I received a gift of this plant from my friends, Alex and Thato probably about five years ago. It was originally two succulents in a small boot pot. Over the years it started producing new shoots so I transferred it to a bonsai training pot. I put this training pot next to my desk and one day I ate an apple took some of the seeds pushed it into the pot and honestly forgot about it. At the end of November, I saw three little shoots sprouting and realised the apple seeds had taken. Two of the sprouts were growing nicely until... Apple seed sprouts, 9 December 2024 First, let me start by saying this blog will be very personal and intimate but this sprouting of seed is a testament to something the world has neglected in the past 60 years or so and this parable is very telling. If you search global fertility rates by country you find a marked decline from around the 1960s when the data was first collected to now. In the 1960s the average number of children per woman was around 5 ...
Have you ever had a dream which created some panic? A while back I was having a consistent dream that I would return to school and in my dream I was never studying for the subjects or attending the class and it would make me worry that I would sit in the exam and know nothing. Now, this is a random dream and it has been years since I was in school but in the subconscious of dreamland I was going to sit in the exam, know nothing and then fail the exam. Now imagine for a moment you wake up and that dream becomes a reality. I think that is how Adam and Eve may have felt when they had committed the first or original sin. Satan and the Beast of the Sea, by Jean Bondol and Nicholas Bataille "Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked: and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons... 'I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself" (Gen 3:7,10) The devil's lie was an empty promise. The serpent said to the woman, "You will...