There are times when I have the free time to write but no ideas to provide inspiration. Then, there are times when I have so much that I could write about that my mind must resemble a trampoline full of children, all jumping madly, shoving and jostling and accidentally sinking their teeth into each others scalps. When this plethora of ideas occurs it usually corresponds with a time when I am unable to write (in the car), or have more important things (small people, actually) demanding my attention.

People reading my last post might have been left scratching their heads in confusion and thinking that I must be slightly insane. I can only apologize and explain that I have no idea why where I live affects me so strongly, just that it does. At one point my husband and I, together with our firstborn (less than a year old at the time) were sharing a home with a friend of his in a nice little corner of suburbia. After a period of time I began to feel as if my soul were being stifled or drowned. One day while driving I heard the song "Soul Meets Body" and I burst into tears. Now, some people would just chalk this up to being female and prone to things like mood swings and crying - but my family and others that know me would probably recognize just how odd an occurrence that is coming from me.

I have many theories as to the cause, ranging from the plausible to the fanciful: a variant form of SAD (seasonal affective disorder). A deficiency of vitamin D caused by spending almost six months hiding from the sun and the heat. A Traveler somewhere in my ancestry causing a dislike for regular society and feet that itch to wander.

The one I find to be more plausible - which would probably seem the most fanciful to some - is that to me, cities seem to have an almost palpable spiritual miasma that blights and withers and destroys. I cannot help but believe that people were not meant to live this way and that it adversely affects people to be living in such close proximity to each other and to be surrounded by ugliness, decay and filth instead of the beautiful handiwork of God. Cities are full of distractions, brimming with easily accessible entertainments and vices.

"For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse."

It is a lot easier to ignore the invisible attributes of our Creator when we are busy looking at what man has created, instead.

I have returned! (She says, as the tumbleweeds blow past and a lone cricket chirps)

I spent just over ten days with my family members that live in Tennessee. I told my husband he was lucky I love him, or I wouldn't have come back! It was so depressing to return to Florida and to know that my twenty-year exile here is going to continue indefinitely. Have I mentioned that I hate Florida? Probably not, but I'll mention it now - I hate Florida. I really, really hate Florida. Sure, the beaches are beautiful, but I live in the center of the state and have not been to a beach in years. The heat and body-crushing humidity present for at least half the year manage to be outstripped by the soul-crushing, year-round power of the ugliness of most of the populated areas of the state, and at this point, the populated areas cover a significant portion of the state. There are areas here in which you could drive for two hours and the only way to tell you are not in the same city where you started are the signs declaring your passage through a chain of towns - towns that are built not for beauty but for commercial interest, where the ugliness reaches the level of a visual assault. I am 'lucky' enough to live in an area surrounded by low-population agricultural and commercial areas - a chain of pastures and phosphate mines. Here the scenery is not ugly, merely tediously tame. Most of Florida is quite flat and thus offers no intrigue, no mystery - there is no wondering what scene might unfold as you reach the crown of the hill, or what might lie beyond the next curve, because there are no hills.

Have I mentioned that I'm stuck here? (I sure am being a grumbly, grumpy, discontented whiner today) I am though - stuck like the rat in the trap. My husband has lived most of his life here and has, in the past, shown a great reluctance toward relocating elsewhere. I think he would do so if he found a good job elsewhere, or at least one in a field that interested him, but in today's economy finding any job, let alone one worth relocating for, is a dim possibility. The other, much stronger, chain holding us here are his parents. My mother has seven children and seven grandchildren (not including a handful of children and grandchildren related via marriage rather than blood). As her youngest child is only eight, it will be several years yet before her nest is likely to empty.

My husband, on the other hand, is his mother's only child and our children are her only grandchildren. When my husband responded to my comment about only coming back to Florida because I loved him, it was to say wryly that we would drive his parents into an early grave if we left. I wish this were only a joke, but I am uncomfortably aware that in his mother's case, this is probably quite true. His mother is the flower unlucky enough to have grown in a crack in the pavement, blossoming despite the careless tread of passersby and the withering glare of the sun. Should the little bit of soil nourishing her roots ever be depleted she would become a desiccated shell ready to crumble under the first accidental brush of a foot.

My mother, aware of my feelings of uncomfortable obligation toward my husband's mother, said that she would pray that my in-laws would desire to change locations and move away from Florida. For a moment, baseless hope struggled forth from its cocoon and began to slowly spread its wings in preparation for flight... only to be crushed underfoot later that day by careless remarks from my father-in-law, blissfully unaware of my hatred for Florida. He mentioned how one of his sisters has tried to convince him, for years, to return to New Hampshire but that he loves the Southern climate. This was discouraging, but not an insurmountable barrier, as Tennessee's climate is quite mild in comparison to New England. The real crushing blow was delivered later, when he mentioned that his wife needs to teach for another nine years in the county they reside in before she can retire with full benefits.

Nine years!?!

Nine years.

Hope died.

I've been wandering, parched and footsore, in this desert for twenty years and I fear that God will leave me here for another twenty. Not my will, but Thine, even though my stifled spirit grieves within me and physical tears threaten to spill past the boundaries of my eyelids. Oh Father! Have mercy on me and teach me to be content and joyful regardless of where I dwell. This burden is small and laughably light compared to the burdens that others are given to carry and I feel ashamed of the fact that it feels so heavy.

For those few of you that visit regularly, or semi-regularly, and make my soap box less lonely - I'm going to be on vacation for a couple of weeks and unlikely to have much, if any, time on the internet.

I'm afraid I have no cat to post a picture of for the duration of my absence, so here's a selection of pictures I had on my computer (including one of someone else's cats!):

Need a laugh? Wes had me laughing out loud with the following post about men wearing earrings. Enjoy!

I've noted some interesting things in association with a discussion I had over at Vox's, about the appropriateness of making crass and mean-spirited jokes in a public, printed format about someone's dead daughter (a girl that did nothing immoral to merit her brutal death).

1) It's acceptable for a man to critique Vox and to suggest that his behavior is other than what it should be. Heaven forbid a woman do so.

I do wonder what the response would have been had someone with a masculine handle been the one to say something. It was rather frustrating to see some of the responses I got and to see my intent and my words misconstrued (sometimes wildly) solely on the basis of the fact that they were written by a woman.

2) Feelings. Most people seemed to believe that I was trying to make people -feel- badly.

In fact, I had tried to be careful about using language that would suggest I wanted people to modify behavior based on what they felt. My last comment sums up my position fairly well.

Oh, I've laughed about the macabre, The Abe. As you said, that's human nature.

I've not been speaking of feelings, nor suggesting that anyone here needs to feel badly. I've been speaking of behavior. Just because we have the right to free speech, it does not follow that we should say, or more to the point, print, everything we think. Just because we can make jokes about someone's dead daughter being coyote poop (for an example) does not mean that we should - especially in print in a publicly accessible format.

I see nothing wrong with my belief that behavior should be constrained by respect for other people. Perhaps I'm old-fashioned that way.

Edit: I suppose it doesn't hurt to clarify that I believe as Christians, our default behavior when dealing with strangers, acquaintances, friends and family should be respectful. We should continue treating people with respect until they show, through word or action, that such respect is not merited. As Christians, we are also warned about the wickedness of the tongue and the need to keep it restrained.

I read the Darwin awards occasionally. They make me laugh. I thought it was pretty hysterical when that guy known for working with grizzlies was - surprise - killed by grizzlies. So a part of me responded to the black humor implicit in the headline "Teenage folk singer killed by coyotes" when reading a post about it over at Vox's.

But I take issue with certain things about his post, namely this:

And then of course, when one first reads the headline, it's hard to escape the fleeting thought that there could be an element of divine justice at work there.

As far as I can determine there was no reason why THIS death should have any element of divine justice at work. I simply cannot imagine God taking the time to send coyotes to tear apart a young folk singer when people like Al Gore, Roman Polanski and Susan Smith are still alive and kicking.

I was also seriously irritated by some of the people that commented. Some of them treated it as a great joke. Some of them self-righteously commented about how the girl should have known better than to go alone and unarmed into a wilderness park. (Yeah, because NONE OF THEM have ever done anything naive or stupidly dangerous.) Others used it as an opportunity to flex their manliness and declare that they weren't afeared of no coyote - they would just shoot it, stab it, or tear it apart with their bare hands.

A young woman gets torn apart by wild animals and it's a joke. Clearly, her unprepared naivety was a crime worthy of such a savage ending.

What the hell?

I've been musing again, on the subject of men, women and marriage. (What follows may seem somewhat rambling and disjointed, I'm just following the direction of my thoughts with what I'm writing.)

Marriage is meant to represent the union of Yeshua* and the Church. It's no surprise, then, that it has come under such heavy fire and that day by day we see the already vast gap growing between men and women. Both men and women are willing to lay the blame anywhere but on themselves. Both sides are full of bitterness and each accuses the other of being the problem.

My previous post was not meant to lay the blame at the feet of men while absolving women of their responsibility. I'm sorry that it was interpreted that way. Perhaps I can clarify the disorganized and often muddled thoughts behind my post.

What I see, in both Feminism and the Game, is a distorted view of the opposite sex. Feminism views men as chauvinist pigs, potential rapists, bumbling fools and adult-sized children. The Game paints women as whiny, weak, sluts, manipulative and childish. Feminists claim that this is what men naturally are and the Game claims that this is what women naturally are - and each uses this claim to justify the use of their system as 'necessary.'

Now, the men that visit here might say 'but that is what most women really are like!' to which I can only respond that is not how women are supposed to be. A system designed around responding to and manipulating women in their current, broken state is not going to help bring men and women back together, to make them partners exemplifying the relationship of Yeshua with the Church - the same way that Feminism could never 'fix' men via legislation.

Men and women have both been severely crippled in the last few decades, but the problem predates the rise of Feminism. There was an excellent article linked through Ladies Against Feminism at one point, showing how the family has been systematically torn down - first by removing men from the home before the advent of Feminism and afterward by removing women from the home, via Feminism. The result was to leave children exposed and vulnerable without the protective influence of their parents. (John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education exposes some of the human actions that helped bring the family to its knees.)

Now, I don't want to mimic Eve here and lay the blame at Satan's doorstep. All of us are responsible for our participation in actions that run counter to God's will. The only solution is to once again fix our feet on the path of righteousness and keep our eyes on God. This does not include supporting systems or attitudes that will only cause the rift between men and women to widen. Feminism and the Game have something in common - both are about dominating the other sex through manipulation. The method of manipulation is different but the result is the same - destruction and decay.

Now, I'm mentally cycling through the men in the Bible, and there are a lot of examples of what I would call 'real men' there. Enoch, Noah, Moses, Joshua, Samuel, David, Solomon, Elijah - but the common theme in the lives of these 'real men' is not how they dealt with women, but the fact that they all strove to follow God and to walk in His ways. In fact, it was when they took their eyes off God and started focusing on women that they got into trouble. David committed adultery with Bathsheba and the first son she bore him died because of it. Solomon took foreign wives and was drawn into the worship of false gods and the size of the kingdom his descendants inherited was vastly reduced.

Paul stated that it was better to marry than to burn with passion - but he also exhorted Christians not to be bound together with unbelievers. If a man cannot find a godly woman he's better off with no woman at all.

I guess what I've been trying to say is that I believe it is much better for a man to focus on being what God wants him to be, than in focusing on what a woman needs him to be. The latter is unlikely to happen without the former, and focusing on the former will make the latter simply an incidental result.

*I just like using Yeshua better than Jesus or Christ. Perhaps because Yeshua is not used as profanity.