Denuding the Illusion is written and directed by rewilding pioneer and award-winning author of four books, Daniel Firth Griffith. Here, we produce a reader-supported publication with corresponding podcast, weekly nature-based and cultural articles and essays, and more.
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This is the second part of a short series within the weekly release of Postcards of the Night Sky Sent to Shepherds. If you have not read the first part, “The Birth of Cain,” I encourage you to click here and read that first.
Click here to visit the main, TABLE OF CONTENTS page for this book, Postcards of the Night Sky sent to Shepherds.
The Birth of Abel
The birth of Chava’s second son lacks both a timeline and the fanfare that surrounds her first. She does not celebrate; she does not even name him. The text stumbles over those details like a mystified drunk stumbles over a curb or a mystified, forest traveler stumbles over a root. Did she hold him? Did she even clothe him?
The ancients simply state that Cain’s brother is born and that Cain’s brother is named Havel, or Abel. The excited animation and mystified ceremony of Cain’s birth has long dissipated across the lonely dessert, like salt over too much meat that is beginning to rot. Known by association alone, Havel’s name means “breath that vanishes” or, perhaps, “a vapor of smoke.”
Yes, we know breath and vapors associatively and never directly and so it makes sense that the text does what it does and the story goes how it goes. Breath is the manifestation of something else much greater, much stronger, much more real. The energy of exhale, breath dissipates proportionally to its ability to be known and our story follows.
After periods unknown, Abel becomes a keeper of sheep and Cain becomes a tiller of the ground. Where is Chava? The story leaves her in the dust. That is the strange thing about genetics, you know. Once they diverge, you can never get them back. Like Humpty Dumpty, you can never put them together again.
Where is their father? Where is Adam? In the ancient language, Adam is ha’adam, or “the man.” Interestingly, as authors Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler wrote in their pivotal book, The Bible With and Without Jesus, ha’adam, or “the Adam,” is ancient wordplay and is connected to ha’adamah, meaning “the earth.”
The man. The Earth.
In this way, mankind and Chava’s “Adam” in the book of Genesis is more properly translated as Earthling. But the earth and its earthlings are not separate entities, for “Adam is the land, and the land is merely an extension of Adam,” writes Rabbi Michael Paley.[1] When humankind is punished in the Garden, the land is the focus of Creator’s wrath, the curse striking the earthlings “at the center of their being,” again writes Paley. Adam, the personal noun, does not appear in Genesis until late in chapter four (4:25), which is long after our story ends.
Where is Adam? He is here, here as the desert plane in which our story dwells and here as the desert winds that hammer, that pierce, that cry against the night, like its newborn child.
Today’s green movements—agriculture, energy, and business, namely—are often hailed as a process of reconnection. One thought leader recently said on social media that, in these green movements, “we are reconnecting to each other; we are reconnecting to nature.” Thousands line up to like and comment and share the post but adam, the earthling, the earth, billows and flashes and tears against our delusion of disconnection, weeping like Creator wept.
When we dig in the soil and lift it up to inspect it, to sift through it, to attempt to understand it, does it become something else? Disconnected from the soil beneath your feet, does the soil in your hands transform into something that is not soil? This is the delusion. Our green movements seek reconnection because they fundamentally believe that we have, in our separation, become something else, some other structure.
Unlike the soil in our hands, the supposed solution to our separation is regeneration. When in all its simplicity the real solution is to just let it go—to release, to let it splash downward and ripple, a wave in a pond, across what it already is: itself.
We return to ourselves when we pause, when we drop everything, and splash against that which we already are—earth. We are her Earthlings. No reconnection is necessary. Just breath, or a “vapor of smoke.”
Our violent, desert storm is not necessarily a call for regeneration and its “reconnection” as much, I think, as it is a call for our blood and our tears.
“Earthlings,” Creator calls to us, that is, in the truest sense, the primate, and not us, the industrial capitalist and savior of the world merely seeking reconnection. You cannot separate earth and its earthlings, we know deeply, but we do not remember, our memory is the problem.
Where is Adam? They are here. Will you join us?
Just breathe.
[1] https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/a-meditation-on-adamah-and-ahavah, This essay is from The Peoplehood Papers, volume 14 – Sustainability and Jewish Peoplehood – published by the Center for Jewish Peoplehood Education.