Montaigne Your Distance

 

I am on page 386 of a 1336 page book. This elegantly bound bruiser is wearing me out. The length is daunting, but I have often covered books of such girth. This book’s problem is content. I happen to be female so when Montaigne allows himself a bevy of slurs and insults against women with withering frequency I feel the sting personally. I am struggling to hear all the other things he has to say. I enjoy medieval literature. I recognize that there were different mores at that time. Other men writing at the same time presumably with similar inclinations have not offended me at all. Montaigne makes his disdain very personal.

Maybe he thought that few women would read his work, after all women were illiterate mostly. Maybe he was gay and the frustration of not having access to the love of his life left him angry with women, which he did have access to. Maybe he was just socially awkward and “girl jokes” had slayed at boarding school.  I don’t know why Montaigne is so (to put it mildly) gauche, but he is. I would recommend avoiding him, but for the fact that his flies in amber show us how much progress we have and haven’t made in valuing women. He is a good litmus test of the enlightenment we believe we have secured in the present. Women especially should read him and be fortified that we must never go back.

One page at a time, the medicine goes down.

Furrowed Brow

 It was fifth grade, and my friends confirmed that I had lines on my forehead that were not normal. They were pretty sure I was thinking too hard. As an adult I’m sure they were right. I’d decided someone had to understand the problem of human evil so that it could be overcome. Yes, I knew Jesus had overcome it already, but there was this pesky thing called the Apocalypse. I thought it was a piece of future history we could do without.

So I was studying human evil and how it might be overcome. Anytime someone said something was really evil I looked it up, I asked around, I made up horrendous playground games. I gave people nightmares. I did not waste time on horror movies and such, only non-fiction evil for me. I don’t think that was healthy, and my brain is a little fragile as a result. I never figured out the answer to human evil, and for the sake of my health I quit trying.

Suzanne Collins explores the problem of human evil with the creativity and a faux innocence that could easily be credited to a child. I fell into her Hunger Games and knew I had to beat it to death or run and hide like her protagonists. I chose the deep dive, and was relieved when I could sit in the meadow with Katniss at peace. Despite the stress it was causing me I loved Suzanne’s writing. I liked living in the world deep enough to understand it. The way her character’s brains worked awakened old models in mine. 

When The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was advertised in the window at Barnes and Noble, I was apprehensive. When the movie came out I went to see it, but with half a mind in reserve. I kept putting off buying the book using my book budget as an excuse, but I love her voice. I was going to buy it and I was glad when I finally did. Songbirds is more about human evil, but examined in a slowed down, armchair traveller way. It gives her a chance to help those of us who were too freaked out by the rush and carnage of Hunger Games a chance to see the underlying principles this time in a slower more tempered way. It is the right book for the truly committed. I should have read it right away.

Mommy Magic

 

Whenever we would go traveling with the kids I took time to collect items for our Love Bug Bag. The Love Bug Bag is black and covered with hearts and I swear sometimes Hermione put a charm on it, because it has a huge capacity. I filled it with games and puzzles, toys and books and handing it over to the kids was one of the best parts of any vacation.

Ashley Wright has turned such joy into a science. Her girls are still very little, so she has to think about diapers and potty training, sleeping in a strange place, loading up a stroller, and all the normal practical issues. She goes one further with carefully thought out activities to make the flight or a late dinner go smoothly. The Wrights mainly travel to Disney World, and if you want to see how that is done look Ashley up at Pixie Dusted Mom or if you want to add some magic to your cleaning routine try her new channel, Spoonful of Cleaning

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCnYjpNazZ0ixJCXxH7Z2B7g/videos

Slap It!

 https://www.amazon.com/Portable-Wearable-Silicone-Wristband-Healthcare/dp/B08YR9D6FZ

I’m always looking for ways to improve productivity. A to do list is the most basic unit no matter how you dress it up, but I recently found a new version of this basic on Amazon—the to do list slap bracelet. If you’re a little older you will remember the slap bracelet with its ability to transform from a flat rectangle into a bracelet with just a tap on your wrist. Someone has developed a grown-up version with a ruler printed on one side and a place to make a list on the other.

This simplicity gets a little complicated as you need a frixion erasable pen and an eraser so that the list can be erased and the bracelet be used over and over again. I think it is worth it. I got one for myself and for each child still living at home. They even come in colors.

 

A Little Vegetarian

 

I am always trying to expand what I am willing to eat, partly because I’m stubborn about food and partly because I want to be ready to eat whatever in case of an Apocalypse. Vegetarian is a new category. In my ideal world all the fast food chains would offer a veggie option to save the world and our diets. For that to happen we have to be eating more vegetarian food, so I’m trying to eat more vegetarian food. Taco Bell offers the excellent Crunchwrap, a long-term favorite, and when I heard it came vegetarian with black beans, I could not think of a reason to decline. It’s delicious. The texture of the the beans blends with all the other textures and I get to be virtuous for nearly no effort. 

Give it a try. It’s good for you and the planet.

Changed

 

I only planned on giving Revelations of Divine Love a week. It was important and would close the loop on female, medieval mystics, but it was me in collector mode. I did not expect to be changed by the reading. St. Julian received a deep bounty of wisdom about the love of God and its impact on our lives. She shares it with clarity and humility. You really must read it for yourself. Take your time. You will be a different person when you finish.

On an aside, I might pair it with Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death. She surely shares the antidote.

Dust Ups: Shaun Overton

 

I fell in love with Africa when I was a child. I grew up in a mission-minded church that supported missionaries, and the missionaries would come back every four or five years and teach us where they’d been. They would bring back slides, items, but most of all stories. It meant a whole Sunday away from the monotony of our preaching cycle, and a glimpse of the exotic. We sent missionaries everywhere, even in the US, but my favorite was always Africa.

I meant to be a missionary myself, but God had other plans. In any case, I get excited about African content. I bumped into The Green Wall of Africa, where they are fighting desertification one hole in the ground at a time. I went through a lot of You Tube videos about it all, but they felt static, like encyclopedia articles. Shaun Overton sneaked into my feed with his project in west Texas. Buying a large ranch in the desert, he is deternied to raise up a desert forest. He was just this guy going out there with no real idea of what he was doing, but determined to do it. It is that grit that makes the show interesting. He hires experts. He chops up cactus. He takes a week a month to put in the hard labor his project demands. I just love it.

I wish someone would create the same long-format story-telling in Africa.