Just before the year’s end, I was on the phone with my father wishing him a happy 85th birthday. Somewhere between how-are-you and have-the-rains-come, he went into story mode-
A tale is told of the man Adam- dad said. He was given land as a gift by his maker. It was fertile land, capable of producing the best crop and filled with cattle that could greatly multiply. But that man Adam was lazy. He did not farm the land, he just ate of the wild fruit that grew freely.
I was now fully engaged. Dad went on-
When his maker found out about the lazy ways of this man, he threw him out of the fertile land, fenced it off so he could never reclaim it, and put him in an unproductive piece of land that needed hard and frustrating labor.
There was no Eve in this story, no Lucifer either. Just lazy Adam-
So you see, if we do not take care of the gift of land which comes to us, someone else will see your laziness, take the land and fence you out.
That’s how dad ended that story.
I certainly had never heard the Genesis mythology from that angle. Soon as I said goodbye and silently thanked the Maker for the gift of my father’s days in the land of the living, my mind got to furiously spinning the gears of that original version.
That version that would eventually make it into the Christian canon well over a thousand years later, thanks to the ambitious (and ruthless) politics of a Roman empire that knew the power of story.
I also successfully fought off the urge to compare it afresh with other creation mythologies. I just wanted to sit with this one as a gift from father to daughter and see what he saw. A story makes you see.
A mind that turns a well-worn story over and tells it anew is a mind you want to spend time with. That is why our people treasured the minds of elders. They are not dry casks that we should retire away. Tap into them and you will find that sweet honey in the rock that drips new insight into younger minds.
Adam was a lazy man!
I could see how this world has filled up with an Adam who chose to go about stealing and plundering other people’s lands. The colonial generation my father came from understood that intrusive Adam. Lazy Adam goes about blaming others and fails to see the many opportunities that come his way.
I could see how the land of toil and tears is a second chance and not a punishment. No matter the mistakes we make, there’s always another gift of soil after the first one has been taken away from us.
Like many of us, I have felt the ripping apart of mind over mistakes and miscalculations made and I know what it’s like to land in that garden of thorns and thistles that won’t let you sleep. But sucking on lamentation is Adam’s laziness. Don’t entertain it.
The mind is your garden, your patch of soil to till. Soil is life’s womb. It’s what we breathe into, what we reap from. Soil is opportunity to experience life in its fullest.
I can see how the human mind is our place of banishment. It is the garden of toil we are thrown in to when we outgrow our mothers’ free breast. It demands our responsible tending and not our constant wailing.
The mind is also the Eden where the wonder of life unfolds.
If we don’t cultivate useful knowledge in there and pull out the dense weed of fake and manipulative information, someone else will move in and use your mind to do what they want.
And so I leave you this gift of story to carry you through the year ahead. As you till your land, as you tend to your mind, be gentle with yourself and remember to pause for moments of rest.
