There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.

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I was driving back from a friend’s house a couple of evenings ago.  I’m feeding and watering his ducks (3 Campbell crosses, one miscellaneous), chickens (5 Plymouth rocks), and one goat (hyper-active).  The sun had just set seconds before I got into the car.  On my left, the snow-covered Manzanos took the exact color of the twilight on my right.

The moment was breathtaking.  A voice, or something like it, said in my mind, ‘Time is sin.  Time is error.”  The sense, I think, was that all pure moments bleed into each other, are, in a sense, the same moment.  It was a good thought for Christmastime.

Peace like a river. (more…)

Blessed are the gentiles, because of their belief in me, in and of the Holy Ghost.

3 Nephi 16:6

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Just as we have parts that exist in space, we have parts that exist over time. We are the sum of our temporal parts, even though not every one of those parts is essential for our identity. Conversely, none of our temporal parts is the whole of who we are. As four dimensional wholes, we are never simply the person who exists at a single point in time.

All the temporal parts of a person (or object) carry the same ontological weight

Think of heaven as the place where the ontological equality of temporal parts becomes absolutely real.

–Stephen Webb

I’ve believed that for awhile. I thought I was the only one, so its comforting to see that this is path others have made.

But I’m not sure about his notion that we can continue to act at any point in time, rewriting the past, as it were. This past doesn’t look rewritten.

The past with the clarity and beauty of a Bruegel landscape

Why is living in the past so popular a pastime?
. . . .

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Bruce Charlton’s commenter Arakawa has derived his own version of the amphibious synthesis of time and eternity. (more…)

On the sweetness of Mormon life. (more…)

Christian gentleman and friend of the blog Arakawa is mulling humor in heaven.
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There is only one Christmas. Each year it comes a little more into view. (more…)

I’m going to swim out into deep waters in this post. Stand by with lifesavers. (more…)

I saw the other day the Sphinx’s painted face.
She had painted her face in order to ogle Time.
And he has spared no other painted face in all the world but hers.
Delilah was younger than she, and Delilah is dust. Time hath loved nothing but this worthless painted face. (more…)

The flower of the pear-tree gathers and turns to fruit;
The swallows’ eggs have hatched into young birds.
When the Seasons’ changes thus confront the mind
What comfort can the Doctrine of Tao give? (more…)

Places long unseen often loom larger in memory than they really are. That haystack on the old farm . . . that green lane . . . that high fence in the back yard and the tree we climbed to look over it – surely they were an important part of the universe. And the old house had yawning caves in the closets, and untold mysteries in that deep cellar and up in that beckoning yet forbidding attic. Why, that house couldn’t have been as small as now it seems.

I remember these things, and they were real, and and they are real now where I keep them in remembrance.

But we can’t go back.

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Read this article by apologist extraordinaire Dan Petersen. (more…)