When A Writing Prompt Becomes a Letter
The river is an altar bending through the Garden carrying my stolen acorn toward the open space where I already reside...
The singer/songwriter Jeffrey Martin has a song called “Quiet Man” on his most recent LP where he sings these two lines:
There's holes in all our bibles where we make secret compartments
To hide the broken treasures we smuggled out of the garden.
The album is called Thank God We Left the Garden, its fabulous and one of my favorite albums of the last year, so you can see the connection between the above lines and the title of the album. Speaking of connections, I like to create “writing prompts” for myself (and my friends, who rarely participate, but I love them still). In this case I asked the question, What did Jeffrey Martin smuggle out of the Garden?
I wrote my response by hand and passed it to Jeffrey when Kate and I saw him live in Santa Fe a couple weeks ago. The thing with letters handed off or mailed, is that you may never know if they’ve been read or received. I both despise and relish the mystery. But you, dear Substack reader, do not have to suffer the unknown any longer. Here’s what I wrote to the prompt I created and handed off to the person who inspired the prompt at a live show in which he sang the two lines I already shared with you.
It reads like this:
Jeffrey Martin inspired the practice of “Garden smuggling.” Prior to his smuggling he first drilled some holes in a bible. I don’t know if it was a bible that belonged to him, or maybe he found a big, dusty one at the Goodwill. Either way, this bible has a bunch of holes in it and somehow he finds himself in the Garden with the hole-y bible. I’ll only make that joke once, I promise.
Anyway, such a scenario is not possible for the biblical literalists because the book version of the bible came along after the vision of the Garden of Eden came to fruition. But, theologically speaking, nature, and you could definitely call the Garden of Eden some top-level nature, is what some good theologians say is the first bible. By this they mean read nature and you’ll learn what God is like. Which, depending on your interpretation abilities, can mean a lot of things. Some of them are really bad though, interpretations and abilities alike.
So Jeffrey finds himself in the Garden with the second bible, full of holes. I’m not sure if he’d thought through the smuggling prior to his arrival because, if we’re being honest, not a lot of room in the bible for natural artifacts. But let’s call it a mystical book and because it is, let's assume that Martin managed to store whatever he was going to smuggle inside those holed out pages. Stuffed within his secret compartments he claims to have gathered broken treasures. This is interesting because, for one, we can only speculate what he smuggled. They are secret compartments after all. I won’t speculate.
However, I do find it interesting that he chooses to round up what he deems to be “broken treasures.” First, the concept of broken treasures in the Garden will mess with your fundamentalist mind. Shouldn’t they be whole inside the Garden? I guess if Mr. Martin smuggled the bible full of holes into the Garden then we can only assume a bunch of the treasures have been broken in the time between our metaphorical exit and his return. Second, and I admit to getting in a little over my head, I think a lot of these treasures are available all around us right now. You know, like maybe we are living in the Garden. But I too am less inclined to notice the treasures around me. I’d also rather raid the Garden.
Since I have no way of knowing what Jeffrey stashed in his secret bible hole compartments, or why the treasures were broken, I figured I’d enter the Garden for myself and see what I find. In the spirit of Martin’s song, “Quiet Man,” I promise to go quietly and bring my own bible full of holes.
___________
The first thing I notice when I arrive at the Garden is a sign where the flames and swords were supposed to be. Used to be? Anyway, the sign was facing outward so those leaving couldn’t read it without looking back. I wonder if Adam and Eve looked back. Did Martin? This sign was less of a sign and more a work of art. Burned into a flat piece of Acacia bark were the words, “Thank God We Left the Garden.” I took a selfie to document the moment, unsheathed my hole filled bible from my backpack, and entered where I thought re-entry had been forbidden.
Those first steps on the other side of the “Thank God” sign were met with the uneasy expectation of smiting. The fact that Jeffrey had already been back to the Garden, and lived to write about it no less, should have assuaged my fears. But I waited, tense. When nothing happened the first thing I noticed was the smell. Fresh and alive, pathways of lilacs spread in every direction. Depending on the direction, one could find a river flowing through a canyon, a meadow of wildflowers, or a pristine mountain peak lined with pines.
Inside one of the holes in my bible I had decided to smuggle something into the Garden. I pulled out the tube housing my fly rod, uncrewed the canister, and rigged up in search of some treasure. To the river canyon I went.
Wading in I could hear the rocks whispering, not crying out, welcoming my steps. Maybe rocks crying out had been a bit overstated. Eyeing the riffle in front of me, I felt the willows swaying on the banks, and the gentle whistle of the Canyon Wren reverberated through the canyon. Raising my rod to cast, I stop with it pointed skyward. I let my backcast fall into the current behind me. I slide the rod back into one of my secret compartments for safekeeping.
Walking upstream, buoyed by the whispering stones beneath my feet, it occurs to me I’d rather walk in the water than upon it. And this is the treasure I insert into my secret Bible compartments. The only treasure I need. Treasure in tow, I’m reminded how an elder or two has taught me about the importance of bringing a gift to leave in exchange. This seems especially important since I’m in the act of smuggling.
I drop an acorn I stole from the lands of this elder, an acorn I never told anyone about, into the flow of the stream. A subtle splash, a peaceful plop, and it floats away from me in no rush to justify the exchange for my previous theft.
The river is an altar bending through the Garden carrying my stolen acorn toward the open space where I already reside where the Garden is still all around me and even if it seems cliche I know the river has washed me and will wash me again and when I walk out of the Garden by stepping along the streambed rather than upon the water I know I will look back and remember the sign above even though I already have a selfie and I’ll mouth the words to my former self and I’ll speak them with my heart and I’ll mean it, thank god I left the garden.
But for now I stand in the water with my bible full of holes.