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Baths v showers? No contest...

Baths are great - deeply-relaxing, deeply-cleansing; and you can read - or sleep - if that way inclined (and I often am).

And very traditionally English!

After all, Samuel Pepys's wife once had a bath; so he complained (admittedly Pepys himself never did).

But ...

Very early this morning, I woke up with the stanza "Garden" in my mind and accordingly got up and posted it before returning to bed. (Otherwise, I would likely have forgotten some of it.) Here it is again:

The juice of Eden's bitter treeWas in the cup from which he shrank,And like our father Adam, heWas doomed to die ...

The "romantic" search for an escape from the mundane nature of life in this-world - that is, for enchantment - takes many, many forms; and is pursued by different people in widely varying ways.

A very incomplete list of the themes would include by religions/ spiritualties/ ideologies; through reading, TV and movies; ...

The juice of Eden's bitter treeWas in the cup from which he shrank,And like our father Adam, heWas doomed to die the day he drank.Enacting there the Fall afresh,He knew according to the flesh Our woe, and in obedience He did what Adam did in sin, That full atonement thus might thence begin.

My recent post "Pain. Paradise. Repeat" shows a T-shirt with the word pain 22 times and paradise 7 times, noting that the ratio of these two numbers approximates pi.

Bill left a comment there noting that those numbers correspond to July 22 -- which is his birthday, my sister's birthday, the date of my first major ...

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"Yuzi" Chahal's unique celebration after taking a hat-trick (three wickets in three balls) in last year's IPL

It is the IPL again - the Indian Premier League; which means the highest overall standard of T20 cricket in the world; with a match (sometimes two) for us to view every day, and for many ...

All four of these have been somewhat interchangeable symbolically.

First, I wanted to post these two stills from Twin Peaks, shared by WanderingGondola in a comment on "The white pebble, Peter, Humpty, and the key." (That's "TIBET" written on the map in the background, Debbie.)

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While I was on the road this afternoon, my meditations took me to the prayer offered by the father of Lamoni (who we can infer was named Laman but who is called only "the king" in the text). I recited it to myself, finding that I could do so easily despite never having intentionally memorized it, and began mentally ...

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Mary and the resurrected Jesus at the tomb

Where I presume later excisions is marked: ...

John 20: [1]: The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre, and seeth the stone taken away from the sepulchre.

[2] Then she runneth, and cometh to Simon ...

I've posted many times about times when, reading, I momentarily hallucinate a word that is not there and then discover this to have been caused by the influence of adjacent lines of text. This morning I had another such experience, seeing Humpty Dumpty at the end of a page of Words of Them Liberated. Unlike most such ...

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William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Les saintes femmes au tombeau (1890)

In "A feast for the god of war," I noted that Mardi Gras coincided with the beginning of the Year of the Fire Horse. In another 2026 coincidence of Chinese and Christian holidays, the significance of which is much more ...

And I am filled with charity, which is everlasting love; wherefore, all children are alike unto me; wherefore, I love little children with a perfect love; and they are all alike and partakers of salvation-- Mormon, Moroni 8:17

"Except to the eye of love, one Aberdeen terrier looks very much like another Aberdeen ...

As I was waking up this morning, I was thinking about what shape the next stanza in my series would take. It is to be about the Agony in the Garden, but beyond that I didn't have any very clear concept of it. (The basic framework and precise poetical form of the stanza series was given to me in a "download" during ...

At 2:28 this morning I received an email, addressed to a group of which I am part, which included this:

In the early 2000s I was very keen on Joseph Campbell, who occupied what was probably a similar cultural space [to Wayne Dyer]; and got most of his books. The basis was mixture of Jung and comparative mythology, ...

Last night I dreamt -- almost entirely in Chinese, which is unusual for me -- that I received a phone call from a roofing company informing me that they were suing my school. The grounds for the lawsuit were as follows.

My family had owned a cat that was extremely aggressive and used to scratch and bite people ...

For me, the significance of Good Friday is that this was when Jesus died; which he needed to do in order to fulfil, to complete, his core mission.

He did not need to die in the way he did, because any mode of death would suffice; and death was inevitable one way or another, sooner or later, for Jesus as for all ...

Last night, I watched Kill_mR_DJ's mashup of the Linkin Park songs "The Emptiness Machine" and "Guilty All the Same." Yes, watched, and not listened only. I don't usually watch music videos, but I watched this one.

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The video begins with the new, Emily Armstrong-fronted Linkin Park performing. ...

We are living through the end times when spirit is obscured by matter as a result of which even when the spiritual is acknowledged it is often perceived through the distorting lens of modernity.

One of the characteristics of the end times is that the whole era returns as part of a general summing up of the age, but ...

In "The pebble key" (March 26), I discuss how Joseph Smith's seer stones and specs were described both as white pebbles and as a "key." I connect this with Johnny English's comparing his "small key" to the "pebble" with which David brought down Goliath, and I also mention Joseph Smith's identification of "the white ...

When first on Heaven's bread they'd dined,They slept and woke again to findNew hunger. Day by day they fedAgain on manna, and are dead,For Moses never found a wayTo make the life he gave them stay. But Jesus' bread and Jesus' cup Will never fade into the past.

No, Jesus Christ will make his supper last.

The Book of Mormon uses the archaic plural brethren 499 times and the modern brothers 9 times.

Brothers always refers to biological siblings, both elder and younger. Laman and Lemuel are Nephi's "brothers," and he and Sam are their "brothers," too.

my elder brothers, who were Laman, Lemuel, and Sam (1 Ne. 2:5)

I ...

Today I learned that Duke Ellington's piano teacher was called Marietta Clinkscales -- a clear instance of onomastic determinism. Just as Wordsworth had to become a poet, Bolt a sprinter, and Colón a colonizer, Miss Clinkscales obviously had no choice but to become a piano teacher.

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I was looking up the Duke ...

Amidst our civilization characterized by extremely weak motivation - probably the weakest in the history of the world - there are individuals who are strongly motivated.

But these commonly make the mistake of assuming that their own personal motivation is something that can be scaled-up: the mistake of assuming that ...

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If I look back on the technological breakthroughs of my life, and reflect on the genius required to make them; none are more impressive than the bottom buttonhole of shirts.

I mean, of course, the idea of rotating the bottom buttonhole by ninety-degrees compared with those above it - to make ...

Traherne saw men as Cherubim,Each boy and girl a living gem,For so they had appeared to himWhen infant-eyed he looked on them.And what in infancy he knew,He never to the end outgrew. Conflicting visions make their claims For each to pass his judgment on, And so it was with Peter, James, and John.

Easter seems to be a time when the confusion, incoherence, and errors of mainstream Christianity become most evident; as mainstream Christianity finds ever more way of being wrong, of misdirecting attention, and sowing confusion!

Perhaps one root of this is the un-Christ-like, fake-virtue of humility.

This leads ...

I am reading Daymon Smith's Words of Them Liberated concurrently with Hugh Nibley's Enoch the Prophet.

In the introduction to the first Words book, Daymon incorrectly states that Tolkien used the name Azoyan for Numenor, adding his own interpretation of that name ("i.e., Zion") in parentheses. Every single word and ...

Last night I discovered Blue Sun Ben, a 1984 children's book by Jean and Claudio Marzollo.

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In "The Son of Righteousness, and the Talking Quartz of Kirtland," I report a sync in which a vivid fantasy about the Blue Sun of the Homeric age coincided with seeing the phrase "Son of Righteousness" -- a ...

This is:

Because "we" (the group with whom I identify) have, over many past generations, sunk so much effort, resources, sufferings into such-and-such aspects of the religion;

"Therefore" I/Now cannot possibly conclude that such activities and actions are here-and-now now useless, or harmful.

(Poor little me all ...