Saturday! Finally! amidst all the mundanity

it's an archtypal saturday morning.

we woke up late. (i haven't woken up late since I decided to be a more serious writer -- as most of you know 5 am is my date with my muse.) I had echinacea tea, j & a joined Lynn for some chai tea. She picked up an obsession from Andrea G. & the kids have joined her in her devotion to the stuff...

J & I both have the coughing, sneezing, sniffling, sneezing croup so HONEY in my tea (since I read _secret life of bees_ this summer, I have the sneaking suspicion that honey *is* the cure for everything) was great. Been listening to coldplay parachutes loud.

The kids are playing in the new sandbox grandpa garry just built them yesterday (read: that's not a sandbox -- that's a SMALL BEACH.)

The whole family ate popcorn and watched the neverending story last night. We've been fielding questions from Jaelyn about "what *is* the -nothing- though?" all morning.

I'm imagining a psuedo sci fi story where the nothing (eg. anti matter, black hole) slowly approaches the earth, and there are religious wars in churches, which are, along with casinos and brothels and prisons -- packed out....but the whole story wouldn't be about the world coming down (and i'm thinking that the world-coming-down story would be gentle and inevitable like the short story _The Ceiling_ and the novel _Blindness_ - not like the movie _Armageddon_) it would be about a religious conflict over whether or not different END TIMES theological frameworks (the kingdom coming, the rapture, the millenia, the apocalypse) could be REALLY HAPPENING in the approach of the coming nothing or if the coming nothing signalled something else. Kind of like a theological debate in the style of the _Name of the Rose_ -- only not quite so death-and-destruction as that story....

Eh?

And we put an offer on a house closer to Malone and it was accepted and now our house is on the market and we have to paint our kitchen ceiling, fix our bathroom (downstairs) walls, put in a little flooring, make up for three years of bad gardening plus the onslaught of fall...and we're signing hundreds of papers. And the tenure process is taking forever along with a self study that i'm heading up in the department -- we're sorting data and developing coding processes...

(anyone *else* bored with that last paragraph? how'd you like to live such administrivia?! BUT YOU DO!?! that's the kicker -- if it isn't homework, its taxes or investments or gardening and 401Ks and church boards and the United Way...)

And so when Jaelyn says but what *is* the nothing? I want to tell her that its the colonization of institutions upon the freedom and happiness of our minds....

But I know that these very same institutions frame our lives and give us privilege (give *me* privilege) that we otherwise couldn't enjoy...

It's a beautiful saturday morning -- sunshine in the wake of the leftover hurricane storms we've been feeling. And the resting makes me *see* the frenzy and the routine in a way that's not so benevolent.

I hope your Saturday morning gives you rest and peace and HOPE for the rest of the week -- because ultimately, I affirm that its not the presence of the institutions and their suckage that =s The Nothing --- it's the seeping & creeping away of HOPE in the bustle of trying to keep up with the great Sucking....and i hope that rest & hope leaves you feeling God's

peace~