Ballagarraidh"bah-luh-gah-rahy" or "bah-lah-ghaw-rah"

n. The awareness that you are not at home in the wilderness. Sometimes you move through the city and feel how strange this all is—the spectacle of modern civilization. There's a part of you that thinks, You are not at home here. That still remembers Eden.

There's a part that longs to hop the fence and flee into the forest. To experience nature in all its simplicity—raw, indifferent, ferociously real. Yet another part knows Eden is a fantasy. Even our oldest symbols of nature are unnatural: the plants we eat are sterile and swollen; the family dog is just technology. You too are a domesticated animal.

We need to believe in the fall from Eden, that we corrupted a place that was pure. But maybe we had the story backward. We cast out the jungle, broke it into pieces that served a purpose. We couldn't handle the true state of nature—the overwhelming chaos, where life and death are intertwined. So we barricaded ourselves in a walled garden.

In the beginning, there was everything.