Redefining Eden

Tonight I am wondering:

Did God really have to cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden?  Or did He, perhaps, simply leave the gate open?  Once the first humans (being human) saw the gate ajar, would they not, sooner or later, have walked through?

About two years ago, I named the baby in my womb Eden.  I heard the name clearly one day as I lay in bed with my burgeoning belly.  The name announced itself and that was that.  Fortunately, it seemed to fit.  At least, it fit the direction of my mind at the time.  

In the weeks approaching Eden's birth, I was thrumming with longing for a Garden, a place of union with nature, of simplicity and purity.  I saw myself giving birth to this baby and raising it in a place of great safety and nurturing, removed from any flavor of modern suffering and disconnect.  Flowing water and golden light on cottonwood leaves.  A bower.  My own Eden.

When my fantasies of actually picking up and moving to such a place bumped up against the realities of New Mexico real estate, I set about creating a bower in my backyard.  We put up a privacy fence around our patch of scrappy lawn and began watering it the grass copiously through the hottest part of the summer.  We planted an apple tree.  The birth tub was going to go right there, in the garden.  

My older children had been born beautifully at home, but this birth was going to go beyond simple homebirth.  I was going for complete non-intervention.  No ultrasound.  No worrying about dates and nudging things along.  No poking, prodding or cutting of any kind.  We even planned for a lotus birth, so the baby's umbilical cord would not be cut, but simply dry up and fall away in its own time.  

Well, Baby Eden had other ideas.  In fact, Baby Eden has been, shall we say, redefining Eden since before his own birth.  In the end, he was born by cesarean in a hospital in Albuquerque, an experience for me of beauty and surrender beyond anything that I could have imagined.  He gave me my first lesson in the power of the Eden within.

Baby Eden is now a fearsome and delightful toddler of twenty months.  He is possessed of a fiery and fearless exuberance that fills me with equal parts pride and alarm.  If there is something to climb, he'll be on top of it before you can say Jackie Two-Sticks.  If a rocky precipice presents itself, he'll exclaim with delight and head for the edge.  If our garden gate is left open, he'll cross the yard and be through it and heading for the street in about 4.5 seconds.  If I am planning to keep this boy in my sheltered bower, gazing at the cottonwood leaves, it's going to be an uphill battle.  And, really, the same can be said for my other children.  Though they are more measured in their exploration of the world, one day the world will be theirs.  I can and should shelter them now, but my fences are matchsticks in the face of their destinies.

These children: they are so little, but so powerful. Their futures, stretching before them, guide me in directions unfamiliar but inevitable.  And for all my resistance, I know the rightness of growth, of danger, of an embracing love for the world.  As I see it now, if Eden is union-consciousness, what part of our world does that not include?  The Edenic mind knows no fear, no separation.  Can a fence, literal or spiritual, contain that power?  And if Eden is All, does it not also contain the Fall? The garden, the apple tree, the wall, the gate, the windswept plain...do they not exist together in beauty and perfection?

On many levels, I am sensing that the gate of my family's Garden is open.  We have been living a sheltered life of great beauty, a life I have created with love, hard work, and the convictions of an idealist.  I love it more than ever and long to stay and stay.  The new spring leaves have never been so green.

But I feel it.  The gate is standing open.  What does it mean?  Where does the path lead?

I don't know.  But I do know that once the gate is open, it is only a matter of time until we walk through.  

First and third photos by Erin O'Neill

Comments

[Erin]

Shelter and surrender, oh these beautiful opportunities to grow inside ourselves during the tender years of motherhood. I see you rising to the challenge so gracefully, stretch those wings mamas and your baby boards will do the same.

[Storymama]

Thank you, Erin. It is such a dance: such small calibrations, but so big for me.