We were so busy Mother’s Daying yesterday we forgot to put anything up.

The JG salutes mothers.

There was a man who fell into a shining portal and woke up in another world.  At the very first he thought he was just somewhere foreign, or in the past.  He appeared in what seemed to be a normal village from old times, children running around, a busker juggling for coins, blacksmiths, tanners, a market square for crafts and foods…but he soon discovered he was a in a land of magic.  Wizards worked spells.  Warriors developed their talents until they could leap across streets and bring down lightning with their sword.

Oddly enough, the people of that land were as impressed with the novelty of his background as he was with theirs.  A land of … tech nah loe jee? But when he insisted that Earth had no magic they didn’t believe him.  Every place had some magic.  Scholars assured him that it was a natural law–every land and every dimension might have a different form of magic, but magic they had.  He in turn assured them that Earth didn’t.

One day a chance remark of his led the people he was with to explain to him how babies were made.  The mother had to collect and work a series of powerful spells (long, arduous, dangerous) while the father had to go on a series of dangerous quests for rare alchemical ingredients (long, arduous, dangerous) and then they jointly had to seek a boon from the Gods.  It was all they could do to barely maintain their population.  All of their feats and might were earned in the service of eking out a child or two.

“Weird,” he said, “that’s now how we do it on Earth…” and then he explained.

The people were dumbfounded.  They were struck with a vision of a world so magical that nearly any man and woman, who wished, could work the greatest feat of magic known merely through love and the workings of their bodies.  The rumor of the magic of Earth spread like a wildfire throughout the land.  It created decades, centuries, of wistful art and literature about the fantasy of a land where even the very flesh was magic.

There are so many wonderful Madonnas with child. From my LDS perspective, I wish there were also some Madonnas with children.

There once was a land that was blessed with the greatest wizard of all time.  He just spent his time muttering and wizarding in his high tower, so from a practical standpoint his presence didn’t make much difference.  But everyone agreed it was neat.

But one day God put it in the heart of some tradesmen and yeomen to ask the wizard for a great gift for the people.

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On the sweetness…

You are away from home.  There is an older woman sister missionary who is acting as the greeter.  She says, “welcome to the church of joy!”  She grins puckishly.

When you get back, one of the friends you are staying with is  Protestant.  He tells you, sheepishly, that there’s something’s been on his mind, and he wrote a sermon–would you like to hear it?  You say yes.

Nehemiah 8:13, he says.  The joy of the Lord is our strength.
Hebrews 12:2.  Look unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross.

Today in the sacrament we remember a body broken and blood shed, and then that same body made whole again, a person again, and clothed in spotless unbloodied white.

I also remember a pale unmoving body and look forward to when she moves again, ruddy with life.

This is what I wrote on Betsey’s 4th birthday.  What would have been her 4th birthday.

One promise of the Resurrection can be found in the fact that the grief never fades.  We were not meant for separation.

Betsey, wherever you are, think kindly of your father.

Someone from a prior era, maybe John Derbyshire, once said sleep made him an atheist.  The existential horror of just… shutting down completely

I have never felt that existential horror (though I have sometimes idly speculated that maybe spirits aren’t fully self-aware until embodied).

But there is a stage of sleep that makes my flesh creep.  It’s when you wake up in the night and can’t sleep.  You look at the clock.  You then lie there wide awake for what seems like half an hour but when you look its only 10 minutes.  You then toss and turn some more, again, it feels like half an hour.  You look at the clock again, and two hours have passed.  Somehow you have slipped in and out of consciousness without realizing it.  And this does horrify me.  It does not lead me to atheism, but it strikes some kind of existential fear in me.  To be so powerless that your mind can disappear and you not even know it.  Just you are there and then you are not.

Sometimes I wonder if a particular dream is from God or just from my sleeping brain.  Prophecy or Phantasy?

Last night’s dream was no prophecy, I feel sure.

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I dreamed I was an American mining engineer in an airport somewhere in the US on my way to a job in Peru.  Do to snarl-ups, my luggage hadn’t shipped separately so I had a bunch of suitcases and such all piled up higgledy-piggledy on a long cart I was dragging with me.  Also on the cart were two fruit tree saplings that had been shipped to the airport instead of my home address by mistake.

At which point a couple of Brit security arrested me and took me to some sort of Brit enclave at the airport.  They said I shouldn’t be in Britain and was going to be deported.  The rest of the dream was me having great fun getting on my high horse about how I was an American citizen, passport and all, that I was not now nor was I going to be in Britain, and that actual illegal immigrants in Britain went unarrested and undeported their thousands.  The most fun was where I held up my passport so they could see it but wouldn’t let them hold it.  They kept shaking some kind of deportation paperwork in my face, but their hearts weren’t in it.

Your relationship with time gets weirder the older you get.  The days jam together so fast.  It’s as if there is a wreck at the end of time and your days are piling up behind it.

A look at over 900,000 insurance claims showed that the rate of serious medical problems after taking the abortion pill was about 10%.  More than 20 times what the FDA and the manufacturer claimed.

https://nitter.poast.org/EPPCdc/status/1916811619822113255#m

Why does it seem like the central pillar of modernity is lying to you?

Last night I dreamed that Ireland had these specially made windows and mirrors.  The thick windows would allow you to see not just the whole panorama but maybe one part of it in great detail and vivid color, and the mirrors worked with the windows to let you see views from even farther and farther off.

There was a place on the southeast coast*, a building made of brick with thick walls looking something like an abbey.  English people who had lived in Ireland had all been expelled, but they could step from the boat into this seaside building and look through one of its many cloistered windows so see the land they had loved.  There were massive tall thin mirrors set into thick round brick bases, like windmills, all over Ireland bringing the views of Ireland to this place.

I have nothing intelligent to say about President Trump’s specific tariff’s actions, nor about the ideal general tariff and free trade regime.  I meant to weigh in anyway but somewhat to my own surprise decided not to.

But I have changed my mind on the wisdom in principle of running free trade when trade partner countries are highly protectionist.

When I was a kid, I saw Milton Friedman point out that trade imbalances were China giving us stuff while we gave them green pieces of paper.  Which I was all in favor of.

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President Nelson wants virtue to garnish our thoughts.

Blog Friend Marilyn has been doing a study of virtue and has found some interesting things.   One that stood out is the dual meaning of virtue in the English language.

Mostly its used to refer to moral goods, but then you also see it used to refer to the properties of things.

Virtue — that substance or quality of physical bodies, by which they act and produce effects on other bodies

So we have scriptures about Christ’s healing where the “virtue” went out of him, or we can describe some effect happening by virtue of its cause.

It’s pretty easy to come up with a technical definition of love or glory, but these definitions don’t satisfy.  The scriptures talk about them almost as if they were a substance, some kind of spirit fluid.  Virtue seems the same.