Roomin' House Blues

It is the 4th day of Lent, the first Sunday in Lent.  Lenctentid  (spring-tide) in the Anglo-Saxon Old English was the name of March, because the first signs of spring came forth, and the days grew longer.   The fast period from Ash Wednesday up to Easter was therefore: L encten-fœsten.   For the ancient Anglo Saxon's time was measured in seasons, by the sun, the weather, the moon.  Noon was whenever the sun was highest where you lived.  The regulation of lives by the clock, which in the modern sense did not yet exist, was unimaginable.   Outside, while still the same grey, luke-cold, rain that is the curse of Seattle's "mild" climate, shoots are greening up and buds are breaking open. My winter blues is waning, although my rooming house and hard times killing floor blues still hums along.  It is also the first day of daylight savings time, a modern artificiality that plays havoc with our health, through sleep deprivation, our...

Today at mass, for the first Sunday of Lent, the readings began with excerpts from the 2nd and 3rd chapters of Genesis, explaining the fall of man (and woman) due to eating forbidden fruit in the center of the garden.  As you no doubt know, the rest of the fruit was not forbidden.  The story shows, upon careful reflection, not some much how much bad there was in the world, but how much good.  Adam and Eve could not even know evil until they ate from one and only one tree.  The rest could be eaten of. Hidden in the story to the average reader are some meanings in the semitic languages the story comes from.  Adam means man, and therefore first man and Eve means woman, mother (and therefore mother of all the living) and mirror, a mirror of Adam, having been taken from him.  The breath God breathed into Adam was called Ruach, which also means spirit.  And Adam is derived from Adamah, which means soil, or clay.  It is the bre...