Janece took this photo of Amira and printed it out for me, where it sits in front of me on my desk, daily reminding me just how lucky of a father I am:

I’ve never done one of these meme things, but I guess all the other kids are doing it and I never took a purity oath, so..

1. Your Real Name:
   Paul Edward Moment
2. Your Gangsta Name (first three letters of real name, plus izzle):
   Pau-izzle. (Pau-izzle?)
3. Your Detective Name (fav color and fav animal):
   Crimson Weasel
4. Your Soap Opera Name (middle name and current street):
   Edward Butternut
5. Your Star Wars Name (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name, first 3 letters of mom’s maiden name.):
   Mom-Pa-Mos
6. Your Superhero Name (2nd favorite color, favorite drink):
   Black Nuclear Ice Tea, or Black Mudslide
7. Your Witness Protection Name (Mother’s middle name and father’s middle name ):
   Diane Arthur
8. Your Goth Name (black, and the name of one your pets ):
   Black Luther

This invitation to silliness brought to me, and forced on you, by Janece and Amy. I feel so used…

But still… I think I’ll start calling myself “Black Luther”.

Dana sent me this excellent reading from Walt Whitman, excerpted from Leaves Of Grass:

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman it is enough… the fact will prevail through the universe… but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost.

This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body…

The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured… others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches… and shall master all attachment.

Betcha didn’t know that Whitman, one of America’s most influential, unabashedly exuberant and muscular poets, was gay.

It comes, as do many good things, from one of my favorite authors — Anne Dillard in her book The Writing Life:

I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order — willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern…

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life. A day that closely resembles every other day of the past ten or twenty years does not suggest itself as a good one. But who would not call Pasteur’s life a good, or Thomas Mann’s?

Your takeaway quote: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” I’m putting that on my computer monitor.

Many Christians believe that Hell is the final destination for the untold millions of humans beings unlucky or stubborn or evil enough to have missed or rejected whatever version of salvation ritual they subscribe to. They believe in a God who demands love, rewards the submissive, and who unemotionally condemns the rest who did not perform the salvation ritual before they die to eternal punishment. They believe that these millions will be subjected to the most wretched, horrible torture and suffering imaginable for the unthinkable eons of eternity. They believe that many of the people they work with, interact with at the grocery store, visit with as their kids play together on the playground, and whom they even call friends, will be among these writhing, screaming figures of the eternally tortured.

They believe this, and they seem only mildly troubled by it. They rarely act on this information, or even remember it. Christians who would burst into tears if they accidentally ran over a squirrel look daily into the eyes of men, women and children who they firmly believe are one heartbeat away from horrible torment, and, astonishingly, joke and laugh and argue and fight and interact with them as though nothing were going on but life as usual.

Two of my sisters-in-law died within 24 hours of each other this last December – wonderful women with deep intelligence, rich personalities, and hearts of love and service for others. Neither of them were professing Christians. In fact, both of them expressed antagonism to it because of past run-ins with churches and church folk. My church-going sister told me tonight that other Christians actually said to her (in sympathetic tones, I’m sure), “it must be hard for you knowing that they are lost (ie. in Hell)”.

There’s a word in psychology for this: emotional detachment.

“The person, while physically present, moves elsewhere in the mind, and in a sense is ‘not entirely present’, making them sometimes be seen as preoccupied or distracted.” It is “a component of many anxiety and stress disorders” arising from psychological trauma.

Imagine the helpless terror of truly believing in the existence of an all-powerful God who is not only cold enough to design and preside over this frightening system, but also demands and requires — not just obedience — affection. Imagine also the subconscious horror of being certain that almost every person you meet every day is destined for the most awful kind of eternal agony, and never being sure if you’ve done everything right enough to be spared their same fate.

How would I describe living a lifetime in that kind of trauma? Hell.

So, I’ve been gone for a good long while now.   Over a year, to be precise.  This year, like all years, has been enormous — full of transitions and changes — but it doesn’t feel right now like I’ve been gone for more than a month or two from blogging. I’ve missed this, tho.  I’ll write more about this year’s journey later, but for now it’s enough to say that it’s very satisfying to start back in on writing out my life.

Tonight’s been all about upgrading to get my blog working again, so it’s time for sleep.  More later as I start in on making this a regular part of my days again.