If nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do.Angel (DavidBoreanaz, Angel)
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with
us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And
cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in
utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come
William Wordsworth
"As man is, God once was.
As God is, man may become."
C. S. Lewis, The Weight
of Glory:
"It is a serious thing," says Lewis, "to live in a society of
possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature
which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet,
if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations.
It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we
should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no 'ordinary'
people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations -- these are mortal, and their life
is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit -- immortal horrors
or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be
of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other
seriously -- no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling
for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner -- no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies
merriment."
...men
are, that they might have joy.
2
Nephi 2:25
My
Dad was cool. When younger he won first place in stock car races with the old jalopy he had turned into a blur of speed,
performed in a country music band (playing songs like “Tennessee Waltz” and “Hear That Lonesome Whippoorwill”
at Trestle Creek Inn near the tiny town of Hope), moved massive amounts of earth with a bulldozer, felled a scandalous amount
of trees, built our home himself including electric, plumbing, water well, etc. and wrote poetry to boot. In his seventies
he often could be found careening around sand dunes on the Oregon coast in a homely dune buggy that he had built from scratch.
When the young whippersnappers with their shiny new buggies got stuck in the sand my Dad would graciously pull them out with
his muscle buggy.
