Garden of Eden

Sometimes I read something that makes me go "Wow!" or that simply makes me go, "Well, yes, of course." Sometimes a combination of the two, like just now, in reading up on weather astrology.

"[...]Swinging closer as he passed, he found [the planets] pitted with craters. They were creased with long, tortuous trenches and ridged with saw tooth mountain ranges.

"In short, crossing the solar system, the space traveler found the world of the sun to be a desert, a corner of the universe where neither plant nor animal could live.

"But what he now sees coming up before him in the distance is clearly something different. This planet is green. It looks like an oasis in the solar wasteland. As his ship streaks toward the burgeoning earth, he begins to make out details. He sees the glimmer of water, the ice caps at the poles, glittering in the sunlight; the green masses of the continents breaking up, the blue of the seas-all of it coming and going in endlessly shifting patterns behind drifting white clouds.

"Indeed, this is a garden in the solar desert."

And that's when I went "Wow!" and "Of course!" at the idea of the garden of Eden as not one spot on Earth, but as Earth. Part of the Wow! is also the idea of some travel-weary space traveller doing exactly as Boesen, the writer of the above quoted paragraphs, describes: First passing a number of inhabitable and inhospitable worlds, and then discovering a friendly and living jewel.

You may enjoy reading the whole chapter. It's an interesting and even poetic description of Earth and its climate (part of a series). http://www.weathersage.com/texts/boesen2/chapter2.htm