A long time ago, there was a place called Eden. Eden was a beautiful garden. And in this garden there was love, there was blood, there was birth, and there was death. And in this garden, people lived.

While living in the garden, even before teeth were sunk into that famous apple, something wondrous happened there. There was fire, and meat roasted on a spit.

The curly wisps of smoke like helixes rose up to the sky out of the flames. And in the smoky air over the years the faces and bodies around the fire began to change.

The people learned to hunt together, for each other. They learned to gather, for each other. What they picked, dug up or stuck with a spear didn’t upset the balance of the garden (just don’t tell that to the mega fauna!). What they ate and metabolized allowed for the various cell colonies and organisms in their bodies to live in harmony. There was balance regarding what the humans took from the garden to eat,… for what they took was needed by the garden to be taken. And that which was taken by the humans to eat provided their hormones and cells an environment in which it was advantageous to work together.

They did on to each other, for themselves and the garden, as they would have each other and the garden do onto them.

But then one day, they ate a forbidden apple from a tree (although it might have really been crushed wheat that was their downfall, perhaps the serpent offered an apple pie?), and obtained a knowledge of agriculture, namely, how to domesticate grains, that challenged the garden’s hunting and gathering way of life. And for this, they were cast out. Out of the garden.

And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?

Hot ashes for trees?

Hot air for a cool breeze?

Cold comfort for change?

And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?

-from Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”

And humans lived on. They began to grow plants and further domesticate animals.  And thousands of years later, this system provided them food very unlike how it was provided for them when they lived in Eden.

And they began to take more from their gardens than they put back into them. The wheat and corn and sugar and soy and rice began to strip the land of its wealth. They began to fight for the land and water and crops at a scale that brought a level of destruction that was unlike anything ever seen in a tribal war.

They cared not how they treated each other. The Human Action that created the economics of hunting, gathering and trading with each other their fruits and vegetables and meats for mutual health and wealth ceased. They just ignored the fact that their food was making them sick, and instead concentrated on fighting with each other over the power to see who had the authority to dole out the rations from the granaries.

And so appeared a top-down growing model, nothing like a garden, an agricultural system that grew to become based on fiat/paper money and ag subsidies. Their fields produced high fructose corn syrup for gluten and sugar laden foods begotten from an exhausted earth. These strange foods were even fed to their animals (and bees to make honey!), which made the animals as sick as the humans.

And the people cared not what they did onto the earth to grow their food, and the dying earth began to do onto them in the same way back. Famine, drought, and underproduction occasionally took their respective tolls on the centrally planned food system and accompanying centrally planned human societies founded on malinvestments in unhealthy sugars and carb-filled crops using the sandy bedrock of paper money that makes profits turn into debt and bankruptcy via inflation.

10,000 years after their exodus from the garden, the food that the people ate started to cause war among the colonies of cells within their human bodies. The high carbohydrate diet from the grains and sugar caused the adipose tissue to expand and horde nutrients at the expense of the organs and the brain. Hormones that used to work in harmony now spoke past each other in a cacophonous discord causing metabolic syndrome.

What they thought was enough food stored in their granaries was pure sugar, and it began to slowly cause them debt, and cause them to become sick. And they began to realize that what they thought would be enough, wasn’t. And they couldn’t grow enough anymore for everybody. Quite simply, the “real” price of their grains was becoming known, and it was an investment based on incorrect assumptions of currency stability, the food’s health benefits, and the ability of the earth to continue growing in unsustainable ways.

The Golden Rule preached 2,000 years ago which echoed the lost life of the garden, now in this day and age is forgotten by many. But not by all. These teachings are a part of religion for many, they are teachings that I indeed try to follow. There are many who don’t follow a religion, and instead explain the world solely through the scientific method. But these teachings are also part of our evolution, our lives both in and out of the garden, and in our bodies, and amongst our cells. The aspect the Golden Rule plays in our evolution can be understood by those who hold the Golden Rule as part of their religious outlook.

We may not be able to return to Eden, but the Golden Rule applied to evolutionary living will help us find a way to feed each other.  We are now the faces that may be seen through the smoke. We are the ones now sitting around the campfire once again figuring out a way to continue to live for our mutual health and wealth.

Do onto others, as you would have them do onto you. This is part of us, this is how we may evolve if we are to continue.

We are part of this evolution right now.  

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 8:00 pm and is filed under EF-De Vany reference, Granary, Kairos, The Paleo Garden Party. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.