On dancing and snakes and lovely gardens just out of reach

December 14th, 2011 § 2 Comments

My words have been scarce as of late and I’ve tried to determine why. Life is full, full, full and yet I open this page and I sit and my mind whirls and twists and I feel like my thoughts are dancing in the most exciting moment of the ballet. twirling. spinning. unable to stop. unable to look in one spot and focus and get out what needs to get out. instead my head whips around like a dancer, circling quickly, but always coming back to that one point so as to stay on my feet and not fall dizzy in a heap.

and so I wait.

But here we are weeks later and still I sit and stare and I don’t know where to begin. Where does one start when there are four thousand six hundred and thirty seven things I want to say?

At the beginning, of course. And so I begin at the beginning, the only place it all leads back to.

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1) And it was all so very good. The light and the water and the fish and the stars in the sky it was all so deliciously good. And man and woman and so, so good.

And then there was a garden. Even at the typing of the word garden I feel my heart turn in some sort of resentment for the very thought. I have a hard time convincing my mind that this garden was good. Don’t get me wrong, I know that it was because scripture says it was a most lovely place. A beautiful perfect garden. But I can’t see it because I think garden and I think snake and I shudder. I shudder not at the man or the woman there in the garden who were so enticed but at the things I see around me. My heart feels weighted in my chest as I think about relationships in conflict, bodies that are failing, little white lies. I look around me and I see it. I see the effects of the snake and I want to scream and yell and tell him that there is no room for him here.

My mind can’t fathom a beautiful garden because I know the rest of the story. I know the parts where we do not do the things we want to do but do the very things we don’t want to do. I see the people around me who ache, who carry loads too heavy, who look to everything but the One True Thing to satisfy. I’m trapped here, in this messy jungle thick with tangled branches and I long to breathe the air of a wide open space.

I long for the garden, to feel it the way it was.