“Your words have been stout against me, saith the Lord. Yet ye say, What have we spoken so much against thee? Ye have said, It is vain to serve God: and what profit is it that we have kept his ordinance, and that we have walked mournfully before the Lord of hosts? And now we call the proud happy; yea, they that work wickedness are set up; yea, they that tempt God are even delivered.”—Malachi 3:13-15

The Celestial Room of the St. George Temple is a relatively colorful room. Morning light diffuses from three sides, including through the open doors of two small sealing rooms off the south side of the Celestial Room. (more…)

Most of the year, then, I spent in ways Thoreau would have recognized: sometimes on the shores of Walden Pond, sometimes atop Ktaadn, alternately healing and agonizing. Summers, however, I approached nature in decidedly unnatural ways, worrying less about understanding nature than helping shape it into something abstract and alien. I worked each summer through most of the 1970s as a surveyor for the Utah office of the Cadastral Survey, a sub-bureau of the Bureau of Land Management, and pretty much did what my supervisors told me to do—in spite of the qualms I’d carefully nurtured in my more gentle experiences in nature—and painstakingly documented in the University of Utah library. I spent eight long summers helping Thomas Jefferson achieve his dream of an American landscape entirely and eternally subdivided into perfect square-mile sections, personally doing those observations, measurements and calculations that pay homage to our founding fathers’ vision of a classically ordered and economically useful American landscape, committing crimes against the southern Utah landscape I’ve spent many years repenting for. I can’t plead ignorance: even then, I understood that my work on a government survey crew was imperialistic, phallocentric, and linear beyond any right-brain redemption. My reading in French philosophy helped me understand that land surveying was existentially inauthentic, and my reading in Marxist theory made it impossible for me to deny that the rectangular survey did anything other than promote the agenda of the ruling class.

As a result of this basic conflict in my life, I was required to spend each fall, winter, and spring defending what I’d been doing each summer. At one point, a group of my friends arranged a kind of intervention, forcing me to face the essential hypocrisy of my life and demanding that I come to terms with my environmental incorrectness, an all-night confrontation that culminated with a woman shouting at me: “How dare you draw lines on nature!” Exhausted, I told her it was only a job, money for tuition and rent and auto repair, but even as I said the words, I knew I wasn’t telling her the truth. The truth was that I loved my work, loved it in ways that involved need and dependence and even, as happens in the deepest loves, the possibility for both physical and spiritual transcendence.

http://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2013.1/13.1Hales.htm

https://australianmining.com.au/news/peter-meurs-quits-fmg-to-join-the-mormons/

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865651730/Meet-the-Churchs-new-General-Authorities.html?pg=all

http://www.smh.com.au/business/mining-and-resources/fortescues-meurs-scores-biggest-pay-package-20121010-27cut.html

I heard an interesting testimony last Sunday. (more…)

I found this article interesting in relation to many themes that come up at our website: Rising From The Ashes: Restoration Begins At LDS Ranch At Warm Springs

For example,

“In the past, life was a little different,” [Area Director of LDS Facilities Mark] Waite said as he noted evidence of old Eagle Scout projects of the past embedded in the infrastructure of the property. “You could come out and just put something in with whatever supplies had been donated for that purpose. We used to have every different PVC pipe that you can imagine running out here. People would just come out on a Saturday and run a water line as a project. We don’t do those kinds of things anymore.”

Nowadays the key improvements to the area will be done uniformly and up to the appropriate code using a qualified contractor, Waite said. Of course, that requires more time and it costs more money than using volunteer labor. So the entire area will not be able to be restored at once with the initial insurance settlement funding.

The facilities will be better constructed, but that reflects a narrow vision of their purpose.

new cannery

My stake president died yesterday. (more…)

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20190910-the-major-cities-being-designed-for-adults-not-families

Reading posts and comments at Jr. Ganymede this week led again to thoughts of the Studio Ghibli animated film “From Up on Poppy Hill.” That one has lodged in my heart, and various expressions left here by many of a yearning for honorable family life that creates whole children who are becoming capable manly men and womanly women keep bumping against “Poppy Hill.” So, I watched it again tonight.

The setting is Yokohama 1963, and the central character is the 16-year-old daughter of a sea captain, who was lost when his cargo ship hit a mine during the Korean War. (more…)

I went to G.’s essay from last month on “How to Survive a Disaster” to leave a comment, but no more comments can be added there, so this addendum is here, a link to a Washington Post article by Meagan Flynn about a factory in Pennsylvania manufacturing polypropylene to send down the supply chain to manufacturers of face masks and surgical gowns. “For 28 days, they lived on a calling in a factory.”

Writer Harrison Smith of the Washington Post has crafted an excellent obituary for an 100-year-old World War II ace, Edward Feightner. I recommend you read it all.

“By the time he graduated in 1941, he had compiled some 250 hours in the cockpit and wanted only to keep flying. The Army seemed a good opportunity but had a long wait list for aviators. And while hanging around the airport one day with his future still undecided, Adm. Feightner watched a Navy pilot land his plane, stride through the hangar in a gleaming white uniform and step inside a yellow convertible, where he gave a ‘big smooch’ to the blonde behind the wheel and sped off down the road.

“Adm. Feightner flew to a Navy recruiting station in Michigan and enlisted that same day.”

“He was a very aggressive fighter pilot, and he was still driving that way at 93.”

“Adm. Feightner often attributed his survival in World War II to luck, noting that while he was sometimes shot up he was never shot down.”

I was advised that Metropolitan Opera is making recordings of their productions available during this time of at-home confinement, a different one free each day. My young daughter dislikes when I play radio opera on Saturday afternoons, which I do because there is no fuller use of the human voice, but she found herself drawn into the video streaming’s excellent reproduction of one of the comedies.

One thing I didn’t know when I began viewing Parsifal Thursday night is that it is four and a half hours long. Past midnight I felt tired, but I was not tired of watching it. In fact, I arrived at Good Friday about when the opera did; Act III transpires on Good Friday, so that felt appropriate. Sacramental communion and a people who are cut off from it, and the mercy of Christ’s atonement, is the central matter in the story. I was very glad to have taken it in before Easter. Those inclined could draw parallels between the fool/hero Parsifal who restores administration of the sacrament and Joseph Smith, prophet of the restoration of the fulness of the gospel. (more…)

Has the coronavirus infected you? Probably not. Can you name anyone you have been with last month or the month before who is infected? Probably not. (more…)

There was one suspected coronavirus infection of someone who works in a different building of my facility, but that person tested negative. It is a funny kind of epidemic that so far is not known to have infected any of the 2,000 people where I work, and we have each been asked to report in if we become sick or possibly infected. I searched for a “list of famous people infected by coronavirus,” and the list compilers had to dig pretty deep in coming up with “famous” people. Besides Tom Hanks, Idris Elba, Placido Domingo, Rand Paul, and a couple basketball players, I’d never heard of any of those people. Most of them are like Olga Kurylenko, best known (if known) for a role in a James Bond movie a dozen years ago. Does anyone reading this personally know someone who has tested positive for coronavirus infection? (more…)