It’s not unusual for Norman Fischer to offer a literary aside mid-dharma talk.

There’s nothing strange about him citing Milton’s Paradise Lost to the Mountain Rain Sangha on the May 3, 2025, “Dongshan Stories” (regarding several koans of the venerable Zen teacher) episode of the Everyday Zen podcast to which I subscribe.

What’s weird is that I didn’t hear the words I’m about to quote until three months later, right in the middle of a production inspired by the very same text (see “Dream on the Farm: Paradise Lost”, FarmArtsCollective.org). I know, it’s a popular text. Not such a great coincidence? Shhhh … I’m with the theatre people and we like magic. We make magic out of imagination and practiced skill. That’s art.

After bringing up Milton’s gorgeous language in the middle of the dharma talk, Norman says, “Adam and Eve eating the apple was not a mistake. It had to happen.” In order to mate and reproduce and propagate the human race,” he says. He’s been speaking of shame and sexual lust/desire.

He continues,

“Maybe this is what the Zen Masters are trying to tell us: don’t forget that part of us is always still in the garden of our simply being here. Of our simply, innocently being alive- beyond our shame and our worry about good and evil. We are simply here. Always right here. Maybe our practice is learning the way back to the garden, which is paradise, not utopia. Paradise- not a figment of our imaginations, but the real actual world once we can fully appreciate it as it is.”

It’s an astonishing sidebar to the writing in my journal which I don’t have time to share right now. I’m too busy living because the living is the work. The words are a fragmented documentation that may, in the end, exist more to free my memory than to mean anything to anyone else. -ag