The Knowing Tree

A Dartmoor Eden

There’s a Devon sun peeking. I sit in my little yard with a mug of tea and have a discreet soak. This cobbled space is still early-morning cool - moisty air - but the sun is up over the hill, the copse, the lambs, and furtively shining down onto my face. It’s a pretty good feeling. I’ve had a rest since Summer School: my brother came to stay and we strolled and laughed and cigared and whiskied our way through a few memorable days together. A grand rehydration. Now I’m beginning to turn my mind to next month’s Peregrini Sit out in the woods, and The Skinboat & The Star, just after that. I have never felt so engaged in anything, ever.

And somewhere in all that wondering, something else has happened.

I’ve been imagining how the story of Genesis would look if it happened here on Dartmoor. Or parts of it. This kind of imagining somehow brings the bones of the story closer to me. It’s not some attempt to be flippant or casual. In no way, shape or form is it a substitute for the great origin story, but it keeps me in an active and receptive mode. It may seem odd, but I retain the original better. I’m working through quite a few of the old Biblical stories in this way. This could be the start of something.

So this wouldn’t be a sacred story I’m telling exactly, but a response to a sacred story.

Many of you will know the root tale back to front and upside down, but there’s more than a few of us that don’t, or could do with hearing it in a slightly different way.

Dartmoor

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The Knowing Tree

A long time ago, up on Temple Mountain, Moorman slept and Maker nicked a rib.

Why shouldn’t he? He made the lad.

What did Moorman dream as Maker did his work? Something the Maker was doing required the lad to be asleep. It was not for his eyes, this alchemical surgery. Did he dream of what he knew or what was to come? Maker did this doctoring before there was even rain or barley or gorse, before there was Lucky Tor or Yal Tor or Benji Tor, and we can barely imagine a time before them. This is the Backalong time.

Before Hexworthy chapel, where John Wesley dismounted from his horse and preached to the farmers. This is before the Rugglestone Inn where we drink our apple-heavy cider, before even the big church at Widecombe, where Gawain and the Green Men are carved above the priest’s head. Before all of that.

So the lad lived nested into the wonderful. Above him were yellowed stars crafted for the Lesser Light, and then there was the Greater Light where you could see everything. Around the Moorman was swoopy birds and many four-legged things and wriggling things and a good feeling that lived in his tummy. Even when he heard stark howls in the night he never lost the good feeling. He loved naming all the beings Maker created. He could name them relentlessly and never run out of words. It was beyond imagining, what Maker was up to. Time was slowly made known to the Moorman by the big and little darks, and the turning of weather and how seeds grew.

Moorman was made from mud and the breath of the Holy Maker. Blown up his nose it was. It was such a very special wind. The wind that blew in from the sea did something particular, the wind that rattled wispy through the branches did something specific, and so did this wind. It made the mud-man walk. So Moorman was alive and he had work to do, but it’s hard to get up to stuff on your own.

And that is why Maker took that rib and he made First Woman from it. Moorwoman. 

Maker made the woman and man in his own appearance. He seemed delighted with his labours, especially these two.

Moorwoman had the good feeling in her tummy too. Her Eve-ness galloped in all directions like those Darty rivers, to the sea, to the sea. She could see the ocean far away, feel the soft grasses under her toes, and revelled in the grail of Maker’s garden. And those sea waters were teeming jubilant and thick, even down where it goes from blue to black Maker slipped in creatures perfect for those Underworld Depths. There was nowhere he didn’t attend to. There was so much to enjoy and be part of. Everything had its nature to slowly understand. And Maker was there sometimes, in the dusky time, strolling around.

The First Two were naked and thought no more about it than a tree has bark.

And talking of trees, there were two in particular.

There was the Life Tree, the most intense of places. There you could eat the fruit and know blessed communion with Maker. But this other one, the Knowing Tree, you had to leave that alone. That had prohibition on it. That tree had fruits containing insight that was meant for Maker alone. You ate of them, you knew things you should not know. To eat from the Knowing Tree would bring death into the world. With that knowledge, everything in the end would stop. With that knowledge the First Two would come to know death.

I would have told you that the Maker made an awful lot of things. Some that crawled, some that burbled, some that seemed to hang in the sky. And he made one that was awfully smart. Crafty in fact. This was Wyrm.