garden is a place where we bring together the things that delight us, and hope to make them grow SEE The Heart and the Garden
