Nancy's Musings

A few weeks ago my brother asked for recommendations for his book club, including for short stories. I recommended a very short work by Ursula K. LeGuin called " The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas " and they went for it. Well, it's like four pages long. So on the night of his book club, my little brother texts me: "What does it mean?" His very literal-minded book club had tried on several scenarios for the allegory, but none of them fit entirely, so they'd basically given up in disgust. Naturally, I went straight for the meta. "It's about censorship in fiction," I eventually posited. I can defend that reading, too, as counter-intuitive as it is. But really, it's just not that complex. The story's power is in its non-specificity (they called it "vague" which isn't wrong). It is not the moral dilemma it ostensibly seems, but a realistic distillation of contemporary life (anyone out there seen The Good Place ?). As a moral di...

Nephi wrote, "do not spend money for that which is of no worth, nor your labor for that which cannot satisfy," but follow the Savior, and "feast upon that which perisheth not, neither can be corrupted, and let your soul delight in fatness" (2 Nephi 9:51). Of what is this abundance (called "fatness") made? What comprises it? Personal Context: After being without regular, paid work for nearly nine years, I finally have a part-time job. This feels like wealth, in some ways. But my soul is hurting today for many reasons, and I turn so often for comfort to things that I want that I should not have: not just indulgences that I can afford now, but peace at the cost of agency, equality at the cost of freedom, and loved ones who make the decisions that I would make. In prayer I leak all the anxiety and terror of the world we live in now. It fills me like the fierce air of an empty oven when I just wanted the memory of baking. And God wonders why I am asking for...

So. . . people with guns stormed the capitol building in Michigan to try and intimidate legislators into voting to end the general "not doing things" thing. I think they were wrong to carry guns, and wrong to protest, but they had to do something . People are losing jobs and food is becoming more scarce, and things are scary, and people are dying, and they're saying, "just sit at home and bake sourdough!" which begins to sound a lot like, "let them eat cake" after a few weeks, and we've been doing this for. . . more than a month? We should be able to expect our government to intervene, to have plans in place, to be organized and encouraging. But we can't because we have very little say over where our tax money actually goes. If we don't have government, whom can we depend on? Well, there's Cthulhu. So I've been listening to lots of stories of H.P. Lovecraft and laughing and thinking and being repulsed for reasons he a...