All around us is evidence that everywhere is home. Over and over again, non-human beings burrow and nest wherever. And yet we got it in our minds that we need a specific space to designate as home; put a fence around it, maybe build walls and draw militarized lines to claim some places as mine, but not yours. That over there is yours. And anything that intrudes over my line, into my spaces, I have to kill. We hold on to the concrete abstraction that strict variables must exist in order for us to feel home. This idea of home, a place to root, a place to flourish, being contingent on parameters outside of ourselves denies the animal and spiritual reality that we belong to everything and everywhere.
As I evict these plants from the brick walk (all except mystical mullein, connecting the heavens to earth), it is reminder that plants and animals are wiser than we. They carry their belonging to everywhere and everything within.
Maybe when we were in Eden we knew that everywhere was home and we belonged everywhere. But when we were kicked out, we began a long and complicated forgetting. And that's such a dangerous story: to believe oneself as unworthy of belonging to the everywhere and everything that was the garden, that is Earth. To believe oneself as unworthy of home, here; even as every other being homes everywhere.
I don't know how we begin to remember. I just know that in this country, the number of unhoused humans is currently 600,000 while there are over 110 million displaced people worldwide, and 1.6 billion people live in inadequate housing. Is this what happens when we don't know that all beings belong to everywhere and everything?
But Eve knew. And before her, Lilith.
Knew they belonged to everything and everywhere just as everything and everywhere belonged to them. Knew home as a given; knew you carried home as birthright within you. That's nothing to punish.
That is the true story of Eden. That is our deeper story. Can we remember?