Waking inside the Garden

The dream

I went to sleep after thoroughly reflecting on the concept of the Jubilee — a year where all people revert back to their ancestral land, leaving their permanent house and their field behind. The ancient Israelites did this every 50 years. While laying there with my arm around my wife, I contemplated, reflecting on it. Inhale — Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God. Exhale — have mercy on me, a sinner.

The next thing I know, I’m waking up in a land I can only describe as primordial rainforest. Yet, there are no mosquitoes. My wife is there too. She looks like an australopithicus, covered in hair, yet still human. Naked, yet clothed by hair. Yet somehow, I recognize her. She has an exuberance I’ve never seen before. Her face is younger than it was when we met, yet more mature than that of a 70 year old and somehow, there are no wrinkles.

She looks at me with a level of joy that not even Christmas morning could capture. She smiles. She turns. She runs — on two feet. I follow her several hundred yards. I didn’t know we were capable of running this fast. She stops abruptly and turns around. She looks at me with the most childlike and innocent smile. Then she looks past me. I turn and look at the tree behind me.

She wants me to eat. I don’t think twice. Its fruit look familiar. Words can’t describe them exactly. Something like the purest of all Georgia peaches you could find on earth. I pluck it from the tree. Before I can take a bite, I wake up in my bed.

The irony

What began as a reflection on the Jubilee quickly turned into a lament before I had this dream. I was deeply wounded. Constantly wondering, “What is my ancestral land?” I always imagined it was somewhere in Northern Ireland. A man’s inheritance, until the last twenty years or so, has always been traced through his father’s lineage, not through his genetic makeup. For example, I am only 12.5% Irish. However, if you trace my father and his father and their fathers, you wind up square in the Kingdom of Ulaid. Nulty -> McNulty -> Mac an Ultaigh (Son of Ulaidh man).

Life as a human in 2026 is little more than it was originally. We just invented a toll booth to enter the land. Then another toll booth to look at the fruit and another toll booth after that to pluck the fruit and another to bite into the fruit.

The Jubilee had fewer toll booths. You were not judged by what you possessed. You were going to give the land back to God and He gave it back to its rightful owners. If you had no money, it wasn’t a generational problem. You could go home, plant crops and build a shelter. Sustenance in this system was a basic need and it was assumed. There were no bank accounts. You didn’t need to worry about utility bills. You did not need to sell your time, money, ideas or physical prowess. You could do all of these but it was not required. You could opt out of the economic system almost entirely and quite literally live off the land. No building permits. Money was not central to the world. It was extra.

I woke up in what I can only describe as my true ancestral land. Even the Jubilee, as beautiful a system as it is, is an abstraction. Even farming is an abstraction. God provides food straight from the tree. Our emotional insecurity drives us to hoard food. To hoard food, you need to produce it en masse. Bills and taxes are an abstraction. Today, even the concept of building a shelter is highly permit-gated. If I were to walk onto unoccupied land, even if I was the owner, dig a hole in the dirt and put up a shack, I’d be looking at countless violations and possibly even criminal charges for simply trying to fill a basic human need.

The city wants money for a permit so it can extract value. All work must be done by a contractor so he can extract value. The shelter needs to blend in so my neighbors can extract property value. Once all of this happens and ownership becomes “permanent”, even without a mortgage, property taxes need to be paid or ownership reverts back to the city — who sells it to the highest bidder. That final part doesn’t happen every 50 years. It’s possible any year. If the city does take the house, a poor family cannot use it. The land and house go to the highest bidder — the richest man.

The system I describe here is a complete bastardization of the Jubilee. Built for extraction and exploitation at every step of the process. However, land ownership in and of itself is an abstraction. There is one common denominator during all this abstraction, money.

Our dollar, who art backed by nothing

In today’s world, money is more important than ancestral inheritance or even the right to eat. A poor man in the ancient world could farm and eat crops on publicly owned land. Today, a poor man isn’t even supposed to own land. He’s a DHHS case. He’s not supposed to cultivate anything. He’s supposed to beg the government for help. The government in turn surveils the man, to make sure he isn’t lying. Even then, he is not given a place to produce food, he is given money. Money that doesn’t keep up with inflation. This way the state can extract value from the man in the form of valuable data. Data that’s worthless for a single person. On a macro scale, spread across millions of beneficiaries, this data is priceless. It holds the keys to an entire sect of civilization. The man receives his food stamps. He is not allowed to spend this money on seeds or soil. He must only spend it at a state-approved grocery store, so the store can extract value.

The Beatitudes conclude this piece better than I ever could. Examine them in light of Original Sin.

Blessed be ye poor: for yours is the kingdom of God.

On earth, the poor have no kingdom. We get an invoice for the very dirt we stand on.

Blessed are ye that hunger now: for ye shall be filled.

In the garden, the hungry take food from the trees.

Blessed are ye that weep now: for ye shall laugh.

That exuberance that I simply cannot explain. A joy unlike any other.

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man’s sake.

The serpent tricked and separated us from the Garden, from our true place of belonging. The serpent’s world doesn’t reproach us, it traps us in a hamster wheel of economic activity. Opt out and you’re not reproached, you’re viewed as anti-human, even evil and this reproach comes from people who “accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.”