if i can't have world peace when i blow out my birthday candles

i'll pretty happily exchange that wish for this one: at least one shining happy memory for every person on this earth. i have a brilliant set of past-lights in my pocket, and they cheer my dreary days. i have so many i can sort them into categories: pick-me-ups, make-me-cries, remind-me-that-i-have-a-hearts, laugh-laugh-laughs, too-dear-to-shares, my-life-is-a-movies, thy-life-is-a-miracles. isn't it nice to have a secret place for your own treasures, that no one can find or take away?

next point. i'm going away on wednesday to hear large writers read largely, and this helps me not feel too small.

the motivation for a post soon to come where i explain for myself as much as for you why i believe what i do

i have been so out of touch lately. i hardly catch the news in snippets over radio as i drive to and from work. i don't know that an op-ed and a blog post in response count as news, but i read them both and found them interesting. i thought you might too.

here's the short version in representative quotes.

op-ed by ian williams (never met him): "A culture that walks in such tidy lockstep has the advantage of homogeneity, and will always look good on paper. It certainly works for my many cousins, whom I love. But some of us who have experienced the Mormon life firsthand would rather choose a messy, colorful America lurching forward without so many confines — every day and twice on Sunday."

blog by james goldberg (friend of mine): "But you seem to think that your world is the real world, and that the real world is something I'm impossibly distanced from...You know the world, I would guess, far better from how it looks on paper than from how it looks up close."

yes, i find this stuff interesting because i belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or Mormon), but I also find it interesting because it raises these questions for me:

• is it possible to fundamentally understand or experience another person's reality?
• what habits, practices, etc. do i have that enhance or limit my ability to understand the people around me?
• how do we talk civilly about things that matter most to us?

poetry

for we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.

for in this we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed we shall not be found naked.

for we that are in this tabernacle do groan, being burdened: not for that we would be unclothed, but clothed upon, that mortality might be swallowed up of life.

...therefore we are always confident, knowing that, whilst we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord: (for we walk by faith, not by sight:) we are confident, i say, and willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord.

wherefore we labour, that whether present or absent, we may be accepted of him.

--from 2 corinthians 5

death is an adoration of God

you know how there are seasons of life where you practice one same thing over and over like a dance routine or a spelling bee list or whistling for the first time?

my long season is practicing letting go. every day all day long round and round. i've told you this before.

lately it's been work. i can't be any everything and that is hard. i can't be perfect most things and that's hard too. so i'm working on drawing lines and getting back Bs and sometimes Fs because that's just the best i can give, and what you probably already know that i'm just learning is that it feels great to fall short when you give your best because you don't have to wonder if you could've done more. i'm giving my best and walking on.

death is an adoration of God, the priest said, because it is the inevitable and proper culmination of a lifetime spent learning to let go, and not just for the sake of sake but for God's sake.

and then--death be not proud--we let go of death too.