Eden

one

We're born, then, we die.

In the middle,it seems to be mostly aboutwho has power over whom.In loving,we give our power away.It's the greatest thing.It's the scariest thing.- from Creation, by Sylvia Nickerson

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The first time I met her she was wearing blue as blue as the sea and her skin was tan like she hadn't spent a day away from the sun in her whole life. She was bent over some herbs in the garden, collecting them in bunches.

Sometimes when you describe being enthralled by someone, you describe their other-worldliness. That wasn't it. She was very much of this world - she reminded me of the earth. She didn't know what was right and wrong, she didn't say it like a stamp. She was always uncertain and looked to you for answers more often than not and I think owning up to your uncertainty is the most human thing you could do. People who say they know the answers are lying; there is no way any human - or even every flawed human stacked together - could know all there was to know in the world.

Over time I've come to respect those who look at the world with honesty. That means looking at it with awe. With wonder. It means not trying to hold it and capture it and break it down and deduce it and say all these black and white statements about it. It means surrendering and saying "I don't know anything at all, but it's beautiful how little I know."

At one point my life could have gone in many different ways. Now, there was only one. Seeing her bent over those herbs in the garden was the thorn that set my path askew; and I still see her sometimes. I see her behind my eyelids or in a fluttering glimpse of light when the sun breaks through the window. I see her in times I don't mean to. And each time it's like a compass.

I see her now, like an apparition, right smack dab in the middle of this cathedral and I think she's more beautiful, more real, more honest, than anyone in those cloaks and frescoes up ahead. Because they never bend their heads and admit they don't know the answers; they say they do. They've always said they do, and that's what got us into this mess.

When I want to remember how flawed doctrine and rulebooks are, I remember this. When I want to remember how malleable they are to human agendas (of power, of greed, of corruption), I remember this. When I want to remember why I'm not back there at Eden, I come to this Cathedral. And I remember how I want to throw all these golden frames and silk robes and silver chalices, and all these other riches, out the door. Out the windows. Fragmenting the broken stained glass to mosaics of orbs. I want to throw it all into the air until it disperses into a weightless wealth everyone can grab from the sky like falling rain.

And I walk out, right down the aisle while they're preaching (I don't care), and I realize every time I open the door and the sun hits my face that God is so much more here than in there. He, or whatever it is, is so much more in these human faces around me than in the cutting, rigid lines of their books. And I remember that some force of good exists - has to exist - because the world is so beautiful, but they've stripped it of beauty every time they've tried to catch it.

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I grew up desperate to stand on some ground. I didn't feel like I stood anywhere surely, trustingly, so I was out at sea feeling like any life raft was a safe one. That's how I can describe it. Life rafts seem safer and safer the longer you're drowning, even if they have holes in them. You do a kind of maneuver of willful ignorance. You force yourself not to see their holes.

I was suffering from a burnout of massive scale. An uptight academic was what I was - all my time holed up in the library, dropping as many references to obscure philosophies as I could into conversation and scoffing when people didn't get it. Yeah, I'm not proud of it. I've always built my identity up out of tissue paper, and that was mine at the time. It always works like that: when you want to assert who you are, you first exert what you're not. And the more uncertain you are about yourself, the more rigorous you are in making fun of the things you don't want to be. I did not want to be worthless, that's the beating heart of it. School was good for that. Shining A's meant I was on track - there was no ambiguity. Ambiguity drove me mad.

A burnout comes and strips from you the only identity you've known. Hard worker. Smart student. Now you're bedridden and you don't know what you are, because all those things you could have been are fluttering by you and you can't grasp them anymore. Trains you could have been on if you'd worked hard enough - trains others are on, to doctorates and diplomas and tenure and surety - rush past. It does a number on your self worth. Mine crumbled inward, whatever cardboard hold on it I'd had before.

And I took to backpacking. Escaping seemed like the only route forward. I took all I owned on my back like a turtle does and took to hiking hostel-to-hostel along the countryside until I "found myself".

I donated all my books, and felt like my old self died when I left her right there in my downtown apartment. There's a way you can die without dying. You simply say goodbye to everything you used to be and pick yourself up by the skin, insides blank as canvas.

It was a dangerous thing, maybe, to want no continuity whatsoever back to my old life. I didn't contact friends or family. I thought if I died I'd do it properly. Start again. The blanker the canvas the more open the journey.

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What feelings I had for my old life, my old world of flashing downtown lights, became polarized over time to contempt. I didn't hate them, though. Not really. I had great friends. I had shitty days but I had good ones. The city is a rotten place of inequality and pollution; but still there were volunteer places I felt like sun shone out of. There were nice people. The food was good, I had some favourite restaurants. Nothing is entirely good or entirely bad; good and bad never belong to one side alone. In reality, there are no sides. Just tangled balls. Sides and categories are our own creations.

I didn't really hate the city. I wasn't happy there, but I wasn't happy in Eden either. Good and bad are everywhere. Eden became a claustrophobic and hypocritical hell but still, its nature was beautiful. The food was good. People were nice. I think people are mostly nice one on one, when you look them in the eyes. When you find something in common. It's only when you put them all together and throw power their way do they become horrible. Only when you look at them out the opposite end of a telescope are they truly ugly. Up close, everyone has some beauty in them.

I've loved people everywhere. I've loved little pieces, little micro-moments... Because love and beauty, and opportunities for them, are everywhere. Good and bad exist in tapestries, knotted up together. Everything is both good and bad, and neither. So if someone says they are the sole owners of Good and Truth, run. If someone makes it sound so simple, it's not. The only honest people are the ones who speak in nuance, who own up to uncertainty. Most of all, if someone says God is anything but love, run.

Truth is, people don't know anything. They only know the near-sighted walls of their own fictions. They stand by them because they don't want to admit they're fictions. But it's all cardboard if you look close enough.

And the closest thing I know to truth - the only thing I'll call truth - is that love is always good. And that it is the force that pushes this earth forward in all its rhythms, the force that remains when everything else - everything material of this world, every person with every paper name they keep tracing over - fades.

Love is a beautiful thing. A terrifying thing, too. Because you usually have to swim upstream all the time in this selfish world just to give it. It seems almost everything works against it; and it makes you wonder what it is about this cardboard world that love threatens. Maybe it would cave in - maybe the cathedrals and the skyscrapers both would crumble - if we really loved.