The artwork impressed me with a sense of beauty and mystery and goodness and consisted of landscape painting in an impressionistic style, panoramic scenes of ocean, lake, desert, sky and also still-life subjects and other subjects. The artist told me she tries "to keep the wonder and awe about our existence and all that God has created in my heart as much as I can." Fine. "Wonder and awe." Note that wonder and awe are temporary feelings, they fade and go away. The artist likes these feelings, but it's a struggle, not easy to retain them. The human 'heart' is the center of individual existence. It is an open space inside us for the storing of what is most important to a person. "Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also" (Matt. 6.21). The artist, like most of us, puts high value on wonder and awe, but these emotions don't stay in our hearts. A child experiences wonder on seeing and touching a flower garden, but later, older, walks by, day after day, without a thought or little thought for the flowers. This tells me that something is wrong w/the human heart. It can't keep safe these highly valued emotions. I would guess that people do drugs to try to rekindle these emotions. Also, think ye not that art, whether literary or pictorial, attempts to rekindle these emotions in us?
What if Adam & Eve felt wonder and awe every instant of their lives in Paradise? This, maybe, was their, and hence our, natural emotional state. The serpent lured them away from well-being to knowledge of evil. Deprivation is evil. Being without wonder and awe is evil. The Garden of Eden is far from modern man.
