10 months later

Wow. 10 months later... here I am. I remembered I had a blog the other day, and have just decided I'd actually do something with it for a minute.
This year has been crazy with a capital C. J is in preschool now. H is in first grade. L is in second. Mommy (me) got a job in March and what was supposed to be a 12-15 hour a week hobby has turned into a 40+ hour a week full time job. I was made assistant manager week before last. James is working for a security company still. He has to take a 10 hour test next weekend to upgrade his work stuff.
School ended. Summer started. Summer ended. School started. Life moves on.
Oh yeah.. news of the week. I had a hysterectomy last Monday morning. Full hysto, with the leaving of my ovaries purely to avoid medically induced menopause at a mere 31 years of age. I was sick for a long time, months really, and decided to get rid of the cause of the sickness. So here we are. I'm a week into recovery. I have to be home a minimum of 4 weeks, and then back to work. Checkup in 6 weeks. And then back to life at full speed ahead.

I mainly logged on to post a post from my best friend's blog. Ahhhh... yes... THAT phrase. The b f one. Well, life itself has changed the very meaning of that in the past 10 months also. Friendships once thought to be as solid as a rock have melted away like a sandcastle in a wave. Unexpectedly, other ones have cropped up. Life happens like that sometimes. Facts are what they are. Heartaches, headaches, and tears all encompassed in the phrase.

So anyway... a post from his blog (yes... his) is posted below. It is entirely an appropriate statement to be put on this humble mom's ramblings, although it's source page is, well, you'll have to check it out for yourself. clicky

Snagged post as follows:

"an open letter to the world at large.

so if we are to believe the people who claim to run things and whose influence somehow pervades our minds, then the following is an utter truth, backed by history and scripture, and the words of the Son of God Himself.

1 corinthians 13:13

'13 But now we still have faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love.'

this is from the bible in basic english translation. to my mind, the least ambiguously worded version i could find at a glance.

the last half is applicable. it has been proven again and again.

i have opined on love before, and i know now that love is an emotion, simply. a concept that we have grown out of familiarity and successful survival to define how we should act.

and yet we don't. faith seems to be the big one lately, and it seems to me that a person trying to reconfigure the message in his or her holy scripture is committing blasphemy and sin right there, by their own belief system. and then they try to justify it.

the point is, love is not a rational or irrational emotion. it is an emotion experienced by both rational and irrational beings whose brains, bodies, minds and souls are merely a cognicent interpretation as to the meaning or purpose behind what our inner selves have thus far experienced. we are built for the purpose of survival and reproduction. we have been given enough time and the right tools through nature to be aware of this fact. seeking deeper meaning to this is unnecessary because there is no further concrete idea of our function in existence other than to survive and reproduce, and now we can think about it while we do it.

at that level, why is not as meaningful as we perceive. how seems to be, but asking why and how at the same time yields an inaccurate and irrational answer.

the greatest of these virtues as proposed by a group of people thousands of years ago who thought a change would be nice. love is the greatest, and as the beatles said, love is all you need. hope and faith can be within the bounds of love, though faith is actually the very thing that will destroy religion or us all if they aren't checked.

so why is it so important to abandon reason for faith and then marginalize hope and love, which always provide a better alternative to wishing for something and not knowing why it does or does not happen like you wanted it to.

faith in the senses is all the faith we can have, and i am a personal witness to the ambiguous nature of our sensory perceptions and our interpretations thereof.

hope is a wish for the future to improve, but with only faith as a foundation, stagnation and stalemate will occur. hope for the future and the faith in humanity is all well and good, but without love to fuel the passion behind it, we are slovenly and ignorant. true love is not just a romantic notion. compassion, honesty, charity. these are all rooted in love, given the right intentions. the right intentions are sculpted from faith and hope as well.

for some reason, a reasonable thinker can call this like it's nothing, but it would seem to be the most utterly foreign concept to the masses.

and therein lies the problem. how do you impress the importance of rational thought on someone who is caught up in irrational thought? how do you change minds? it may not be possible on that level, and i accept that.

however, if you spread a good idea and make it available, in years or decades, there is a chance that, if anyone else who sees the same things i see also makes a positive statement, then there is an ever-increasing chance of a younger person who is searching for knowledge and understanding happening upon just one piece of it, understanding the idea that faith is not more powerful than love unless you're not thinking clearly. this person could then act accordingly and lead by example as well.

this is already at work in our art and philosophy areas of society, but commerce (an arbitrary construct relative to art and philosophy) and religion have lost sight of the overall goal of survival and reproduction and the meaning is almost entirely lost in the deluge of supercilious details.

the point is, love is supposed to conquer all, and it does. but we have to practice it unconditionally toward each and every person in the world. if not, things like everything we take as just being 'the world today' happen and peoples' lives are squandered and lost in the vain pursuit of an ignorant and invalid goal, faith conquering all. love is greater and faith can never overcome that.

faith, hope, and live remain, but the greatest of these is love.

if you believe that is the sacred word of God, then you had better examine your entire life and all your thoughts and actions. do you practice unconditional love for one another? i doubt it. it's hard. i still get upset a lot. but i know the point is to remember that we are all lost souls in a sea of lost souls, almost totally unaware that we and the sea are one and the same.

only the sea is self-aware and self-conscious. it should be more aware of its surroundings as well, and take it all into account. our perspective is not a definition of reality, merely an opinion on it. everything in the world and the universe is there, like it or not. we'd be better off to accept that fact and move on to how it works and understand what we are truly capable of, learning from history's mistakes that technology and science are neutral ideals. it's the people who have them and use them that bend and pervert them for ill gains or destruction. but the same science and technology can help others and it even makes it possible for me to talk about this and hope that others will read it and think about it.

this is all my opinion; you must judge what to agree or disagree with. but make sure you think long and hard about these things i write before jumping to a conclusion or assuming i'm off somehow. we're all off. that's my point. if we want to know what 'on it' is, we had better figure out how to get on it before it leaves without us.

later."


So there you go.

I'm off to do something...what that something is is yet to be determined. In my post-surgery state, I slept pretty much all day today... and that leaves me at this hour awake. ♥