Eden

five

It's hard to put into words, but when you live in these constant, beautiful rhythms of nature moving around you all the time - rhythms where everything clicks together and is made with all its parts in mind - you realize that we're just small pieces of a larger puzzle. In nature's ecosystems, each little piece has its own role. Each piece exists because of, and for, all the others, and together they sustain life.

The problem is, in the world I'm from people live like they're their own puzzle pieces. Like they stand alone. People live like hurting the entire puzzle - ruining their planet - won't hurt them, too. It will. Because we are each other; and when we hurt others we hurt ourselves. Maybe not right away, maybe not to the naked eye; but somewhere deep down in the soul where we're all entangled. The puzzle is more important than the piece and, most importantly, I believe that for the piece to be really, truly, deep-in-the-soul happy, it needs to live in harmony with the whole rest of the puzzle.

Of course it does; we are composed of the very same thing that we're either nurturing or suffocating. It seems we lay our hands on something out-there, some distant and abstracted dead earth, but really the hands are always turned back on ourselves. It seems we gut the bottoms of mines out there we will never see, but really in doing so we gut our own hearts. They are made of the very same thing. The longer I live with my mind fastened to the turns and flows of these rhythms, the less I see myself as something bordered. I don't think I live so much in my own skin as I live bursting outside of it in that stretched-out web; perhaps the most important parts of me are what's stretched beyond it.

And the most peaceful moments I ever had were whenever I could stop thinking about myself. There were these baby kittens Charlotte and I rescued once because their mother had been hit by a car. We heard them mewing when we were walking out to the pastures, across that rural road we had to walk past to get to a faraway field. Little babies of all different colours - orange and white and grey. I'd been worrying a bit that morning about money, and how if I was living my normal life I'd be working right now to pay off student loans. I knew they'd catch up with me and that my payments would be due, and in reality (in the world of fake money that I was still bound to) I was broker than broke. But when we found those kittens, every anxious thought fled my mind and my only focus was in saving them. We collected their little mewing bodies into our palms and wrapped them up in our sweaters and we brought them home and fed them cow's milk out of a syringe. We sat in the dusty floor of the barn all evening just watching them struggle to open their eyes to the light.

Charlotte, who I'd told about my worries that morning, was smiling up at me with her chin perched on her knee when I raised my eyes. "You don't look worried at all anymore."

"I know," I smiled back. I kissed the orange one on the forehead. "Now that I'm not thinking about my own worries, only about taking care of these kittens, I feel peaceful. Funny, isn't it?"

"Not funny," she held her own grey cat up and nudged its nose with hers. "It's true. Everyone's happier when they don't think about themselves so much."

"Mhmm," I reclined my head against the wall of the barn, looking up to the sky through the slits in the ceiling. This world was so, so big. So beautiful.

"I think our life matters most when we're not in the centre of it," she said, and it sounded like poetry. I'll never forget those words.

We went to visit the kittens every morning before breakfast. We named them very original names. Spots, stripes, and pumpkin. We brought syringes and fed them milk right from the buckets, milk that was still warm. And we made a little crate for them until they were old enough to walk.

Charlotte and I would always be talking about this idea, of the self and the earth being interconnected. My favourite metaphor I ever heard is that the earth is our mirror. Sickness in one is sickness in the other. I thought about all those stressed-out and burnt-out people back home and how they were living their busy lives in that soul-draining way for no reason. They would have to keep working, making more and more money, to fill this hole they could never fill because they weren't happy. The only thing to truly fill that hole is connection, and the city is fuelled on disconnect. The hole keeps growing and people keep buying more and more to fill it; but if you're happy, you don't need so many things.

I felt we could never really be happy as long as our earth was dying. As long as we were killing it. There's no way you can really be at peace - there's no way you can look yourself all the way in the eyes - if you're killing the home you live in, is there? We live cutting off our own life source - how is that peace?

I saw the truth so clearly, this truth of some great whole in which we are all entwined, when I was standing on top of the hill looking out over Eden's green horizon. The bees pollinated the plants and the plants fed the animals and the animals eventually became the soil that fed the plants again in one big circle; and it's because of something so small like a bee that we have any food to eat at all. To every single little part of this ecosystem we are tied tightly. To every single part we owe our life. We are part of the earth and it's part of us, and even deep in the walls of the man-made city, it's in us still. Waiting for us to turn to it.

Sometimes I get so worried about what I'll do and be and all that, and then I'll go outside and touch a tree and imagine its roots running deep, deep to the ground. I imagine it tying me down to the earth's core that springs up with all the life around me. These roots give life to me and these roots give life to everything, and if I dug deep enough I'd realize they were the very same roots that belonged to all of us. I'd imagine myself opened up beyond my borders and stretched out into a web that was entangled with everything else on earth, and I'd feel silly for forgetting I'm always part of it (but it's easy to forget in this city of lines and borders). And I'd stop worrying all these small worries that begin and end in my own skin because I'd realize there's only one thing to ever do: to take care of that which matters most - to water these roots that sustain us. To care for that which extended before my lifetime and will extend beyond it; that which is much bigger than all of us alone.

I think our souls might be crying out for nature most of the time but we just don't know how to listen. It's a part of us and it's dying; somewhere deep in us is dying; and we call this unrest other things. We find other fixes that are no deeper than bandaids. Fixes that are really just more shovels, digging deeper holes.

See, I hated the artificial, near-sighted world outside of Eden. I hated so many of the things this modern world called good. It's a society of the self, of individual accomplishment. The one who stands tallest is applauded most, even if it means they're standing on the backs of others. In the city that has disconnect and inequality as its fuel, you're always standing on the backs of others.

And back home, we never thought about the way every single being composed some whole together - some puzzle, some web. We didn't think we were tied to anything other than our selves. There was a slice at the end of a name where care hardly extended beyond it. We only thought of our own lives, and how they'd dart forward in straight lines, even if it meant squashing everything in their paths. We don't even look at each other, we don't even smile walking down the street. Going from busy destination to busy destination. Time always closed instead of open. We don't even stop and think or feel. Just move. Move and move, so quickly. To where? Where is so important?

My old life was alien to me. I could never fit back into it again. I was afraid to.

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I suppose that's what Eden was trying to be: a place where we lived according to the laws of Creation. The laws of harmony. A place where we didn't live for the self.

But the pendulum can swing too far one way. And self denial was a virtue at Eden. It went beyond a virtue... there was a certain piety in unhappiness. Suffering was almost noble.

I'll never forget the way Charlotte came and sat beside me one evening after dinner while I was watching the children and we were all telling stories in a big circle. "I'm so hungry sometimes," she whispered.

"Me too," I nodded. And I suddenly didn't care about my own hunger. I looked at her face and all I wanted to do in the whole world was protect it. "If you could eat anything, what would you eat?"

"Honestly?"

"Of course honestly," I nudged her shoulder with mine.

"Chips," she elongated the word and bent her chin back as if in ecstasy. "Chips and chips."

"Salt and vinegar? They're my favourite."

"Yes, and barbecue. And Doritos. Anything... everything."

I laughed, and I made a silent promise to myself that I was going to buy Charlotte chips. Somehow.