A lot has been made over the past 3,000 or so years about our sudden eviction from the Garden of Eden and all its verdant paradisaical splendor. Sure, you don’t miss your water until your well runs dry and all that, but it always struck me as strange that our concepts of such a state of arboreal grace must be derived from what we know, or have known, here on Earth. I think it would do humankind well to consider the possibility that we never actually left the garden. The sooner that we stop treating our planet like a divorced-dad apartment, the better.
At the end of that unpleasantness with the Tree of Knowledge, Yahweh is said to have set cherubim with flaming swords in place to guard the way back so we wouldn’t mess with the Tree of Life. At the risk of being pedantic, and/or struck by lightning, according to Genesis, He/She/Them never said not to mess with that one, but it is probably too late to point that out.
After the first big reset during Noah’s flood, it seems to me that the fences are all down, but unlike the Jurassic Park movie franchise wherein the dangerous raptors always find the weak spots (quite literally, the de-fence) in the defense of the garden, we are the apex predator and we have been on the rampage outside the gates since time immemorial.
If we put aside the avaricious yearning for yet another paradise, we can likewise drop the handy scapegoating of the fairer sex—and, by extension, our primordial mother Earth—that has allowed for the rise and domination of a patriarchy that has yet to earn a spot in the playoffs, let alone an unbroken string of participation championships reaching back for millennia.
After the second big reset, the coming of the Christ, his teachings, and most importantly, his sacrifice, we should have been satisfied with the biggest “Get Out of Jail Free” card that has ever been dealt out, instead—especially with the onset of the industrial age—we have subjugated the very garden we were tasked with nurturing, all in the name of progress. Our spiritual health has been separated from the physical, when they must be one and the same. Without the shadow of the Fall of humankind, would we have allowed the shadows that plague our planet to proliferate?
I believe that we were given the Tree of Knowledge so that we might better tend the garden. If it was on me to write another narrative, I would have the Creator say, “All right, so now you have the manual, you two smartypants. I’ll be back to check your work. Don’t fuck it up, or I shall smite thee!”
Román Leão 