Categories
faith family personal

I Now Know Five Things

I used to know four things.

I mean really, really, know, for certain, in a shut-up-you-can’t-tell-me-otherwise. Because it’s important to feel this way about something, and dangerous to feel this way about the wrong things, I revisit the List of Things I Believe often. This time, I made a dramatic addition to the list while my son fell asleep on me. I’d like to make this into a “you know, my son taught me something today” type of tear-jerker, but it can’t be. My son was falling asleep on me, in the same rocking chair in which my mother rocked me to sleep, and I was thinking about cold certainty.

The list used to be:

  1. I am.
  2. I sense.
  3. I want.
  4. I don’t always sense what I want.

I’ve always been uneasy about that last one. It assumes something, and perhaps a great deal, about time. The last bit doesn’t count at all when I’m completely satisfied. But HA!, I don’t care about the list when I’m completely satisfied anyway, so it doesn’t matter. I’ve come up with other cheap tricks to get around that uneasiness, but nothing’s stuck for long. Here’s the next trick.

  1. I am.
  2. I sense.
  3. I want.
  4. Now is a moment different from others I can remember or imagine.
  5. At different moments my sensations correlate with my desires to different degrees.
  6. I need to work on the wording quite a bit, but that’s the list for now. In the end, this list gets me to a point where I can guess that other things exist. Why I would bother with this while a warm bundle is spreading a drool spot on my shoulder is another issue entirely.

Categories
nshrine personal

nshrine.com sees a milestone

Over 25,000 candles have been placed in public shrines (and now private shrines) on nshrine.com. Though it was a public candle in a well-traffic shrine, I don’t feel quite okay about linking directly to it here, as it was a candle of mourning.

So I have mixed feelings about the milestone. Though if you browse a few shrines, you’ll see that there are many playful and even goofy shrines, most shrines and candles are for people to mark or share the sorrows and losses they’ve experienced. So I can’t really jump up and down–“Yay! Another moment of mourning!”–I can be pleased that there’s one more moment where someone expressed something probably best not left unexpressed.

Categories
photos

Seeing A Bit Deeper

I feel pretty confident of my ability to frame a snapshot of a flat snapshot. I’m back to trying to understand how deeper things flatten in the camera. I suppose at some point I should learn how to represent depth well, but for now, I’m just trying to flatten more and more. In this case, I think I took it to an absurd degree. This is a light fixture on a pipe sticking out of a wall about a foot below a medallion.

Categories
family glove personal

Going To Have To

Me: Hold on. Glove.
Flora: Daddy, you don’t have to take a picture.
Me: No, I don’t have to. I’m going to.
Flora: Same thing.