On a sunny March day Sarah and Michael and I first brought the kitties home. Sarah bought a cardboard carrier box that was decorated with cartoon-y space ships and planets. It was an apt illustration of how the experience would be so new for these little animals that they may just as well be floating through outer space. When we got home and let them out on the carpet, they walked around on tense and wobbly legs, timidly toppling around on their new terrain. To these weak framed fluff balls, Michael kept calling "Hello, life! Hello, life!" Since that day, I often think of the presence created by the lives of things around us. Sometimes I think of dead days that can't carry themselves and the brief spurts of life that find their way through them. In those bright moments I also think "Hello, life!"

I am going to do something a little crazy and be religious for a second. I've been re-thinking how similar religions are. Like how everyone is trying to pin the tail on the same donkey but we've been blindfolded and spun around so many times that it's hard. Also how human thought and connection and ability grows and changes and evolves on the same timeline. In this, the story of Jesus' life and the new covenant changes the way i think about people interacting with god. I sometimes think it marked a change in how all people interact with god. So, the reading for this Sunday (when i get confirmed...???) is this:

"The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt-- a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, "Know the LORD," for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. "

It is from jeremiah. Let me tell you what it means. It means that there was a period of time on the planet when people needed an external spiritual mediator. However, now god and truth and stuff can rest inside people. All people can have an internal spiritual flow of experience and connection with god and each other. this makes sense, also, when you think about sin as separation from god. If sin is the point where people became so self-aware that they needed a mediator to connect to their spiritual selves, we no longer need that mediator, ok? This authoritative tone is completely tongue-in-cheek. Please remember that any definition i have for words like 'god' and 'spiritual' rambles around in circles and is basically undefined. You can tell I am not convinced in reverence by how inconsistent my capitalization is. I can't even take words seriously, much less god and stuff.

there is a little girl in my class who tells me every hour that her nose is still running, like it's something new, like she's surprised every time she realizes that it hasn't stopped. that is how i feel about both this blog entry and my life.

hello, life!