Leaving the Garden

When Adam and Eve left the garden, story began. When they walked away from the safety of their own small world, they opened themselves to exposure to other ways of experiencing and thinking. Their story became mingled with others’ stories that were different from their own. There was no going back; no putting the story back in the box.

And so it goes still. With the invention of boats and planes and spaceships, telegraphs and telephones and the internet; the stories of one people meet the stories of another and converge into a collective story. Try as we might, they cannot again be separated.

Another 50th anniversary of an opening of story this month: the Cuban Missile Crisis. I was ten years old, living in this same house I am again living in. Then as now, the vine maple leaves were turning red and gold; the sun rose behind the mountain over the fog-filled valley; fir needles, cherry and big leaf maple leaves covered the driveway. What I remember about the days and months following the disclosure of those thirteen days would almost fill a matchbox. “Duck and cover” drills, as if getting under a desk would protect one from nuclear fallout. The information that people were putting bomb shelters in their homes with supplies to last a few weeks, as if one would want to outlive the world. But I knew nothing of that ridiculousness then. We were doing what we could as the story exploded to include new stories that we couldn't understand.

If the Crisis was discussed in my family or in my fifth grade classroom (both of which I doubt), I do not remember. Such things were not talked about with children, perhaps appropriately. There

is an instinct to let children stay in the garden of innocence as long as possible. I wonder if my parents talked about it to each other, or if they wanted to stay in the garden, too. Afterall, they had already lived through the depression and a world war. Didn’t they deserve time in the garden of denial in the safety of their small town, cocooned with their children in their home on the side of a hill overlooking a bucolic valley?

But whatever the personal stories, the world left the garden again when the story of how close we came to ending the narrative came to light. I think it may be true that we have not really been able to return to that particular illusion of safety since.

It is so hard to leave the garden we know. I understood that the Lenten rose in my North Carolina garden would bloom around Easter and the blooms would hang beneath the leaves, changing colors all summer, and new growth would come from the ground in the fall. I knew the winter jasmine would bloom bright yellow in the dead of otherwise colorless winter. I knew the gardenia would perfume the air when it got hot. Then I planted a banana tree. I had no idea how that would change the garden. I had no clue yet how to take care of it. Each plant I added to the garden, changed its story; changed my story. And, yes, it made care of the garden more complex. And the complexity made it more beautiful.

We are just sixteen days from a historic vote in the state of Washington. The 42nd state is poised to become the first state in the union to provide, by popular vote, all people the opportunity to marry. Nothing really will change, in practice, for LGBT couples－ Washington already has a comprehensive domestic partnership law. What will be different is that one more stand for equality will be made. And the story will move on toward the day when no one thinks about discriminating against a portion of the population.

And there is resistance. It is the narrative of our society through the decades. Women fight for equality, and men resist leaving the garden. Blacks fight for equality, and whites resist leaving the garden. People who are gay fight for equality, and people who are straight resist leaving the garden. We want to keep the story simple, familiar, and understandable. And so, like duck and cover, we fight back with ridiculousness; because it is all we have in the face of inevitable change.

Stories, like that my 96-year-old mother told a reporter this week about how discrimination is wrong and that everyone should be able to marry the one they love, won't change minds. Not immediately. But when we articulate our experience, and when it is written down for others to read, it becomes story. And it joins with our neighbor's story. And our collective story transforms the world. When we leave our small garden to join another's exodus from their small garden, we plant a bigger garden－one that holds us all.