Avoiding The Fall—Maintaining Our Garden of Eden

Last evening while helping my child with their homework I was called to read a re-interpretation of the Creation Story presented in Genesis.  The assignment focused on Adam and Eve’s banishment from the Garden of Eden—a result of both Adam and Eve having eaten fruit of the tree of knowledge.

Waterfall

The interesting thing about this book’s interpretation was that it saw the results of Adam and Eve’s act of eating of the tree of knowledge as bestowing them with not only an awareness of pain, death, and of shame, but a stark awareness of these factors that rendered them so naked and vulnerable as to destroy their ability to interact with divinity face-to-face. For some divinity is truth. For others it is a static or transforming deity governing one’s reality—Christ, Oya, Siva, Yahweh, Allah, The Buddha.

Many artists perceive God in and through the works we create. We interact with divinity when painting, writing, shaping poems or glass we blow into being with our breaths. Whatever the material, our work as artists is both an extension and expression of all that we cannot see, but know and sense present in this life.

The experience of creating is in essence a way, our attempt at touching upon, if not re-entering the Garden of Eden, if only for but a moment as when we give that last touch of color to an acrylic painting on canvas, write the final word of a novel or poem we have revised for the 5oth time, or simply stretch out a note on the piano or cello—take it into the unknown where sound meets with silence, and one absorbs the other.

Whatever our conduit for touching upon this blissful part of life and living that exists through, in and around us—the ultimate reality that bestows meaning upon our lives, we owe it to ourselves to let nothing stand in between our ability to return and sup from the brim of its overflowing cup.

We must remain committed not just to the act of creating that so brings us joy, but also to the truth that emanates through, and about the works of our artistry.  

We must acknowledge the breath of life moving in and out of us engendering the life force that directs our brush, guides our fingers in typing, our hands in writing, our voice in singing.  We must remain honest with ourselves, and follow the lead of our hearts. We must not fall in the search for certainty, and lose grip with its ever-present and evolving beat.

The heart knows what God desires, what we need, what we must create and how to accomplish it.  In our hearts dwells truth--that of the eternity of the ages. It lives in each moment we take a breath.