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.

Other Posts from the Sunday Morning Session of the April 1991 General Conference

Marriage is an Eternal Concept

The way to draw closer

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.

(more…)

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.

Holy Pirate King or bust.

“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.

(more…)

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.

Here is  a story in which you are the hero.  Well, the sidekick.

There is a hero and his group and the villain and his group.  But you must not imagine that you are in a superhero story.  The hero is a suburban dad.  You are, well, you.  The rest of the hero’s crew are neighborhood people.  The villain is a rangy, rawboned young man in a wifebeater who operates out of a collection of trailers out in the sagebrush.  His crew are trailer park people.  One of his sidekicks is a woman in her 30s who looks like a cafe-waitress: a bit the worse for wear, stringy mouse brown hair, prettyish if not so unkempt, face a bit lined, a little too thin.  There are no superpowers.  Maybe minor powers, the woman can possibly do a few spells or something.  There are devices that work better than they should.  You are definitely a sidekick in a pulpish or cinematic story.  But no superpowers.

There is a backstory by the way.  Act 1, before the story starts, you and the hero tangled with the witchy woman.  You of course prevailed.  Now, in Act 2, she found this villain and helped him put together a group. (more…)

On the sweetness.

Our ward sang beautifully but absurdly today.  We still cannot sing together.  So we had some families record songs in advance.  Others had stations in rooms around the church building where they could sing to have it piped into the chapel.  It was beautiful but also absurd.  Much like, I suppose, God in a manger.

We’ve had a lot of errands to run at night, around town and out into the empty.  We’ve been looking at the Christmas lights.  We have decided we have a lot of respect for the single strand of lights.  It usually runs along a fence or sometimes an eave or around a window.  It often looks a little tired.

But a street with single strands on nearly every house has more cheer about it than a street with one house lit to the nines.

I like a house lit to the nines.  My own house is an elegant and tasteful blaze.   Yet there is something affecting about that little strand of lights.

It is someone showing their devotion to a celebration and a standard even if that standard doesn’t make them look good.

It is the equivalent of what some sociologists call the decent poor.  It is the nameless virtue (#namelessvirtue)

It is the Christ deciding to become a mortal, starting out as a baby.

A long time ago, I dreamed about a sword. The dream was strange. It was told by the sword.

There was an Arthurian, elven style court. Noble knights and fair ladies who went forth from their shining walls into the happy green land to the sound of music. The king had a magic sword which narrated (?) the dream. They jousted, they chased the deer among the huge boles of the stout old trees. They may have had some foes scattered around that they could fight. (I have it all written down somewhere, but at this time do not recall.)

At one point there was a crack. A kind of restlessness set in. I think it was adultery but it may have been a personal affront. A quarrel. It made people angry. It didn’t really get patched up. The anger and bitterness widened. The knights and ladies started in on each other. There were killings. They fought little wars. The land was ravaged. Eventually the king turned into an orgy of destruction as did everyone who still left alive, destroying just to destroy. The magic sword could unmake things and raging the king unmade. It was the Jaredite end of the Arthurian legend. (more…)

Mormon and Moroni 9 are the horror chapters of the Book of Mormon.

But they are necessary.

They show that God really does make us free.  We are free to choose for good or for evil.  Our choices matter.  We can make destruction happen if we choose.

No one prides themselves on not murdering, but in fact that is something you could do, it is something people have done, and it is to your credit that you don’t.  But only to your credit in a world where murders happen.