Living in Harmony

I love Sundays. It never fails that no matter how tired, or sick or emotional I am, church and worship never fail to uplift me. Church is kind of like the Statue of Liberty, give me your tired, your poor....We all come there seeking peace and comfort and strength. There is such power in sitting in a room full of people who are united in one purpose, learning to know and follow God. We had a great lesson in Relief Society about families living in harmony. The pianist played a chord that was right and then one that was out of harmony. It almost hurt my ears. That sound of dischord was very powerful in conveying the message of harmony. As we have prayed and read scriptures as a family, I've really noticed how much we get along lately. Jared and Ayla are reading together, playing together. Dave and I rarely if ever fight and when we do disagree we are respectful of each other. I have this overwhelming sense of heaven when we are having family night. These principles really work!

School is going well. I really enjoy the campus at the University. There are great trees and the beds are landscaped. The ground is really uneven though. I ahve to walk up quite a hill to get to astronomy and up another hill to go to the library. But I love being there. Going two days a week, I have very little guilt about being away from my kids and I get to really appreciate the time I have with them and away. Its really a best of both worlds kind of thing. I do feel constantly that i am not applying myself to the degree that I should. I know that I could do better and that I could get more out of my study, but, frankly, I'm tired! My body seems to be moving in slow motion now matter what I tell it. And growing a baby apparently inhibits the energy flow to the brain. I am learning a lot though. Astronomy has always been an interest of mine. When I was a little girl I remember the enormous telescope that Dad had in the closet. I always wanted to look through it, to see other worlds. This last Thurs. I looked at Saturn in my lab. Its so small in the eyepiece and so far away. But I wanted to just keep my eye there, to stare at it. The heavens are an amazing place, one we know very little about. It is a fascinating field with a really dynamic set of laws. Things are changing all the time and we can learn so much about who we are but studying these things.

I am also really enjoying British literature. So far, the anglo saxon poets have been my favorite but this week we are studying King Arthur and Sir Thomas Malory's Morte D'Arthur. I love literature and reading and studying words and what they convey. I do not miss the strain and concentration required for the art classes. Literature is much more relaxed for me. I really enjoy it. Some things I don't like to read but then as I ponder and really attempt to understand I begin to see such value in these things. My teacher says we are in a sense archeaologists. We are digging for information about the culture and beliefs. This tells us a lot about ourselves and where many things that we do come from.

Anthropolgy is a bit of a mystery. I understand the draw. To be a voyeur into someone else's way of life, to try to understand it from an objective perspective. But its not exactly my cup of tea. To some extent I disagree with my professor about there not being any "right" culture. That we all look through experience at others. This is true, but that doesn't mean that there are not universal values. Whether cultures practice them or not is irrelevant. We are studying a culture that live in the Dani valley in Indonesia. These people, in the 1960's, had not progressed beyond the stone age. They live a very primitive lifestyle, but it is also very laid back. They do not have work requirements like we would think, very little art or music (aside from spiritual) and they have some customs that I do not understand. One of which is removing fingers from their daughters when someone dies. I do not understand inflicting pain on someone for a spiritual reason. I'm having a hard time with this one. In any case, I'm trying to broaden my understanding and be more open to these people, who are children of God.