life in the garden of eden.

The Tree of Life

The Garden of Eden must have supported an immense, fantastical orchard. The Bible notes a huge variety of trees — indeed, every kind of tree that looked nice and produced something edible. There were two special trees featured in the Garden: the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

The Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. And out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the Garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
–Genesis 2:8-9

The Tree of Life bore the fruit of immortality. Adam and Eve were not forbidden to eat from the Tree of Life, thus as long as they remained within the Garden of Eden, they could live forever. However, after acquiring the knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve became too God-like. Immortality and Wisdom being too potent of a combination, they were expelled from the Garden of Eden to toil under the weight of mortality.

And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
–Genesis 3:22

Christian mythology gives few indications what sort of Tree of Life produces the Fruit of Immortality. Rather than a literal fruit, the Tree of Life may be a metaphor, a symbol for something too divine for humans to understand.

However, much like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Tree of Life also exists outside of Biblical references. There are numerous analogies in other religions and cultures:

• Assyria: The Tree of Life, a religious symbol, was depicted by a series of nodes and criss-crossing lines.
• China: The Tree of Life is frequently shown with a phoenix at the top and a dragon at the base. A Taoist story notes a tree that fruits every 3000 years, with a peach granting immortality.
• Egypt: Isis and Osiris emerged from an acacia tree, called as the Tree of Life or the tree in which life and death are enclosed.
• Germanic / Norse: Iðunn’s tree bears apples that grant eternal youth to the gods. Some have also noted similarities between the Tree of Life and various World Trees; Yggdrasil, oft depicted as a yew or ash tree, is a World Tree, located at the center of the universe.
• Mesoamerica: The Maya, Aztec, Izapan, Mixtec, and Olmec cultures all reference World Trees, often depicted in a similar fashion to the Chinese Trees of Life, with birds in their branches and roots extending into water, sometimes atop a water monster. The Mayans conceived of the World Tree as a ceiba tree.

SOURCES
Tree of Life - Wikipedia

IMAGE CREDIT
Peach by fredandcharlie, Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0 license
Apples by Clairity*, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

Gardens and kitchens and songs and smiles remind me of Mom. My world is a lesser place without these things, and most of all, without her. Yet I find some familiar comfort in nurturing plants, in cooking, in hearing my daughter sing. And then there are those unexpected moments when I see my mom’s warm smile in the face of my twin, my niece, my daughter — even my own. I guess these are the things that make up a mother’s legacy.

I could get all maudlin reminiscing about my mother, so this year - less of my words, more of hers.

An email from my mom after she’d set up ICQ for the first time:

Subj: ICQ authorized
Date: 4/12/01 7:22:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time
From: ********
To: alysiaskye@aol.com

You are now on my contact list, hurrah! Right now you are shown as online but away and Lilithiel is offline. Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, if they do, bite them back, till they’re all black and blue.

Love,

Mom

This is excerpted from an email she sent me early in 2001 about growing up in a Finnish community in Minnesota. I still don’t get the appeal of saunas, but I’m a native Californian; maybe I’ve never lived anywhere cold enough?

The sauna deserves more explanation. It was a two room building, about 15 by 30 feet. There was a stairstep of benches opposite the wall where the fire box was. The stove was a metal enclosure about 3 feet tall with a fire box beneath and filled to the top with big field stones. A fire was started at least an hour before bathing.

There were two styles of bathing: Mom and Dad and their kids, or men and women separately. We did both. Finnish kids never have to wonder what the other sex or all stages of their own sex look like. Since hot air rises, the top level bench was where the macho people sat or those trying to shake a cold. Water was dipped out of a bucket and sprinkled over the hot rocks. When the steam cleared and you could almost breath normally again, more water was thrown.

Some people slapped themselves with bundles of soft branches, probably beech. It felt kind of like getting your back scratched. The switches smelled nice and herbably. When you had worked up a good sweat, you came down to the bench at the bottom. Everyone had their own bucket of warm water. You take a sponge bath and soap your hair from the bucket. After rinsing yourself with the washrag and dunking your hair in the bucket, you stand up and pour the bucket of water over yourself. Feels wonderful. Then you hurry into the dressing room and get dressed before you loose the heat of the sauna.

Some of the men sometimes would, in the dead of winter, run out into the snow, bare naked. When the ladies returned to the house, the blonds would give their hair a lemon rinse while the brunetts used an appled cider vinegar rinse. During the winter, sauna might be only Saturday nights. During hay making time in July, it was every day.

My mom put together a heavy cookbook with all of the recipes she was known for at family gatherings. This was a special (easy) breakfast she made:

Finnish Pancake

4 eggs
1/4 cup honey
3/4 teaspoon salt
2-1/2 cups milk
1 cup flour
4 tablespoons butter

1. Place butter in iron skillet or 2 glass pie pans.
2. Heat in 425 degree oven until butter melts but doesn’t brown.
3. Blend rest of ingredients in blender jar, scraping down sides once or twice to mix the flour in.
4. Pour mixture into hot skillet or pans.
5. Bake at 425 degrees for 25 minutes or until knife inserted in center comes out clean. Pancake will puff high but will almost immediately deflate when it is taken out of oven.
6. Cut into pizza pie wedges and eat while hot with syrup if needed.

The Finnish name is Suomalainen Pannukakku.

This version has 1830 total calories. For a low cal version use non-fat milk and 2 tablespoons of butter and it will be just as good. It’s also tasty if eaten cold, assuming there is any left. The recipe can be split in half and baked in 1 pie pan.

Yes, the calorie count is right. No, there usually isn’t any left to eat cold. It’s total comfort food.

I miss you, Mom. Thank you for giving me memories.

There are no WORDS to describe my horror! ::runs away, screaming::

more cat pictures

Loquats are one of my favorite fruits, tying with home-grown strawberries, boysenberries, cherries, plums, and kumquats. They’re best fresh, and the preparation is simple: spit out the seeds!

I found a recipe for spiced sweet loquat pickles that looks delectable, and that got me started on a search for other recipes. Here are some combinations I absolutely want to try.

Spiced Loquats
3 cups sugar
1-1/2 cups water
1-1/2 cups cider vinegar
1 tablespoon whole cloves
1 tablespoon whole allspice
2-inch stick of cinnamon
3 pounds of loquats, washed, stems and blossom ends removed.

Combine sugar, water, and vinegar in a large kettle. Tie the spices loosely in cheesecloth and add. Boil 10 minutes. Put in fruit and cook gently until tender, then remove the fruit. Pour remaining syrup into sterilized jars. Fill almost to overflowing with the hot syrup and fruit and seal at once. Yields 3 pints.

Loquat Jam
5 cups loquats
1 box fruit pectin
7 cups sugar

Wash fruit well. Cut off both ends and remove seeds if desired. Place fruit in a saucepan with a small amount of water. Cook slowly and mash with a potato masher occasionally until well done. Stir occasionally to prevent sticking. Add the pectin to the fruit and stir well. Let the mixture come to a rolling boil stirring occasionally to prevent sticking. Add sugar and boil to a rolling boil for 1 minute.

Loquat Chutney
1.5 pounds loquats (after removing stones)
4 large apples, cubed
.5 pounds dried apricot, cut into strips
3 ounces gingerroot, julienned
4 tablespoons mustard seeds, partially crushed
1 pound raw sugar
3 cups cider vinegar
2 teaspoons salt
2 teaspoons crushed chile

Put all the ingredients into a large pan and bring to the boil. Simmer for about an hour and a half until the apple is cooked to a pulp. Stir occasionally so that it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan.

IMAGE CREDIT
Loquat by Naitokz on Flickr, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license

Take your time.

There’s no need to rush in play-by-post roleplaying. The pace of a live, real-time roleplay chat encourages brevity, speed and less solid writing than forum roleplaying. By contrast, the pace of a play-by-post roleplaying game allows (and maybe even requires) a little more consideration and time to share something substantial with your audience.

When you hurry to get something (anything) on the board, there is a strong likelihood that your writing will be confusing and disjointed. Misunderstandings about your writing and storyline can occur when you:

• misspell or misuse words
• leave some crucial identifying phrases out (He said he wanted to kill her? Which he? Who said that?)
• forget to include a “prompt” or “tag” (offer something for the next person to respond to)

At best, the misunderstandings may send your storyline in an unintended direction. At worst, regular mistakes will disgust your audience and they may ignore any future contributions.

Of course, if your fellow players are in as much of a hurry as you or if they view writing as a chore, they probably won’t notice that you wrote “barley” instead of “barely,” that you seem to have lost the Shift key on your keyboard, or that you shut down the thread by not giving them anything to respond to.

Otherwise, observing the following might make your posts more readable and easy to understand:

• Add some white space with a few hard returns between paragraphs. PLEASE. 300 words all squashed together in one fat block is too much.
• Try to write complete sentences more often than not. These are not complete sentences: “Screams following just after. Then the being leaving. The other four doing the same.”
• Use Firefox. It will automaticallly spellcheck and redline your spelling goofs. Here’s a hint: It’s “guard,” not “gaurd”.

Re-read BEFORE you click post. You don’t win a prize for puking your prose up onto the intarwebs faster than anyone else. Read your part of the story over before you hit send, and don’t be afraid to edit after you’ve posted.

Quiz filched from TeflonPaladin.

Me? Wrathful? I can’t believe my Pride is so low!

Discover Your Sins - Click Here

The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil

One of two significant trees in the Garden of Eden, The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil has been variously posited as:

• Apple
• Fig
• Pomegranate
• Tamarind
• Grape
• Iboga

Or it may just be a metaphor or symbol.

Whatever it was, God didn’t want his creations eating from this tree, and told them not to do it, “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

The Serpent which guarded the tree refuted this:

The serpent said to the woman, “You will not die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons.
–Genesis 3:4-9

So, the fruit of this tree apparently made the eater like God, providing wisdom and enlightenment as well as an understanding of what was Good and what was Evil.

Adam and Eve’s first reaction was that they didn’t have any clothes on, with resulting shame and embarassment. That doesn’t sound very wise and enlightened to me.  The significance of this act may have been that the pair gained the knowledge that God lied to them (as they did not die on the day they ate the fruit), and that their creator had given them free will to disobey his orders.

Similar trees appear in other religions:

• Sumerian seals depict a tree guarded by the Serpent
• Greek mythology details a central tree featured in the blissful Garden of the Hesperides, which was guarded by a serpent named Ladon
• Buddha received enlightenment (knowledge) from the bodhi (fig) tree

Much like the Tree of Life, the Tree of Knowledge is not unique to Bible stories.

SOURCES
Tree of Life (Judeo-Christian) - Wikipedia
Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil - Wikipedia
The Knowledge of Good and Evil

IMAGE CREDIT

• Tamarind Tree by dinesh_valke, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivative Works.
• Fig Tree by taomancer, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 2.0.
• Pomegranate tree by drumsnwhistles, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial No Derivative Works.

more cat pictures

Story Updates

It’s Complicated is a character development piece that has been brewing (fermenting) in my head for a month, and I finally found the words for it after a few nights of roleplay recently in the Red Dragon Inn at Dragon’s Mark. It was co-written with Chryrie Nightstar. “To Hell with them” would have worked almost as well for a title, but I thought there was a nice symmetry with “It’s Complicated.”

Alysia’s Journal has been updated with her thoughts on Rhydin’s Beltane and Rhilshen’s Festival of Fire.

Rhilshen Lorebook Updates

I updated the entry for K’Thayn, the Elemental God of Fire. Kirvathayne and Festival of Fire are two new Concepts that I added while I had Beltane on the mind.

Forum Updates

Chryrie Nightstar shared a short conversation she had with a random, drive-by creep in The weird IMs I get sometimes… Drive-by IMs provide the best examples of random WTFery. LOL.