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After a month of lacking inspiration, or the inclination to share it with the world, and in a spirit of lightheartedness (at last!), I write.

I first wish to address the delight of listening to the novel "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society," which I originally thought sounded like a horrid novel about a women's gossip and bridge association. How wrong I was! My most vivid regret is simply that I do not have a British accent, and never will. I certainly would be a much more charming young lady (for I am now twenty-four, turning such being the most fantastic feeling and most wonderful day! What a fantastic feeling to be a real lady!). I would have gentlemen doting on me from the front door to the end of the block (but of course I would turn them all away and fall in love with my gardener). Sigh. It's so lovely to listen to British voices reading memories and stories about the German occupation, dear friends and happy, simple island life on the isle of Guernsey, where some of my ancestors lived.

I so wish to live there now... And even more I wish to write. To write and write, to meet lovely people, to love them and to write about them.

What a wonderful world. What wonderful people there are *everywhere* and how happy they are to talk to us, and to be known. What a hilarious, informative and touching novel.

I feel so happy when that sly, uncontrollable bubble of laughter moves in me, like when Juliette describes her pompous former fiancé who, when moving his things into her flat the day before the wedding, packed her books into several wooden boxes and replaced them with his dozens of sporting trophies. She demanded that he put them back and broke up with him on the spot! (and later laughed in irony when her flat was bombed, because if she had put her boxes of books in the basement as he wished, she wouldn't have lost a single one). Or when Oscar Wilde wrote a young girl letters informing her of the 3rd life of her deceased cat, as a musketeer adventurer cat in a castle in France. Or right now, driving through Wyoming with my mother, laughing at rocks on hills that shape themselves as bears and squirrels.

I am undeniably charmed by Midwest smalltown life. I cannot get enough of it, right in the very moment that I am returning to the West. Driving through Indiana, mid Illinois, Michigan, Iowa... my heart! If only I could live forever in those brushing corn fields, painted with golden-rose light in the setting summer sun... I can't explain why my heart catches in my throat driving those roads, and knowing I am leaving. A piece of my heart will remain in Indiana, and in those roads between Chicago and Champagne, and may never be returned.

  BTW TYPOGRAPHY ANNUAL!!! <3 span="span">

 












 And Wichita Lineman! (which I got for free)

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My inspiration of late from Deuteronomy: 

[love love love Deuteronomy!]

Chapter 4, verse 27-29 ... did I already write about this?  

"And the Lord shall scatter you among the nations, and ye shall be left few in number among the heathen wither the Lord shall lead you. And there ye shall serve gods, and the work of men's hands, wood and stone, which neither see, nor hear, nor smell." 

This was the world that the boy Joseph Smith entered. A world that worshipped a faceless, 'substanceless' God. The less substantial God is, the easier it is to justify sin and a less meaningful life. Knowing that He requires things, that he has a body, a mind and heart, that he knows us, is capable of loving us and feeling emotionally toward us--that is more of a motivation to trust him.

So the next verse: But if from thence thou shalt seek the Lord thy God, thou shalt find him, if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul." 

How lovely. That is what Joseph Smith did. with all his heart he sought the Lord, the TRUE AND LIVING GOD, and he found Him. He learned about His nature immediately in that grove of trees where the Father and the Son appeared to him. 

I love that this was all written in one of the first books of the Old Testament, all foretold, and all fulfilled. 

Oh YES, and let me just throw this out there:

Be strong and of good courage, fear not, nor be afraid.. : for the Lord thy God, he it is that doth go with thee; he will not fail thee, nor forsake thee.

And the Lord, he it is that doth go before thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed.

THE END! :)