It's a long one, so get your coffee

I don't have an entry for a month, and now two in two days! Amazing.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have been trying to really personalize my home. Over the "holidays" (and I really use that term loosely) I refinished an antique telephone desk. I must admit, I needed the help of my mom to answer such questions as "Is the point of priming the desk to practice painting?" and "I totally missed painting one leg. What do I do?" Despite these blips, I really enjoyed it! Cam would be proud of my domestic abilities! These are the before and after shots.

And another excerpt from the latest book I read. "Wicked" by Gregory Maguire. He just says it so much better than I:

"She wondered briefly if she was going insane. That night she sat up in a chair and though about what she had said.

A person who doesn't believe in the Unnamed God, or anything else, can't believe in a soul.

If you could take the skewers of religion, those that riddle your frame, make you aware every time you move - if you could withdraw the scimitars of religion from your mental and moral systems - could you even stand? Or do you need religion as, say, the hippos in the Grasslands need the poisonous little parasites within them, to help them digest fiber and pulp? The history of peoples who have shucked off religion isn't an especially persuasive argument for living without it. Is religion itself - that tired and ironic phrase -the necessary evil?

The idea of religion worked for Nessarose, it worked for Frex. There may be no real city in the clouds, but dreaming of it can enliven the spirit.

Perhaps in our age's generous attempt at unionism, allowing all devotional urges life and breath under the canopy of the Unnamed God, perhaps we have sealed our own doom. Perhaps it's time to name the Unnamed God, even feebly and in our own wicked image, that we may at least survive under the illusion of an authority that could care for us.

For whittle away from the Unnamed God anything approximating character and what have you got? A big hollow wind. And wind may have gale force but it may not have moral force; and a voice in a whirlwind is a carnival barker's trick.

More appealing-she now saw, for once-the old-timers notions of paganism. Lurlina in her fairy chariot, hovering just out of sight in the clouds, ready to swoop down some millennium or other and remember who we are. The Unnamed God, by virtue of its anonymity, can't ever be suspected of a surprise visit.

And would we recognize the Unnamed God if it knocked on our doors?"