An Interesting Perspective on the LDS Mother Blogging Phenomenon

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/01/15/feminist_obsessed_with_mormon_blogs

My friend and coworker, Kelsie, sent me this link and I found it very entertaining and interesting. Isn’t it funny that there are feminist woman, not of the LDS faith, who love reading these LDS mothers’ blogs? It is especially funny to me because I am LDS and I want to be a mother, but I am not really interested at all in any of these popular LDS blogs (except for NieNies) … I’ve read a few entries from some of them but they were never something I kept going back to…that I couldn’t get enough of. Why? I think it is because it is nothing new. They are describing life as I know it. I may not be a mother yet, but I want to be. And my home was and is a happy one. I have always felt loved and appreciated and supported by my family and friends. And I have always, even in the most difficult of times, been supported by my faith. So, though it is nice, from time to time, to visit one of these blogs and learn how to do a craft, etc., reading the day to day account of their life isn’t really something that entertains me (unless it is a blog of someone in my family and then it becomes very interesting to me).

Another thing this article made me think of was a trip Delys and I took to Salt Lake a few years ago. We went to temple square and visited some of the church history museums and had a grand time. In one of the museums, there was an exhibit that displayed accomplishments and stories from the life of each of the latter-day prophets, from Joseph Smith to President Hinckley. It was incredible to read about all that they did—all the good they accomplished. Nearby, was a room with an exhibit dedicated to the women of the Church. And honestly, it left us feeling a little disappointed. I don’t think I am a feminist in the way that the term is used in today’s world, but I do know the value of women and all they have and all they can offer to society and to the world. And this exhibit didn’t really show that for me. I think it showed a pioneer quilt and dresses. Things like that. And those things are fine. But after seeing the accomplishments of the Presidents of the Church, I wanted to see the pictures and hear stories about their mothers, the women that had nurtured these great men. I wanted to see Eliza R. Snow’s powerful poetry and writing displayed. I wanted to see Minerva Teichart’s painting of Esther. I wanted to see Lucy Mack Smith’s autobiography of her son. Not that the quilts and the dresses are not important. They are. But I feel like sometimes as women, that is all we see.

I believe that being a mother and a wife and a daughter is the most beautiful and fulfilling thing a woman can do in this life and the next. More fulfilling than any job that I have now or any job I may have in the future. It is fulfilling because it connects you to people in a way that you cannot connect to them professionally. It is fulfilling because it is permanent. It is fulfilling because you are needed and loved always and you need and love others always. No one needs and loves you like a child does. There is nothing else in the world like it.

And I can see then, how being a mother and wife, is a full-time position. Which makes it more amazing to me when you have women like Lucy Mack and Eliza R. Snow, and my mother and my mother-in-law who are not only raising their families, but who are consistently creating beautiful things and consistently contributing to their communities in the school systems and through community service, and simply by taking care of their neighbors. I am constantly amazed by what is accomplished by the mothers and wives and the daughters and single women that surround me.

Men, I am constantly amazed by you. I may not have children to support, but I do know what it is like to work an 8 to 5 job, sometimes an 8 a.m. – 10 p.m. job, on a day to day basis. But you do it, every day, because you love your wife and your children and you want the best for them. And you do it all, even when it is grueling or dull, and are still able to find fulfillment in it. And you do it for a lifetime. I know that I have gone on and on about what women can contribute, but it has always been clear to me all the good that men can contribute to the world as well. My father and father-in-law, and my brothers and brother-in-laws are living proof of it.

Everyone Needs to Watch This

Rachell told me last night that Josh Groban released a new CD so it is time for all of you to watch this and revel in the beauty that is Josh's voice:

All of you need to watch this

All of You Need to Watch This

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0REJ-lCGiKU&feature=player_detailpage

Geology, mostly.

This blog could be tricky. For some reason the pictures are showing up as text/code, so I am not sure what is what. I will do what I can though. I have recently had a host of "firsts," I think including this blog (first of this year). My other firsts are a little more noteworthy. For the first time I had to buy jeans with a 36 waist. Kind of embarrassing. I am going to revise that statement to say I chose to buy 36 for fear of not being comfortable, but could have handled 34. Anyway, that first led to another: my first purchase of running shoes. I decided I needed to do something quickly about this growing problem (pun intended). So I have been out running a couple of times, and it hurt. But I am probably headed to the Bahamas in April for a geology trip, so I need to be looking good. The third first is that I donated blood for the first time. I figure getting rid of a pound or two of blood also helps keep the weight down. I'll probably donate weekly. And I had no problem. Since I assume that only family reads this, I don't see a need to explain what kind of problem I might have had. Those are the firsts I had on my mind. There are probably some others, too.

The following is almost strictly geology related. If you are reading this blog and not interested in the geology pictures, I suggest skipping to the last picture for a good laugh.

I have started working with a professor that focuses on geophysics, and that includes seismic work. I have been going out into the field with him to gather data, and it has been cool. The next 5 pictures are from a trip to an old and massive landslide a couple hours south of Provo. One of the sweet things about this setup is that I get paid to be taught. Love it. This day I was clocked in for 14 hours.




This (above) is looking down on the landslide where we gathered data. If I remember the picture correctly, almost everything you see is landslide material.



This is our project site. It is a little bog that sits on the landslide. The idea is that we can shoot seismic and find where the contact point is between bog material and slide material. Then carbon dating of the bog material closest to the contact will give us a rough estimate on when the slide occurred.



Here we are laying the geophones and line to record the data. The phones are every two feet.



The way we get the data is by pounding on a steel plate. That generates a wave of motion that is detected by the phones. We hit the plate at every phone, somewhere around fifty times. That is why the professors bring students along. This guy hammering is a grad student in the class that my mentoring professor teaches. We were the only two students.



This is a picture of how the seismic data shows up on the computer. Not much can be said about this. More correlating data is necessary.



The above is a sweet shot looking towards Provo from Provo Canyon. Specifically from the Bridal Veil Falls fold in Provo Canyon.

The next four pictures are from a structural geology field trip. If you would like to know more, I can send you the write-up I had to do. I tried to put a link to it, but was unsuccessful. The pictures are kind of in reverse order too.



This is what we climbed up to see, the very middle of the hinge of the fold.



I hoped this picture would give some idea of how high we were. You can see the road in the bottom corner.



This is trying to climb a face up to the hinge zone. Only one professor in the department would even try something like this with 20 students.



This is where we climbed to, zoomed in from the road. End of field trip.



This sign says it all. This is Death Valley, a field trip from mid October. The next several pictures are all there.



This is a salt flat we were looking at.



This sign says Sea Level on it. I haven't zoomed in yet.



Sea Level zoomed in.



Devil's Golf Course, which is a badly deformed salt flat, more or less. It looks like it has been plowed. It hasn't.



This picture is to show the vastness of the playa lake we were on. A playa lake is a dried up lake that occassionally fills slightly.



These are magic rocks. If you look closely you can see a trail behind the rocks. Nobody knows how they move, although there are theories. Some of the rocks are fifty pounds or more. The trail indicates they move when the lake bed is wet, but there are no other marks (like foot prints) that could say how it is done. It has to be wind, although the conditions to move fifty pound rocks are hard to imagine. Another theory is aliens. You could google this.



Sand dunes in the valley.



Death Valley, from the top. I still don't know how to orient pictures. Obviously. Death Valley has the greates topographi relief of any location in the country. Meaning that the vertical difference over the horizontal difference is huge. The mountains on the other side of the valley top out at 13000 feet, and drop almost straight down, as it were. End of geology pictures.



This is on my birthday. Elin made a delicious strawberry-rhubarb pie. Really, really delicious.



Logan came home looking like this once during high school. More or less. Turns out I have very narrow shoulders. I'll say it is the angle.

A Stage Without A Play

This is a marvelous bit of Nibley from a lecture he was asked to give at Westminster College in 1977.

The world we live in today is a stage without a play. This was brought home to me thirty years ago when at the dawn of a cold March morning, I happened to approach the Third Mesa with Brother Virgil Bushnoff, a long time missionary to the Hopis. When we stepped through the little tunnel into the windy plaza, it was still dark and what I saw was most remarkable. To an audience consisting of only one or two ancients, and a handful of shivering children, a full scale Greek chorus and 52 dancers, elaborately and splendidly attired, tremendous headdresses and so forth. [. . .] were performing a sort of play with the protagonist in it. And why were they going to all that trouble with nobody to look at it? I soon learned that this drama was part of a cycle that went through the year.



We had come to the Mesa to visit Tom Quisho, 94 years old at that time, who was one of the grand old men of the Hopis, and he explained many things to us. These people were at that time enduring, and since have endured what we would consider, insufferable hardships. And that cheerfully because they knew what they were doing. They had a plot to their play; they had a scenario to go by. What was most impressive was that this carefully staged theater was being performed in a vacuum. At that time there was only a dirt road, (that was a long time ago), leading to the Mesa and it ran for sixty miles through a scene of utter desolation [. . .] There was nothing but sky and rock. So it seemed as it really was, that we actually were beholding a drama in space, in bare space with nothing but sky and primordial earth between. A rocky planet orbiting in a vast emptiness. To find an inhabited planet in space is remarkable enough but to find a full scale drama in progress when you stumble on it—what’s going on here? That’s something truly fundamental.

The whole strength and astounding survival of the Hopis lies in the plot to the scenario by which they live. And my point is that our world does not have such. A scenario in which their real life, the vicissitudes of life, were a parody, a side show, a mock play on the side—and that’s the only play outsiders ever see. And our existence is a parody, it’s not the real play. Scenario is a Hollywood word. It’s a good one, we have to use it [. . .] It’s very old, it’s a Renaissance word, but the dictionary defines it as an outline or synopsis of a play, or the book of an opera, showing the scenes and entrances and exits of the actors. An abstract of the chief incidents in any drama or work arranged according to act and scene, giving a sort of skeleton to the piece, that’s your godspell. That’s your spiel. That’s your play [. . .] And a scenario is then [. . .] a plausible story to explain a certain condition or situation.

Whereas a model is a plausible mechanism to show how something works. The dictionary calls that a set of plans or designs for a building to be erected or similar drawings to scale of a structure already built [. . .] In general, models are scientific, scenarios are religious or philosophical; they go together. The properties of the play suggest the play, they don’t determine it [. . .] There are a number of scenarios available today, not just the Hopis’. Every scenario is a model and has its merits and its faults. The best have survived for hundreds of years. And the weaker ones fall by the way. But all are tentative. Each one offers only a suggestive solution.

As with the gospel too. Try it on for size. Try it this way and see how it works. The best models are strong enough to dispense with dogmatic touchiness. The question is not which scenario explains everything perfectly, as we know none of them does, but which gives you the best explanation of the most phenomena to your greatest satisfaction. You choose the model that suits you best.



Now, what Joseph Smith gave the world was a remarkably full and complete scenario. An enormous structure actually. And this accounts for a good deal of what happened when he started giving it to the world. Brigham Young shows us the reaction on both sides. He “rushed as to a banquet, spread by the prophet.” He came like a starving man. Why? He tells us quite plainly: because his world had no real explanation for anything. No satisfying scenario. It was not hard work or austere living that made life gloomy in Puritan New England, but the sense of not really knowing what it was about. This went beyond the scope of their disciplinary rules. As Samuel Sewell sat in church one morning, he writes in his famous journal, “The idea occurred to me with great force and conviction that Jesus Christ had never existed.” And this from the most devout and conservative member of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

So, Brigham says “being raised in that atmosphere there was more or less of a gloom over my feelings form the earliest days of my childhood that I have in my recollection. Until I heard the everlasting gospel declared by the servants of God. The secret feeling of my heart was that I would be willing to crawl around the earth on my hands and knees to see such a man as was Peter, Jeremiah, Moses, or any man that could tell me anything about God and Heaven. But to talk with a priest was no more satisfactory to me than it is now to talk with lawyers. And then when I saw Joseph Smith, he took heaven, figuratively speaking and brought it down to earth and he took earth and he brought it up and opened it up in plainness and simplicity the things of God. Under that preaching the gloom vanished and has not since troubled me for a moment. I gave away all I had, I started to preach the gospel. I was obliged to do it. For I felt as though my bones would consume within me if I did not. Consequently I devoted my time to preaching.”

So there you have it. As he said, “outside of the religion we have embraced, there is nothing but death, Hell, and the grave.” And my question is do we have any competing thesis to offer here? I have heard old timers, pioneers, declare more than once they would gladly, like my grandparents for example, gladly go through everything they did all over again. A thousand times if necessary. Why? They hadn’t seen Joseph Smith. They didn’t know him. They joined the church in the old country and came over here, and it was for the gospel. Why always for the gospel, a mere doctrine and abstraction? Because it told them what they yearned to know and nobody else could. There were times when they possessed nothing else and then they considered themselves richest. But that was enough.

The reaction of the world around Joseph Smith clearly proclaims bankruptcy. I think it is one of enraged frustration. Some years ago, surveying all of the anti-Mormon works, from the beginning to the 1950s, I noted there a standard stereotyped reaction to Joseph’s message. The trouble was not only that Joseph Smith was putting forth the most wildly extravagant story and doctrine that anyone had ever heard, but what was far worse, they had nothing whatever to put up against it. Hence, the two paradoxes often noted in the history of the church: the fierce, unparalleled persecution of the Mormons for no apparent reason whatever, and on the other hand, the incredible loyalty of the Latter Day Saints to their cause, regardless of the hardships they had to face or the difficulty in getting along with each other or accepting some of their leaders. Even the apostates could never shake its influence once they’d come under it. The scenario was worth everything. For that they were willing to sacrifice anything.

Things of which I can hardly contain my excitement for:

I was awakened in the middle of the night 2 nights ago by the sound of thunder. I don’t know the last time that has happened.

Forrest bought us a futon for our guest room.

It has thundered, flashed lightning, and poured rained intermittently throughout the last two days and it has been glorious.

The BYU football team is practicing for a quickly approaching season (they are probably out there playing as I write this!)

The first BYU football game of the 2010 season in LaVell’s stadium is on September 4th! (I know, who ever thought I would be this crazy about football? Ah well, it was bound to happen sometime—it’s in my blood (i.e. Grandma Jenson))

I get to dust off my BYU football jersey that Forrest got me for my birthday last year and I can wear it on September 4th!

In exactly 4 weeks I will be with my sister Delys and my niece Katelyn.

My parents are going to be here in 5 days and I get an early birthday party!

The third book of the Hunger Games is coming.

I want to eat a Café Rio pork salad right now.

I watched Finding Neverland this week and cried.

A slice of Watermelon sprinkled with crystal light sounds amazing (thank you Jacob and Mary Jane for reminding me of this delight)

My little brother is serving a mission in Milan and he sent me the sweetest letter.

We are thinking of going to Atlanta for Thanksgiving!

My brother just moved to Chicago and I want to visit him!

The movie Flipped – I can’t wait.

I finished hemming half of the curtains in my house. (I would probably be completely finished if I had Blythe here with me!)

An inside joke that I have with Laura and Caitlin about scrubs (not the show).

I have almost finished reading Atlas Shrugged.

Tomorrow is Friday