Love in a garden

Love in a garden

In a very special day, having someone special in my mind, I publish here a meditation about love and nature. I hope it can convey harmony and peace to everyone reading it.

Once upon the time, there was the beautiful garden of Eden. It was the theatre of the first love story: Adam and Eve were created and united here. So, the first love story had, as a scenery, the most wonderful landascape one could imagine. Of course, the first pages of the Bible report a myth: a myth diffused in ancient Middle Orient, but a myth the biblical author was able to shape in such a way to convey peculiar ideas. But the ideas at the core of this myth are of fundamental importance and true.

First of all, at the beginning, the man is called ish, while the woman isha, its perfect female form. The English man/woman cannot properly traslate it: man and woman come from the same root - they are complementary, opposed faces of the same medal, different, but born to love each other and to work together. Second, the woman is created from the rib of the man: this means that she must be beside him. She  mustn't be before him (like it often happens nowadays), nor behind (like it happened in the past), but beside: and I found no better illustration of this tenet, than the verses by Kahlil Gibran in the poem The prophet, in the part about marriage:

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when white wings of death scatter your days.

Aye, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other's cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other's keeping.

For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.

And stand together, yet not too near together:

For the pillars of the temple stand apart,

And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other's shadow.

Another beautiful image of this myth (which, every year, arises tons of new bibliography) is the fact that the first love story takes place, as hint above, in a beautiful garden, where everything is perfect and no evil exists. The ideal place for a love story. Then the first man and woman will lose this priviledge....This side of the narration, anyway, has not received proper attention, according to me. Nowadays very few believe that something like Eden existed, so I often heard a lot of skepticism about this part: even religious people don't believe that a period devoid of evil could exist on earth (too many dinosaurs around!). And yet, something similar is recalled in many traditions.

As Vergil tells in his Eglogae (Egl.4), ancient Greeks and Latins believed in the aetas aurea, the "golden age", later corrupted into a silver, bronze, iron age: no evil existed back then on earth. The same myth is related in Hesiod's Works and days (VII B.C.), in Greek literature. Something analogous can be found also in the myth of Atlantis, reported by Plato, and in the myth of the Shambala kingdom, narrated n Tibet buddhism (and known in the West as Shangri-la, thanks to the novel Lost horizon by James Hilton). Along the centuries, poets and philosophers have expressed their nostalgia for such an era: like our Torquato Tasso, in his pastoral comedy Aminta, where he sings the lost golden age and its love deprived of any inhibition: back then, in an eternal spring, no war, no trade, no agriculture was necessary; and love was free in a wonderful nature, where milk and honey flew, snakes bore no poison and the fields spontaneously produced their fruits.

Now, many myths recorded in the beginning of the Bible cannot correspond to history in a strict sense, but convey some shades of reality: for example, it is very well known that the story of the Universal Flood was probably originated by the consequences of glaciations (when the Black sea didn't exist yet and one could go to England by feet!) and of the subsequent melting of ices. In addition, the ancient Middle Orient (Irak) experienced some catastrophes, involving floods of rivers (Euphrates, Tigris), bursting of wells, enormous sea waves; therefore, it is very possible that some very ancient spark of memory could be preserved by the Eden myth. In fact, some researcher has observed, there is a simple method to eliminate seasons: straightening the Earth's rotational axis. And it surely happened during its multiple movements along the centuries....

So, at last there might have been a garden of Eden, somewhere. The most important idea conveyed by this myth is that, at the beginning, there was a wonderful place, devoid of evil; and, at the center of this place, there was a couple. There was love. Eden is the real birthplace of love. Since the beginning, true love is surrounded by beauty, by nature, by a wonderful garden. And love is the beginning of everything: from the first couple the rest of the world was born. And there also the first evil took place. If we want to go back to Paradise (whose meaning is, in Persian "garden", as this word pointed to the ancient gardens of Middle Orient sumptous palaces), if we want to go back to happyness, we must heal the first root of everything: love in the couple.

So, the garden of Eden remains as a point of reference, an ideal, where we can look back. Interestingly, the original sin corrupts, after the relationship with God, first of all, the relationship among the man and the woman: he begins to dominate her, she feels always more like a servant, emotionally and physically dependent on him. At the same time, his labour becomes fatigue, her delivery a pain. Later fear, discord, fights, even murder will follow. But, at the beginning, it wasn't like that. The most interesting side of Christian tradition is that the Eden isn't just a "lost horizon", a form of mythical bliss which cannot be recovered anymore, but, in spite of our limits, it is also before us: it is, at least partially, a possibility, a goal, the aim of a project. Recovering the harmony of our life, we can recover a part of that bliss too. The path is infinite, but it can lead to a substantial improving of our lives, after that ideal. Eden can be before us.

(it goes on)