Quite a mix of things I would have tweeted if Twitter were still functional...
Christian
I get tired of explaining this...God is a Spirit. We are not meant to attach ourselves to images as if God were limited to a body. If we have carelessly started to think that God really has to look like a grumpy old man draped in a bed sheet, it may do us good to think that the Bible describes Her as having metaphoric female parts. (God has, according to the Bible, a big firm bosom, a uterus, and also hen wings. God spoke through the dove and the jenny. God is, relative to us, a Mother, and a Father, and both together, and more than that.) If children of abusive fathers can't bear to call God "Father," nothing ever said they had to do that. Let them meditate on God's motherliness, and on God's unbodied manifestations such as Light. But Jesus did, in historical fact, call God "Father," and I think it would be a good discipline for people estranged from their fathers to think of their Father in Heaven as being very different from their fathers on Earth. I was--not as horribly estranged from my father as people who were beaten or prostituted, but estranged in the usual way young people are when they disagree with their parents on enough points that they don't want to see the parents' point of view. I did. I think it actually helped me achieve some reconciliation and family bond with my father.
Marketing
Poetry
I really think this one may be the first draft of one of the classic poems of our era. It's a crystal. I think, if Susan Jarvis Bryant lets it rest for a few days and goes back to it, this can be a diamond.
Political Slanging
Largely true:
Science
This is cool, even if it was handed to me directly by The Grouch rather than popping up in a blog post or e-mail. I knew that peat, the black dirt you put down a dry-flush toilet, is a low impure grade of carbon; the toilet normally bakes all compost material until it all looks like peat. As a classroom experiment you can bake peat further into lignite, which Europeans will sell to one another for coal; from lignite carbon can be further heated, compressed, and refined into bituminous coal, the low-grade kind still found in Virginia, and from that into anthracite, the higher grade found in Pennsylvania, and from that into diamonds. So if you saved up all of your pet's bodywaste long enough, you could turn a stash of dog or cat litter into a small but real diamond, the ultimate pet souvenir. Coal is sometimes called black diamonds. But I had never heard of black diamonds being a special kind of real diamond, hard enough to use in machinery.
Weird Weather
From Vancouver, a weather poem that sounds like Southern California:
Women's History
Well...shaping the jugs like her was tacky. But the image we know as Aunt Jemima belonged to a real woman (Jemima was not her real name) who, some might say, deserves to stay in history. Nothing racist about remembering her. She sounds like another Black woman, like Madame CJ Walker and Butterfly McQueen, who used what life handed her and did well...Back then even Lillian Moller Gilbreth was finding that the way for a woman engineer to sell her designs was to design for the kitchen.
Zazzle
My desk pad design:
Someone else's mouse pad design:
I find your comments on Spirit?Mother/Father/God really intriguing, Priscilla. Yes, not a man in a bedsheet but All Spirit, all-encompassing. Ha, scrolling down, I see you shared my drought in Tofino poem. Thank you for that. We are so badly in need of rain but none will come, sadly......no rain in a rainforest, while the world leaders talk and talk and talk.........
ReplyDelete...as if their talking could make weather distribute itself equally. May the trees grow back and attract more rain soon!
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