The Lovely One dreamed the Church announced it was taking down all the angel Moronis on the temples to replace the trumpet with a sword.
Then this morning we read this verse in D&C 6.
Behold, I am God; give heed unto my word, which is quick and powerful, sharper than a two-edged sword, to the dividing asunder of both joints and marrow; therefore give heed unto my words.
See also Hebrews 4:12.
So I guess we are gearing up for the long haul by getting healthy and happy.
Every doctor in the land has their own brand of health advice. Much of it, I am convinced, bad. The studies are mostly bad and all contradict each other.
I have my own views on health. But in this post, I am just going to tell you what I know from my own experience. It may not apply to you. I am not going to tell you everything I do or believe, because some of it I believe works but the effects are not obvious enough to be sure.
I will say that feeling healthy is much better than not.
Here is a problem that happens in marriages and other relationships. It comes from well-intentioned people being well-intentioned.
You want one thing and you have reason to believe your spouse wants another. Happens all the time. But you are well-intentioned. So you come up with a compromise in your mind. You mentally give up part of what you want. It feels like a real sacrifice to you. After all, you want the whole thing. It is a real nice thing you are doing for your spouse.
Eventually you get around to telling your spouse, or more likely you execute your compromise. Your spouse gets mad. And you feel betrayed. This is the compromise! Your spouse is rejecting even the compromise. So intransigent. Don’t they see your sacrifice?
But there are reasons your spouse feels that way. They don’t know about your sacrifice and by this point it will feel otiose and manipulative to tell them. It wasn’t their compromise. Quite possibly your compromise wasn’t fair. Human nature is that we rate our own interests higher even when we are trying not to. Quite possibly your compromise misunderstood what was actually important to them about what they wanted. But even if the compromise was completely fair, its your compromise. You can’t skip the part where you counsel together. The process is important. I’m not just saying that your spouse will feel like they are being cut out of the discussion, though that too. I mean that your spouse hasn’t had time to assimilate that there is a split in goals and hasn’t had time to assimilate the need to hash something out.
We saw it for the first time a few days ago, on John M.’s recommendation. It is a gem. We will see it again. Highly recommended.
I was thinking about a science fiction story I read in my teens. Enemy aliens make the sun go out somehow. A young man and his mother struggle on in an apartment building. The story lovingly details all the shifts and jury-rigs he has to do to keep the warmth in, to keep the warmth going, to chip off blocks of frozen atmosphere and thaw them. There is an implausible happy ending, or at least I thought it was implausible when I read it at age 12.
They say that science killed poetry. They have a point. But there is a potential for poetry there also. One could try to create an image of bitter cold, building up the images word by word. But none of it would be quite as effective as this story going step by step what these lone survivors had to do to survive. In memory its as good as or even better than To Build a Fire.
An ape scraped together some education and a chalkboard. RULES, he wrote on it.
RULE NUMBER ONE: SHARE YOUR FOOD
He called the animals together and showed them the rule. The lion had his doubts, but the ape reminded him that even kings were beneath the law. By way of teaching the rule by example, the ape helped himself to generous samples of every animal’s food.
Later the ape gathered some tender shoots and was munching on them. A number of animals who liked that sort of food gathered round for their share. But “ah,” said the pe, and led them back to the chalkboard clearing. There, written clearly under Rule Number One, was the following:
EXCEPTION ONE: Unless the Food is a Luxury.
Sharing is for necessities, the Ape explained. Tender shoots are a delicacy, not a necessity.
The monkey objected, “you ate most of my banana. That wasn’t a necessity.”
“Oh, they are for apes,” the ape replied. “But in any case . . .” He turned to the chalkboard and wrote a new exception.
EXCEPTION TWO: Unless the Food Requires Effort to Prepare.
“I had to dig for these tender shoots,” the ape explained.
“And I had to climb the tree for the bananas and you made me peel it for you!” was the monkey’s hot reply.
“I feel sorry for you, friend,” the ape said. “But Exception Two didn’t exist back then.”
Moral: the rules created by rule manipulators aren’t real rules. The explanations they make aren’t real explanations.
Right or wrong, understandable or unforgivable, awesome or awful, the events of yesterday and the reaction today both represent escalations.
The political doom spiral continues.
Yesterday was the last day of Christmas. We kept the lights on for one last night.
One Christmas Eve years ago after the kids went to bed I sat up a model train around the perimeter of the tree. One of my girls woke up around 3 AM, went out, and ran the train around and around for an hour or so before she went back to bed. If you ask her, that is one of her most magical Christmas memories. The dark, quiet night. The lights on the tree. The train going round and round.
There is a feeling somehow that the train is going somewhere. What if, after it went around enough times, the air changed and the room opened up and there was another space there where your whole family living and gone were waiting for you? It feels like there is a barrier that can somehow be broken through.
Christmas is like that. We are on repeat from year to year, but not just on repeat. We are headed somewhere.
President Hinckley said that marriage was beautiful (giving his due to its difficulties) and then had this to say about divorce
Some of you within the sound of my voice could recount family sorrows in your own experience. But among the greatest of tragedies, and I think the most common, is divorce. It has become as a great scourge. The most recent issue of the World Almanac says that in the United States during the twelve months ending with March 1990, an estimated 2,423,000 couples married. During this same period, an estimated 1,177,000 couples divorced. (See The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 1991, New York: World Almanac, 1990, p. 834.)
This means that in the United States almost one divorce occurred for every two marriages.
Those are only figures written on the pages of a book. But behind them lies more of betrayal, more of sorrow, more of neglect and poverty and struggle than the human mind can imagine.
We live and have lived in a country that is free for many practical purposes. The downside is that to date the greatest persecutions inflicted upon us as a people have been inflicted by ourselves. True, we live in a society that encourages and facilitates divorce. But no one made us do it.
I sometimes wish we excommunicated for more divorces, though that would not cure the ugliness that led to the divorce in the first place.
I was reading D&C 1 and felt a General Conference Doggerel coming on.
Lord, I come to you with but 10 sins
Or if you press me, how ’bout just one sin?
A faint little sin, like it hardly had been.
And the Good Lord said, divide it by ten.
Our challenges demand that we should be supermen of history, capable of resolving the crisis our age and place and constructing the new understanding. Nothing less will do than be iron men and saints.
We should be men with hearts full from the well-springs of tradition, but also with fierce eyes for the coming forms of life that lie over the horizon. We should have a dual orientation: both an immovable rootedness and the most expansive wanderlust.
-thus Rafael M.
“The weak things of the world shall come forth and break down the mighty and strong ones,” D&C 1:19.
I once thought this prophecy was real inspiring. I now think its a prophecy of bad times coming. Because the weak don’t take on the strong, nor win, unless the strong have made an utter misery of the world and dragged everything including themselves down into destruction.
“The prophecies and promises … shall all be fulfilled,” D&C 1:37.
Inspired by Rozy, I wrote a poem in the style I call General Conference Doggerel, though bluer.
(For you single people, sorry. Your display of the nameless virtue is honorable.)
Here goes.
I recommend the Planetary Anthology: Neptune. It was better quality and more even quality than I remember recent anthologies being. One story was literally gay, but other than that . . .
The story Sea Change was good. It pulled off the trick of making you think there was a deep, rich world behind the story while only showing you the few glimpses necessary for the story. In particular, the actual world-feature that provides the narrative drive is only briefly mentioned in a couple of scattered sentences. Good story with real moral weight, one I would recommend even if it didn’t have the word ‘sennight.’ One cannot trust pseudonyms these days, but on internal evidence I would think it was written by a woman.
There is a paradise place where the grass is lush and soft; the dew sparkles; the trees whisper in the wind. There is a farm there. The farmer and his family have a routine. Every morning, for example, he or one of his children go to see the ducks to make sure the fencing for their run is still well, to check for predators, and to collect eggs. The land is beautiful and so is the routine. But to make sure they avoid stagnation of the mind, each time they go to the ducks they recite a poem or a passage. They do this for all their many ordered activities.
It is not necessarily a poem about the activity. It is often just a poem they like. But it is the same one for each activity. They find it more beautiful that way. At the ducks, Dover Beach. Cutting cabbage for sauerkraut, Out Out Brief Candle. There are a thousand or more that they recite.
At nights, they play together doing geometry proofs.
If you go past the influence of the farm and its people, past the woods they log, past the hills where they pursue game, past the event horizon of their lives, you find a wasteland. It is dark and roiling with chaotic forces, with an anarchy of brutal energies.
The farm family doesn’t know it, but that roiling darkness is what underlies their farm also. Only it is guided and tamed and brought into order by their poetry and their passages and the harmony of their lives. It is what makes everything so lush and green. The lush farm is the natural end those forces were meant for.