February/March 1982 RAIN Page 7 religious groups, seeking to mobilize their sense of concern for the human condition, to dramatize the plight and the possibilities that faced society after a hundred years of heedless and irresponsible industrial exploitation. Sometimes they did this with standard doctrinal appeals to Christian stewardship, but sometimes also with a new sense of poetry. There were even Survivalists who spoke with the fervor of evangelists. Their meetings gradually acquired a name: Vision Bringing, from the ancient idea that vyhere there is no vision, the people perish. "Now, O my sisters and brothers, let us speak of Original Sin. "There are many sins we commit today; we know what they are. But let us think far back, beyond our ancestors, to the time of Adam and Eve. Let us not take that story too literally—insulting as it is, to both women and men, to imagine that man was created first, and then woman created as an afterthought. But let us return in our minds to the Garden of Eden, the original paradise. The place in which, at first, no human beings were, but instead creatures something like us, creatures with infinite slowness growing bigger brains, more useful thumbs, creatures finally learning to speak, to sing, to be human!" ("Hallelujah!" came the audience's response.) "The Garden, then, the place in which the new human beings needed to wear no clothes, for the tropical air was balmy. The place where ripe sweet fruit dropped from the trees, where fish and shellfish were abundant in the warm rivers and seas. The place where all beings lived in a terrible and beautiful harmony, each one eating and being eaten in turn, to the glory of life!" (Amen, sister!' ) "For it was not the eating that was the Original Sin. ^11 creatures were created as eaters. Even the lowliest worms and grasses in the Garden, each had its own food—organisms and substances proper and ready for each to eat. As day followed day and moon followed moon, the insects fed upon the flowers, the birds fed upon the insects, animals fed upon birds' eggs, and the rich decayed remains of dead birds and animals went back into the soil to fertilize the growth of new plants and flowers. All this was the great circle of life, my beloved friends—fearful and strange, but it was the law of the Garden. "And human beings too lived within this holy circle. They wandered about gathering fruits by day, but when night fell they cowered in their caves until the tigers came, and sometimes their young were devoured as they played in the sun. Disease microbes thrived in their stagnant waterpots, and sometimes the parasites would grow in their bellies until they died. And lo, their average age at death was 25 years. So their populations of small bands stretched thinly over the land, only eatirig what the Garden made ready to be eaten. They upset the great natural order of the Garden no more than a leopard or a snail. "And so things went, O sisters and brothers, for more generations than the people could count. They hunted and gathered and fished in the ways their parents handed down, and the great earth in its majesty ceaselessly circled the warming sun, which gave light, made the plants to surge up from the earth, caused water to evaporate and then return as blessed rain." ("Hallelujah!") "Thus things stood in the Garden for two million years after human beings first appeared. And all those thousands of generations came and went, and things remained the same. Those, O sisters and brothers, were the generations before the Fall, when all creatures and beings lived together upon the earth in equality. For some were strong in one way, but weak in another. Each had suitable gifts, of strength or guile or agility, fitting it to eat some other creatures, and each was eaten when its time came. The cycle endlessly turned. If we were there we would have thought that things would go on thus forever without cease—and without sin." ("Amen! ) "But then, O sisters and brothers, a great and terrible thing happened. We do not know exactly how it happened, or who did it. But instead of wandering about in the Garden, gathering food where they could find it, perhaps occasionally planting a little patch of yams but then moving on, humans discovered that they could plant and cultivate fields year after year. This sounds innocent enough, does it not? Who could blame them, who could call this quiet, industrious, cautious, productive change the Original Sin? But verily I say unto you, this was the root of Evil, this was truly the Devil's work. For consider what happened next. The people began to study the seeds of plants to select the best ones, so that next year's crop might be larger and stronger. They improved the soil so that it could produce more grain, and they began to regard land as private property, valuable and to be kept from others. Moreover, this productive land could grow more grain than they could use, so they could trade it to other people—for salt, or shells, or furs. "Some believe that it was women, caring for their babies in settled campsites, who thus invented agriculture, and that understanding crop plants constituted the Tree of Knowledge, and that when Eve in the Bible story offered Adam the apple, she was entrapping him into agricultural society, the life of exploiting the Garden. At any rate, when men stopped hunting and gathering, and began settled agriculture, they soon developed Sin! They learned clubs, and then armies, to defend their fields and the market cities that grew up among the fields. They learned government, to tax the fields and support bigger armies, police, roads, temples and priesthoods. They learned fortifications, and metals and poisons. They also learned dietary and public health precautions. And lo, their numbers increased. They invented gods who told them to go forth and multiply, and subdue all the creatures among whom they had once lived "A suicidal national government, a government that seems bent on devouring its people rather than nurturing them, forfeits our allegiance. We did not choose this situation. But we must recognize realities. My friends, dear friends- we are on our own!" in peace. They domesticated animals for power and developed machines like windmills to harness the forces of nature; they turned the Garden into a Factory. Their numbers rose unto the fifth and tenth powers over those of the tiny tribelets that had inhabited the Garden, and their cities and the filth they produced overran the rivers and the atmosphere. Until by our times, O my people, no square foot of earth anywhere, no matter how remote, was left unpolluted by our plutonium, our chemicals. And our interference in the circle of being had no limits. We killed off the wolves so we could graze sheep unhindered, then wondered why coyotes came to take their place. We chopped down the forests, then complained of floods and erosion. We developed chemical poisons for insects, then could not see why these chemicals also poisoned us—or why the fast-breeding insects soon developed resistance to them, while we did not. "Now you may ask, O sisters and brothers, can we escape this blind pattern of Sin? Can we go back to the days before the Fall, the days in the Garden, and live again in peace and harmony with all beings? No, I must in sorrow say to you that we cannot. We have learned too much that we cannot forget. We have crossed over the fateful line from innocence. And also we have forgotten all those things that people knew when they still lived in the Garden; the herbs that could ease pain or cure disease; the ways that beings talk together in the terrible but holy encounters of eating and being eaten. We are like blind people now, and it will take us many years and much close attention to learn again how to see, how to accept the circle of being. And because we have destroyed so much of it, ^
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