Soooo, speaking of sleep deprivation… We were speaking of sleep deprivation weren’t we? Since it feels like my obsession these days, we must have been.
Why do our days have to get loooonger right when summer rolls around and the garden needs to be tended – on top of a kazillion other things that need to be done in the course of a day? Does the sun care? Does it take any moral responsibility for the fact that the human race is scurrying about in frantic haste on the surface of the the third planet, wearing themselves to a frazzle because the saying, “Make hay why the sun shines.” seems to make some kind of relative sense to our benumbed, exhausted, and guilt ridden minds?
Silence.
Just as I suspected, the sun’s not fessing up to anything. Yeah, I know, it’s summer somewhere on the planet all the time. That doesn’t really help!
I just watched the CGP Grey You Tube video You Are Two CGPGREY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wfYbgdo8e-8 and found myself having one of those “Aha!” moments. So the right brain is our silent partner? Yeah, sure. I doubt s/he is so silent. I suspect that silent right brain (Righty for short) is really the brains behind the weird dream sequences which inform us of the real state of our mind and the impending psychotic break we like to pretend isn’t happening.
You know what I am talking about, those dreams where the kitchen broom has grown to statue-of-liberty-size and chases us down the halls of our childhood home, which bizarrely looks a lot like our fifth grade classroom. Obviously, Righty is having some fun with us after a day of being hammered with twenty kazillion images/problems/paradoxes and only three rational choices.
So, we have two brains in one person? My son wondered if that was anything like the Trinity, three persons in one God. Don’t know.
Righty, any thoughts on that?
Oh, yeah, you’ll let me know tonight.
Sigh.
Dying for Revenge: The Lady Doc Murders 
I just finished reading Bill O’Reilly’s Killing Reagan. I’ve read a few other books about U. S. Presidents and other world leaders, and I am also currently reading Samuel Pepys The Unequaled Self by Claire Tomalin. Each of these books highlights the various roles people play throughout a lifetime. For many people their roles may change only slightly, or as in the case of Samuel Pepys, one may make a complete one-eighty and become very near the opposite of a previous self.
In Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, Chapter Three, entitled: The Night Shadows, he wrote, “A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart neatest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this.”
A balanced life is an opportunity to live to our fullest potential. I love the monastic ideal of dividing the day between the three core needs of our lives: prayer, work, and study.
Some people would say that we are more connected to the world than ever, but I wonder if this is really true. I heard a statistic this week that suicide is the third leading cause of death for teens. That tragic information made me pause. Why would teens, in a world full of options, choose to end their lives?
While my husband was alive, we came up with a great idea to write a story based on the wonder of raising our kids in the country. It seemed so right, like an apostolate. We knew we had been blessed in a mighty way, and that God had guided us to our little place and helped us to learn the amazing skills needed to garden and manage a mini-farm. John took to homesteading like a fish to water. Other homeschool dads used to call him “Our Amish Paul Bunyan.” So, it felt natural to share our joy and success with others. I wrote stories based on what we did everyday: meals, working our little garden, nurturing nature, loving kids… loving God. John was going to create the illustrations since he had a wonderful knack for drawing. Except he couldn’t. Leukemia intervened and that success was put off…forever it seemed.