American Hallows

It's dusk. GLAD-RAD plays John Powell & Howard Shore, drowning out dear D's air-balloon organ trill next door.  It's that Vincent Price spook 'em tune that he's graciously postponed playing all month until tonight.  The first year his display went up, it played semi-daily until 10 PM, & the kids muttered a bit about lost sleep; but ever the morose one, I rather decided to like it.  (How is it that they lost sleep? They never go to bed until after 1AM?)

I finally heeded the LORD with the apology I owed neighbor kids J & T --over threatening to pray that God avenge the five year old they were picking on.  It went well.  I hate it when my anger management problem overflows into the lives of poor innocent children!  One claimed to have no idea what I was referring to, the other looked at me with those knowing eyes that told me he'd been wondering when I was going to 'fess up.  It was a good opportunity to remind them how much God loves them and does not plan to harm people, only to bid them Come To HIM when He calls.  These boys grew up mostly avoiding Sunday School, Bible Club, and much of my God talk, but I perceive a deep well of need and a welcome mat for the Gospel.  Holy LORD, capture the boys of our street, pour out your grace and mercy and bid them with powerful visions of all you have in store, not just all you hope to save them from... in the Name of our Saviour, Christ Jesus! aMeN.

It's time to set up our coffee table out front.  Like last year, I'm not sure who will hand out candy at the door, as all three offspring have sprung to attend parties.  After our chili and pizza night two years back, it became clear that our living room is too small for an all-comers neighborhood gathering.  The coffee-out-front idea was suggested at church. Good call.  I want to take credit for their change of heart in canceling ye olde harvest carnival.  I'd always excuse ourselves from it to stay home where the relationships are.  I  mean, who wants to miss out on all the kids, the costumes, the chiming trick-or-treat!'s? Someone must have been listening.

God of heaven, secure the borders of our corner of this patch of planet.  With your angelic heraldry, defend and arrest anything demonic that would dare foment evil in our children and our ways.  Open the eyes of our neighborhood that You would be our first thought every day, and your praises lifted before our first act every morning.

Saints alive! It's Halloween.

RainRainWentToday, NextTimePleaseALongerStay

It's Requiem for a Dream playing on Pandora (Clint Mansell/Kronos Quartet) along with blessed other movie soundtracks on GLADiator RADio, OS outside finally settling on one-color-or-the-other for the front of the house since the sun came out, but not before beating his eldest Sis' at a rainy morning game of chess. I could pretend it was a their idea, but that would be untrue: after listening to Glad-Rad all day yesterday, it became glaringly apparent that when it's gloomy & wet, one's chess board must be put to use, or what's a rainy day for? Pawns & bishops dusted off, table cleared, it wasn't hard to sell the plan. Soggy leaves dot the wood floors, added a woodsy touch.


Middle Chyle. She's out with her church kids, climbing Mount Baldy. (She will not track in a single leaf. That's just who she is.)


Mr. Man. Off driving go-carts with team members from work, but will walk in at any moment (he WILL track in more glorious leaves), hence, I must be brief in the interest of beating him to the kitchen where chicken thighs are thawing.  We're locked in a game of 'cooking wars.' I am not really interested in winning, but I am certain that he iS, so today shall be my turn.


Wait. Yesterday's laundry, still unfolded. The morning was spent penning a letter, talking on the phone, HELL talking (theology, not trash) with eldestD,  and reading an old Will Glasser blog. On THIS very day, eight yrs ago, he wrote the item below.  It exactly declares my usual position on Halloween, but I've 'acclimated to the culture'; moved left of right. You kinda hafta' when the house next door is a The Coney Island of Halloweeness. Would that I could post a picture.  I've come to adore what I once abhorred.


Mr. Glasser's now married and living in SO-CA, yet a little too far away and too clean to give a call to D#1, his fellow classmate who is a slightly bohemianized variation from the PHC ideal.


I salute him anyway:

"WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 23, 2002

October 31st: Reformation vs. Halloween by Will Glasser.blogspot.com

On October 31, 1517, a monk stood at the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. With several strokes from a hammer in his hand, he nailed a piece of parchment to the wooden door. The parchment bore ninety-five statements condemning the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church. The man was Martin Luther, and the ninety-five theses that he posted on that October day set into action a movement that would change the course of history - the Protestant Reformation.

Sadly, Christians today do not associate October 31st with Luther's brave action. Instead, the day is spent in celebration of a pagan festival of death and darkness. Reformation Day has been overshadowed by Halloween.

The roots of Halloween can be traced back more than fifteen hundred years before Luther's time to the Celtic festival Samhain. This festival was celebrated on October 31st, the eve of the Celt's New Year, to honor their lord of death, Samhain. On this evening, the Celtic pagan priests, called Druids, built huge bonfires, on which they sacrificed crops and animals. The people would array themselves in ghoulish costumes and parade around the neighborhood to frighten off spirits... "

(Funny. I was just perusing the blog of Jim Morrison's wife,  "Mrs. Morrison's Hotel," who celebrates her Wiccan priestessness, wishing her readers a Happy Samhain. [D#1, how do you pronouce that, again?) Good thing for all of us she doesn't take comments. I doubt she wants me asking if she's really a priestess of death. Jim is a little beyond caring, at this point.)

I wrote a near identical Halloween Hellow to give away with the candy some eight years ago, too. [OMG. Did I steal it from him? can't remember back that far...] The hope --beyond redeeming the night-- was that some like minded family would see our info, call, and invite us to a neighborhood Bible Study. I'm starting to figure out that is never going to happen.  All these years, I've considered our house too small, but I hear the LORD lately saying OhPooh. You don't need a big house to worship Me. Just do it.  What a concept. (Does Jesus say Pooh or Pshaw? Such a deep day of Theological Thinking.)  So...

...if I can demand my children PLAY CHESS already, why not hypnotically propose that DH hold a Bible Study already?

It's complicated.

A Passive Aggressive Follow'd my Lead

I am anxious to get to a giant anamorphous/yesmakingupmyownwordsagain pisanous pile of newspapers, news magazines, Life:Beautiful, and CA history, but as the 'walls' of numerous due-dates are closing in, so the walls of my home are also.  And this, just found on someone's iMac desktop, tho three months old, fits my present state of mind; reminds me that my children learned passive aggression AND NOT SO PASSIVE aggression, from none other than their mother.

That would be Me.

I confess.

Holy God,
Friend. 

Heal us all. 
Help. Mend.

"10/2010

 My dear SLB:

I removed the sewing bags from the living room weeks ago when someone was cramming stuff between the wall and the couch, not caring that parcels were spilling out, a file box was gaping (it was never welcome to stay there in the first place), and someone's empty beverage containers were rolling around the vicinity. So I took action as a matter of self defense against apathy.  I hate apathy, and I think you do too.

You never brought the matter up with me, you simply returned your sewing stuffs back to the place from which I had removed them.

I hear they call that being “passive aggressive.”

Worried that my desire to control your stuff is a desire to control you?

Man-Up and ask me! You'll get a question in return: "Is my desire to control this home meant to communicate that it's not yours to control?" Um, yauh! Controlling Females. Somewhere, there's a ballad by that name; a book by that title; a sestina by that theme...

I feel claustrophobic when things touch the walls.  There it is.  I am neurotic.  Besides that, our tolerance for clutter is starting to relax so much that all the purses on barstools, books on tables and magazines on bars are not bothering me like they used to. I find this alarming! (Does nothing matter anymore?  That’s a sign of depression.  I’d rather clean up the clutter than go on anti-depressants.)

So, if you want your small room to feel less small, store your excess in the art room, garage loft, or a rented storage unit.

Thank you for trying harder than the rest of us to make things harmonious and artful, God breathed and holy.  You rock, but notSoMuch when you resort to my old freakish methods of agresion con pasion.

Love you,

Mom."

Two Months? Seeing What Is. And an Unknowing Prophesy.

These first two months of virtual redux have moved slowly. Glancing back at August 1, it's hardly there, lost in a bleary haze...  


Propelled by wiki-inquiry and a backward look at a lifetime of stunted growth, the pensive journey forward into 50-year-old-ness is plight filled. Who wants to be transparent enough to admit that middle age has arrived before people skills? Who wants to live with the certainty that, though Celebrate Recovery lifted the veil of shame from a lifetime of anger and pride, I have only a few remaining years to recover from the losses? Twenty? Thirty? How stark life appears when viewed through that lens.  


Thus, I took an online query on an Asperger site and found I'm only two points away from being autistic.  Clever, huh? To diagnose away my problems is to avoid responsibility for them!


That explains why I'm perseverating over zygoteness.  There's something about wrapping one's identity around being but a morula. 16 cells. The zygote's last stand. Morula: Latin for mulberry --that tree they cut down in front of the girls' kindergarten classroom. That tree from which silk worms will only eat. It is small, useful, cute, unassuming, and, like the silk worm, has no idea what it's about to become, nor the usefulness for which it was created.


At (eight to) ten weeks, however, the morula has expanded to "fetus," that implanted little figure that NARAL and Planned Parenthood preach is a mere blob of tissue, despite the presence of heartbeat (21 DAYS, wiki.heart development) and brain waves. It's settled, then. Into a purpose, every morula must grow; let go its grip on the door frame and allow God's hand usher in the life He's planned.


WikiOde to the precious early stage brain (recall chords of Snow Patrol, Up To Now...): "The ventral half of the neural plate is controlled by the notochord, which acts as the 'organiser'. The dorsal half is controlled by the ectoderm plate which flanks the neural plate on either side.

Ectoderm follows a default pathway to become neural tissue. Evidence for this comes from single, cultured cells of ectoderm which go on to form neural tissue. This is postulated to be because of a lack of BMPs, which are blocked by the organiser. The organiser may produce molecules such as follistatin, noggin and chordin which inhibit BMPs.

The ventral neural tube is patterned by Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) [yes, you read that right. It really is called that]* from the notochord, which acts as the inducing tissue. The Shh inducer causes differentiation of the floor plate. Shh-null tissue fails to generate all cell types in the ventral tube, suggesting Shh is necessary for its induction. The hypothesised mechanism suggests that Shh binds patched, relieving patched inhibition of smoothened, leading to activation of glia transcription factors..."

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BEFORE four-year-old Ellie was found floating face down in Tulloch Lake during one of her family's post-waterski siestas, I am sure her neural plates were differentiated in the most Einsteinian fashion (with hair like mine, she certainly looked the part); but AFTERWARDS, not so much: all that O2 deprivation bundled the synapses in a confused mass of anti-algebraic debility. 

OH the inhumanity! Or, not.

The "retard" the siblings made fun of in subsequent years was every bit as precious in God's sight as Little Albert. The fragile-X children of Brian Doerksen are every bit as precious as the most brillant Oxford don...

And with that thought, I turn to D#2's Dell and play Creation Calls on YouTube for the Nth time.  Thank  you, Mr. Doerksen, for reminding me of God's perfect mind, hand, heart, plan.

Everything He's made is good.

(Another progeny-ward P.S. - OS: Ponder, please, the Sonic Hedgehogness* of your calling. Be a musician. (SHH!) You're a mere !noggin molecule! now, but lodged to become more; much more. Or not. Just let go the proud doorframe. Let's see.)

Epilog 
(That? No, that was not the prophesy. Here's the prophetic element: YOUR LOFTY WORDS DID NOT MEET YOUR ACTIONS, after feeling forced to move away from your neighborhood of 24 years, because a home for the disabled crashed your party by moving in next dorr...doer...Doerkson... DOOR.  Suddenly all the unreconciled angst, bitter self pity and unresolved anger over everybody's failures coalesced into dramatic tears every time you so much as looked out the window at the new "facility" next door, or heard the angst ridden cries of the victims living within, as they were fed, sunned, or diapered on the kettle druuuum of a wood deck they installed between your houses.  I sought counseling. She whom I paid $125 per hour to enlighten me as to WHY I couldn't stop crying, said to move, and then to try and figure it all out. To my great shame, we did. And my entire universe collapsed. . .)

Zygo's R Us

"The zygomatic bone (cheekbone, malar bone) is a paired bone of the human skull. It articulates with the maxilla, the temporal bone, the sphenoid bone and the frontal bone. The zygomatic is homologous to the jugal bone of other tetrapods. It is situated at the upper and lateral part of the face and forms the prominence of the cheek, part of the lateral wall and floor of the orbit, and parts of the temporal and infratemporal fossae [Fig. 1*]. It presents a malar and a temporal surface; four processes, the frontosphenoidal, orbital, maxillary, and temporal; and four borders.

The term zygomatic derives from the Greek Ζυγόμα zygoma meaning "yoke". The zygomatic bone is occasionally referred to as the zygoma, but this term may also refer to the zygomatic arch or the zygomatic process."  -- from OS's Anatomy Class web link

NOTE to three who were birthed by me:
Zygo, zygoma, zygomatic.  Whatever way you slice it, it's all about the face, facebook, the image you want to present to the world, and what kind of stuff you are really made of.  So, while you chilluns backpack away your Columbus Day Weekend, please note how exasperating was your reply to my farewell note.  My "poor choices" comment was not about separation or feeling the pains of some empty nest. OMG--you can SO miss the point when denial is your default.  It's about hamstringing him who is enrolled in college classes that we've paid for. It's about my lawn going un-mowed for 8 weeks.  It's about that mess on the workbench in the garage. It's about my house sporting two different shades of brown with masking tape left around windows, ladders left up in the side yard, and a bathroom that awaits it's weekly cleaning. For the third week.  It's about D#1's (expensive?) detour to OuterBanks, NC last Monday. It's about waiting to plan the whole trip until the NIGHT BEFORE.

While you enjoy those broken budgets, the underage drinking (OS), and the lovely woods of our blessed Sierra Nevada, I recognize that impulsiveness is a family plague, and I cry out to God for His healing forgiveness.  I had a hope while we went through the home-ed motions that you all might adopt some accelerated form of godliness beyond that limited mode we modeled.

Exasperating.  Our zygomas are showing.

(*PS: I must confess those pictures were priceless and your spark for adventure, enviable. Now, would someone show me how to insert visuals in blogs?  The skull image that went with the above definition was perfectly Halloweeny.)

Two months.

Being propelled toward 50-year-old-ness, these first fluctuations of virtual redux are fearful.  

I am now a morula. 16 cells. The zygote's last stand. Morula, Latin for mulberry.

Remember that tree they cut down in front of the girls' kindergarten classroom? That tree from which silk worms will eat? The children are twenty something now, yet their special tree is no more. Some silk moths somewhere are in lament, learning with me that life is one fluctuation after another, one disappointment and frustration after another.  Weather them well, and fruit appears.  What the BioDome failed to appreciate, we know instinctively: [>Bleep<] happens, growth occurs. Composting in a nutshell.

I wish I could say this truth is internalized.  Sadly, my compost is an anerobic mess. Smells bad.  But all is not lost.  In the next seven months, good things may come.

I am waiting.