The Tastelessness of Eden: A Tribute to Lilith and the Holy Wild

I have of late been savoring the succulent words of Danielle Dulsky in her book The Holy Wild — A Heathen Bible for the Untamed Woman. It is nourishing to my soul, and I see pieces of myself reflected in her stories and descriptions. “Priestess,” she calls me. “Witch.” “Star-child,” and “living altar.” I sink into the warmth of this recognition until I see it, know it, own it. She is reminding me of my divinity and of my autonomy. And right from the beginning, right from the introduction, she brings tears to my eyes as she lifts me from the ashes and embers into a bright new sense of self.

Lilith Retold

Dulsky uses parables and mythology to illustrate her messages, giving us a character to relate to, a story to reflect upon and connect with. I am particularly taken with her revisioning of the tale of Lilith and her fall from Eden:

“Lilith’s story, in all its many variations, distortions, and interpretations, is a tale of the too-small life outgrown and a more soulful selfhood embraced. We begin here, with her, not because she is the embodiment of the grounded, enduring feminine and not because she is a beacon of warmth, grace, and solace. By contrast, Lilith is the rootless Maiden, the one whose very identity is defined not by who she knows she is but by who she knows she is not.”

She tells the tale of a woman sick with discontent over her existence in a Garden of superficial beauty. A woman longing for an untamed and uncultivated landscape. A woman desperate for something real. Lilith turns to the Tree of Knowledge as her only way of escape, understanding full well that she shall be cast out… and desiring exactly that. So she eats the Fruit with fervent and fiery defiance — long past ready to be free of her gilded cage — and she spreads black wings and takes her leave.

I soaked this in deeply. I read it again. Because clearly, immediately, I could see the reflection of Lilith in my own experience. I have been in that Garden. I have settled into the safety and comfort that it provides. I have lived that life of vibrant tastelessness. And I have felt the desperate hunger that comes with outgrowing a too-small life.

My Eden

In the middle of my college career I met a man and I fell in love. He was charming, sweet, smart, a little awkward… and he loved me, too. After about a year of dating he decided to move out of his apartment and buy a house, and he took me along on the hunt. We found one, he bought it, and I moved out of my mother’s house and in with him.

He was an engineer and worked for his father. He made (really) good money. I waitressed my way through the rest of my college degree, paying my own bills but never worrying about rent or utilities. He took me on vacations. We raised chickens. It was easy.

As the years passed, however, I grew restless. I was becoming more and more spiritual; he was devoutly agnostic. I wanted to travel and explore; he wanted to drink and play video games. I longed for growth, for learning, for experiences that delighted my soul; he was content with how things were. Our relationship grew stagnant. From the outside it appeared that I had it all, but in my heart I had outgrown my life, and the pain of such constriction was suffocating me.

My Tree of Knowledge

Eventually I decided to take a solo trip across the country. I had made many dear friends through social media that I wanted to visit, as well as other out-of-state friends that I already knew in person. I plotted and planned. I budgeted and mapped. I took nearly a month off of work. And then I hit the road. I maintain to this day that this trip was divinely inspired. The adventure practically laid itself out before me of its own volition.

This was easy. This was delighting my soul. This was me in my personal power, following my instincts even though I didn’t know why or how. Friends and strangers alike donated toward my “Cross Country Love Project,” and I left in my wake a plethora of encouraging fliers, joyful greeting cards, Free Hugs, chair massages, and little gifts. This was Lilith, standing in full awareness before the Tree of Knowledge, hungry and ready for something more.

My Fruit

I had driven from Michigan to California, staying with friends and crashing in motels, and was now working my way back home. More than a thousand miles to go and already the tightness of my “real life” was creeping back in as though my ribs themselves were shrinking. I didn’t want to go back. I hadn’t truly realized I had been suffocating until I could finally breathe again, and the thought of returning to that perfectly pruned and perfumeless Garden created an ache I couldn’t ignore. I tried to push it aside anyway.

Then I reached Utah.

I had met the friend I was visiting there a few years prior on social media. We ran in the same spiritual circle and had developed a deep respect for each other. I had less than 24 hours to spend with him — an evening and the next morning — so he took me up into the mountains where we wandered and talked, and I fell in love with the Holy Wild that he shared with me. Those mountains sang a song to my heart.

As I drove away the following day, something felt wrong. Something felt empty. It was as though I hadn’t noticed a puzzle piece sliding into its spot in my soul, and now I was leaving it behind and the hole was glaringly obvious. I tried to make sense of it. I tried to rationalize it. I tried to explain it away. And less than an hour later, I received a text message:

“Is it weird that I miss you already?”

No. It was not weird. It was exactly what needed to happen. Not only had I fallen in love with the mountains, but with him, as naturally as though it had been written in the stars a million millennia ago. This twin flame connection ripped my soul wide open and, as when Lilith devoured the Fruit, there was no going back. I saw what more there could be for me. I felt the breath of Divinity.

The Price of Desertion

I broke up with my boyfriend and moved into an apartment as soon as I returned to Michigan. He didn’t fight it. I can still remember, though, trying not to laugh as he resignedly said, “I just wish you would give us some time to work this out.” I gently expressed my belief that, if we hadn’t worked it out in the six long years we’d been together, we simply weren’t going to. We desired different lives, and those lives didn’t mesh. We loved each other but it wasn’t enough to keep us happy together. Sometimes love means letting go.

My twin flame and I spent three whirlwind months in awe of our connection, our ears red and aching from hours on the phone, enjoying Skype chats and movie dates, and discussing our future. I bought a ticket to fly out and see him for New Year’s, and then it happened. Right before Christmas the other shoe dropped. No, not a shoe. My entire world — everything I thought I knew — dropped out from under me. He broke it off.

I was shattered. I was a mess. Meeting him had made my world make sense, both the tangible and the spiritual. Losing him meant that I had to reconstruct everything, including myself, from the ground up; I even started going by my middle name as a symbolic nod to this personal evolution and brand new self. Lessons were learned. Growth was attained. And wasn’t that what I had wanted all along? With a little research, it all made sense: that is exactly what twin flames are for.

The Gift of the Wild

The Holy Wild has no well-worn paths, no trails with specific destinations, no map. It is twisted and tangled. It stretches and reaches. One must navigate by the moss on the trees and the angle of the sun. I had to design my own compass, build my own shelter, and forage for sustenance. It wasn’t easy… but oh my Heavens was it flavorful!

Life in the Garden offers comfort and protection, but there is nothing there to push you to grow. It offers no room for desire, nor creativity. Only complacency. Even its glorious beauty has a shallowness to it because, as one of my favorite quotes by Neale Donald Walsch goes, “In the absence of that which you are not, that which you are… is not.” With nothing but delicately manicured vegetation around you, there is nothing to compare that beauty to, and through that lack of comparison it loses its vibrancy.

The Tree of Knowledge is the only thing in the garden that actually smells of earth and life and growth. Its Fruit is for those of us who understand that the most precious things are those we work for, and those that don’t last. It is for those of us who can no longer smell the too-bright flowers, and those who find the sunshine too hot and long for the shade of tangled foliage. That juicy, luscious, forbidden Fruit is for those of us who hunger for greater depth of experience and flavor of life, no longer content to sit in a safe and stagnant Garden of superficial beauty.

I have learned, along this journey, that opening up to greater joy means accepting greater pain. We cannot pick and choose which emotions to feel more deeply, we simply feel deeply. I also understand now that pain does not have to be a “bad” thing: it is a push and pull, a resistance training that builds our strength and fuels our passion. And I will gladly take it all in, because this is where growth occurs.

This is where the flavor is.

This, my love, is the Holy Wild… and those of us hungry enough will follow in Lilith’s footsteps and choose it over Eden every time.