Blog 3678 – 11.30.2025

Adventures in Paradise 

Some time ago I borrowed the title of the James Michener book about Hawaii to write about about paradise and think I should like to take another bite out of that apple, alluding to the story about our first parents’ expulsion from paradise for eating forbidden fruit, probably not an apple. But, I do have an apple bitting story: A young unexperienced man from the West Virginia hills had his first train ride and first bite of an apple on the same day. His mother had packed him a sack lunch for his journey and another travel offered him his first apple in exchange for one of his sandwiches. As the young man took a bite of the apple, the train entered a tunnel and ever after when he told the story he warned of the danger of bitting into an apple: “One bite and I went stone blind for several minutes.”

Many people envision a a future paradise for “the good guys” and if not a hell for “the others” at least lesser accommodations elsewhere out of sight and mind. Yet others spend a lot of time looking back to some golden age that has passed them by never to return.

Jack Nicholson made a movie some years back where his obsessive/compulsive character refusing to wait his turn at the psychiatrist office asks a room full waiting patients what if this is “As Good As It Gets”? I would like to rephrase that question slightly: What if paradise it not some future state to look forward to nor some past golden age that we forfeited by disobedience or neglect?

Two clues regarding the location of paradise come to mind from two sources. The first comes from a children’s book about a magical land over the rainbow that a Kansas girl named Dorothy sang that she heard of once in a lullaby and that she actually goes to after a twister blows a window frame out on her head knocking her out cold. Dorothy discovers that the technicolor land of Oz is not paradise, but that somewhere much closer is: “There’s no place like home.”

People have long disagreed about the existence and the location of heaven or paradise. In answer to the question Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” That is even closer than your own backyard, huh D.?” 

A lady in the nineteen-sixties sang, “I have been all around the world, but I’ve never been to me.” For the highest and best adventures in paradise we need to go within.

I confess that I do not know a lot about meditation, I think it is about finding ourselves, about finding answers, and about finding paradise within.

Your friend and fellow traveler,

David James White