A Garden or a Dump? Does Mormonism Fit In?

[Philo Sofee]

A Garden or a Dump? Does Mormonism Fit In?
By Kerry A. Shirts

It is, after all, from a Garden we have come from and a Garden with which we long to return to, that is the ebb and flow of our lives. So we have turned the Garden into a cesspool, a filth, ugly canker, rusted, twisted, warped and deformed dustbowl, which all the more strengthens within our breasts the desire for the peace and beauty of the Garden, a real Garden.

Call it what you will, Eden of the Hebrews, Hesperides of the Greeks, lob into it the images of golden apples, talking snakes, even the gods, whatever you wish, none of that immunes us from our longing for our home, the Garden. Recall the varying mythologies of Greek Dionysius, Egyptian Osiris, Hebrew Jehovah, The Elder Edda of the Ancient Scandinavian Drama, the ancient Babylonian Baal and Mat cycles, The Enuma Elish, the loss and return to the Garden of Immortality has been dramatized from time’s beginning of humanity here on our earth, the main archetypal theme being the loss of it, and the renewal, the rebirthing of it, the fructifying and replanting of that which was lost in the bitter hoary winters of dark and dread, both in our external world in which we live, and within the souls of men turned cold and hard from bitter disbelief, consternation, death, misery, and suffering.(1)

This is not a mere child’s story, a mere myth told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but a powerfully lodged archetype within us which means, it will hound us to the ends of our days until we wake up and recognize that to plant that Garden ought to be the first and foremost thing we do with our lives, and lets its vines, flowers, oak trees, fruit trees, natural perfumes and pleasures of both feel and sight, rivers, and delightful bounties of the earth come rolling back out for the benefit of humanity as it used to be. It is both forlornly longed for and cheerfully remembered in the ancient sagas, tales, stories, fairy tales, and mythologies the world over, and is studiously overlooked, ignored, and fearfully replaced by something… anything else that we can put in its place as our discomfort for this “Heaven on Earth” for the sterility of philosophy which has ended up talking more and more about less and less.

The stale, loud and noisily bothersome drum beat non-stop, maddening clackity clack of mechanist thinking and wishing as our personal end has replaced the blood, sap, relaxation, and warmth of actual life of things in themselves as our supposed destiny, and it’s very spiritless end has caused a miasma of illness in the souls of all, many not even knowing what it is they are rebelling against explicitly, but rebelling we are! The image of our future is miserably bleak for the “accomplishment” and sole projected “purpose” of our lives. To be downloaded into a cold, dead, dull piece of machinery and live forever as a cognition of what once was is more a ghoulish fantasy than a loving fulfillment of who and what we are, breathing the fresh mountain air, smelling the deliciousness of a flower, climbing the grand stately tree, and fishing in the clear mountain lakes. The mystics have such a dramatically diametrically opposite and vastly more delightful participatory view than this mere computer-human amalgamation will ever achieve. They would ask us to give up our humanity for an eternal existence in a robot/computer body, a mere memory and consciousness in a chunk of metal. Such a detour of our own self-worth image has collapsed into a horror of Frankenbot, erasure of absolutely all characteristic of our humanity, the very best part of us, for a feeble immortality of dead dullness. But we will live forever! Who cares if it is not enjoyed, lived, participated in with touch, love, communion with one another, rubbing each other’s feet or backs, combing our hair, seeing with our eyes the beauty of the world, eating the delicious food, having wonderful night’s rests after a good successful day of work, feeling pain and pleasure? Our philosophy has so morphed into silliness, it has forgotten entirely what it is to actually be alive, ignoring it, while postulating a dread and dead future. To replace our humanity with a robot of ourselves is to kill precisely what we are looking for in the first place, a Garden of Eden in which to live. The old image is preferred to the supposed inevitable future of the scientific dull robot that will become of man. They would kill what they most want, a meaningful eternal life! Idiots. And they pooh pooh the mystic, religious feelings of being alive and engaged with nature and the earth. Idiots. It is no wonder our age is awash in angst, fear, loneliness, and churlish selfishness. We have lost the value of our own selves. But it doesn’t need to remain a polluted hell we have imagined and begun to make of our world and ourselves. It is truly still our choice.

The Heliconian Muses lived in the top of Mount Helicon(2) exactly as many of the United States billionaires choose to reside in Jackson Hole, Wyoming as near the Grand Teton Mountain Range as they can be. They convent together at Sun Valley, Idaho as well, not in the capital city, Boise. The reason is obvious. For one thing, the view is primevally spectacular! The air is crisp, clean, stalwart, desirable above that of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, or Houston, Texas. They long for the pristine calm, the gorgeous colors, textures, waters, and land of Mother Nature, not the industrial drab of steel and concrete, pollution and filth of industrial cities. There is peace and quiet, and real wildlife (which they protect… that’s right, they protect), which to see, interact with, and enjoy in their own version of the Garden of Eden. The paintings in the art galleries are of bison fighting, elk bugling, the majestic stalwart Big Horn Ram and Rocky Mountain BIlly Goat high on the craggy tops of unclimbable mountains, the magnificent eagle aloft on wings, of which are valued to the tune of millions of dollars each, some on extraordinarily enormous canvases of which I personally have seen, and they are lush, and indescribable! Naturalistic wood carvings, bronzes, and authentic native American pottery fill their sumptuous homes. Never do you see their multimillion dollar estates made of anything but the logs of trees, and the natural stone or rock, thickly surrounded by the grandeur of forests of their own making on their giant sprawling properties, including artificial lakes which are stocked with fish, which also encourage the migration and settling of much water fowl, the ducks, geese, cormorants, etc., not the steel, glass, rubber, plastic, and concrete of cities, with their gears, dirty oil, smelly enormous gasoline engines polluting the air. Industrial smelting, automobile manufacture, noisy, chemical and nuclear waste producing companies are not allowed to destroy Jackson Hole or Sun Valley, Idaho.

There is every reason to know why that is. It is because it is Eden as our entire earth could be, were we to desire it enough. They can actually see the stars at night, something you can’t hardly do in L.A. due to the stench of pollution far and wide of hundreds of square miles. Their snow is actually white, not a grey or black from soot and industrial sludge, griming the air and all that comes from it onto the ground. The sky there is a deep and gorgeous shimmery jewel blue, not a slate polluted stinky grey as in industrial cities around the world. Their food coming straight from their mountains, both animals and vegetables, truly daily fresh, actually tastes delicious, not the industrialized cardboard cereal and rotting old produce shipped in from elsewhere. There is no billions of tons of sludge, slime and sewage in city dumps with its rank stenches and miasmic gore oozing out all over the land offending nose and eye alike. They actually literally get to see the gorgeous paintings of Mother Nature’s sunrises and sunsets, along with the astonishingly beautiful variegated colorations of all hues of the rainbow, something many in the dark,dank cities have very sadly never seen yet, except in pictures in magazines, nowhere near the same experience.

Almost prophetically, Dante’s Hell has nothing to do with the fairy tale made up silliness of Christian doctrine, and scripture, but is soundly grounded on an ecology, one made by themselves through their own choices and actions in life. Hundreds of years ago he envisioned what an actual hell would be like, and his description fits our large cities and industrial places to a “T”, astounding enough! “Dante’s Hell is a sink of noxious gases, polluted water, and denuded forests. THe people there have caused their own misery and have created the miserable environment in which they are trapped. They all suffer an impairment of vision that causes them to exaggerate their selfish rights and to satisfy themselves at any cost to others or to the world around them… the setting corresponds to the moral and psychological state of the people within...since all humans have chosen the particular circumstances that define their lives, they have contributed to the creation of an environment that perfectly mirrors their values...Hell’s air is clouded with contaminants and foul odors. The carnal sinners of the second circle whirl in a storm of dark air. It is black air and dark fog. Everyone in hell squints b because of the stinging air and its failure to pass enough light for clear vision...it all but prevents breathing and sight. Hell’s water never runs pure… the River Styx spurts forth its waters even darker than deep purple, running through stagnant bogs notable for their smells and muck. Other rivers ran blood or salt tears, all are without nourishment for the barren land through which they pass. Their banks are either lined with stones or, like the channels of Malebolge, created with exhalations rising from below/stuck to the banks, encrusting them with mold/ and so waged was against both eye and nose...people are plunged in excrement that seemed as if it had been poured from human privies. Literal and figurative sewage is the burden of all infernal waters… they have become torture to those who polluted them...Hell’s most distinctive characteristic is its hostility to life.”(3)

There is no actual green foliage, and plants are formed like a twisted humanity. The landscape is bleak, barren, morbid, boring, poisonous, and all natural processes are diseased. “Modern oil slicks are suggested by Dante’s description of the boiling pitch in which the barrators suffer, especially the waterfowl which are stuck and trapped in the petroleum. It is enough to “recognize his fourteenth-century attempt to imagine the worst possible human environment describes many of the environmental features that have only recently been realized in our own day. Hell is also overpopulated, overcrowded, and ghoulish, spacelessly jammed with everyone else on top, underneath, and right on their laps, rubbing their sides, etc… their punishment is due to “a common single-minded egotism” Life was truly, totally, and only about me, me, ME! “All of these souls have limited their vision of the world to the confines of their personal interests and activities. They all assume that their private experience of the world is somehow definitive of its basic nature. The souls in Hell are those who have lost the capacity of seeing themselves in the context of a larger perspective. Like many moderns, their creation of a joyless environment results from the actions in which they take the greatest pride...Scorning the condition of one’s own soul is one of the meanings of Hell...Souls in Hell are not punished by God. No rules, and no God appears in the Comedy. It is not an external authority that governs the context and its consequences. The people in Hell are there because they have lost the good of the intellect. They alone are responsible creators of their world in which they must live.(4)

T.S. Eliot said it probably the best, “The river sweats oil and tar,” though the cure is “In the mountains you feel free.”(5) Joseph Campbell, the Mythologist, was known to have said that the Holy Land is not in Israel alone. It is wherever we are, here, now. This is it, where you stand! That is profound. William Blake wrote:

And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Til we have built Jerusalem,
In England green & pleasant Land.”(6)

It does us precious little good to revere and keep sanct a holy land far over there on the other side of the world to visit, and destroy the rest of the planet and convert it to waste and sewage to live in does it? I think Blake clues us into that. The poet Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) could be angry with a God who isn’t there. “Is Heaven a physician? They say that He can heal., But medicine posthumous, is unavailable.”(7)
To wait on God to heal our death is fruitless. To wait on God to give us Eden back is also piffle. It isn’t going to happen that it is prevented,or given back, and hence death is one of the most lauded if not dreaded subjects in all literature and poetry, not to say of religion.

If our lives are to have meaning, if they are to amount to anything, it is going to be we, the people, who make sure of it. And how do we do that? Ralph Waldo Emerson’s (1803-1882) thunderous dict is simple “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.”(8) And as such, perhaps it’s time to reactivate an idea which was anciently accepted as completely obvious, but in our age of overarching, unrealistic skepticism, has been relegated to the realm of fantasy, or lunacy. And everyone seems hell bent on simply respeaking the aphorism of our age as if it is a fact. It may very well not be so. The ancient idea is this, as David Fideler notes. “Thales, the very first philosopher, saw the entire universe as a living organism. For him the “arche-” the originating principle of the universe - was water, which then changed itself into all things through a process of self-transformation. This “arche-” was alive and everlasting, capable of self-organization. Ultimately everything is alive and animate… he meant that soul, or the divine power of movement and transformation, is inherent in all things. Not only is the world alive but it is also intelligent. We see that the universe is alive because all reality is a ceaseless flow of activity and motion is a sign of life...the order of the universe is not imposed upon it by some outside source, but is a natural expression of its own inner life, intelligence, and being.,”(9) And just how do we go about proving that objectively? We live in rhythm with it. We learn to be the eyes, ears, hands of the earth, the universe, and live within the bonds of nature. Learn from it, and be in it. We cannot step out of Mother Nature, because we come from it. As Alan Watts so humorously (and yet with a serious edge to it), as the tree apples, the universe peoples! We are part of the intelligence of the universe ourselves.

For me, this is not easy though. Just hang on a minute I hear you say. I am right with you. Perhaps a cue from Emily Dickinson, America’s favorite woman poet, can help guide us gently into this. Because, quite frankly, I am mildly skeptical, and that’s the hook into Dickinson here actually. James McIntosh reiterates a letter that Dickinson wrote to her dear friend Judge Otis Phillips Lord Who she almost married, but ended up not doing so. “On subjects of which we know nothing, or should I say Beings - is “Phil” [Judge Lord] a ‘Being’ or a ‘Theme’ we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”(10) Nimble Believing! Now, I have a personal note here to share. I am so glad I came onto McIntosh’s book on Dickinson first, before ever having started to read her poetry; her incredible, weird, stimulating, and adroit poetry! I cannot exaggerate this. I have just never read anything so amusing, gentle, astonishing, stark, stunning and sudden! He gave her context that anyone who has never read Dickinson (poor soul) would really be helpful. Now her poetry is amazing to me, but the context here, considering her seclusive life, is quite important. And McIntosh’s book is an easy read, with superb analysis, crosschecking, and referencing, demonstrating the Dickinson he is presenting is the real Dickinson in the poetry. It’s only 160 pages of reading, and a spectacular helping hand to enlarging our perspectives on things. I love that I read the book first, poetry afterwards.

So, “Nimble Believing This is believing for intense moments in a spiritual life without permanently subscribing to any received system of belief… hers was a vacillation of doubt and faith.”(11) And isn’t it all of ours? These shifting inner conditions in her is what propelled her poetry, and is what rings so authentic, so meaningful to us, her readers in our own lives. The vacillation within us is a “volatile truth” embodying the unknown. And there is an enormous more of it than actual knowledge around us in our lives. At times she doubts God, then she hurries back and loves Him, then hates him from the Calvinist theological pap-n-pablum she learned as a child, then she hates him for causing death, then tries to figure out the unknown in death and an afterlife, then she goes all around again, but in each case, her poetry thickens, blends, grows, and elaborates on many themes, evincing delicious paradoxes, and one of the most fundamental is the importance of ourselves in nature. It is gorgeously majestic to read her!

In line with this, William Wordsworth, (1770-1850) one of the Romantic poets, demonstrated what is meant by active engagement with our life and our world. I think his description is rather very nice. “These beautiful forms [of nature he had just described] Through a long absence, have not been to me as a landscape to a blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din of towns and cities I have owed to them, in hours of weariness,sensations sweet. Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind...for I have learned to look on nature… and I have felt a presence that disturbs me with joy, Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man; a motion, a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all beings. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods.”(12)

His description “felt in the blood” just wow! But it is the belonging in nature as a thing of course, it’s natural, and it is to that ground we belong, and we long, and so, it speaks to us, as we contemplate it. There really is a connection in other words. We are a part of it, not apart from it. I say that a lot, but I mean it. This is the sense of the sacred our age has lost, and it shows,

Robert Frost (1874-1963) challenges us to challenge ourselves about our knowledge. This is one of the fantastic things about poets, they can get to truth in a way no others can. They are not by any means stuck with convention whether through science or religion. They are the light seekers of the soul, so to speak, and they do speak! In his poem “Too Anxious for Rivers” he asks skeptically “how much longer a story has science Before she must point out the light on the children And tell them the rest of the story is dreaming?” The poem implies that the ‘light’ of science - that is, of empirically based knowledge - is not an eternal flame.”(13)

An example of this is explained by Dana Wilde, “Immensity is a kind of surrealism. Subatomia is a kind of surrealism. Immensity and subatomia are abstract, in the nature of principles rather than concretions”(14) When we talk about subatomic particles, we do not and cannot know them as “things,” but our comprehension of them is only in light of their behavior, not of the things themselves. All we know is our own mathematical representation of their behavior. “So talk about the particles is talk about what the particles are like, it is metaphorical… what we comprehend is the metaphor, not the atom.”(15) Further in his fascinating essay, Wilde startles us with this: “Subatomic particles are surreal because we speak of them metaphorically, that is, we use words or mathematics - materials other than the particles themselves - to create images that do not correlate directly to reality, in order to understand the behavior of these tiny invisible somethings. It is not even clear whether the somethings are something.”(16) The truly weird thing is we are, that is, our bodies, are made up of these somethings which may not be somethings! There may be nothing below us physically when we get to the subatomic range. In other words, we actually do not know what we are made of! Whoa.

Rather than be sore amazed and disturbed about not being able to know actually what we are, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) gave us a psychological key to overcome our personal angst in our lives. Where do we belong? Why is life so difficult, miserly, damnable stupid? What’s the bloody point already? Where the hell is God in all this ugly mess? Come on heavens open up! Rather, it is we who need to open up, to the revelation all around us. I’ll let Coleridge take it from here. It’s not that God is ignoring us, it is that we are ignoring God, i.e., nature which is the invisible world of God manifesting, of which we also belong and are and part of! The opening of our own eyes is the key, not God showing up where God already is.

WIth other ministrations thou, O Nature!
Healest thy wandering and distemper’d child:
Thou poorest on him thy soft influences,
Thy sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
Thy melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing,
Amid this general dance and minstrelsy;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit heal’d and harmoniz’d
By the beningnant touch of Love and Beauty.(17)

Now, I don’t remember what program it was I saw a few years back, about very disturbed youth, jailbirds, uncontrollable, parent beaters, computer hacks, belligerent snot nosed teenaged brats, knife fighters, and worse, very dangerous to other people. They had become literally impossible to deal with. One man in the Western United States, offered to have 12 of them come to his ranch for the summer and do ranching with him, you know, the old riding the horse, roping the cattle, gather the chicken eggs, hunt the wildlife, and go on a genuine cattle drive through forests, rivers, prairie, taking them to market to sell. That 3 month experience completely, totally, changed every single one of those kids. It was the singular most spectacular program I have ever seen! One of the things that brought several of them to tears was the astonishing stars at night which they have never seen before. They looked at them every night and learned their mysteries, the names of the constellations, how the earth worked in its orbit and rotating on its axis, etc. They learned how nature works and why the sun comes up in the morning. Riding the horses was the other really memorable and favorite activity they engaged in daily to get the work done. This rancher knew the problem, they were in the city, narrow vision possibilities, with no skills other than rebelling against their prison in the inner city, even though they were free. All had been thrown out of school, several came from broken families, most had been arrested and on drugs, doing them, selling them, etc. And what took the “authorities” years to fail, this rancher accomplished literally the miracle, the MIRACLE in just 3 months, and it was in getting these kids in touch with their true nature, doing so in nature. It’s real. It changes people. Coleridge knew whereof he spoke, he knew.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) wrote odes to the winds, clouds, skylarks, indians, and everything to do with nature. He was an intellectual giant among his peers, and it showed through his poetry. “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being…drive my dead thoughts over the universe like withered leaves to quicken a new birth.”(18) “I am the daughter of Earth and Water, and the nursling of the Sky; I pass through the pores of the ocean and shores; I change, but cannot die.”(19) This is a statement in his poem of the Cloud. Nature gave him his anchor in his station in life. Not as a mere nothing on a mere speck in the midst of gigantic space of worthless value, the universe. But as a living, breathing piece of it all. He was not dwarfed, he was anchored in reality.

John Keats (1795-1821) in his ode to the Nightingale was mordantly depressed with life, and yet here was this bird joyously singing away all the time! He was more or less forced to pay attention and through it all ended up on an optimistic end of exultation. He complains of his lot in life, tries to shoo the bird away, and through the process was transformed into an entirely new man with an entirely new lease on life, and from just a little singing bird! “Was it a vision or a waking dream?”

All these authors, poets, liberal intellects knew something that is missing in our philosophers today. They have soul. They have spirit, a much more all wholesome and whole inclusiveness in their lives that is missing in ours. And they all testify with astonishing poetic conviction of the power, the way to find this key to being alive in the world and participating and fulfilling life. And that was to immerse ourselves into nature. They knew. They knew! They had it. They got the point.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the Grand daddy of them all, and his discourse on Nature is simply the greatest manifesto ever written on this theme. If you haven’t read it, you actually are less than you ought to be. It’s a mere 45 pages or so long and power packed with intelligence, genius, astute observation, sage advice, and downright stellar spirituality. Why though? What made him tick? What gave him such authority to command entire generations of mankind onto greater greatness? It is this: “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we through their eyes,. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to day also.”(20) We move forward on and out of and with our own authority and grace and experience. We have all the authority of the universe because we are a part of it, which means, we are the whole of it. That vision, that horizon and intense inclusion of all with us is what is missing today in our humanity.

His arresting image of what happened to him while come to grow and be included in infinite nature, and the most famous one he ever wrote simply stuns. “In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life - no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes) - which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground - my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space - all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God… it is certain that the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in harmony of both.”(21)

I honestly cannot think of a stronger way to end this essay, and am hard at working on another essay discussing further his downright perfect image of a transparent eyeball which I will get posted as I have time to work on it.



Endnotes
1.Told in exquisite detail in Theodor Gaster, “Thespis,” Gordonian Press, 1975.
2. Hesiod’s, “Theogony,” Penguin Classics, Dorothea Wender translator, 1973: 23.
3. Joseph Meeker, “Dante and the Comic Way,” in “Alexandria, Cosmology, Philosophy, Myth, and Culture,” Vol. 5, Phanes Press, 2000: 8-9.
4. Meeker, “Ibid.” p. 11.
5. “T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 1909-1950,” Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1952, p. 37, 45.
6. William Blake, “And Did Those Feet in Ancient Time” in Stanley Appelbaum, “English Romantic Poetry: An Anthology,” Dover Publications, 1996: 22.
7. Rachel Wetzsteon, editor, “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson,” Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003: xxvi.
8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Peter Norberg, editor, “Essays and Poems by Ralph Waldo Emerson,” Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004: 116.
9. David Fideler, “Restoring the Soul of the World: Our Living Bond with Nature’s Intelligence,” Inner Traditions, 2014: 32-33.
10. James McIntosh, “Nimble Believing - Dickinson and the Unknown,” University of Michigan Press, 2000: 1.
11. McIntosh, “Ibid.,” p. 1.
12. William Wordsworth, “Words at Tintern Abbey,” in Stanley Applebaum, “English Romantic Poetry,” p. 26, 27.
13. Dorothy Judd Hall, “Contours of Belief, Robert Frost,” Ohio University Press, 1984: 4.
14. Dana Wilde, “Galaxies and Photons,” in “Alexandria,” Vol. 1, Phanes Press, 1991: 105.
15. Wilde, “Ibid.,” p. 106.
16. Wilde, “Ibid.,” p. 107.
17. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Dungeon,” in Stanley Applebaum, “English Romantic Poetry,” p. 62.
18. Percy Brysshe Shelley, “Ode to the West Wind,” in Applebaum, “English Romantic Poetry,” p. 153.
19. Shelley, p. 156.
20. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Introduction to Nature” in Norberg, p. 9.
21. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature,” in Norberg, p. 12-13.

[Paloma]

Philo, your post deserves so much more attention and comment than I can do here, but I was struck by how you mentioned well-loved poets of mine, and I'm thankful to know about the McIntosh book re Emily Dickinson.

Are you familiar with the Enneagram? As I was reading your post, the thought crossed my mind that you may be Type 4 (though only the individual himself knows, and it's not about "typing " others.) I guess I wondered that because I am Type 4 with a 5 wing.

And the title of your post drew me in immediately, as it mentioned a garden. In university, my Sr. thesis was on the Garden and the Desert, with a focus on T. S. Eliot and Tennyson. (That's all I remember ... I'm older than Dr. Peterson and not nearly as old as Dr. Midgley, so you can imagine that I'm up there in years, though not in my dotage.)

I'm going to read your post again, slowly and carefully when I have more time, and I look forward to the responses by people here who are truly your peers in intellect and LDS experience.

[Philo Sofee]

Philo, your post deserves so much more attention and comment than I can do here, but I was struck by how you mentioned well-loved poets of mine, and I'm thankful to know about the McIntosh book re Emily Dickinson.

Are you familiar with the Enneagram? As I was reading your post, the thought crossed my mind that you may be Type 4 (though only the individual himself knows, and it's not about "typing " others.) I guess I wondered that because I am Type 4 with a 5 wing.

And the title of your post drew me in immediately, as it mentioned a garden. In university, my Sr. thesis was on the Garden and the Desert, with a focus on T. S. Eliot and Tennyson. (That's all I remember ... I'm older than Dr. Peterson and not nearly as old as Dr. Midgley, so you can imagine that I'm up there in years, though not in my dotage.)

I'm going to read your post again, slowly and carefully when I have more time, and I look forward to the responses by people here who are truly your peers in intellect and LDS experience.

Thank you Paloma. I am rather enjoying this new dimension of reading the poets now along with the historians giving me a further context, perhaps a more congenial one with science and religion. I have not been an accomodationist between the two, but I am even rethinking that. It is always a good thing to check your assumptions no matter how painful.

[Kishkumen]

Thank you for posting this, Philo. You really bring something distinctive and rich to our community here at DM. My sense is that your work has always been interesting and thought-provoking, but now it is really coming together. You really ought to think about writing a full book. It could be a collection of essays, but I would love to see something more along the lines of a sustained argument. As for this piece, you sent me into deep contemplation last evening, thinking about humanity's profound belonging to the cosmos and how the image of the garden helps draw us back into reflection on that relationship. Wonderful stuff, sir. Keep up the excellent work.

[Philo Sofee]

Thank you for posting this, Philo. You really bring something distinctive and rich to our community here at DM. My sense is that your work has always been interesting and thought-provoking, but now it is really coming together. You really ought to think about writing a full book. It could be a collection of essays, but I would love to see something more along the lines of a sustained arguments. As for this piece, you sent me into deep contemplation last evening, thinking about humanity's profound belonging to the cosmos and how the image of the garden helps draw us back into reflection on that relationship. Wonderful stuff, sir. Keep up the excellent work.

You are very kind Kish, for which I am very grateful! It is a pleasure to write again. I actually told my wife yesterday in typing this I am not typing what I intended to type. I have very rarely had this experience before, truly. I just whiz banged it out in a complete data dump! I was shocked and rather in awe of what, perhaps, other writers have felt when they say the Muse sang to me and I wrote. That is exactly what my wife told me this morning as I read your response to me here on the essay. She asked me to read it to her, which I did. It isn't like what I normally write at all. It is weird, yet humbling, because I suspect I now have a glimpse of what in-"spiration" means, the god breathed in me.
I know this comes across as bragging, I assure you, it is not. I am not anything special or chosen now, I just sat down and wrote and this is what came out. I now kind of grasp what happened to Muhammad when the angel showed up to him and began to talk, and then simply said to Muhammad "Write!" And so he did, and we have the Koran. It's a nice story, but now, not so fast in my own thinking, perhaps he really did just sit and write and the muse, angel, spirit, call it whatever, took over and out came the whizzing words!
I wrote this in just an afternoon. Started to type, and 3 hours later here it is. And it is nothing compared to what I had prepared to write. It sort of shocked me actually. It shocked my wife this morning. She asked me rather incredulously after I read it to her "Is that what you were working on yesterday?" I told her yeah, and she said "You wrote all that while you were typing and I was watching the news?" And I said yeah....
This appears to be a Wow! moment for us, and perhaps it is. But the ideas are not mine, I just pass it forward. There isn't an original bone in my body or thought in my head, but I love to write and when the hankering hits, I can flow with it if I will just shut up, sit down, and type.....lol.....
Thanks again, I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of my keyboard for all of you to read...

[Kishkumen]

You are very kind Kish, for which I am very grateful! It is a pleasure to write again. I actually told my wife yesterday in typing this I am not typing what I intended to type. I have very rarely had this experience before, truly. I just whiz banged it out in a complete data dump! I was shocked and rather in awe of what, perhaps, other writers have felt when they say the Muse sang to me and I wrote. That is exactly what my wife told me this morning as I read your response to me here on the essay. She asked me to read it to her, which I did. It isn't like what I normally write at all. It is weird, yet humbling, because I suspect I now have a glimpse of what in-"spiration" means, the god breathed in me.
I know this comes across as bragging, I assure you, it is not. I am not anything special or chosen now, I just sat down and wrote and this is what came out. I now kind of grasp what happened to Muhammad when the angel showed up to him and began to talk, and then simply said to Muhammad "Write!" And so he did, and we have the Koran. It's a nice story, but now, not so fast in my own thinking, perhaps he really did just sit and write and the muse, angel, spirit, call it whatever, took over and out came the whizzing words!
I wrote this in just an afternoon. Started to type, and 3 hours later here it is. And it is nothing compared to what I had prepared to write. It sort of shocked me actually. It shocked my wife this morning. She asked me rather incredulously after I read it to her "Is that what you were working on yesterday?" I told her yeah, and she said "You wrote all that while you were typing and I was watching the news?" And I said yeah....
This appears to be a Wow! moment for us, and perhaps it is. But the ideas are not mine, I just pass it forward. There isn't an original bone in my body or thought in my head, but I love to write and when the hankering hits, I can flow with it if I will just shut up, sit down, and type.....lol.....
Thanks again, I'm looking forward to seeing what else comes out of my keyboard for all of you to read...

That probably means you are doing something right and ought to keep at it!

[Ed1]

This is not a mere child’s story, a mere myth told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but a powerfully lodged archetype within us which means, it will hound us to the ends of our days until we wake up and recognize that to plant that Garden ought to be the first and foremost thing we do with our lives, and lets its vines, flowers, oak trees, fruit trees, natural perfumes and pleasures of both feel and sight, rivers, and delightful bounties of the earth come rolling back out for the benefit of humanity as it used to be. It is both forlornly longed for and cheerfully remembered in the ancient sagas, tales, stories, fairy tales, and mythologies the world over, and is studiously overlooked, ignored, and fearfully replaced by something… anything else that we can put in its place as our discomfort for this “Heaven on Earth” for the sterility of philosophy which has ended up talking more and more about less and less.

It is certainly the dream of Transhumanists to make themselves into gods over time whether or not there was ever a God. Similarly, the earth can be transformed whether this ever existed in reality or not. Humans can do what they can do to make a paradise out of their surroundings, and ought to try. I for one however think that this Eden is coming to earth again in a natural way soon enough, and whether people are around still when it becomes that depends on how they choose to live their lives.

[Philo Sofee]

The entire earth is Eden, we just have to cleanse the lens of our perceptions.......to follow William Blake's idea. America before the European invasion and raping of it was pure paradise in every way.

[Ed1]

The entire earth is Eden, we just have to cleanse the lens of our perceptions.......to follow William Blake's idea. America before the European invasion and raping of it was pure paradise in every way.

There is some truth to this.