Recently people in high places have been astonishingly candid and honest.  They come in for their share of lumps from me but here I have to admit they are better men than I–were I in their place I would not dare to be so honest.

Rich businessmen and powerful leftists admit they ran a shadow collaboration to, ah, guide the 2020 election outcome.

A Washington Post journalist goes on the record that journalists are powerful and can promote people they like and damage people they don’t (and they should be able to, because democracy is important).

Because journalism, particularly at the highest level, is about raw power. It is about bringing important people to heel. . . .  [T]he Post could offer the carrot of great exposure to those who needed it, but also, always, the stick of negative coverage to those who spurned them.

I can only hope to have half so much integrity.

A father was out with a giant chipper feeding it brush and cuttings. The small stuff slipped down between the cogs and was ground down.  The large stuff got caught between the cogs and was ground down.  But one straight piece around the thickness of a finger bounced off the cogs, bounced around for a bit, and then went hurtling out the other side like a javelin.

The dad was hugely delighted.  He grabbed another little limb about the same size and tossed it in.  It bounced and was hurled.  Wow!  Again!

His son was out playing in the field and when he heard his dad laughing with glee came running.  Unfortunately he came running straight down the path that the sticks were hurled.

The dad yelled, “Out! Out!  No!  The sticks!” and suddenly the boy realized what was coming.  He turned ashen, span around, and started running away.

“No!” his dad yelled, “run to the side, to the side!”  By some father-son chemistry or through a long habit of obedience the son, even in the crisis, was able to understand his father and turned to the side.  He had only gone a step or two sideways when a stick came hurtling through the space where he had been.

Moral: It can better to dodge than to flee.

I still recall a dream on the eve of my conversion (this would probably be in 2008) in which I saw a globe being covered by darkness; with the darkness being added like black pieces of jigsaw to cover the nations and oceans.

(I knew what was implied by this darkness from my own life and work.)

I saw that Good and evil are sides in a war. And I realized that I had to choose one side or the other: either that Life which was valuable, or incrementally-expanding darkness and spiritual-death.

At last I recognized that the we either take the side of Good – or else we are evil.

And I knew that I personally wanted to take the side of Good.

I put off linking to a marriage article because its framing is way more plebeian–One Weird Trick to Have More Sex with Your Wife!–than is suitable for the austere dignity of this blog thingo.

My poppets, my misgivings remain, but I have now relented.

The article is about how husband and wife should counsel together.  Good, and better yet it has a formula.  I like formulas, and this one fits with my own experience.  It isn’t anti-man like some marriage advice you see.  It also treats men and women as different and has a common sense explanation of how those differences each help when counseling together.    The Church puts big emphasis on the marriage counsel but even a lot of what you hear from members treats the counsel as if the two in it were fungible units.

That said, feel free to take issue with the advice if you are so inclined.

A far-away land had the same proverbial warning about riding a tiger as us, except that tigers were not unknown in those parts.  A villager with an inquiring bent of mind one day thought that the trouble with riding the tiger was not the ride, but what happened on getting off.  Whereas, he thought, if you could contrive to stay on safely, it would truly be a magnificent steed.  Could it be made safe?

He did a close study of the different types of harnessing for horses and oxen and reflected how to adapt them to a tiger.  Certain aspects would need to be strengthened, others changed . . .  He worked and tried and discarded and improved and created a system that got better and better.  He even made a life-size fully articulated wooden model of a tiger to experiment on.  At last he was ready.  He had made a peculiar and very sturdy saddle at the center of an intricate and interwoven network of large and small leather straps that allowed fine control of the movements of the tiger and dampened its wayward movements.  There were also semi-detachable sheaths for the riders legs and, in short, any number of ingenious and well-though out contrivances.  As close to perfection as anything can be in this world, his tiger-riding harness was perfect.

He hoisted his harness onto his shoulders and set out into the jungle to try it out on an actual tiger.

On his way he met an actual tiger.  The tiger sprang on him and devoured him before he could even lift the harness off his back.

Some conventional Christians do not like the principle of self-reliance.  They think it impugns our dependence on God.  Others accept it, but as a temporal worldly principle only, like life insurance or brushing your teeth.

It is, however, a principle of the restored Gospel.

The difficulty goes away when we realize that self-reliance isn’t a statement of what our relationship with God is.  Its a statement of how God wants to teach us.  Self-reliance is an educational principle.  Self-reliance doesn’t mean God isn’t your father.  It means he is a father who wants his children to grow up.

Other Posts from the Sunday Morning session of the October 1991 General Conference

What is Self-Reliance?
Anyone or Anything Except the Lord

In a certain country there was a city that had a crown without a king and a throne without a monarch.  Elders ruled the place until a king should come.  The people were not just waiting, no.  Because in fact there was a test.  From time to time the elders would approach a likely candidate and test him to see if he was the new king.  The details of the test were not generally known, but the people did know the test was administered from time to time, though so far no candidate had been successful.  It was not known exactly what criteria the elders used.  They seemed to pay particular attention to the gleaming athletes in the gymnasia, but there were other ways too.  Again, the details were not generally known.

There was a man in that place who one day wondered why the king should not be him?  He was already fit but now he dedicated himself to athleticism and beauty.    He was frequently seen in the gymnasium, gleaming with olive oil, wrestling in the nude or hurling a discus or running.  He grew stronger and swifter and more handsome.  The people began to glory in him and as he did he felt the taste of kingship coming stronger over him.  But still no call from the elders came, so one day he went to them. (more…)

Beauty is always experienced as rare, even when it is common.  When you cease to experience it as rare, you cease to experience it as beauty.

Mortality is what allows eternal beings who have passed through it to eternally experience each moment of beauty forever as unique and rare.  Entropy, the decay and passing of all things mortal, is a device to defeat entropy–there is not anything and not even the least bit of savor of anything that is ever lost, not even a little.  It grows and grows.  You experience the moment of beauty forever and also continue on experiencing the experience and experiencing the sharing of the experience and contemplating it from new angles in light of your other experience and the manifold experiences that worlds and people without end bring to you, and the experience grows and grows and grows.

There is beauty all around.  It is no poetry to say that in your commonplace actions you are a knight errant or a princess.  You do not need to change your scene to live in the grand manner.  Who you are is already enough.

I recently read a talk by President Hinckley from what doesn’t seem like so long ago.  But I guess it is now.  The talk is Our Solemn Responsibilities.

For me the talk was like a switching yard.  It started a number of different trains of thoughts. (more…)

I don’t understand the reason Joseph Smith didn’t retranslate the 116 lost pages.  Since we are reading D&C 10 today, it is probably time to take the problem off the shelf for another look.

You wise ones, your thoughts would be much appreciated. (more…)

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.

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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.

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