People search for order instinctively. Many writers have discussed the way various gardening styles reflect and express different visions of paradise.

The Garden of Eden is a foundational myth in my tribe. God planted the garden and placed a man and a woman there. They walked and talked with God. Though at the cosmic scale, evil did exist, the man and the women knew nothing of it. They were not yet “as gods,” knowing both good and evil.

They lived in a pleasant shelter where maybe they could have lived forever as children. They were forbidden to eat the fruit of one tree, warned that the penalty for doing so was death. So they were given a choice.

The path they chose led to a knowledge of good and evil. They had to leave the garden to earn their food through labor and bring forth children in pain. They chose hardship and pain and a knowledge that could be had no other way.

I don’t believe God was either dismayed or surprised at the choice they made. I don’t believe his plans were frustrated, any more than wise parents are stymied when their children begin making their own decisions, despite parental warnings, finding out some things for themselves. No one else, even God, can do our knowing for us if we hope to be free.

We have to struggle with evil before we can understand goodness. Eventually, the man and the woman would die, but not before they were given time to restore their unity with God. Time is opportunity, and there is no better use for it than to learn the meaning of the cosmic contest between good and evil.

The end of their quest would be, as T.S. Eliot put it, to arrive where they started and know the place for the first time. Our goal is paradise. Our method is facing trouble.

The story comes to us through Moses, who was, Eric Voegelin argued, the most significant human in history. Monotheism was a powerful cognitive advance—something of a unified theory of meaning.

Polytheism provided a less ordered vision. It recognizes many of the forces that are present in consciousness-reality, but it sees only weak relationships between them. In Homer we encounter a tremendous—epic, we might say—grappling with evil and a dawning sense of universal justice, which his characters can glimpse but not yet articulate. In the war between the Greeks and Trojans, various gods took different sides. Homer was enough of a poet not to simply take his tribe’s side, but to see in the drama something larger than tribes, beyond even the gods—some force that cared about what happened and that favored some actions and disapproved of others. We witness, haltingly and mysteriously, the coming into the world of justice.

Homer could not quite answer the question “what is right?” It couldn’t be disentangled from the question “which god do you follow?” A few centuries later, Socrates had become a monotheist, because, he said, of his personal experience of deity. Revelation. Having got that far, he knew there was a universal moral law, and, brilliantly, he also saw that humans could perceive that law through reason. An escape from the cave was possible, because there really was a “beyond” that the senses could not perceive but that the mind could know.

The purpose of life, he taught, was the quest to know the purpose of life. The end of human life, my tribe teaches, is to re-create paradise—to have it not merely as a gift but also as an attainment, a state which we know how to care for because we learned how to create it.

Visitors never fail to mention how much work my gardens must be. I usually shrug or mumble. The garden provides an occasion for effort and the effort requires time, but I hardly ever do anything that I don’t feel like doing. It’s quite a joy to find one’s own mind by rearranging and editing the world as it is given, and to have at hand the means to do so.

Trouble is transient, but what we learn from meeting trouble endures. Labor and pain and death are occasions for us to use our growing powers to make places and worlds quite better than we once could imagine.